“You may be right.”
“I am right.” Steven gave Matthew a thin, cold smile. “When you sit at a table amid the wreckage of what was and ponder what will be, raise a cup of the Velvet and remember this conversation, for we had here a chance to change the future.”
“Speaking of which,” Matthew said, “you told your father that his plan might yet succeed. Why did you say that, knowing it’s come to its conclusion?”
“He needs something to cling to. Without that, he might give up and pass away. I love my father as I loved my mother, sir. I’m sure you would do the same, in my place.”
Matthew didn’t respond, but he knew that was the truth.
“Good day to you,” said Steven. He put down coins for their coffees and stood up.
Matthew watched him leave the shop, pull his dove-gray cloak tighter around himself to brave the biting wind, and walk past the front window in the direction of Cable Street.
Then Matthew sat alone for a time, just thinking. Finally he returned to a pocket the paper with the challenge to Professor Fell upon it. He stood up, put on his cloak with the mask of Albion within, donned his tricorn, and walked out to find the future.
Twenty-Seven
MATTHEW found himself nearing the Black-Eyed Broodies’ warehouse.
The wind was truly vicious, the sky layered with clouds that looked as thick as armor plate. He’d walked in circles for awhile after leaving the Rising Sun, on this day when the sun had hidden itself. He was in need of sleep. He thought if he could grab an hour or two of it, he would have a clearer vision of where to go and what to do. Two hours of sleep, and then he might be on his way to the central city to find Gardner Lillehorne. He sorely wished Hudson had come to London without Berry; what was to be done about that?
The street was quiet but for the constant rumble of wagons of various size. Matthew started up the steps to the door that appeared to be boarded-over and nailed shut, the windows the same.
Then he saw the bloodstains beneath his boots, and quite suddenly the cold pierced him like an iced blade.
He pushed through the artfully-disguised door…
…and entered a slaughterhouse.
The first body he saw was Paulie’s. The boy was lying crumpled in a heap, the face covered with blood. His heart pounding, Matthew knelt beside the body to search for signs of life. There were none. The throat had been cut, the face misshapen by blows. Both eyes had been gouged out. On his forehead there was another wound that had crusted over, indicating it had been some hours since this murder had taken place. The forehead wound was an inverted Cross.
Matthew stood up. He staggered back a step, for on one wall was another splatter of blood and lying at the bottom of it was a figure he had to get closer to identify. He thought it was Will Satterwaite, but he couldn’t be sure. Again, the throat had been slashed and the forehead marked. And, again, the eyes were missing.
The place smelled of gore and the heat of violence beyond description. Matthew came to a third body; this one, a young man, he couldn’t identify and it did not bear the forehead mark. The man had been slashed across the stomach with a blade, and from the gruesome trail he’d left it appeared he’d crawled some distance before expiring. His throat was also cut open.
Matthew intended to shout hello? into the silent darkness but his voice would not come. He leaned against a wall and stared at a bloody handprint and smear of gore. His gorge rose and he choked it down.
“Hello?” he called. There was no answer. Above him the pigeons cooed in the rafters. “Hello?” he tried again, louder. Then he knew he had to go deeper into the place; as much as he feared it, he had to go.
In the dim shafts of light that pierced the warehouse, Matthew stumbled on. A half-dozen steps further, and he nearly fell over the body of a woman. He turned her over with trembling hands. It was Jane Howard, her eyeless bloodmask of a face frozen in a rictus of terror, a blade wound near her heart, her throat slashed and the Devil’s Cross carved into her forehead.
“Rory!” he shouted into the gloom. No answer. “Pie!” he shouted.
Silence, still.
He went on, and began to count the corpses. Whoever had done this had made sure no one would survive. The bodies had been stabbed multiple times and there was evidence of cudgels at work, battering the faces into unrecognizable lumps of putty. All their throats had been cut, and to sign the job a sharp blade had carved the mark.
“Rory!” Matthew shouted once more.
He stepped over what he thought had been John Bellsen, and then Lucy Samms and Tom Lancey, lying so close together their blood had become a small lake. The first flies had arrived in spite of the cold, and soon this warehouse would be swarming with them as they came through the cracks on the coppery scent of murder.
