by Brian Hodge
“Arsehole!” Burke shouted. “Took your own bloody time, didn’t ya!”
“There’s a fine display o’ gratitude.” Hare went for the rope and, with the Hyde still spasming on his feet, dropped the noose over his head, tightened the slipknot, and put his boot up the bastard’s backside.
Burke got the idea and helped hustle their mark toward the widest window. Hare grabbed the cleaver’s handle and twisted, and lord, didn’t the Hyde squeal then. Hare used the cleaver like a rudder to steer, yanking it free at the last instant as Burke rammed the bugger through the window and into the night. The Hyde tumbled away in a shower of glass and billows of fog, and the rope snapped tight with a twang, as sweet a sound to his ears as violins.
“Christ on a crutch, but ‘e was a tough one.” Burke took a few weary moments to rub his jaw, his shoulder, his sides, his balls. He nodded at the window. “Dead yet?”
Hare peered over the sill. “Best give ‘im a few minutes to quit kickin’.”
“Not too many, mind. The doc wants ‘im pronto, and I don’t aim to disappoint, not with our pay on the line.” He lurched to the door and took a look down the hallway at the shambles left in their wake. “If we wasn’t in stook before, we sure as ‘ell is now. Look at the state of this place! Be lucky if we breaks even.”
Just like a nagging woman sometimes, he was.
“If this is wot it takes to get it done, there ain’t no profit in killin’ Hydes.”
“We done all right, first time and all,” Hare said. “Just needs to refine our methods.”
Outside, they rolled their cart out of the carriage house and alongside the ivy-covered wall where the Hyde dangled. They poked and prodded until they were satisfied he wasn’t going to rouse midway through the trip to Pretorius’ place on Browning Street, and put their tits in the wringer all over again. They returned inside and used the cleaver to cut him loose at the newel post, then dug in their heels to lower him gently to the ground and spare the goods any more damage.
“Bugger weighs a bleedin’ ton,” Burke grunted.
“And ‘alf of it whiskey,” said Hare. “Whiskey we bought to pour down ‘is throat. That don’t set right with me.”
They rejoined the corpse, ready to give it the heave-ho onto the cart when Hare thumped the dome of its belly. He listened to it slosh and gurgle like a keg before last orders. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels, gazing into the late night fog. Sometimes he astounded himself with his pragmatic clarity.
“That’s a waste of good whiskey, that is. If ‘e took a single piss all night, I didn’t see it.” He gave the corpse a nudge. “Before we gets ‘im in the wagon, you take that noose from off ‘is neck and cinch it ‘round ‘is ankles.”
Burke turned as pale as the moon. Funny, the things that queased him out and the things that didn’t. “Naw, William, you ain’t…you don’t mean…”
Hare shushed him with a stern finger. “Gotta recover our losses somewhere, and that’s what’s nearest at hand. There ain’t a man alive went broke sellin’ whiskey, no matter where it’s been. Now you get ‘im strung back up that wall, and I’ll fetch a barrel and a pipe.”
*
An hour after dawn the next morning, Burke was off on his own for a change, giving his sorrows as much of a soaking as the last puny bit of bankroll in his pockets would allow. Some days it seemed that no matter how clever you were, there wasn’t any profit to come of having ambitions…or a partner either, for that matter.
Get the Hyde dead and delivered and all their troubles should be over, right?
In a pig’s eye, they were. They’d carted him to Pretorius’s place near the stroke of midnight, laid him out on the laboratory slab, and it all went lousy from there.
“Sorry ‘e’s a bit banged up,” Hare had told the doc. “But you was probably expectin’ that.”
So far, so good—Pretorius had agreed that bruising was inevitable. Then he’d commenced to perform an inspection before handing over their pay. A few minutes later he’d stripped off his gloves, dropped them to the floor, and told them they might as well take the corpse back home with them, for all it was worth.
“He’s useless,” the doc had said. “Where the life force is concerned, you brought him here too late.”
Bugger all. That would’ve been the Hare-brained scheme to recover the rotgut. Burke had told him they were pushing it, timewise, but had he listened? Like hell he had, the cocky bastard.
