Doyle raised the rain curtain on his side of the cab. A mob surrounded the conveyance. Desperate faces pressed closer and stared inside. A woman’s hand reached inside, and fingers brushed lightly over Doyle’s Inverness. “Please, yer lordship!” she said before someone shoved her out of the way. Rougher hands thrust through the window. With restrained calm, Doyle drew out his pistol, then returned it to his pocket, all the while meeting the bitter gaze of the leprous man who peered at him. Grudgingly, the unfortunate stepped away from the cab.
“Well played,” Bell whispered. He held his own pistol out of sight in his lap, but he put it away at once.
A thunderous blast erupted from the commissioner’s gun. Shouting, cursing, the mob fell away from the cab and in twos and threes melted back into shadow-filled doorways and alleys. Sir Charles Warren of the Metropolitan Police settled into his seat once more and closed the hansom cab’s door. Acrid smoke still wafted from the barrel of his oversized revolver as he leaned back and shoved it into its holster. “Damned beggars! Packs of them! Like diseased wolves! They’re everywhere, and not just in the district, either. Through all of London!”
Bell could barely repress his disgust for the commissioner. His mouth tightened into a lipless line as he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out his wallet. Without a word or a glance at either of his companions, he drew out a sheaf of pound notes and flung them out the window.
The streets grew darker, and the rain began to drum with an insistent rhythm on the hansom cab’s roof. The rain curtains rustled and flapped as the wind picked up, and the cab itself rocked under the gusts.
In Berner Street, the cab slowed to a creaking stop. Sir Charles pushed open the door and the wind blew it closed, banging his head and his knee. With a curse, he kicked it open again and the driver, having dismounted, caught it and held it for them. Bell and Doyle climbed down. The thin rain stabbed at them, and the wind snatched at their coats. Bell pushed his hat lower on his head to keep it from flying off.
Another crowd had gathered close by, but this one was a mixture of ordinary citizens and policemen. The cab had stopped before a factory warehouse. The sign on the street-side of the building read, A. Dutfield, Van and Cart Builders. Close beside it stood another warehouse, and the faded white-paint sign above its entrance revealed it to be the business of one W. Hendley, Sack Manufacturer. A narrow black alley, utterly devoid of any light, separated the two businesses.
Someone called out, “Commissioner! Sir Charles!” A large man pushed his way through the crowd and hurried toward them. His face was concealed beneath a sodden hat that he wore pulled down over his eyebrows to shield off the rain, and his coat collar was turned up high around his neck. “Over here, Sir Charles. She’s down the alley.”
“Of course she’s down the alley,” Warren growled. “They’re always down the damned alley! Why can’t someone ever get murdered in a nice, clean street with decent lighting just for once?” He made a gruff gesture toward Bell and Doyle, “Inspector Abberline, these gentlemen with me are Dr. Joseph Bell and Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. They’re . . .” he hesitated, frowning, and seemed about to choke on the word. “. . . consultants.” He waved a hand toward the alley. “Now lead on, man. Lead on!”
Inspector Frederick Abberline nodded to Bell before he turned to obey the commissioner. Bell had already met Abberline at the scene of the Annie Chapman murder three weeks’ previous. Despite Abberline’s failure to apprehend the killer, the inspector impressed him as one of the few competent detectives in the city.
A pair of constables carrying lanterns joined them at the entrance to the alley where yet another pair were positioned to keep the onlookers away. Taking one of the lights, Abberline led them into the darkness.
“Six paces,” Bell muttered as the lamplight fell on the body. He squeezed passed Sir Charles and knelt down. “Eighteen feet at most. Who found her?”
“A passing wagoner heard three short screams and stopped,” Abberline answered. “Claims he saw someone in a cloak and hat run away. We’ve identified her as Elizabeth Stride, but she was known on the streets around here as Long Liz. A prostitute like the others. Forty-five years old. Swedish immigrant. Lived in a lodging house off Devonshire and Commercial Streets.”