Matthew was very suddenly overwhelmed. He thought he had steeled himself, but after counting twenty bodies his knees sagged and he grabbed at a bloody wall for support. It was denied him and down he went. He threw up his guts, retched and retched and threw up again, and then there was nothing more to expel. His mind reeled; it seemed that every Black-Eyed Broodie had been killed in a savage attack, the throats cut to ensure death and that damned mark cut into their foreheads as an exclamation mark of Satanic triumph.
Matthew forced himself up and onward. “Pie!” he croaked. With the next step his boots stirred a bloodpond, and flies arose to whip him in the face. A slender body lay at his feet. He saw a mass of short-cut curly hair. The face was averted, the body lying as if nearly broken in half. He bent down to turn her over.
“Don’t do that,” someone said.
Matthew froze, his heart a crash in his chest, his entire body trembling and tears of surprising rage upon his cheeks.
“Don’t,” Rory repeated. His voice was hollow and otherworldly. “Come closer to me. Watch where you step.”
Matthew obeyed, as if locked in a nightmare beyond human endurance. He saw a meager glow in a far corner. Rory was sitting on the floor, and when he shifted himself the small light of a single candle was exposed; the candle looked to be stuck with wax to a floorboard at his side.
“Closer,” said the eerie, strengthless voice.
Matthew nearly tripped over yet another body. That would make number twenty-two. He bent over, feeling again as if he might throw up.
A bottle came rolling across the boards. It stopped a few feet short of the dead man at Matthew’s feet.
“Drink,” Rory said; it was a command.
Matthew picked up the bottle. It was not the small blue bottle of the Velvet, as he’d thought it might be; it was a large brown bottle of rum, corked, with maybe three swallows left in it. He pulled the cork out with his teeth, drank almost all the rest of it, and pushed the cork back in. The horror of the moment would not be dulled by any rum, no matter how potent. He stood where he was, wavering on his feet.
“A massacre,” said Rory. “Ain’t that the right word for this?”
“Yes,” Matthew said.
“They’re all dead.”
“Jesus,” Matthew answered.
“Hm. Yeah. Any a’ that left?”
Matthew took him the bottle. Rory reached up, grasped the bottle, uncorked it and finished it off. When he was done he set the bottle quietly down beside him, as if in respect to the sleepers.
“All of them?” Matthew asked. He thought he’d heard movement and soft cries, but he realized it was only the pigeons.
“Three extra dead men,” said Rory, whose own face in the candlelight was pale and ghostly. “They were vicious bastards. Finished off their own wounded, I reckon if they figured they was gonna die anyway.”
“The Mohocks did this?”
“No,” Rory said listlessly; the absolute evil of this wholesale slaughter had drained him of emotion just as he’d drained the rum. He sat upon the floor like a shattered shell. “Not the Mohocks. The men they left behind…they ain’t war-painted. And the way they done it…no, not the Mohocks.”
&n
bsp; “Who, then?”
“I’ve been sittin’ right here…I don’t know how long…tryin’ to figure that out. Who? But I know the why, Matthew. That’s clear enough.”
“Tell me.”
“The cellar’s been cleaned out. They took ever’thing. Likely brought two wagons…one full a’ killers, the other empty to haul the Velvet in. Took it all…except for one thing.”
“What?”
“I’d take you down there and show you, but…I can’t move from here, Matthew. Been sittin’ here…for hours, maybe? Right here, and I don’t really care to move. You could go see for y’self, but I won’t put that on you.” Rory looked up at Matthew. Sweat sparkled on his face and his eyes were hollow holes. “They left one blue bottle, right in the middle of the room. One blue bottle. Know what they filled it full of?”
Matthew dared not guess. He thought of the bodies he’d seen, and in particular the eyeless faces of Paulie and Jane.
“Yeah,” said Rory. “Left it there, I reckon for a constable to find…or whoever would come in here lookin’. Would that be what an educated fella like y’self might called a ‘statement’?”
“A declaration of war is what I would call it,” Matthew managed to answer. “War against Professor Fell.”
