A Taste for Monsters

by Matthew J. Kirby

  My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,

  Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

  The tune was another I’d heard before, a love song about a woman as much as an ode to a waterway, and it was exactly the sort of music I had long since dismissed.

  Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,

  And winds by the cot where my Mary resides,

  How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave

  As gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave.

  I knew no man would ever make me the object of such praise or adoration, and it seemed a fantasy to imagine it otherwise, yet that seemed to be the lie that every man singing upon a stage wanted me to believe. Well, I was determined not to be so deceived, and when this performance was finished I followed it with less applause than I had given Charles for the previous song.

  “Another?” Mr. Merrick asked.

  “Afraid I must be off,” Charles said, tucking the violin in the crook of his arm. “But I’ll try to visit again later in the week. Will I see you again, Miss Fallow?”

  “That’s quite possible,” I said, “even if unintentional.”

  “And what if I intend it?” Charles asked as he stooped to replace his violin in its case.

  In that moment I began to suspect him of mocking me. I couldn’t imagine why he would intend to see me at all. “I can do nothing about your intentions, Mr. Weaver, even if I had the desire.”

  “Charles,” he said.

  “You’re quite a performer, Mr. Weaver.” I decided to tease his vanity with a false compliment of my own. “Clearly you belong on the stage.”

  “I thank you for that,” he said. “Yes, I’ve played many a music hall.”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding yourself another audience besides me. Good day, Mr. Weaver.”

  He smiled, then shrugged, before putting his bowler back on. “Good day to you, Miss Fallow.” He strode to the door, opened it, and turned back. “’Til next time, Joseph, my ugly bloke.”

  “Until next time, Charles,” Joseph said.

  The door shut, and Charles’s shadow passed across the window as he climbed the cement stairway.

  “I wish I could go to a music hall,” Joseph said. “Or the theater. I would so love to watch a pantomime. Perhaps my friend Mrs. Kendal could arrange it?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, my ear divided between what Mr. Merrick said and the echo of Charles’s presence in the room. I still had trouble identifying why he unsettled me.

  “I hear there are amazing spectacles to behold on the stage,” Mr. Merrick said.

  “I’ve never been.”

  “Amazing spectacles, they say.”

  “How did you come to meet Charles?” I asked.

  “Oh, his father was a bricklayer working on the new Grocers Wing of the hospital. Charles came to see him one day with his violin, and Dr. Treves asked if he might play for me. We have been friends ever since.”

  “I see.” At least the affection Charles showed for Mr. Merrick appeared genuine.

  Mr. Merrick remained in his chair for the rest of that morning as I changed his sheets, which needed to be cleaned as frequently as his person. When the nurses came to give him his first bath, I went to fetch his luncheon, and he asked if I might also bring him a book from the hospital’s library.

  “Certainly,” I said. “Do you have a title in mind?”

  “I’ve recently enjoyed the novels of Miss Jane Austen,” he said.

  “Miss Austen? But she’s a favorite of mine, as well! My own copy of Emma is one of my dearest possessions.”

  “I’ve read it!” Mr. Merrick said. “Oh, do you ever wonder what Emma and Mr. Knightley are doing? I think they must’ve had children by now, don’t you? A son and a daughter, I imagine. I wonder what they named them.”

  I didn’t know what to make of those questions. It pleased me to know he and I shared this in common, but he spoke almost as though the characters in the book were real people, rather than figments. I chose to say nothing to dispute that.

  “Are there any of Miss Austen’s novels you haven’t read?” I asked.

  “Northanger Abbey,” he said.

  “Then I shall see if they have a copy of it.”

  With that, I left the room and found my way to the hospital’s library by asking for directions from the staff I encountered, and discovered it in the medical college at the southwest corner of the hospital grounds. The library was a long, open room, with towers of bookshelves and many desks where several students hunched over their studies. A wide alcove of windows looked out over the large garden field in which the hospital’s vegetables and fruits were grown. Before I could venture deeper into the room, a bald, bespectacled man appeared before me, short and round as a cabbage.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Mr. Merrick would like to know if you have a copy of Northanger Abbey. By Miss Jane Austen.”

