A Taste for Monsters

by Matthew J. Kirby

  Any one of these men moving about the hospital so freely and easily could’ve been a murderer in healer’s clothing. By his appearance, I could believe the man before me capable of terrible violence. He looked up at me askance as I drew near him, and I let go of the cumbersome hod with one hand to pull my shawl tighter around my face.

  He stepped to the side of the corridor to let me pass. “Miss,” he said with a nod.

  “Thank you,” I said, and slid by him with my head down, giving him as much distance as I could manage.

  “Where you going with that coal?” he asked my back, his voice hollow and rough.

  “Mr. Merrick’s rooms,” I said without turning.

  “I could help you.”

  “No.” It might have simply been my nerves, but something about his offer felt wrong. “But thank you.”

  “Looks heavy for you,” he said, with some insistence.

  I stopped and looked back. He hadn’t moved from the side of the corridor, and he stared at me from under that prominence of a brow. A chill overtook me, and my breathing stopped in fear.

  “It’s my duty,” I said. “I can manage it.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, but he didn’t move from that spot for several moments, watching me until I’d rounded a corner.

  I hurried back to Mr. Merrick’s room, shaking, where I confined myself for the next two days, unless my leaving were absolutely necessary to fetch his meals and see to his needs. Though haunted, that place had become my final safe harbor, save the few hours I spent each night with the other maids around the table and then in my room.

  On Thursday the following week, though I’d watched Mr. Merrick decline in that time even further, Dr. Treves came as planned and brought with him Miss Flemming and Miss Doyle. The nurses took Mr. Merrick into the back room to bathe him and dress him, and while I waited with the doctor I wondered how Mr. Merrick felt about this primping and imminent exhibition.

  When Mr. Merrick emerged from the bathroom, he looked even more pitiful than was usual for him. His head swung low enough I feared it would drag him to the ground, and he looked paler than I had ever seen him. Again I felt a deep ache in my chest from my guilt.

  “Are we ready, then?” Dr. Treves asked.

  “I am ready,” Mr. Merrick said, his voice almost a whisper.

  Dr. Treves produced an enormous and curious cap with a wide hood attached to it, which Mr. Merrick allowed to be placed over his head. It covered his face to the shoulders in the manner of a potato sack, with a slit cut in the fabric before his eyes.

  “Would you walk with us, Evelyn?” Mr. Merrick asked me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Dr. Treves led the way outside, where Miss Flemming and Miss Doyle left us to return to their duties. We then went through the east wing into the hospital gardens, our progress quite slow due to the laborious nature of Mr. Merrick’s gait. I walked beside him, my arm linked with his to lend him both support and my companionship. He drew much attention from those patients we passed, but less from the staff who had no doubt been warned not to stare—but with the hood covering his face, those who did watch him showed expressions of curiosity rather than horror or fear.

  “I used to walk here at night,” Mr. Merrick said to me just before we’d reached the far side. “I like these gardens.”

  I nodded. “They’re quite lovely.”

  “I should like to see them better,” he said. “Without having to look through this mask.”

  “Perhaps we can arrange for another private walk sometime,” Dr. Treves said.

  After the gardens, we crossed the grounds to the medical college where I’d found the library and borrowed Northanger Abbey. Dr. Treves stopped us at the steps up to the front doors.

  “Wait here a moment,” he said. “I’ll just go in to make sure they’re ready for John in the theater.”

  After he’d gone, I could not resist asking, “Does this bother you at all, Mr. Merrick? Being displayed like this?”

  His expression had always been difficult to read, but with the hood over his face, it was utterly impossible, and I didn’t know how to interpret his silence that followed my question.

  “I’m very grateful for everything the hospital has done for me,” he said at last.

  “I don’t doubt that,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t complain,” he said.

  “So it does bother you, then?”

  “I do feel … like an animal at a cattle market. All those doctors prodding and whispering.”

  “Why don’t you tell Dr. Treves you don’t want to do it?”

