Mayhem

by Sarah Pinborough

  ‘Who is he looking for?’

  ‘He don’t tell Chi-Chi.’

  ‘Does he smoke?’ My words were thick, struggling to form against the lethargy that gripped me.

  ‘Yes: smoke first, look after.’

  The strange man was almost at the far end of the room, where stairs led down to the small lower level where Chinamen came to gamble. Extra beds, for busy nights, lined the area.

  ‘Have you noticed, Chi-Chi,’ I muttered, ‘that he looks at them strangely? I don’t believe he’s looking at their faces – around them, perhaps, but not at their faces. Why might that be, do you think? What is he hoping to see?’

  Chi-Chi said nothing more but shuffled away as if he had not heard the questions, and as the stranger disappeared downstairs, I turned again to the pipe. I had perhaps two hours more until five o’clock, when I would have to head home to wash and change for the post mortem examination. I did not want to waste them. As I lay back down on the couch and looked up at the cloud I had created with my night’s indulgence, I wondered about the man. I had seen him before – before these strange visits to the opium dens. I was sure of it. But where, and when?

  4

  The Pale. March, 1881

  Aaron Kosminski

  ‘Fire!’

  Sweat burst from Aaron Kosminski’s forehead as he sat suddenly upright in the bed, crying out. By the time his mother and Matilda came in, Betsy was forcing her feet into her boots and wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. Baby Bertha was held tight in Matilda’s arms. ‘Hush!’ she said. ‘If you wake Morris again, he won’t be happy.’

  ‘He’s doing it again,’ Betsy grumbled. ‘It’s been four nights now. He sweats like a pig and then the bed is freezing.’

  Fifteen-year-old Aaron was vaguely aware of his family’s presence, just as he was vaguely aware of the bed and the room, and that somewhere in the real world – the world that was a haze between him and the visions – his skin was freezing cold, not burning hot.

  ‘Run, run, run, run,’ he cried. ‘They’re coming!’ His breath came in short bursts. ‘They’re coming here – all of them.’

  Screams – people screaming. Burning wood, cold air, and so much anger. So much hate – black hate. Matilda terrified – the babies, somewhere he can’t see – screaming as hands grab her. So much confusion. Morris: Morris’ head is smashed red against the white of the snow. His lungs burn as he runs, he and Betsy, running and not looking back. Mother and Matilda aren’t behind them – they were behind them, for a little while, but now they’re gone. He’s too afraid to stop and look; he must keep running. So much hatred. So much darkness.

  ‘Shh, my son.’ His mother hushed him softly and wiped his brow, but he was lost in the vision, unable to respond to her touch. In the vision she was no longer there – she was dead, or something worse. ‘You’re here with us. It’s just a bad dream.’

  ‘The same bad dream for four nights.’ Matilda snorted. ‘No wonder I’m so tired.’

  Outside, snow fell softly. Winter hadn’t quite let go just yet, but its grip was loosening. For the best part of six months the shtetl had been smothered by a foothigh blanket of freezing white, but the blasts of wind that had driven the icy weather their way had fallen, anger spent, and most days there was some thaw, leaving the paths between the cramped houses and around the market place muddy slush. It was difficult for anyone to stay clean or dry as they wandered to and fro to work, or seeking work. Everything was dirty, and would stay that way until the ground dried. Sometimes it felt as if they lived in grubby blackness.

  The night is black. Eventually he stops running and lets go of Betsy’s hand. Even in all this fear and panic he doesn’t want to touch her. The softness makes his skin crawl slightly, and he remembers that awful night, and the terror that had filled him – only flashes of memory now, but enough to have scarred him. Betsy doesn’t notice his hand is gone from hers, or if she does, she doesn’t care. She’s panting from the run, and although the days have been warmer it is now nearly midnight and her breath pours out like smoke.

  They turn and look as flames consume the makeshift town that was their home. Even from this distance they can hear the yelling, both of terror and of angry excitement. The towns have turned on them. There is so much hate. There is no sign of Matilda or Mother or the babies. Neither he nor Betsy speak – what can they say? He wants to run and keep running until they reach an ocean they can cross. That’s what they have to do. They have to run.