  “Oh.” He sniffed. “A novel.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “We have a small collection of those for the patients. Wait here.” He turned away before I could finish speaking and disappeared between two banks of shelves, returning a few minutes later with a volume in his hand. “There you are, for Mr. Merrick. I noticed it has never been loaned before.” His tone and mild smirk suggested this pleased him.

  I accepted the book from him. “Thank you. I—”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No, sir, that—”

  “Then, good day.”

  He blinked at me, clearly waiting for me to leave, which I did, and crossed the hospital grounds to the kitchens. There I claimed Mr. Merrick’s luncheon and returned to his rooms with both his meal and his book. The nurses had finished bathing him and gone, and I set his food before him at the table.

  While he ate, he asked, “Would you read the novel aloud to me?”

  “Of course,” I said, delighted, and soon found myself engrossed in it such that several hours passed and I forgot to fetch Mr. Merrick’s tea, only giving a thought to his dinner when the nurses came to offer him his evening bath. He didn’t seem to mind my lapse, and asked that I read to him again the next day, and the day after that.

  We passed several days this way. I read to him at the table, at his bedside, and near the fireplace as he sat in his peculiar chair, breaking from this diversion only for our discussions of the book, his meals, and washing, as well as his occasional visitors. Dr. Treves came to see him daily, and Matron Luckes every few days. I wasn’t certain the matron approved of my reading Mr. Merrick a novel, but I supposed she likely disapproved of novels in general, and anyway she said nothing to discourage it.

  The novel was quite different from Emma, and—Mr. Merrick agreed—from any of Miss Austen’s novels he had previously read. It was eerie and spoke of ghosts and vampires, which seemed to thrill Mr. Merrick, but which I tried to scoff at inwardly.

  Yet late one Thursday evening after dinner, while reading the second volume of the novel, our heroine, Catherine, finally came to the abbey for which the book was named, a storm descended upon that gothic estate, and I felt the first tingle of fear at the base of my neck. The novel’s gloomy, drafty corridors along which murmurs crept, and its distant moans and rattling locks, all vividly described by Miss Austen, insinuated a sinister air into the immensity and oppressiveness of the hospital, and I recalled with dread what Becky had suggested about the ghosts of the dead.

  Such was my fear, I found myself reluctant to turn each page and keep reading, and when the door to Mr. Merrick’s room opened suddenly, both he and I startled and gasped.

  “I’m sorry to be late for your bath,” Miss Doyle said, slightly short of breath, a flush reddening her porcelain cheeks. She had come by herself, but I hadn’t thought of her tardiness until that moment.

  “Where is Miss Flemming?” I asked.

  “In the receiving room. There’s a terrible fire down at the
docks, and most of the staff are standing ready for any wounded.” She brushed past me toward the inner door. “You are to help me wash Mr. Merrick.”

  My fear at the thought of ghosts suddenly fled before a fear of something much more real.

  I stammered a bit in protest. “Miss Doyle, I don’t believe I’m qualified—”

  “There is no one else,” the nurse said. “The matron said you are to assist me, and we are to be as quick about it as possible so I can return to my post.” She disappeared through the doorway, I heard the echo of water pouring into a tub, and then she returned. “Sorry to rush, Mr. Merrick. Are you ready?”

  “Of course,” he said, sitting forward in his chair. “If you would kindly help me up.”

  As Miss Doyle took his arm and gently pulled him to his feet, I felt immobilized by a sudden and growing pain in my stomach, and stupefied by the scattering of my panicked thoughts. I did not want to wash him. Though I had grown somewhat accustomed to his face, I desperately did not want to see his body exposed, nor touch it, and I felt terribly guilty about that.

  As Mr. Merrick limped toward the inner door, Miss Doyle called to me and roused me from my stupor. “Miss Fallow, please. You are needed.”

  “I … might I have word with you, Miss Doyle?”

