A Taste for Monsters

by Matthew J. Kirby

  As the train pulled into the dark tunnel, I noticed a fiddle-faced man staring at me from across the car. He was dressed well enough, but the look in his eyes felt both hostile and frightening. I summoned the resolve to do what needed to be done, and returned his glare with force and menace, the image of a leather apron foremost in my thoughts. In response, he nudged the passenger next to him and pointed at me. The other man glanced up but immediately looked away, and his gaze turned desultory.

  “Bloody hell, she got a face on her,” a third man whispered from my side, and I realized the cause of the attention.

  John Alfred’s scarf had slipped, and one side of my face lay exposed. I quickly covered myself, but the damage had already been dealt, and the whispers quickly spread throughout the car. On the street, I could’ve escaped from such a situation easily enough, but I was not on the street. I was trapped with all those strangers on a moving train, under the ground.

  Their stares pecked at my neck feathers, and my chest emptied of blood and breath. I had to get off that train, for there wasn’t any way to know who aboard it might turn violent. It was rare for the hostility against me to surpass the verbal, but it had happened, once when I rounded a corner right into a gang of bruisers, and once when I entered Flower and Dean and ran afoul of a particularly vicious prostitute. Both times they’d knocked off my corner pieces and left me bashed and purple. I didn’t know why they so hated me on sight, but they did, and there were some who could do naught but attack what they hated.

  The silence in the train car had gone to church, but I kept my chin up and my eyes forward on nothing as that short ride back to Aldgate Station became the seemingly longest segment of my entire journey that day.

  When we finally emerged into the gaslit oasis and eased to a stop, I stayed in my seat until the other passengers had disembarked, for it was better to have them ahead of me than at my back. I likewise proceeded carefully from the platform and up the stairs to the surface, believing every stranger around me not only capable of striking me, but of gutting me as Polly and Annie had been.

  I turned up Aldgate High Street, the roadway now lit by gas lamps and storefronts, for the sun had abandoned the world while I’d been underground. The traffic in the street had coarsened in aspect and temperament, no less congested with vehicles and pedestrians, but bawdier and more drunken. I’d hoped to be back at the hospital by then, but aboard an omnibus it shouldn’t have taken much longer to reach it. I passed back under the ancient, broken wall and reached the beginning of Whitechapel Road and the tramway.

  An omnibus waited on the rails, but when I approached the conductor, he waved me away. “Tramway is blocked,” he said. “A wagon up ahead lost an axle. Tipped its load onto the tracks. You be better off walking.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. “How long ’til it’s cleared?”

  He shrugged. “How should I know?”

  I contemplated waiting, but as I looked around me at the crowd I noticed the fiddle-faced man from the Metropolitan Underground. He stood some yards off, but he seemed to be watching me. I didn’t want to loiter under his gaze, so I nodded to the conductor, adjusted John Alfred’s scarf, and set off on foot. Over my shoulder, I saw that the fiddle-faced man moved with me, following at a distance, so I hurried my pace in an attempt to disappear into the crowd.

  I hadn’t been out at night in some weeks. Wood smoke and the savory aroma of charred fish and meat wafted about me. In the glow of gas lamps, barrel fires, and even torches, vendors barked their wares, and pedestrians stopped and ate sheeps’ trotters, donkey milk, herring bloaters, and plum duff. Here and there a small crowd gathered watching street entertainments: acrobats, fire-eaters, sword swallowers, musicians cranking hurdy-gurdies, and numerous others who made the entire roadway into their stage and every pedestrian a momentary member of their audience. I even passed a man with a dancing bear on a leash near Great Garden Street as I made my way eastward through the throng.

  A block later, near St. Mary’s Station, I chanced to look back and noticed the fiddle-faced man behind me, but closer now than he had been before. It seemed he was following me, and at that realization I would have run from him, had the congestion on the street permitted it. Instead I had to duck, slide, and weave my way along the sidewalk, all the while keeping him in the tail of my eye.