  Another silence followed. “I shouldn’t complain.”

  “The way I see it, Mr. Merrick, you don’t owe them this.” I heard the anger in my voice, and I knew it to be half directed at myself.

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. Just because they’re taking care of you doesn’t mean they own your dignity.”

  “They’re ready for you, John,” Dr. Treves called as he came back out through the doors. He descended the steps and took Mr. Merrick’s arm from me. “Thank you, Miss Fallow. He’ll be back in his room in two hours or so.”

  I waited to see if Mr. Merrick would go with him, and he did.

  “Very good, Doctor,” I said through clenched teeth, and after they’d gone inside I marched back to the nurses’ house and downstairs toward my room. As I passed near the kitchens, I saw a newspaper lying on the dining table and assumed Beatrice must have left it there after breakfast or luncheon. It was a copy of the Times from the previous week, and I fought with myself over whether to pick it up and read it. There were things I absolutely did not want to know about the killings, but I also considered there might be further information about the victims. I wondered if I might learn something to stop the hauntings, without leaving the hospital as Mr. Merrick had asked me. I decided to look through the paper, for his sake.

  Most of the text concerned itself with new clues, new witnesses, and new theories, none of which seemed relevant to the lives of Polly or Annie. But some pages in, the editors printed a letter from someone identified as “S.G.O.” In the letter, S.G.O. expounded at great length on the sins that had been allowed to proliferate throughout the East End, and went so far as to claim the recent Whitechapel murders were only the natural result of this iniquity, to the point of nearly blaming the victims for their own deaths, because of their disrepute. Upon reading this, I slammed the paper down in anger and leapt to my feet.

  “Mad as hops, you look,” someone said, and I turned to see the cook standing in the corridor, her arms folded across her narrow chest.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Easy now,” she said. “What’s got into you?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, not because it was, but because I didn’t want to discuss it with her.

  “It’s something,” she said.

  I pointed at the paper. “Do you know what they’re saying about the murders? That it was those women’s own fault getting themselves killed.”

  “Well,” she said, “if they hadn’t been out swiving, they wouldn’t be dead. Can’t argue that, now can you?”

  She angered me as much as the paper, and I stalked away from the table to rid myself of both their presences.

  “But they also wouldn’t be dead if that maniac hadn’t killed them,” she said. “Can’t argue with that, neither.”

  I stopped and turned. “So what are you saying?”

  She unfolded her arms. “There’s blame to be laid, that’s for certain, but you can be sure it’ll fall where it keeps the upper crust feeling safe.” With that, she returned to her kitchen.

  I stood by the table, pondering what she’d said, imagining the rich swells quaking in fear at Leather Apron and desperate for any cause to say he wouldn’t come for them or their ladies.

  “Evelyn!” Becky charged suddenly down the stairs into the room, her breathing quick and ragged, her eyes wide.

  I stepped toward he
r. “What is it?”

  “It’s Mr. Merrick,” she said. “He fell.”

  I found Mr. Merrick in bed with his eyes closed, propped upright against a mountain of pillows, as still as a frozen rain barrel. Deathly still. Dr. Treves and Dr. Tilney tipped their heads together at his side, but both turned to look at me when I entered. I’d run to Mr. Merrick’s rooms even though the matron expressly forbade running, even at times of emergency, but now that I felt the doctors’ eyes upon me I adopted as decorous an approach as I could manage across the room toward them.

  “What happened?” I asked them. “Is he … ?”

  Dr. Treves spread his mustache wide with his thumb and forefinger. “He is alive. But he is very unwell. He collapsed in the theater, and has yet to regain consciousness.”

  “He collapsed?” I asked.

  “I was conducting my lecture,” Dr. Treves said, “and partway through he simply fell.”

  “For God’s sake, Freddy,” Dr. Tilney said. “It was obviously too much for him. I could see that plainly from my chair.”

  A flare of anger burned through my pain, for I had voiced similar concerns before Dr. Treves had taken him.