“Looks like your wagoner scared the monster—this so-called Jack the Ripper—away before he could finish his grisly work,” Doyle said between clenched teeth.
“He finished it well enough,” Bell replied. Yet he knew what his former student meant. Elizabeth Stride was quite dead, but she hadn’t suffered the same butchery as the madman’s other victims. She lay on her side exactly as she had fallen, with her face to the wall of Dutfield’s warehouse. Mud caked the fur trim of her black cloth coat and one side of her face. A cheap penny-corsage made from a single red rose and a sprig of white maidenhair fern adorned her shoulder. A few curls of brown hair spilling out from under her crepe bonnet stirred in the breeze that whispered over the ground.
“Lots of men have it in for these old whores!” Sir Charles Warren scoffed. “Are you sure this one’s the same as the others?”
“There’s no blood on the front of her clothing,” Bell noted as he turned her gently onto her back. “He knocked her down first.” He pointed to a dark bruise on Elizabeth Stride’s chin, then he loosened the neck of her brown velveteen bodice and the white blouse beneath that to expose marks on her collarbone and chest. “Then he held her down to cut her throat with a left-handed stroke. Same as the others.”
Abberline leaned closer with the lantern so the commissioner could see the violent gash for himself. “We found this clutched in her left hand,” he said to Bell, proffering a small bottle.
In the lamplight, Bell studied the fine printing on the bottle’s label. Doctor Gull’s Life-Saving Pills! it proclaimed. A Triumph of Science! The Light of the World! There was more, but he didn’t need to strain his eyes to read it. “Patent medicine. Quackery,” he said, returning the bottle to Abberline. “Charlatans are everywhere offering cures for what cannot be cured.”
Sir Charles Warren recoiled. “She has the pox?” he cried, eyes widening. He whipped a handkerchief from his coat pocket and pressed it to his mouth and nose.
Bell rose to stand. Gull’s Pills, like a hundred other patent medicines, were marketed to the gullible and the poor as a remedy for the African curse. “You’re a blithering fool, Warren,” he said, turning. “If it could be caught by breathing, we’d all be dead long ago.”
With Doyle at his shoulder, he made his way back to the curb. The onlookers parted to let him pass. Without saying a word, he leaned his head on the side of the waiting hansom cab, squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his temples.
“Did she have it?” Doyle quietly asked.
Bell nodded. “As I turned her over I noted the lymph glands in her neck and under her arms. They were quite swollen. And on the muddy side of her face, shingles. Then there are the pills.” Recovering himself, he straightened and drew a deep breath. He still couldn’t quite get Elizabeth Stride’s face out of his mind. He opened the hansom cab’s door. “An autopsy will confirm it. Let’s get out of this rain.”
Inside the cab, Doyle sat facing his old teacher and his friend. “Then it seems this Jack the Ripper is systematically killing infected prostitutes,” he said.
“So it seems,” Bell agreed. “But why? Is it some twisted idea of public service? Or is it out of revenge because he, himself, is infected? The violence of the deeds suggests a tremendous anger.” He sighed again and put his chin on his fist as he stared out the cab’s window.
Then, for a moment he straightened. On the opposite side of the street away from the crowd, something moved in the shadow of a doorway. The wind rustled the hem of a cape, and some stray bit of light touched something silvery. “A knife!” he thought at once, and his hand plunged into the pocket of his overcoat for his gun. But then, the figure stepped out of the shadow and hurried on by.
Not a knife. Only a walking st
ick.
Some gentleman, a noble perhaps, slumming with the Whitechapel ladies and not wishing to be seen. Catching contagion, carrying it home to wives, to other lovers and mistresses who passed it to their husbands and lovers, from the lowest Whitechapel doxy on up to the throne itself.
He’d just examined Victoria that morning, and her philandering husband, Albert. He hadn’t told them yet, nor Doyle, nor anyone.
He closed his eyes again. Twenty years wasn’t such a long time, but he was so tired. He rapped on the roof of the cab. “Two-twenty-one Baker Street,” he told the driver.
“What about Sir Charles?” Doyle said.
