“Why would he confess to such a thing if it weren’t true?” Becky asked.
“Must not have his right change,” Martha said. “He’s barmy’s all.”
“Well,” Becky said, “I suppose it’s better a madman confess to something he didn’t do than do it.”
“But now the worthless mutton shunters are empty-handed,” Martha said. “When are they going to catch this devil?”
It had been three weeks since Annie Chapman’s murder, and there’d been no new crimes, which seemed to me enough of a reprieve to hope Leather Apron’s mania had been satisfied.
“All the liars and fools out there don’t make it easy work for the police,” Beatrice said. “Says here someone wrote a message in chalk on the pavement by some lamppost. ‘I am Leather Apron,’ they wrote. ‘Five more and I will give myself up.’ Now, if the police has to investigate every prank like that, they’ll never catch the demon!”
After dinner, I went to my bed and slept but a few hours before waking to a pain in my jaw, which confused and frightened me. It hadn’t the intensity of my previous ghostly encounters, but it pricked as though from a distance. I checked the time and found it to be but one o’clock in the morning. That meant the ghost I felt wouldn’t be Polly, not at that hour.
A new spirit had come into the hospital. Outside my window, I could see and hear rain, and it felt as though the icy droplets were running down my back. It seemed Leather Apron had not finished with his depravity, after all.
The rain had quieted to a mutter by the time I entered Bedstead Square. Moonlit steam rose here and there from iron grates where the hospital exhaled its heat, and as I walked through those low-born clouds toward Mr. Merrick’s door, the ache in my jaw surged. The pain had its own quality, different from that of either Polly or Annie, the way a bruise felt different from a cut, and both of them from a burn. The new pain was deeper than the other two, and not quite as insistent, but rather dared me to ignore it.
But I could not ignore it. Something was inside Mr. Merrick’s room even then, and if I was right about it, that meant somewhere out on the streets lay the ruined body of a woman, opened up and still warm, and somewhere else a monster made his escape. When I reached Mr. Merrick’s door, I felt the apparition move on the other side, and I entered holding my breath.
The woman stared at me from the middle of the room, her hair in dark, rich curls around a pale face, her back rigid. Mr. Merrick’s open eyes stared in her direction, but I could not tell if he was seeing her, and I worried he had gone senseless.
“Please help me,” she said upon my entrance, her words sweetened slightly with the accent of the Swedes, but then she lurched toward me. Her steps came in twists and jerks, her limbs at severe and unnatural angles, and a loud cracking sound issued from her spine, as though it fractured her very bones to move. “My husband and children are drowned! The water took them when the Princess Alice sank!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, dodging away from her, holding my hands against the air before me as I would a door. “Please, don’t come any closer.”
“But you must help me!” She came again toward me, bones snapping, and again I leapt clear of her.
“How?” I said. “How can I help you?”
“Money!” she said. “I need money!”
I reached into the pocket in my skirt and pulled out all the money I had, but I could not bring myself to hand it to her. Instead, I let the coins fall through my fingers to the floor, where they clinked, bounced, and rolled in her path, while I scuttled out of her way.
She dove to her knees before the money, scooping it up frantically. “Thank you, miss!” she said. “Thank you!” After she’d gathered it all to the last farthing, she let out a sigh and rose to her feet. “I’ll be going now,” she said, and bowed her way backward out of the room. “You are kind. You are very kind. I thank you.” She reached the door, and with one final, deeper bow, she left.
I rushed to Mr. Merrick and took hold of his hand, the chill in which brought a gasp out of me. “Mr. Merrick?” I said. “Joseph? Can you hear me?”
He seemed lifeless. His glassy eyes remained fixed on a point on some distant plane I could not see or know. I patted his cheek, his hand, his arm, but received no response from him, and I feared his soul had fled his body. A feeling of devastation brought me to my knees, still holding his hand, and I buried my face against the side of his bed, caught between a curse and a prayer.
“I had no money for her,” Mr. Merrick whispered.