  “I find your recriminations unhelpful, Francis,” Dr. Treves said. “But … perhaps you are right.”

  “Will he recover?” I asked.

  “We’ve done everything we can,” Dr. Treves said. “There is no cure for his condition. He has no infection, no secondary disease. It seems his body is finally succumbing to the travails of his life.”

  That didn’t answer my question, and his evasion only worsened my panic. I knew the source of his weakness, because I had refused to do what Mr. Merrick had asked me to do. “Will he recover?” I asked again, my voice louder.

  “We don’t know,” Dr. Tilney said. “There is too little medical precedent. But it doesn’t look hopeful.”

  “Miss Flemming and Miss Doyle will take shifts watching over him,” Dr. Treves said. “Miss Fallow, I’d like for you to be here as well. It may be he has some degree of awareness, in which case your presence might prove a balm to him.”

  “Of course, Doctor,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “I shall stay at his side.”

  “Good, thank you.” Dr. Treves then looked at Dr. Tilney, and a nod passed between them. They left the bedside and moved toward the door, and as they reached it, Dr. Tilney allowed Dr. Treves to pass through first.

  “I’ll join you in a moment, Freddy,” he said, and when he and I were alone he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have checked on him sooner. I should have kept visiting him.”

  I appreciated his remorse, but I knew the cause of Mr. Merrick’s decline, and it was not Dr. Tilney’s fault. Nor was it actually Dr. Treves’s, though he certainly hadn’t helped. “You must not blame yourself for this,” I said. “You could not have prevented it.”

  “Even so,” he said, and frowned at the floor. Then he looked up at Mr. Merrick for a moment. “My wife is expecting me. But I’ll return soon.”

  I hadn’t known he was married, but it made sense that a handsome doctor such as he would be, and even though I had not truly allowed myself to consider him in any romantic way, I felt a small disappointment shatter to pieces inside me. “Good day, sir,” I said.

  He departed, and I sat down alone beside Mr. Merrick’s bed, nearly collapsing under the ponderous burden of my remorse. I feared that if I had acted according to his request and sought to help those spirits find peace, Mr. Merrick might’ve been recovering even in that moment, but I’d been a coward. Low as the chances of success in finding Polly’s husband had seemed, surely it would’ve been better to have tried something.

  Somehow, the serenity of his syncope rendered his features less monstrous. By then, the topography of his form had become a familiar landscape to me, and I looked on the mass and growth of his face with a kind of affection, for the first time recognizing his deformity not as something to look past, but as a part of who he was. I wondered if the spirits would’ve come to him for comfort had he not developed a sensitivity toward their sex because of his mother and his affliction, and I sat there for several moments letting guilt flog me, feeling powerless and afraid, until the arrival of Miss Doyle.

  “How is he?” she asked, but in a perfunctory manner that seemed to already know the answer. She took his wrist gently with the tips of her fingers and checked the rhythm of his heart against her pocket watch, after which she wrote something down in a notebook she kept in her apron. “Sad, isn’t it? His life?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “I took a solemn oath to save life,” she said. “But there are cases where I wonder if death would be the kinder mercy. For some patients I find myself wishing for it even as I’m fighting against it.”

  “Are you wishing for it for Mr. Merrick?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I truly can’t imagine the tragedy of his life. He’s here now, and I’ve no doubt his life is better for it, but is he out of pain?”

  Much of my pain had only begun after I’d healed from my surgery, and I’d accepted I would never be free of it.

  “I suppose it’s in God’s hands,” she said, the words and the sigh that followed them sounding well used.

  She stayed a short while, and then left, and then returned, and then left again. Miss Flemming then came in the same pattern. I assisted them when necessary, at one point rolling his great frame to change his bedding, and they taught me how to measure the rate of his heartbeat. It felt odd to count the pulses of blood through the vessels of his delicate wrist, for though they were driven by Mr. Merrick’s noble heart, they were silent on the matter of his kindness and innocence found there.