  She scowled but sent Mr. Merrick on his own through the doorway and returned to me. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Bathe him,” I said.

  She took me by the arm in a firm grip and lowered her voice to a menacing whisper. “Do you suppose this is an easy task for me, Miss Fallow? Because it is not. It is my Christian duty, and I would think a person in your condition would show more compassion.”

  My burden of guilt grew heavier.

  She continued, “And let’s not forget your status here, should the matron learn you have failed in your duties. Do I make myself clear enough on that point?”

  The open threat in her words carried sufficient force. I couldn’t lose my position. “Clear enough,” I said.

  “Good. Then let us do our duty.”

  She led the way and I followed her through the inner doorway, down a short passage, into Mr. Merrick’s bathroom. In it he had a water closet and a bathtub similar to the one I had used in the maids’ dormitories. A single, flickering gas lamp lit the room from one wall, and Mr. Merrick stood undressing in its glow and the steam from the hot water, his back mercifully toward me.

  I balled my hands into fists and tightened the muscles in my limbs against the shaking that had begun to seize them, then forced myself to cross the room toward him. Miss Doyle reached him before I did and helped him remove his shirt, trousers, and drawers, exposing the extent of the devastation wrought by his disorder, while I could only stand in horror and watch. The same growths that had claimed his head and his arm had obliterated his back and his sides, with somewhat lesser destruction of his legs. I averted my eyes from the fleshen drapes of his buttocks and noted the cruel curvature of his spine, like a wet rag someone had wrung out and left twisted.

  Miss Doyle gently took his left arm, his untainted arm, and turned to glare at me over Mr. Merrick’s shoulder. “Miss Fallow, take his other arm and we’ll help him into the bath.” Her voice remained pleasant, even if her eyes did not.

  “Yes, Miss Doyle,” I said, then stepped up beside Mr. Merrick and locked arms with him in a ghastly imitation of a Sunday stroll. I kept my gaze up and forward, so as to avoid seeing his manhood, and did my best to adopt Miss Doyle’s expression of decorum.

  Together, she and I walked him to the tub and steadied him as he climbed in, his smell sharp in my nose, his skin rough and trembling beneath my fingers. Once he was submerged in the water, leaning forward, Miss Doyle handed me a sponge and bar of soap, and then she went to work, first softening her own sponge in the bathwater, then lathering it with soap and scrubbing Mr. Merrick’s back. I did the same, slowly and reluctantly, the pleasantness of the warm water and smell of lavender from the soap doing little to calm my nerves. After we’d finished with his back, Miss Doyle moved to cleaning his head, from which patches of dark hair sprouted like weeds from between the crags of his flesh.

  I’d so far managed to contain my revulsion, but felt myself on the verge of losing restraint, assaulted as I was by thoughts I knew to be irrational and fears I knew to be false. Mr. Merrick was not contagious nor was he cursed, and yet I couldn’t reassure myself of these things; I was overwhelmingly repelled. When Mr. Merrick leaned suddenly backward, I caught a glimpse of his manhood beneath the water. The sight of it was too much for me and I recoiled, staggering away from the bathtub with my eyes clenched shut, forearms dripping water.

  “Evelyn?” Mr. Merrick asked with his soft voice.

  “Miss Fallow?” asked Miss Doyle with a great deal more hardness.

  I opened my eyes and my mouth. “I …” But nothing could have brought me back to that bathtub, so I turned away from them, toward the door. “I must go,” I mumbled, and hurried from the room.

  “Miss Fallow!” I heard Miss Doyle call, but I ignored her and fled Mr. Merrick’s quarters, rushing up the flight of steps into the square.

  There I paused briefly, the image still clinging to my eyes, before rushing along the wing through smoke-laden air toward my room. Once there, I found Becky and Martha already preparing for bed, having finished their duties. Both of them stared as I burst in and threw myself onto my bed, where I let the trembling take me. I knew very well the consequences of what I had done. This life I had only just found would be taken from me.

  “What is it?” Becky asked, coming over.

  I covered my face and shook my head.