  He stayed with me, quite brazenly, the crowd oblivious to my plight, and I understood then how it was Leather Apron had committed his crimes in much darker and lonelier places, especially if I’d been a known streetwalker like Polly or Annie. I hadn’t yet let myself believe the fiddle-faced man to be Leather Apron, but the fear and doubt were there, for I could think of no virtuous reason he would follow me. Sweat chilled my brow, and my heart hadn’t truly slowed since I’d risen from the underground.

  I nearly panicked when up ahead of me I noticed a large gathering completely blockading the walkway in front of the Pavilion Theatre, for if I were to stop or slow, I feared the stranger would reach me. I decided to step out into the street and go around them, unwise as it seemed in the dark, when I heard a voice call out up ahead.

  “Evelyn!”

  I peered across the faces in front of me while still pressing forward in my intended escape.

  “Evelyn, wait!”

  It was then I saw Charles emerge from the crowd and stroll toward me, his normal swagger a bit slipshod, and I would’ve known he’d been drinking even before he reached me and spoke.

  “You missed it. I was just playing not half an hour ago.” He wore a silly grin. “Are you back from Dartford, then?”

  Drunk as he was, I was relieved to see him, for his presence seemed to have stalled the fiddle-faced man, who’d ducked backward against a storefront. “Yes, Charles, I’m back.”

  “That’s right bang up to the elephant, that is.” He leaned toward me, and I smelled the piney scent of gin on his breath. It called my father to mind, the memory of that last night he went out, already drunk. I’d grabbed hold of him and begged him to stay with me, and he’d hugged me. But then he’d pushed me firmly away without looking in my eyes. They later told me the man who’d killed him had done it for the five shillings my father carried, and then left his body in an alley off Commercial Street.

  “Did you speak to the boy?” Charles asked.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “He … he died a year ago.”

  “Died, you say?” Now he offered an exaggerated frown. “Then what’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” And I still worried about the fiddle-faced man. “Listen, Charles, would you walk with me back to the hospital?”

  “Can it be you fancy a walk with me?”

  “No,” I said. “Yes. Tonight only, yes. Please, Charles.”

  “Very well.” He gave me a lazy wink and extended the crook of his arm, and I placed mine through it with another backward glance, dismayed to see the fiddle-faced man dislodge from his hiding place and follow. Whatever the stranger wanted with me, he did not seem to be giving up the chase.

  The hospital was only a couple of blocks away, but Charles proved to be somewhat of a hindrance in navigating the crowd. He bumped along casually, and I had to pull him with me by his arm, much as I’d dragged my father to his bed, watching the stranger behind us drawing nearer. The western edge of the hospital did eventually come into view across the street, but the front gates were now locked. I needed to reach the far eastern side through which we’d left that morning, and I feared I wouldn’t make it in time.

  “Charles,” I said. “There’s a shady man following us. He’s been with me since Aldgate Station.”

  “What?” Charles stood up straighter and spun around. “Where? I’ll take him!”

  “Don’t stop,” I said. “You’re in no state for that. We just need to hurry.”

  “I’ve a better idea,” he said. “Is he watching us right now?”

  I looked. “I don’t see him right—”

>   “This way.” He pulled me suddenly to the side, through the open doors of the nearest building. I’d lost sight of the fiddle-faced man, which I hoped meant he had also lost sight of us, and I thought perhaps Charles had just done well.

  “I’ll pay your way,” Charles said, and gave the doorman twopence. “And next door, Miss Juanita will box any man weighing less than ten stone whilst wearing only fleshings.”

  “Where are we?” I asked, even as Charles pulled me deeper into the building, through a press as thick as it had been on the street. We made our way down a corridor of red velvet curtains, the light quite dim. “Charles, where are we?” I asked again.

  “I wanted to see ’em,” he said, and we turned a corner into a chamber of horrors, and I knew then where we were.