I looked up, and then scrambled to my feet. “Oh, Mr. Merrick! You—I thought you’d left me.”
“I’m … sorry I gave you … a fright.”
I laughed even as tears fell. “Don’t you dare apologize to me, you beautiful man.”
His hand stiffened in mine. “Beautiful—” He started, but his voice faltered at the end of a breath. “You … you said …”
“Beautiful, yes. You are, Mr. Merrick, even if only the ghosts and I are honored to see it.”
He closed his eyes then, and I saw tears leaking from them as they still did from mine. Neither of us spoke for some time, and then Mr. Merrick asked me if I’d given her the money she’d asked for.
“I did,” I said. “All that I had.”
“Do you suppose that’s what she wanted?” he said. “Just … money?”
“She certainly seemed grateful and relieved,” I said.
“Did she take it with her?”
“Yes, she …”
She had taken it, but not in the same way Annie had taken the scarf, and neither had this new spirit vanished in the way Annie had when set at peace. I let go of Mr. Merrick’s hand and he asked, “What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, and followed a slithering trail of doubt to the door, which I opened, and then stepped out into the stairwell. The night had become cold with the passing of the storm, the stars like white chips thrown from the ice seller’s cart. I climbed the cement staircase until I stood in the courtyard, finding it as empty as I expected to, but then I looked down at the ground around my feet.
There lay a pile of my coins. I stared at them a moment, loath to touch them, but eventually I stooped to reclaim them, and the cold in them hurt my hands. Once I’d deposited them back into my skirt pocket, I returned to Mr. Merrick’s room.
“What is it?” he asked again.
I shook my head. Upon reflection, and unlike Annie, there had been no sense of peace in the new spectre’s departure, and I likewise realized the pain in my jaw hadn’t ceased abruptly, either, but faded away by degrees. “Mr. Merrick,” I said, “I fear she will return. But I will put her to rest just as I did Annie, and as I will Polly. Charles will help me. You shall see, Mr. Merrick. You shall see.”
He took on the quiet stillness of a churchyard, but not yet the grave.
“Let’s warm it up in here,” I said, and moved some coal from the hod to the fire. “Perhaps I can read to you?” I sat down in a chair by his bed, my back to the fireplace, and opened my copy of Emma. “Let’s see now, what is the last thing you remember happening in the novel?” He offered me no answer, so I looked up from the pages. “Mr. Merrick?”
A jolt of pain exploded in my jaw, and my hand flew up to the side of my face.
I did not want to look behind me. Mr. Merrick’s eyes had become fixed again, and he trembled as he whispered my name. At last I forced myself to slowly turn, and there on the ground before the fireplace sat a woman with her back to us. She appeared small and slender, hunched over something in her lap, with a slight convulsion in her shoulders. Unlike the previous visitations, she ignored not only me, but Mr. Merrick as well, and I clutched my stomach as the import of her presence froze the room beyond the power of any coal to overcome.
Two women had been murdered that night, in less than an hour’s time of each other. Two more victims of Leather Apron, that butcher of daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. Two more lives ended in agony and terror I could not but imagine, a
nd the attempt to do so broke me up and scattered my pieces.
“Evelyn,” Mr. Merrick said.
“Mr. Merrick,” I whispered, unsure of where my voice had come from.
“Evelyn, go to her.”
I nodded, but had to reassemble myself before I could attain my feet. Once there, I made my way toward the apparition, considering each step whilst keeping my eyes squarely upon her heaving back. I drew closer to her, and within a few paces, her auburn hair came into my sight, spilling down over her shoulders and face so that I had no view of what she hunched over. I sidled around her, my ragged breathing loud in my own ears, but over which I came to hear the spirit’s muffled sobbing.
“He-hello,” I said, from a distance as near to her as I wanted to be.
She didn’t look up at me, but continued to worry over whatever she had in her lap.
I swallowed and took another step closer to her. “Can … we help you?” I asked, but received no reply. I stepped toward her again, and then again, craning to see what she had, and then I finally caught a sight of it.