  “There now,” Martha said. “We’re your friends, ain’t we?”

  I looked at her. I hadn’t called any woman friend since I’d worked in the match factory. I hadn’t even let myself hope for that here.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Yes, you can.” Becky spoke as if coaxing a cat from a barrel. “We’ve all had our share. You’ll feel better.”

  I shook my head again, but then said, “I had to bathe Mr. Merrick.”

  They were both silent for a moment, looking at each other.

  “But that’s the nurses’ job,” Becky said.

  “Miss Doyle made me help. But I ran away. And now Matron Luckes will sack me.”

  Becky frowned a moment. “I don’t think the matron will sack you. She got no one else for the job, does she? Most don’t last more than a day. And the way you been reading to him and everything?”

  I tried to take comfort in what she said, but I didn’t dare to hope she was right.

  “So you saw him, then?” Martha asked. “Whiles he was naked?”

  I could only nod, still at the mercy of those memories.

  “So did you see it?” Martha asked.

  “See what?” I asked.

  “You know,” she said. “His tackle.”

  Becky gasped. “Martha, you devil!”

  “What, me?” Martha opened her hands wide in a shrug. “I’m rightful curious, is all. Ain’t you?”

  Becky shook her head, and I sat upright in my bed. “I am not going to talk about that,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, we won’t tell,” Martha said. “Is it like an elephant’s trunk? Just say whether—”

  “No!” I allowed some of the street back into my voice. “You know what’s good for you, you’ll drop it.”

  “Easy there,” Martha said. “I meant no harm. Becky, tell her—”

  “I’m with Evelyn,” Becky said. “It weren’t a proper question.”

  “Couple of nuns, the both of you,” Martha said, chuckling as she walked over to her bed.

  Becky scowled at her, but then smiled at me and reached out to take my hands in hers. “You’ll sort it out with the matron in the morning. You’ll see. Try not to worry.”

  I nodded, but the matron was only a part of my
concern. I’d likely insulted Mr. Merrick deeply with my escape. He seemed so fragile, and it pained me to think that I’d caused him any degree of hurt. I knew what it was to have someone recoil from me, and yet I had just done the same to him. But there also remained a splinter I couldn’t quite pinch as I first prepared for bed and then lay there in the darkness while Martha snored.

  “You awake, Evelyn?” Becky whispered, sometime later.

  I thought about leaving her unanswered, but whispered, “Yes.”

  “What did it look like? Mr. Merrick, I mean? Sorry to ask, but I can’t sleep for thinking about it. Blast her.”

  Unlike Martha, I knew Becky’s question was innocent, and I answered her honestly. “It was perfectly ordinary.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s … good for him, then.” She paused, and her voice took on a shade of mischief. “How you know what common looks like, anyway?”

  I smiled in the darkness. “I’ve seen enough drunkards pissing in the street, or tending to other … needs. With ladybirds.”

  “Men are all the same, ain’t they?”

  “I … suppose,” I said, but her words had just got the splinter out. Until tonight, I hadn’t truly seen Mr. Merrick as a man. If he’d been deformed down there as I’d expected him to be, he could have remained in my estimation nothing but the pitiable, childlike creature I’d thus far known.

  “Think I can sleep now,” Becky said. “Night, Evelyn.”

  “Good night,” I said, but then I couldn’t sleep. My guilt redoubled at what I’d done. I still worried for my own position, but I felt a greater distress at knowing that Mr. Merrick may have suffered at my hands. I needed to make amends to both him and the matron.

  In the early hours of the morning, I rose, washed, and dressed. The kitchen had only begun to stir, so I made myself a cup of tea under the stern eye of the cook and had it with a buttered slice of the previous day’s bread. When finished, I stepped out into Bedstead Square, where I found the sky still dark and full of storm clouds, and the odor of smoke from the dock fire still sharpening the chilled air. I thought it might be too early in the morning to go to Mr. Merrick and apologize, but I worried that if I was going to be sacked, I wouldn’t have another chance to speak with him again.