  “No,” I whispered, and turned around instantly, but the image I’d glimpsed had already lodged itself.

  Nearby me was the crude form of Annie Chapman, shaped in wax, lying on a table. A deep gash to the figure’s throat nearly separated the head from the body, while the abdomen had been opened, and the figure’s waxen red viscera thrown up and over her shoulders as though in ghastly imitation of a scarf. Her features had been stretched into a rictus of pain no natural, fleshen face could make.

  “Charles,” I said, pain and anger in my voice.

  “What?” His head wobbled back and forth. “Oh, that’s right! You didn’t want to, did you?”

  “No!”

  “Why’re you so soft?” he asked with an irritated scowl.

  “I have to leave,” I said, nearly unable to breathe, and pressed forward the way we had come in. I didn’t even care if Charles were exiting with me, and I didn’t care if the fiddle-faced man waited for me outside. I only knew I could not stay in that building a single moment longer.

  When I reached the street, I inhaled and clutched my chest with one hand, my scarf with the other, then turned up the street and ran. I saw no sign of the fiddle-faced man, and when the traffic in the street broke, I dove across it to the hospital’s side of the thoroughfare. Though the front gates were closed, the hospital windows glowed in welcome as I raced along the building’s length and then turned down East Mount Street.

  As soon as I’d entered the shadows, a figure stepped out of them in front of me. It was the fiddle-faced man, and I halted and shouted, “Stay away from me!” I had no weapon, and nothing around me on the street to use as one.

  The stranger stood where he was and held up his empty hands. “I’ll not come closer,” he said. “I just needs to talk with you’s all.”

  “Who are you?”

  “They call me Jimmy Fiddle, on account of my face,” he said. “I work for the Silver King.”

  I remembered that as the name of the showman who’d exhibited Mr. Merrick. “Why are you following me?” I asked.

  “I had to make sure you’s the one,” he said. “The Silver King got word the Elephant Man had a new maid without no jaw. I seen you on the train in your maid’s apron, and then I seen your face, and I says to meself, that’s her. That’s the one. But I had to make sure, see?”

  “What do you want with me?” I asked. This strange man may not have turned out to be Leather Apron, but that didn’t mean I was about to trust him. “How does this Silver King even know about me?”

  “There’s porters and scrubbers will talk if you buy ’em a drink,” Jimmy Fiddle said. “The Silver King has kept an interest in Mr. Merrick, but the hospital won’t let him in. The Silver King wants you to give a message for him.”

  “I doubt I’m allowed to do that,” I said, but I felt intensely curious. “But tell me the message.”

  “Oh.” Jimmy Fiddle removed his bowler and clutched it in front of his chest. “The Silver King would like Mr. Merrick to know that if he ever wishes to return to the stage, he can be assured he’ll have the very best halls, the very best food, and a generous split of the proceeds.”

  “Mr. Merrick has no wish to return to that life,” I said, but with less certainty than I would have liked.

  Jimmy Fiddle replaced his hat and pulled it down tight over both ears. “But you’ll give him the message?”

  “I make no promises.”

  “You might could be on the stage, too,” he said. “Looks like you got most of your jaw, but they could still call you the Jawless Lady.”

  His suggestion enraged me, even though I knew he had said it without mockery. “I’ll thank you to keep such vulgar ideas to yourself,” I said.

  “Meant no harm,” he said, walking around me. “Could earn yourself a decent living’s all. You give that message to Mr. Merrick, though, will you? The Silver King would love to have him back.”

  He continued down the street, and I watched him go, shaking. I had at one desperate time considered taking to the stage as a freak. It was only the last scrap of pride left to me that’d prevented it. But I knew that’s what others saw when they looked at me, and I knew that’s where they thought I belonged. I recoiled from that, telling myself they were wrong, and Jimmy Fiddle was wrong. I’d found the place where I belonged, which was in the hospital, at Mr. Merrick’s side.