Her left forearm lay limp and torn open in her lap, and with the fingernails of her right hand she raked through her own flesh. Amidst the blood and tatters of skin I glimpsed the blue of what I guessed had once been a tattoo.
I covered my mouth and stepped away. “Mother of God,” I said. “Don’t—don’t do that to yourself!”
She looked up at me then, a woman of at least forty years of age, grunting and grimacing even as she dug deeper into her arm. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “So sorry.”
“Stop!” I said.
But that only seemed to spur her into a more frenzied and aggressive attack on herself, and she clawed away her own tissue until the yellow of her bones lay exposed. I believed she meant to keep going until she had no arm left at all, and I dared not consider what she would tear into after that.
“You must stop!” I said, and in desperation reached my hand toward her shoulder. As soon as I touched her, my stomach wrenched so hard it drove the air out of me, and I thought I might vomit, but she flinched away and broke our contact.
“I’m sorry!” she screamed. Then she leapt to her feet and streaked from the room through the door. I expected to see her blood on the floor where she’d been sitting, but there was none, all evidence of her having been there gone.
“Mr. Merrick,” I said. “Are you—”
A gurgling sound came from his bed, and when I looked toward him I saw one of his pillows had fallen out from behind him, and his head tipped backward, straining his neck and cutting off his breathing.
“Mr. Merrick!” I shouted, and flew to him. Without any strength of his own to aid me, I had to lift the whole weight of his massive head on my own, but the cumbersomeness of its shape made it difficult. His gurgling continued, his eyes wide and rolling, looking up at me as I strained. “No,” I whispered through clenched teeth. “Not like this.”
I wedged both my arms behind him, up to my shoulders, and then I heaved his head forward. Once upright, his air passage unobstructed, Mr. Merrick sucked in a desperate breath with the whine of a torn bellows, while I retrieved his fallen pillow and returned it to its rightful place. I then laid him back against it, his support once again made sure.
“Mr. Merrick,” I said. I was out of air myself and felt a sudden faint wearing away at my sight. I let myself collapse into the chair, and after a few moments of deep breathing, my faculties were somewhat restored, and I leaned toward him. “Are you all right?” I asked, blinking.
He appeared to have lapsed back into a state of unconsciousness, but in that moment he was breathing evenly, and I felt a prayer of gratitude in my heart for that, at least.
His torpid condition left me alone to ponder what had happened and sort through the rapid and disturbing events. Two strange ghosts had appeared in succession, undoubtedly the victims of two fresh murders. Though neither apparition had spoken her name to me, I would learn who they were within a matter of hours when news of them appeared in the papers.
The first spirit, the Swede, had needed money, and had spoken of losing her family in the sinking of the Princess Alice. I’d been a girl of seven or eight years of age when that calamity had befallen the city and didn’t remember it well. I recalled only that a collision had taken place on the Thames between a passenger ferry and a coal freighter, and that many had drowned. The spirit had begged for money, but I wondered whether the boat tragedy had more to do with her torment, and felt I had a direction in which to begin my hunt.
The other spirit troubled me more, not only in my shock at the violence she’d done to herself, but because I knew even less about her. All she’d said was that she was sorry, but to whom and for what I had not a single notion. The blue tattoo, though obliterated as it was, remained the only detail of any peculiarity that might guide my way.
A few hours later, Polly appeared, but against the two wraiths that had preceded her, I welcomed her anxious joy, and even smiled at her familiar wedding gown. I wished she would talk to me, but in her manner she merely stood over Mr. Merrick for several moments, and, finding him unresponsive, went to inspect the cards and photographs along the mantel as though she had no memory of having done so many times before. Night after night she had repeated the same actions, as had Annie, the dominion of these ghosts one of amber, wherein past events and emotions had become trapped in a world unto themselves.
After Polly had gone, I waited to see if Annie would return, no longer fully convinced I had succeeded in liberating her. But when her appointed hour came and went without any sight of her open mouth or sound of her wail, I sighed and smiled for her soul. The assurance that a ghost could be freed, and that I had done it, were all I needed to continue in my Spiritualist enterprise.
