Ripper

by Stefan Petrucha

  “But… you have no interest in solving any crimes?”

  “Not since the incident I’m sure Jackson and Emeril told you about in all its timeworn glory. There’s more they couldn’t even begin to guess and you shouldn’t bother asking about. My prime interest is passing along what I know with what time I have left. As for you, boy, now that you’ve seen all the fancy nonsense, we’re going to take a real look at how to study the criminal mind.”

  The odd smile on Hawking’s face made Carver remember the conversation from the office. “Mr. Tudd said you spent all your time among the mad.”

  Hawking tipped his head left, then right. “Some would call it a madhouse. I call it… home.”

  15

  “BLACKWELL Island Ferry,” Hawking announced to the cabdriver. Turning to Carver, he warned, “Don’t get used to this. It’s late and I want to get home. You’ll be hoofing it most of the time.”

  That, Carver didn’t mind at all. Aside from hanging on the back of a streetcar or dodging past the ticket box on the elevated trains, he’d always roamed by foot. Two things did worry him, though: the surrender of his father’s letter and the fact that Blackwell Island held only a prison and an insane asylum. Oddly, the letter bothered him more. Try as he might to lose himself in the lazy, hypnotic clopping of the horses, he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling he shouldn’t have let it go.

  At the ferry, the old detective insisted on climbing to the open top deck. They’d made it up the narrow metal steps to the prow when the captain gunned the engine. The sudden movement nearly threw Hawking. Carver moved to catch him, but his claw-like right hand snatched the railing.

  “It’s a game he likes to play,” Hawking said, sneering back at the captain. From behind the wheel the grizzled fellow chuckled. If only he knew, Carver thought, that he was insulting a master detective.

  A fine wet spray hit Carver’s face. The trail of coal smoke drew back. The smell of brine came through. It was cold, but so hard to worry about anything with the lights of New York and Brooklyn on either side, reflecting in river water that rippled black as oil.

  After about a mile, the tip of Blackwell Island came into view. It was so low and flat, the grim gray stones of the Penitentiary Hospital seemed to sit on the water. The ferry neared a pier. Well, living among medical staff wouldn’t be so bad. But when all the other passengers exited, Hawking shook his head.

  “Next stop.”

  The boat chugged along, passing the last vaguely pleasant sight he’d see, a garden where the prisoners grew their own food. Moments later, they reached a tall, forbidding wall that severed the island. Then came a second wall, with watchtowers and armed guards. The rest of the land was dominated by a dark, monstrous structure. At its center was a domed, five-story octagonal rotunda that seemed more a place for torture than for the treatment of the mad.

  The ferry stopped. “Here,” Hawking announced.

  Carver tried not to show how hard his heart had dropped.

  As they walked, his mentor pointed at the choppy waters beyond the island’s northern tip. “Hell Gate. Hundreds of ships sank there until the army used 300,000 pounds of explosives to blast the rocks. It sent a geyser of water 250 feet in the air. They felt the rumble as far off as Princeton, New Jersey.”

  Numbed by the realization he’d be living in an asylum, Carver nodded politely.

  Hawking stopped and put both hands on his cane.

  “What is it, sir?” Carver asked.

  “Do you expect me to believe that a boy like you, raised in this city, wouldn’t know about the largest man-made explosion in history?”

  Carver was confused. “I… never said I didn’t know.”

  “No, but you nodded as if you didn’t. If I’d said Broadway was given its name because it was a very wide, or should I say broad, avenue, would you nod then, too?”

  “Yes, sir? I mean… no, sir?”

  Hawking studied him dispassionately. “In the future you will tell me exactly what you do know and ask about what you don’t. I can’t waste time giving you what you’ve got, and I don’t want to skip anything you’re missing.”

  He laid his bad hand on Carver’s shoulder. It weighed heavily, like a dead thing. Too frightened to stare at it, Carver tried to focus on his mentor’s somber face.

  “If we’re to accomplish anything, I need your mind; I need it open and I need it honest. Lie through your teeth to whoever else you like, but not one false word, not one false nod or wink, to me. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Hawking narrowed his eyes. “What year was that blast I just told you about?”

  “1885,” Carver answered. After a brief pause, he added, “October 10.”

  The hint of a smile came to Hawking’s face. He tipped his head toward the ominous building. “What do you know about that place?”

  Carver shrugged. “It’s Blackwell Asylum.” He searched his mind for more, but the clawed hand on his shoulder made him nervous. “A woman once pretended to be crazy so she could get in there to write a story about how bad the patients had it.”

  “Nellie Bly,” Hawking said. “Ten Days in a Madhouse. Read it?”

  “No, Delia… a friend, told me about it once.”

  Removing his hand, Hawking led Carver toward the twin stones staircases in front of the central tower. “They also call it the Octagon. It’s New York’s first publicly funded mental hospital. Two wings were completed, both overcrowded within months. To save money, the guards are all inmates from the prison, so for a good part of the day, the patients are abandoned to the tender mercies of thieves and murderers. Bly’s little book put everyone on their best behavior for a while, but things haven’t changed all that much.”

  Hawking waited for Carver to open the door. When he did, he saw a spectacular curved staircase rising from a glass-brick floor to the height of the tower, a circle of columns lining each floor.

  Above the closed front desk hung the motto “While I live, I hope.” An unshaven guard lay on the floor near two inner doors, snoring. “Think you’re an orphan? Here are the real ones.”

  Hawking pushed open the doors to a long, dingy hall. Shadowy figures were visible along its length. Some sat sadly on narrow benches. Others moved about as if underwater. One man walked straight into a wall headfirst, staggered back and then did the same thing again over and over. Each time he hit, Carver heard a faint, hollow thud, like a ball being bounced on the sidewalk outside Ellis Orphanage. Thud, thud, thud.