Rory nodded. “That cheese-eatin’ rat…he’s swelled up to be the size of a monster now, and…I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you…” His voice cracked. He shivered, his silver teeth clenched together, and he had to fight back from the precipice. “I ain’t never seen such a sight. These men…they took delight in this, Matthew. They took delight in killing ever’ one of my fam’ly…not just once, but two or three times over. Took delight in it.” He nodded again, a little too vigorously, and he reached for the empty bottle and uncorked it and drank rum that was no longer there. For a moment Matthew thought that a cry might burst from Rory’s strained face that would level the warehouse’s blood-smeared walls.
But instead Rory peered up into Matthew’s face, the bottle softly settled back down to the boards, and the terribly-crushed voice rasped, “They’re all gone…all of ’em…and I’m a man without a country.”
Matthew heard Rory make a sound of muffled pain, as if his back had broken and he was by the sheerest force of will holding the scream at bay. He began to crawl across the floor, away from Matthew, and when Matthew reached down to grasp his shoulder he said, “Don’t touch me,” in what was nearly the snarl of a wounded animal. Matthew let him be.
Rory crawled away a distance where the light from the single taper made him only a mass without detail, and there he lay on his left side with his knees pulled up to his chest. The next noise he made was a soft whine that went on and on; it was an unbearable sound of torment to Matthew, and so he walked away as far as he could without again entering the death area.
How long was it before Rory was silent? Two minutes? Three? Matthew waited, the smell of blood up his nose and the memory of those dead, brutally mutilated faces at the dark edges of his mind.
“Figure whoever it was,” Rory’s husky voice reached out, “must’ve stormed the place…so fast there wasn’t no time to put up much of a fight. Must’ve been a lot of ’em. A wagonful, I’m thinkin’. Likely had a ramp with ’em, put that down on the cellar stairs and rolled the barrels up after the killin’ was done. Rolled the barrels up a ramp into another wagon, carried the bottles out, and they was gone. Left three a’ their wounded behind with cut throats so there wouldn’t never be no talkin’. You with me?”
“Yes,” Matthew said listlessly.
“Seen that mark on their heads?”
“Yes.”
“Devil’s Cross. Like what was given that judge. Fallonsby, his name was. You recall I told you?”
“I do.”
“Likely came in…two or three o’clock, I reckon. Caught most of the Broodies in their beds. Happened while I was with you at the hospital. Can you beat that, Matthew?”
“Beat what?”
“You and me. We’re the last of the Black-Eyed Broodies. Won’t never be no more. Just you and me, and we’re the last.” Rory lapsed into silence again.
Matthew waited; it was all he could do.
“No, they wasn’t Mohocks,” Rory suddenly said, as if this question had just been asked. “This was done by those who enjoy it too much, Matthew. This was done by dark things looked like men, but they wasn’t. Must’ve been fast…must’ve come in like the wind…just carved ever’body up. We’re the last, Matthew. Last ones alive.”
“Surely someone heard this,” Matthew said. “The noise of fighting…the screams. Surely.”
“Not much screamin’ can be done with a cut throat. Yeah…maybe they heard somethin’ of it at the Drunk Crow or one of them other taverns…but nobody wants trouble so they just kept on drinkin’. Just put their heads down, and when they was drunk enough they all staggered on home and the taverns closed up and nobody knew ever’body here was dead ’fore I walked in this mornin’. Maybe somebody saw that blood on the steps, or they looked in here and saw Paulie lyin’ dead. Then they turned tail and beat it for home, ’cause they don’t want to get ’emselves killed. I would’a done the same. Maybe you would’ve too.”
“Maybe,” said Matthew.
Rory did not speak again for a long time. Gusts of wind whipped across the roof and made shrill banshee sounds, the rising and falling of ghostly voices. Pigeons fluttered and fought up in the broken rafters and made the rusted chains and pulleys creak. This was now truly a haunted house, Matthew thought. He would not wish to be here when the next fog rose and drifted through the cracks; in fact he wished to never again set foot across that bloody threshold.