Bell looked out the window again, but the cloaked figure was gone. “Devil take him,” he answered. “Let him get another cab.”
The hansom cab rocked in the wind as they journeyed home, and the rain beat down upon it with a growing determination. The beggars left them alone, whether because the hour was too late even for them, or because the driver took a different route, Bell couldn’t say, nor did he care. He closed his eyes, and thought of what he would try to say in his speech to the College of Physicians, and he wondered if any of it would matter or make a difference.
London, the empire, the world as they knew it was coming down around their ears. In Paris, Capetown, New York, even Hong Kong, the story was the same, and the tale only ended in darkness. He laughed soundlessly at himself, recalling the earlier drafts of his speech in which he’d dared to give a name to a disease that defied him. He glimpsed the answer sometimes, or so he told himself, but he couldn’t grasp it. He had suspicions, and he had hypotheses. But no proof and not even a clue as to how to go about finding proof.
The science just didn’t exist yet that could show him the way.
He opened his eyes and stared out into the rain and the fog. “It’s beaten me,” he said. Doyle looked back at him with tired eyes. When the hansom cab let them out at their address, they went by the consulting rooms which still had not been cleaned from the day’s appointments, and climbed the stairs to their apartments. Doyle sank down in one of the overstuffed chairs, then leaned forward and wearily began to pick up the pieces of the broken cognac glass. Nicking his thumb as he gathered the pieces, he said nothing, just wiped the fine line of blood on his trouser.
Bell went to his writing table, and took out a sheet of paper to write. But there at hand was the black case with his needle, and the damnably pretty blue cobalt bottle containing the only paradise he ever expected to know. Pushing back the paper, he opened the case, the bottle, and prepared his injection. Just a seven-percent solution, he reminded himself. But perhaps tonight just a little more.
Doyle dropped the pieces of the broken glass into a wastebasket near the sideboard and turned as his mentor pushed the point into the proper vein. “Does it really give you any release?” he asked.
Bell hesitated for a moment, savoring the needle’s sting, waiting for the first cold rush. “No, but it dulls the pain,” he answered as he withdrew the instrument and set it aside. “And at least for a little while, it eases the fear.” He closed his eyes, and his head rolled back between his shoulders. “You don’t know.”
He smiled to himself. Doyle didn’t know, because he disdained the needle and disapproved of his old teacher’s use of cocaine. Bell didn’t blame him. It was a weakness, if only a small one, but still a weakness.
Soft footsteps on the carpet made him open his eyes. With dreamlike slowness, his student, his friend, and his colleague walked across the carpet and picked up the hypodermic which still contained a measure of the damnable drug.
“Maybe it’s time I found out,” Doyle said. He pressed the point deep into his arm.
Beyond the lace curtain (poor Mrs. Hudson!), beyond the window, the wind moaned and the rain drove down.
Revision Point
The genesis of “The Terminal Solution” isn’t easy to relate. It sprang from a dream, a nightmare, actually, very complete and very detailed. The premise was simple enough on the surface: what if AIDS had emerged from the African continent 125 years early, brought back by David Livingstone, the African explorer, in 1864 to Victorian England? How would the medical science of that time have dealt with such a disease?
Consider that “cupping,” or bleeding a patient, was still a common practice and that basic sterilization techniques were not. Joseph Lister didn’t propose the idea of using carbolic acid as an antiseptic until 1867. Frederich Loeffler and Paul Frosch didn’t suggest the existence of viruses until 1898. Medicine and medical science were, to say the least, still quite primitive.
Social conditions throughout London would have contributed to massive and rapid spread of the infection. Poverty and a huge influx of immigrants were contributing to the swift growth of slums. Prostitution was widespread. So was drug use. Opium and morphine were perfectly legal, cheap, and available. Anyone could buy a hypodermic needle on the corner. Rail lines were also springing up all over Britain, linking major cities and smaller ones, and British forces and culture were spreading across the world.
In modern times, after twenty years of effort, our science and medicine have barely made inroads against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. What chance would the Victorian world have had?