“What about the rest of ‘im?” Hare had tried.
Pretorius had shaken his head. “His organs are no more transplantable than what I could have shipped to me in formaldehyde by any medical supply company.”
“You don’t say—a fine, robust specimen like that?”
“He might have been, once,” Pretorius had said, “if not for the fact that you geniuses have quite literally pickled him.”
Well, maybe they had gone overboard on the whiskey. Seemed like a capital idea at the time, but crikey—all that work and investment for less than nothing. And the doc was still expecting a Hyde in return for his front money. Shrewd old buzzard drove a hard bargain.
At his table for one, Burke ordered another ale and a greasy plate of eggs and bangers, and watched the last of Queenstown District’s nightlife trickle in through the doors: ladies of the evening that hadn’t called it quits yet, a few still on the arms of their gentlemen, and the rest with their sister trollops, winding down with a bit of gab. Burke wished he could afford the luxury.
Earlier, having returned home with empty pockets, he and Hare had sulked over their rotten luck and tried to come up with a quick way out of their predicament.
“What say we pull a fast one on the old doc, eh?” Burke had suggested. “Say we gets ourselves a normal-like fella, see, a fella what’s easier to take down. Then once we got ‘im toes up and smothered proper, we gussies ‘im up to look like a Hyde.”
Hare had given him the skeptical eye. “’ere now—‘ow’s that gonna work?”
“Well, bugger me for a blind beggar if that old doc ain’t a hundred years old, or near enough. You think them eyes o’ ‘is is as sharp as they used to be?”
“’ow do you know they ain’t some of the bits of ‘imself ‘e’s already replaced?”
Burke had been ready for this, and proud of it. “’e was wearin specs, for one thing. For another, if ‘e takes out ‘is old eyes, ‘ow’s he gonna see to put the new ones in?”
“Maybe ‘e done ‘em one at a time,” Hare had said, and squashed the notion then and there. “It’s a crap idea, William. We still got ourselves a promising association with ‘im, but if we do that, it’s a sure way to scupper future business.”
Some days it was all too plain that he didn’t get an ounce of respect from that man, and this was one of them. Just an all-around unsettled morning, and as much as the finances were a part of it, what he could sense swimming under the surface was worse. For as long as they’d lived in Nyxon, every so often things rose up in him like the last wisps of a mostly forgotten dream, feeling as though they’d come from times and places he couldn’t remember…and maybe the cause of why it didn’t feel natural talking like a proper mick anymore. They’d always slip away before he could get his hands wrapped around them, and they always set his neck to itching.
Hare had spells too, and he’d come out of them with his eyes itching, but he claimed they weren’t important—that the here and the now was all that mattered.
Yet here it was again, worse than ever, and the sight of the Hyde hanging at the end of the rope had brought it on. Hours ago, after rolling up the cart next to the house so they could load the corpse, he’d looked up at the unmoving soles of the Hyde’s shoes, and it brought on the kind of shudders he’d never felt when doling out a good smothering.
But for now he had simpler problems. He pushed a chunk of sausage through egg yolk and looked forward to the day when he could lean his elbows on a table and not have them ache with every bite.
Footsteps clicked over to his table, and he glanced up to the not unwelcome sight of a pushed-up bosom, dark hair in disheveled ringlets, and old rouge. Some years on the gal, but all in all, she was a lot easier on the eyes than Hare was, and Pretorius and the Hyde for sure, and the usual company he’d been keeping lately.
“Well well well,” she said after looking over the state of his face. “What hellcat have you been tangling with, luv?”
Burke gave her a glum frown. “It ain’t wot ya think, Polly.”
“Sure it ain’t. Mind if I join you? Sure you don’t.”
Polly settled in a rustle of indigo skirts and a sigh, then kicked off her shoes to give her bunions a good airing. He’d dipped his wick there on an occasion or three. Not a bad time at all.
“Got any vacancies at that house of yours?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I ain’t takin’ you ‘ome, Polly. There’s a time and a place for everything, and right now I ain’t in the mood.”