Miss Doyle and Miss Flemming came before long, and finding Mr. Merrick again insensate, fetched Dr. Treves.
“Damn,” he said, following his examination. “I thought perhaps we’d turned a corner somehow. But it seems we were right in our first conclusion.”
“He was well enough yesterday,” Miss Doyle said, and then she turned to me. “Did something happen during the night?”
Much had happened, but nothing I could speak of with her. “No, miss,” I said.
She turned her body away but kept her eyes on me a moment longer in obvious suspicion. I knew very well she had no idea what had transpired, but under her scrutiny, I felt a bit of perspiration forming along my brow.
Dr. Treves held a fist to his mouth as though he meant to blow into it. “Watch him closely,” he said. “I fear we’re truly near the end, this time.” He shook his head on his way out of the room, repeatedly growling, “Damn.”
Miss Flemming left soon after him, but Miss Doyle remained behind with me. I was about to ask if she needed anything more, but she spoke first. “When you took your day off without permission, where did you go?” she asked.
“I— Why do you ask?”
“Mr. Merrick seemed to recover the following morning. Unexpectedly. Did you perhaps purchase a remedy for him on the street?”
“What?” I said, indignation lifting my chest. “Of course not!”
“Dr. Treves is a man of science,” she said. “He holds no regard for the quacksalvers and charlatans.”
“Neither do I.”
“I’ve watched you, Miss Fallow. I believe you truly care for Mr. Merrick, and I can’t imagine why you’d leave him the way you did. Unless you did it for him.”
To that I had no reply. Though wrong in her theory of what I had done in my absence from the hospital, she’d uncovered my motive for leaving.
“I know you don’t trust me,” she said. “But I promise I’ll not snitch on you. Whatever you acquired for Mr. Merrick while you were out, it seemed to help him. Perhaps you might get him some more of it.”
“I got him nothing,” I said. “I gave Mr. Merrick no remedy—”
“Whatever it was,” she said, and firmed up her bearing, “whatever
it was, it can’t be a bad thing now if it prolongs his life or eases his passing.”
“He is not passing,” I said.
I could sense her growing impatient with me. “Did you know Dr. Treves performed an appendectomy earlier this year? You’re ignorant of what that is, of course, but it was the first surgery of its kind in England, and he saved a boy’s life doing it. The Queen herself named him Surgeon Extraordinary. So you’ll pardon me if I take the good doctor’s judgment over yours.” She shook her head at me and went to the door. “Just think on what I said, and do what you need to do for Mr. Merrick. I care about him, too.”
Whether I agreed with her about Mr. Merrick’s condition or whether she believed I’d given him some patent medicine didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Miss Doyle had just offered me her approval to leave the hospital, which was nearly the same as receiving it from the matron, for there was no one else from whom the matron would learn of my absence. Before I undertook another such expedition, however, I had to learn more about the murdered women.
I pulled on my shawl and walked through the hospital to the front gate, and within a few minutes I was able to purchase an array of the morning’s newspapers from passing peddlers. I carried this haul of gossip back to Mr. Merrick’s room, and there I pored over the sensational details of the crimes.
There’d been two women murdered, just as I’d already concluded. They had met their ends within a short walk of each other, and within the same hour, and, much to the continued humiliation of the police, Leather Apron had accomplished his purpose seemingly beneath the coppers’ very noses.
The Echo reported the first of the victims as a Swede named Elizabeth Stride, and indeed her husband was said to have shipwrecked and drowned. Since then, she’d lived in a lodging house in Flower and Dean, and went by the name Long Liz. I shuddered to think of entering that place in search of information, and hoped that would not be necessary. Of the second victim, nothing was yet known, but her inquest had been scheduled for Thursday, four days hence, at eleven o’clock at the City Mortuary on Golden Lane. I felt a pressing need to be present for it, though I feared Mr. Merrick would not live that long.
A Taste for Monsters Page 18