  Aaron gasped and the vision was gone. He blinked for a moment, adjusting to the sight of his home and his bed and his mother, alive and well. He shivered and his mother pulled the damp blankets up around his chin.

  ‘So much hate,’ he whispered. ‘They were black with it – on the inside.’

  His mother grabbed his hands and rubbed warmth into them, and he saw how red her skin was from all the scrubbing in the freezing air. There were cracks on her palms. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time in a long while. Loose strands of hair had fallen free of the cap she slept in and they were run through with grey. His mother was getting old, but if they did not leave this place she would die without getting older. He felt the truth of that in every beat of his heart.

  ‘I told you.’ Matilda leaned against the wall, a frown forming lines between her eyebrows. ‘The same dream: four nights he’s woken up shouting about fire and hate.’

  ‘Your grandmother used to have dreams.’ Aaron’s mother pulled him in to her breast and held his head there. ‘When I was a little girl she dreamed of us leaving Kiev. She dreamed of old Abramanov killing his wife – no one knew what he had done apart from your grandmother, not until they found the poor woman rotting under the bed.’ She said sagely, ‘Some dreams are more than dreams.’

  Matilda snorted again, though her mother constantly chided her about it. Aaron could understand why: his eldest sister was a pleasant-looking woman, even in the grime and hard living that aged women fast in the Pale, but this mannerism had led to the young men calling her ‘horse’ as they’d grown up, and that in turn had fixed her mouth in a constant expression of down-turned displeasure.

  Aaron kept quiet and waited for the trembling that had gripped him to subside. He hugged his mother back, less out of a need for affection than for warmth. His bones were cold to their marrow. As he shook against the familiar stale smell of his mother’s nightclothes, the vivid images that had overwhelmed him faded, but the underlying sensations remained: hatred, fear and the desperate need to run. He didn’t need his mother to tell him that these were no ordinary dreams. He feared the visions even more when they came when he was awake, helping Mr Anscher cut hair from liceridden heads, or over at the hospital cleaning up after the doctors and patients.

  There was never any warning, his head just filled with something other: terrible sights and sounds, like tonight’s, a forewarning of the towns and villages pouring down upon them in the night and destroying or stealing everything they had. He had almost cut a man’s ear off yesterday morning when the images had hit him. If he wasn’t careful, Mr Anscher would find another young man to help him and then they would lose these rooms, poor as they were.

  He had been assaulted by another vision over the past three days – one that made him realise that none of this was normal. In it he saw a vast city, bigger even than the Kiev he knew from the stories his mother and the old people of the shtetl would tell during the long summer evenings, when they gathered in the marketplace and remembered better times. Perhaps his mind had made the city up from those stories, but he knew he did not have the imagination to invent the luxury he had seen surrounding the screaming man at the centre of the explosion in his vision. The cramped shtetl with its poverty-stricken residents was all he had ever known; he’d never seen a palace, let alone stepped inside one.

  ‘Grandmother’s gift?’ Betsy’s eyes were bleary with broken sleep. ‘It can’t be.’ Her words came out through a yawn and she shuffled forward and sat on the edge of t
he bed, tugging an edge of blanket over her. ‘You always said the gift came to women.’

  This wasn’t the first time Mother had talked of the foresight that was supposed to be in their blood. When their grandmother was alive, she herself had told them about the rotting wife, how when she had touched the baker’s hand buying bread from him, she’d seen exactly what he would do later that night. The children had enjoyed the scary bedtime tales, but as they had grown and their grandmother had died, the ‘gift’ became a myth, a story of its own.

  ‘There’s no such thing as the gift,’ Matilda said, hugging her own tiny daughter to her chest. ‘It’s just old superstition.’

  ‘Old superstitions are not to be sneered at,’ Golda Kosminski snapped at her eldest daughter. ‘They come from truths that we are too busy to see.’

  ‘Maybe if he has the sight he can tell us where Father is. At least that would be useful.’