She drew back, insulted. “Ooohoooo—look who woke up full of himself this morning! Your present state considered, what makes you think I’d have you? No, I’m asking serious. I need a new place to live.”
“Dunno if we can ‘elp just now. The place is a bit banged up at the moment,” he said. “Wot’s wrong with the room you been rentin’?”
She hooted a dismissive laugh. “I’ll take banged up over an infestation any day, thanks. I need me beauty sleep, and I won’t be getting it so long as I’m under the same roof as a stinkubus. Showed up there a week ago and ain’t showing any signs of moving on.”
Burke forgot to chew for a moment. “An incubus, you mean?”
“Naw, ducks. A woman with my experience…? Trust that I know what I’m talking about. A stinkubus I called him, and a stinkubus is what he is.”
“Well, I never ‘eard of ‘em.”
“Then pray you never experience ‘em any closer than what I’m telling you now. Probably wouldn’t be interested in a big, strapping specimen of manhood like yourself. They go for us fairer types…but you never know. You might get a funny one, if you catch what I mean.”
Burke groaned. “Bloody ‘ell, woman, I got enough to worry about now.”
“Definite similarities to an incubus, mind. Same pattern and all,” she told him. “There I am right snug in bed, then I wake up cause I can’t breathe, and what do I see but this randy, hairy little fella perched on me chest, been having himself a fine time with me jublies and me poor overworked fanny. But here’s the difference. The stinkubus, when he sees you’re awake, he farts. And he ain’t been on no steady diet o’ roses, I can tell you that.”
“That’s all?” Burke figured she should try living around Hare when he had a taste for beans on toast. “Why’nt you just ‘old your breath?”
“Cause then he throttles you! Makes you want to breathe. Makes it so you can’t think about nothing else, luv.” She gave him the saucy eyebrow. “Well, you try it and see how you like it…”
He barely had his latest bite of eggs down when she leaned across the table and wrapped both hands around his throat and gave a squeeze. About fell over backward in his chair, he did, and Polly laughed, pleased as punch to have proved her point, but she had no idea, now did she, what she was really doing to him. Stirring it all up inside, and maybe this was the last trigger the truth had been waiting for.
It wasn’t just the itch this time—it was the pressure, the awful pressure. They paired together and tickled down deep and dredged up things a man shouldn’t ever have to remember about what had befallen him.
He understood what the Hyde must have felt last night, dropping through empty air and coming up on the short end of a rope, because Burke now realized that he’d faced it himself once. Except he’d done it sober and in view of a crowd, half of Edinburgh turned out to see him dangle. And he remembered whose fault it was, too.
He coughed up bits of egg and Polly snatched her hands back, then ran around the table to cradle his head against her breast, the way a woman will do. “There, there, dear, it’s all right!” she said. “Didn’t mean to give you such a start!”
“It ain’t wot ya think, Polly,” he told her again, then gave matters a brooding over before telling her that she could have a room at the house after all. “Just give it another couple days ‘til I can finish some business. Plus I’ll want first month’s rent in advance…and, seein’ as you know them streets out there pretty good, maybe a point in the proper direction for a thing or two I needs to buy.”
*
Hare roused to the gloom of night and a fog-gauzy moon, and entertained the notion that the Hyde threw magic punches. They sneaked up on you, a delayed reaction trick that knocked you into the next night even after the bugger was long dead. Walking through the house earlier, plenty of daylight left in the afternoon, and…and now here he was, out in the chill. It was the Hyde’s final revenge, after turning worthless.
Which didn’t explain the wad of cloth in his mouth. For a moment he thought it was a swollen tongue. He dug it out and wasn’t sure he should feel relieved his tongue was fine, if as dry as a scrap of old leather now, because someone had to have stuffed the cloth in his gob, and he knew from experience that was never a good thing. Kind of went hand-in-glove with the aching knot on the back of his head.
He sat up and realized he was looking at the rear of the boarding house, and the black pearl sky, through bars. He groped around enough to comprehend that sit was all he could do. No room to stand. He was in a bloody cage, like an ape in a roadside zoo.