None at all.
R.W.B.
THE ASHBAZU EFFECT
by John G. McDaid
In the course of its growth and development, the school came to be the center of culture and learning in Sumer. Moreover, unlike present-day institutions of learning, the Sumerian school was also the center of what might be termed creative writing.
—Samuel Noah Kramer
History Begins at Sumer
There was no question that Enzu had performed all the required actions, and yet his manuscript had been rejected. He had brought an arua gift to the temple of Nanna, paid the divination priest to prod a reeking sheep’s liver, and, much to his wife’s annoyance, he had hired a professional omen reader to untie his dreams.
“And what did she tell you, Enzu-dumu? ‘Opportunities exist, but there are challenges.”’ Mari, who made a few coins on the side by reading dreams for friends, shook her head.
“Something like that,” he muttered. In truth, he thought ruefully, the shailtu had said his petition would be granted.
“You don’t really believe in that nonsense,” Mari persisted.
“No, beloved.” Enzu sighed. “What’s important is that influential elders still do, and one does well to be seen adhering to the forms.”
“Lum.” She gave him the eye of death and stormed off into the kitchen where he heard her busily rearranging jars.
Her anger was understandable. He brushed dust from his robe and set down the heavy leather bag holding his tablets. Approaching the temple for sponsorship had been expensive, and their savings were nearly exhausted. The high life he’d enjoyed as a school-father had evaporated. Gone were the hordes of aspiring scribes paying cash—and offering up delicious and exquisite bribes for good grades.
Gone with the invention of printing.
After months of arua and wheedling from Yadidatum, his Introducer, Enzu had finally set up a meeting with the financier-priestess at the temple of Nanna. It had been a frustrating wait since he’d sent the tablets, then, finally, today he had been summoned to meet Ningal-ummi.
Trudging up the impressive stone steps, he noticed once again the profound changes. Ten years ago, the lower temple square would have been full of circus acts to entertain the masses: dancing bears, snake charmers, transvestites, the whole nine iku. Now, narrow paths snaked through a huckster’s barrow of tablet stalls, some bare wood tables, the higher-end draped in fabric and shaded with awnings. A continuous trickle of Ur’s citizens wandered the twisty passages amid racks of texts old and new, and the clink of commerce was constant.
Enzu waited in the inner courtyard. Here there was shade, cool pitchers of water, and the fragrant smell of cedar. Around him strolled and chatted the deal-makers of Ur, dressed in fine-s
pun clothes, with neatly trimmed beards. Merchants seeking capital for trade voyages down the Gulf rubbed shoulders with engineers looking to publish canal-building texts. He felt isolated and noticed, and wished he’d been able to talk Yadidatum into accompanying him.
When the page called, he was relieved to be led into the dim stone hallways and directed, wordlessly, into a small audience room.
Ningal-ummi sat on a lush cushion, lit from a courtyard door behind, surrounded by stacks of tablets. She offered food and water, and nodded as Enzu presented her with a small silver stylus. Her eyes narrowed as he thanked her for the meeting, formally and correctly, in liturgical idiom.
“You speak Emesal well,” she said.
“You are kind. What little I know I learned transcribing for Ugazum, one of your tax collectors.”
“He says your hand followed his mouth accurately.”
“Again, you are too kind.”
“Well, to business.” She frowned. “You speak and write capably. So why, scribe, are these tablets so strange?”
“I’m sorry you find them so. I mean only to tell an interesting story.”
“Do you? But this story lies,” said Ningal-ummi tightly. “You talk of real places, people who still live. But then you describe things which did not happen. The story claims that printing was never invented. It says that the Sons of the Left invaded us and took over our temples, our cities, even our language.”
“Your displeasure shames me,” said Enzu, bowing. “I mean only to show what might have been, had things happened differently. I call it ‘fiction-that-continues-a-line. ’ What if Ilammadu had not invented molded text? How quickly things might have gone horribly wrong! It serves to show the greatness of our city and our goddess, and the rightness of our path.”
ReVISIONS Page 13