  I had no intention of relaying the Silver King’s message to him, but I truly wondered what he would say to it should he recover, for was it really so different to be on the stage than to be displayed before the medical college?

  The porter at the gate recognized me and let me through. “You all right there, Miss Fallow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “That’s good. I think they been looking for you.”

  “They have? Who?”

  “Nurse asked me if I’d seen you leave.”

  A knife of worry caught me between the ribs. “Thank you.”

  I passed the workshops and entered Bedstead Square, and only then did I allow myself to slow to a normal walk. As I crossed the courtyard, I labored to drive the image of the waxwork from my mind by instead imagining the living Annie Chapman, the grief-stricken mother wandering the windy heath, unable to depart the place she’d left her child.

  When I reached Mr. Merrick’s door, I opened it slowly.

  “Please do enter,” came a woman’s voice.

  I stepped in and saw Miss Doyle sitting by the fireplace, looking calm everywhere except her tapping toe. I nodded to her and then went to Mr. Merrick’s side, where I found his skin had gone from pale to gray, but I did note the barest movement of his chest. “How is he?” I asked.

  “He continues to decline,” Miss Doyle said, rising from her chair. “The doctors believe he could pass at any time.”

  I nodded, feeling once again powerless to help him, and now tormented by the knowledge that I had failed in finding a way to free Annie from the tyranny of her grief. “Y-you were looking for me?”

  She nodded and stepped toward me. “Where were you?”

  “In the city. I took a day off.”

  “I saw your note,” she said. “Were you not aware that the matron must approve all leave taken?”

  “I didn’t know that for certain,” I said. “But it was urgent for me to go.”

  “I doubt that will save you.”

  “Save me?” Her words took that knife of worry and twisted it.

  “I mean, save your position. You’re sure to be sacked.”

  Panic ravaged me, both for myself at the thought of returning to the streets, and also for Mr. Merrick. “Miss Doyle, I left a—”

  “You left a note, yes, I saw it. The matron did not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I did not show it to her,” she said, raising her voice. “You left without giving word to anyone, which meant that I, along with Miss Flemming, had to do your job. I am a nurse, and I had to carry coal, Miss Fallow. Coal.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to inconvenience you.”

  “The last time we spoke, I warned you, but instead of heeding me, you left your post and went … shopping. With that Charles fellow, the porter tells me.” She tipped he
r head to the side and folded her arms. “That is a lovely scarf. I hope it was worth the price.”

  “Please, Miss Doyle …” I said, but I didn’t know how to plead my case with her a second time. I couldn’t tell her about my real reason for my leaving, or she would think me mad, and then I certainly would lose my position.

  “It is in the matron’s hands,” Miss Doyle said. “She will speak with you tomorrow morning.” She turned her back on me and marched toward the door. “For now, do your duty and watch him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course, I—”

  But she had already left through the door and shut it behind her, and I was alone with Mr. Merrick, perhaps for the last time.

  After Miss Doyle had left, I lowered the red scarf to my shoulders and sat down next to Mr. Merrick. I took hold of his left hand, his fingers frightfully cold, and upon closing my eyes, imagined the rest of him, the body that had so thoroughly turned against him, as finely formed as that delicate hand. I imagined his face without its growths, his arm and his legs of normal shape and size, and found him to be quite handsome in my mind’s eye. But I was also aware that the virtues of an attractive figure were as nothing compared to the virtues of his soul. When a few moments later I opened my eyes and he returned to his monstrous form, he was no less a man to me.

  “Joseph,” I said. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but Dr. Treves thinks you might, so I’m going to talk to you.” I cleared my voice. “I went searching for Annie Chapman’s family today. All over London, it felt like. I even rode the Metropolitan Underground and went out to Kent. I was trying to do what you wanted me to. I learned that Johnny is her son, and she had to give him up, because he was crippled. But he died, you see. So now I don’t know how to help her, and I feel that I failed you.”