  When evening fell, I went to the dormitory for a quick meal and received a round of distant sympathy from the other maids, then returned to his side. I stayed there in that chair into the night, dozing off and startling awake to check Mr. Merrick’s breathing. As I rounded the midnight bend, my awareness shifted to the door of the room and the courtyard beyond, for I wondered if the ghosts would still come.

  A few hours later, Polly did, entering the room as she always had in her wedding gown, but she stopped just inside the door. Her hollow gaze then swept the room, and her eyebrows met in worry.

  I rose from my chair, but dared not approach her. “He is dying,” I said. “You are killing him. Please, if you can understand me, you must leave him in peace.”

  She ignored me as she always did, and instead of leaving, she drifted to the mantel and seemed to study the cards and pictures there.

  “Please!” I called to her. “You must go!”

  She turned about slowly and came over near me to the bed, while I did my best to keep my feet under me and my wits about me. Without Mr. Merrick awake, I felt much more vulnerable, and feared this apparition might yet turn malevolent and violent. She leaned in close over Mr. Merrick and watched him for several moments, her worried expression somewhat childlike and more lost than she had ever seemed to be.

  When she reached up to touch Mr. Merrick, I shouted, “No!”

  I even extended my hand to shield him, but she reached straight through my wrist, sending a freezing convulsion up my arm, and I recoiled. After laying her palm against his cheek, she turned and glided toward the door.

  “D-don’t come back,” I said, though I knew she would ignore me, and she did. Then she was gone, and I dropped hard into my chair, rubbing my icy wrist where she had befouled it with her touch. “Oh, Mr. Merrick,” I said. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m sorry. Sorry I didn’t do what you asked me. I’m going to make it right. Somehow.”

  The next two hours felt strained and tortured on the rack. But they passed, and then came the pain in my jaw, and I knew Annie had appeared.

  When the door flung open and she stormed into the room, I let out a scream of my own, but I couldn’t even hear it over her terrible sound. She charged directly at me, and I quaked and shielded my head with my ha
nds and arms, my eyes squeezed shut. Without looking, I knew she stood over me, her mouth open, forming the same name.

  John-ny!

  “Please go,” I whispered as tears leaked out of my closed eyes. “Please. Please go.”

  No soul heard my plea, and the screaming continued for an eternity. When it abated, I opened my eyes slowly and looked up to find that Annie had gone, and though my tears did not then stop, my sobbing was not for myself. I sat hunched over, crying for Mr. Merrick. I didn’t understand how I could so care for a man I had only known for a few weeks, and I realized then that perhaps all those women who’d sent him cards and photographs truly had been sincere. Perhaps he had touched their lives in the same way he had mine, and for the same reason that drew these spirits to him.

  When my crying subsided, I washed my face in Mr. Merrick’s bathroom and then went about the ordinary duties of the day. Miss Flemming and Miss Doyle continued their observance of the signs of his vitality, and Dr. Treves and Dr. Tilney came as well. After their examination, they pronounced him slightly worsened, and spoke with a solemnness that seemed to have already accepted Mr. Merrick’s death as inevitable.

  Around ten o’clock Charles came to visit, ignorant of Mr. Merrick’s condition. Upon learning it, the knowledge seemed to deflate his posture and humble his demeanor.

  “Poor ugly bloke,” he said. “Will he recover?”

  “The doctors aren’t sure,” I said.

  “What can be done?”

  “Perhaps you might play for him? The doctors believe he may have some awareness.”

  Charles took a deep breath. “Right, then.” He went for his instrument and tuned it as he brought it to the foot of Mr. Merrick’s bed. “What should I play?”

  “Whatever you think he’d like to hear.”

  He paused, looking up at the ceiling, and then launched into a beautiful tune. It had the sound of a country ballad, and though Charles sang no words, a sad and mournful quality hung about the music’s beginning. As the notes progressed, the song found hope and laughter, a little at first, and then a great swell of rising happiness. By the time Charles finished, the song had come to a joyous ending, and I applauded when he played the last note.