  ‘Matilda!’ Betsy said, shocked. ‘Sometimes you are too mean.’ She turned and squeezed their mother’s arm, still wrapped tightly around Aaron, who in turn pulled him closer until he thought he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t like touching Betsy. He didn’t like it at all.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night and I haven’t had any sleep for days,’ Matilda sighed. ‘It would appear that tonight isn’t going to be any exception.’

  ‘Father’s dead,’ Aaron whispered, so quietly that it took a few seconds before his sisters paused in their bickering and looked at him. ‘He wasn’t lying when he said he was going to join the Army. He never got there. He died in a ditch on the way. They took his boots and his hat.’ His mother’s arms fell away and he pulled back from her. He kept his eyes down and picked at his thin hands. They were all staring at him and he didn’t like it.

  ‘How … ?’ Matilda’s question trailed off and she stepped forwards, folding her arms across her chest. ‘How could you possibly know that?’ she finally said as she peered over him.

  ‘The gift,’ Golda whispered. ‘The boy has the gift.’ This time Matilda didn’t snort.

  The cold in Aaron’s bones was getting worse and he wished they would start up the morning fire, even though it was hours till dawn. He didn’t understand how he knew his father’s fate – he hadn’t been aware that he did until the words came tumbling from his mouth. But he had always been certain, in a way his sisters and mother hadn’t, that his father was never coming back.

  ‘They’re all going to blame us for what’s happening to the man. Tomorrow.’ He didn’t sound like himself. Fifteen was nearly grown, but sitting there under the scrutiny of his older sisters and his mother he felt like a little boy again – like the boy who had screamed all night when he was four. He pushed that memory from his head. Just talking was making him warmer. He had to get the coldness out.

  ‘What man?’ Betsy asked.

  ‘The screaming man. The man with no legs.’ His teeth were chattering and his words came out in stuttered bursts. ‘They’re carrying him. His stomach is ripped open and his legs are gone.’

  ‘This is all just nonsense,’ Matilda said, but her nervous voice suggested otherwise. ‘It’s a bad dream – he’s always been strange, ever since that night when he was small.’

  ‘Stop it, Tilda.’ Betsy’s face burned slightly.

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  ‘Maybe he was strange before that.’ Betsy was defiant. ‘It wasn’t my fault anyway. Let’s just forget it.’ She tucked a curl around her ear. She was the beauty of their family, just turned twenty-three and married to Woolf, the butcher’s son. Her choice hadn’t surprised Aaron: Betsy was steeped in blood in his mind; no wonder she liked a man who must stink of it.

  ‘They’ll blame us – all of them. They’re filled with so much hate.’

  ‘Who, Aaron?’ his mother asked. ‘Who will blame us?’

  ‘The town,’ he said softly. ‘All the towns – they’ll come to burn everything. They’re filled with hate and anger and they blame us for the dead man with no legs, and everything else.’ He looked up at his mother. ‘We have to leave, or bad things will happen to us.’ He swallowed hard. ‘To you and Matilda especially.’

  This time his eldest sister paled in the shadowy light that filled the room. ‘It’s nonsense,’ she said again, eventually. ‘The boy’s talking rubbish, playing a stupid game with us.’ She tutted sharply like a schoolteacher. ‘Back to bed, everyone, or we’ll die of exhaustion tomorrow.’

  Aaron didn’t get back to sleep, and he was quite sure that Matilda, lying beside him, was awake too.

  *

  Two days later the news made its way through the shtetl, spreading as fast as dysentery. Aaron heard it at the barber’s; his mother heard it at the synagogue: Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, a bomb thrown under his carriage as he made his way to a military roll call. He hadn’t died immediately, but had been carried back to the Winter Palace. According to those whispering the story, his legs had been so badly shattered that they were just a bloody pulp, and his insides had tumbled from his ruined stomach.

  *

  That night, without any further conversation, the Kosminski women and the two daughters’ husbands packed up their belongings and headed out of the shtetl. They did not look back, and when they were finally on board a ship to take them to a new home in England, Aaron’s dreams of hate and darkness stopped as suddenly as they had arrived. No one was more relieved than Aaron himself. He had no desire to share his grandmother’s gift.