“William!” he bellowed once, then a few times more until the daft ox came ambling out the back of the house and over to the bars. “’ow’d I get in ‘ere? Don’t tell me you gimme a knock and done it yourself.”
Burke shrugged his big sloping shoulders. “Maybe.”
“Don’t play the clever bastard with me. You ain’t as good at it.”
“Ain’t I? Well tell me, then: Who’s in the cage, eh?”
“All right. Fair point.” He swatted at the bars. “Where’d this bloody thing come from, anyway? We ain’t even got ourselves a cage.”
Burke again shrugged it off. “Looks like we does now, dunnit?”
“William, you’re provokin’ me to a state of annoyance ‘ere.” Hare worked his lips, his tongue, the inside of his cheeks, trying to get some spit going. “Be a good bloke and fetch me some water, could ya? You plugged me gob and left me parched.”
And it looked as if he’d done it on purpose, too. Of all the cheeky things, Burke lifted a glass jar and held it a few inches out of reach. Just kept swirling it and screwing the lid off and on, off and on, like the cruel, lowborn bugger he was.
“I’ll let ya ‘ave it soon enough,” he said. “In exchange for answers. We got some things to discuss first, you and me.”
“Get to it, then. Look, if it’s about the Hyde —“
Burke hunkered forward and glared through the bars. “I wanna know why ya done it, William. Why ya done it to me.”
“You lost me, William.”
“Back when and where we used to be,” he said. “Like the other night, see, when we was talkin’ about Helen and Mags…I never could make much sense of it when you’d go off about us bein’ here, and bein’ the way we is now, ‘cause that’s ‘ow folks remembers us. But I think I got ‘er figured out finally. So when I ask why ya done it to me, I ain’t talkin’ about ‘ere, not this place. The other one.”
“Edinburgh, you mean,” Hare said.
“Right.” Burke had gotten so serious he’d forgotten to tease him with the water. “They ‘anged me there, didn’t they, after they caught us? And you ‘elped ‘em do the deed. You sold me out, William.”
As recollection returned, after all this time—all of it now, not the dribs and drabs of before—it came less like a lightning bolt than the rising of slow, dark waters. Hare supposed every time the memories came knocking before, he’d just hammer another nail in the door, trying to keep it shut, b
ut forgetting about the windows and the chinks in the basement stones.
Things always found a way in, if they were determined enough.
Hanged—buggered if Burke wasn’t dead on the money this time. Turning King’s evidence for one of them, a gallows for the other.
“You’d’ve done the same, made the same choices, if you’d ‘ad my gift o’ gab,” Hare said. “Somebody’s neck was gettin’ stretched for what we done there…the only question, was it gonna be yours and mine both, or just one of us?”
“And you thought mine fit the noose better.”
He was trying to lay on the guilt thick as marmalade, and Hare wasn’t having any of it.
“I done ya a favor, can’t you see that?” Hare shouted. “For you it was over quick. You think I had an easy go of it all the years to follow? Try somewhere new, and no matter where, it was only a matter o’ time before some clever sod figured out who I was. More than one pisspot got itself emptied on me ‘ead from a second floor window, you can bet on that.”
Burke didn’t appear much moved…but then, did he ever?
“Still ain’t the way ya do your friend,” he said, and handed the jar between the bars.
Hare uncapped the water and drank up, wrinkling his nose at the taste—stale, with a tang like vinegar. The barmy oaf probably used the pickle jar from the kitchen, and didn’t bother rinsing out the brine. But then, considering the situation, could he complain? Brought to mind the old saying about beggars and choosers.
And now, finally, he had a flash.
Bugger me for a blind beggar, Burke had said last night.
Bloody hell—had some deep-down part of Burke known about that, too, even if he hadn’t realized it? Years away from Edinburgh, Hare remembered, he’d made it as far as London’s East End, and if he’d hoped to lose himself in that mass of humanity, he had found out different soon enough. They’d recognized and mobbed him, chucked him into a lime pit face first, and that was the last his eyes had seen, all the rest of his days in that other place and time.