Rory asked in a voice that was weakening once more, “Who’s gonna bury ’em, Matthew? Don’t you think they oughta get proper graves?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Whoever did it…they knew the Velvet was here. Oh yeah…they come ready to take it. Left one bottle in the cellar. One single bottle. Know what’s in it, Matthew?”
“Listen to me,” Matthew said forcefully. “We’ve got to get out of here. There’s no use in staying a minute longer.”
“Caught most of ’em in their beds. But they got three. If I’d been here…if I’d been here maybe—”
“Stop that. If you’d been here, I’d be the only Black-Eyed Broodie left. Have you got any money?”
“Money? I got a little bit.”
“Enough for a coach to the central city?”
“No, not that much. Our treasury box…had nine pounds and some shillin’s in it, but that was took. They knew where to find that, too. How’d they know, Matthew? Who told ’em?”
Matthew couldn’t answer. He’d thought of searching through the pockets of the corpses. It was a passing thought because it made him shudder and there was no way he could do that. Anyway, he doubted that any of the dead would have more than a few pence. “We’ll walk, then.”
“I don’t have nowhere to go.”
Matthew had made a hard-edged decision; he needed Hudson’s help in the worst way, and it was unfortunate that Berry was with him but the time had come when that would have to be somehow managed. For his part, he would wish to send her in a coach to the next ship leaving Plymouth for New York.
“We’re going to the Soames Inn off Fleet Street,” Matthew said.
“What for?”
“For help. Just trust me.”
“Ain’t nobody can fix this.” Rory made no move to stand up. Matthew thought he’d been in a state of shock for the several hours he was sitting in here with the bottle of rum at hand. Likely he’d already gotten drunk and slept, awakened to this nightmare, slept again and awakened again. “Somebody’s gotta bury ’em,” Rory said. “You help me do that, Matthew?”
Matthew knew the man was talking out of his head, and in that moment he pitied him and wished to put a hand of support upon his shoulder; he knew also that Rory’s rough character would never accept such a touch. “We have to go now,” Matthew to
ld him.
“Bury ’em first. They was my brothers ’n sisters. Yours too. Mousie buried Ben for us in the potter’s field…we oughta do the same.”
Matthew stared down at the floor. It killed his heart that these souls had been born into violence and tragedy and been destroyed by it. The image of Pie Puddin, bright-eyed and saucy, trimming his beard and shaving him was a sharp blade of pain. The others…what chance had they ever had, really? And knowing that, the tentacles of Professor Fell had emerged to manipulate them just as the lawyer Mousekeller and the deliveries of White Velvet to the addicted masses were manipulated.
The sorrow he felt was very suddenly replaced by anger. Rory Keen was alive, and Matthew intended him to stay that way.
“Stand up,” Matthew directed.
“Go on with y’self. You ain’t earned the right to give me orders.”
“Yes I have,” Matthew said. A whirlwind of past encounters went through his mind: Jack One Eye, the killer hawks, Mister Slaughter, Sirki the murderous giant, and the treacherous dangers of the Carolina swamp. “Oh yes,” he repeated. “Stand up or I’ll drag you up. We’re leaving here together.”
Rory’s voice was slurred when he taunted, “Come on and drag me—”
Matthew was on him before he’d finished. He leaned over, took hold of Rory’s shirt with both hands and got him halfway up before Rory bellowed with pent-up rage and drove his fist into Matthew’s stomach. It was a hard punch, delivered well, but Matthew realized his test of combat had been presented; he let go his grip with his right hand, balled it into a fist and struck Rory on the point of the chin. When Rory’s head snapped back, he followed the blow with a left to the jaw. His next right-handed strike missed, as Rory ducked beneath it and came up wildly swinging…and at the same time, screaming.
A fist grazed his left cheek. The next blow connected only with air because Matthew had dodged aside, and the strike after that likewise came up empty. Rory was flailing like a madman, as if he were fighting the very atmosphere of Whitechapel itself. Matthew backpedalled and let Rory come after him, and then abruptly Matthew changed direction, saw his opening and threw his weight into a punch to Rory’s chest that stole his breath and stunned him. The next blow he wished he didn’t have to deliver, but the leader of the Broodies was crazed and only a strong fist would stop him.
Freedom of the Mask Page 35