  4

  The New York Times

  Wednesday, October 3, 1888

  LONDON’S RECORD OF CRIME ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS MURDER BROUGHT TO LIGHT A PERFECT CARNIVAL OF BLOOD IN THE WORLD’S METROPOLIS – THE POLICE APPARENTLY PARALYSED

  LONDON, Oct, 2. – The carnival of blood continues. It is an extremely strange state of affairs altogether, because before the Whitechapel murders began several papers called attention to the fact that there have been more sanguinary crimes than ever before known in this city in the same space of time. The Whitechapel assassin has now murdered six victims and crimes occur daily, but pass unnoticed in view of the master murderer’s work in the East End.

  5

  London. October, 1888

  Dr Bond

  It was just before seven when Dr Charles Hebbert arrived at the Millbank Street mortuary, and even though I had not been there long myself, I was glad to have my friend and colleague’s company. He was by nature a far more jovial man than I, and his presence immediately lifted the hovering dark cloud of my mood. Sitting alone in the mortuary I had begun to feel slightly ill at ease; I wasn’t sure if it was the dregs of the opium or just my current sleepless exhaustion, but I was finding the odour and the cramped confines far more macabre than was normal, and Hebbert’s brisk cheer was entirely the tonic I needed.

  ‘So, what have we got here?’ He took off his coat and rubbed his hands together as he smiled broadly and peered behind the wooden partitions that separated the other current occupants of the mortuary from our cleared post mortem examination area.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he muttered, although still with good cheer, ‘explosion of some kind?’

  ‘Boiler room.’ I didn’t need to ask which cadaver had caught his eye. ‘The other woman started an argument with her husband over another man while he was drunk and holding a knife. The gentleman at the end hung himself after losing very heavily in a game of cards. All within three streets.’

  ‘At least they’re residents of Westminster and not ladies of Whitechapel this time,’ Charles said, reappearing. ‘Although’ – and for the first time I saw his humour slip away slightly – ‘there has been so much murder and violence in this city of late – our Whitechapel friend aside – that I have begun to dream of it. Perhaps I should drink less coffee.’

  ‘Or more brandy,’ I countered, and as we both smiled, the sparkle returned to my friend’s eyes. My smile, however, was a touch forced. If the city’s behaviour had started to affect one so well-balanced as Charles, then
what chance did I have of shaking my insomnia and fits of anxiety?

  ‘Shall we get to work?’ he said, and I nodded. The day – and the torso – would not wait.

  *

  By the time we’d carefully removed the remains from the alcohol, my tiredness had vanished, as had Charles’ childlike joviality, and we were both focused entirely on the task of putting together the puzzle of death that had been presented to us. Even stripped of the maggots, her flesh was so badly decomposed that as we measured the length, waist and chest, we couldn’t even ascertain whether her skin tone had been light or dark. The copy of The Echo that had wrapped her was dated the twenty-fourth of August, but we did not need that to know that she had been dead for at least six weeks.

  ‘What do you think, Charles,’ I said, softly, ‘shall we say approximately the twentieth for her date of death?’

  ‘I’d agree.’ We looked at each other across the table. ‘The twentieth, though?’ he continued. ‘Is it possible it could be him?’

  As always these days, when violent death was mentioned, there was no need to clarify who he was: the twentieth of August fell between the first two ‘Jack’ murders, of Martha Tabram and Polly Nicholls. I could see why people would think perhaps this could be his work too, and perhaps it would be easy to claim it as such, but I shook my head. Although I had not attended the crime scenes of those cases, I had read the reports of Jack’s work. His attacks were more frenzied than this. Also, our victim had a fair amount of flesh on her, so she ate regularly, and those few organs that had been left for us, the heart, liver and lungs, were all relatively healthy.

  ‘She’s in too fine a condition to be a street girl, and this’ – I kept my eyes away from her severed neck as I gestured – ‘this is not his method.’ Ridiculously I found the lack of the head to be more haunting than if it were there, her dead eyes glaring at me for this analysis of her person.