  “That’s Simpson,” Hawking said. “Deep down in his heart, Simpson believes he can pass through walls. An attendant will cart him off and tie him to his bed eventually.”

  Next, they headed for the long curved stairs. Much as Carver helped Hawking, the climb was slow and painful, punctuated by odd wails and mournful cries from the inmates.

  To Carver’s horror, Hawking could name each patient from the sound they made. “That growl is Mr. Gilbert, here two years, diagnosed with mortified pride. The wailing? Grace Shelby, seven months for uncontrolled passion. The high-pitched whine is Reginald Cowyn, diagnosed with disappointed expectations. Disappointed expectations, ha! The thing Nelly Bly never understood is that the doctors are as mad as the patients.”

  Just when Carver thought it would never end, they reached the top and a plain wooden door. Out of breath as he fished for the key, Hawking looked back down the many stairs and said, “That is why I don’t travel often.”

  Pushing the door with his hip, he revealed a large, dark room, eight-sided like the rest of the structure but smaller. Four of the walls had tall windows that went nearly to the floor, while the other four held bookshelves. There was a couch, a table, a few chairs and something that might be a bed.

  With a graceless plop, Hawking sat at the table and lit an old hurricane lantern. Every nook and cranny overflowed with objects, like scattered thoughts stuffed into a too-small brain. There were books, charts, instruments, grotesque, unnamable things in liquid-filled jars, even a bowl of
what looked like bone fragments. Newspapers, some shredded, littered the floor.

  On the table, aside from the oil lamp, was a typewriter surrounded by crumpled balls of paper and an institutional tray bearing the remains of Hawking’s breakfast. The food looked as unappetizing as the bones.

  The hunched man pointed to the chair on the other side of the table. Carver obeyed slowly, trying not to inhale too deeply near the tray.

  “What do you think?” Hawking asked.

  The man had demanded honesty, so Carver said, “I liked the New Pinkertons headquarters better.”

  Hawking snarled and swept his cane across the table. The tray, with its plate, silverware and drinking glass, went flying, then crashed to the floor. Carver was stunned, terrified. Below, the moaning increased.

  The hurricane lamp cast half of Hawking’s face in shadow. “Listen and listen well—all those gilded gadgets are baubles for fools! That headquarters is beneath a sewer and rightly so. This is the only honest place you’ll find in the city, the only place where the pieces of the mind, the things that make us what we are, don’t remain mute out of fear of what might be written about them on the society page. That’s why I’m here, technically a consultant on the criminally insane, but I have the run of the place. Here is where we can learn what makes a criminal, what makes a man. Think that over… and clean up this mess.”

  Hawking rose, clumped over to the thing that looked like a bed and collapsed on it.

  “Take the cushions off the chairs and toss them on the floor. Tomorrow we’ll see about making up a more proper bed for you.”

  Carver did his best locating all the pieces of broken glass and piled them on the tray, hoping the morning light would reveal a wastebasket. Then, quiet as a mouse, he grabbed a cushion, kicked a space clear and lay down.

  With pained wailing, manic laughter and the occasional scream rising from the floor beneath him, Carver eventually fell asleep, thinking about what it really meant to have a dream come true.

  16

  CARVER’S BODY was stiff. Heat was on his face.

  Clack, clack, clack. Hissssssss. Clack, clack, clack. Hisssssss.

  What was that sound? As he opened his eyes, his field of vision washed white from sunlight. He winced and blinked before realizing he was still in Blackwell Asylum. On the brighter side, that meant the New Pinkertons were real, too.

  He looked around. The hissing came from an iron radiator. The clacking was Hawking, his clawed right hand jabbing slowly at the typewriter keys.

  “I know you’re awake, boy,” he said. “Take a moment to gather your thoughts, but no more. Must’ve gotten cold last night. The heat seldom makes it up here. Means an early winter.”

  His mentor seemed lighter, as if all the traveling yesterday accounted for most of his foul mood. Still, Carver remained quiet as he slipped on the ill-fitting pants and shirt he’d worn for Prospective Parents Day. Was it really only yesterday?

  “Like puzzles?” Hawking asked. “Here’s one. Look at the typewriter keys—QWERTY. Ever wonder why they’re arranged that way?”

  Carver repeated what he’d heard. “The most common letters are next to each other to make the typing faster.”

  “No. That’s what most think, and most people are fools. Christopher Latham Sholes designed the layout in 1874 to slow the typist, to prevent the keys from jamming. The patients are at breakfast. You can shower privately. Get cleaned up and bring us back some food from the cafeteria.”

  Carver made for the stairs, relieved, despite Hawking’s slightly improved disposition, to be away from him. In daylight, the asylum didn’t look quite so awful. There was less moaning, and the showers on the floor below were, as Hawking said, empty. He wished he had different clothes to change into, but the towels he dried himself with were clean.

  The narrow second-floor dining room was packed and loud. He tried not to stare, but the swollen brows and tiny eyes of some patients were freakish. Even their laughter seemed off. The only patient he spoke to was a woman in front of him in line. When he accidentally stared at her too long, she explained she was the wife of Grover Cleveland, president of the United States. Carver had no idea how to react. He worried she might get violent if he disagreed, or, if he stood too close, he might somehow inhale her madness.

  Could he ever get used to this place? He had to. Hawking and the New Pinkertons would help find his father and make him a real detective along the way. That was worth a little discomfort, no?

  Back upstairs, the lukewarm tea, gray oatmeal and bread tasted so dull, Carver missed Curly’s cooking. Hawking didn’t mind it. With a bowl next to his typewriter, he alternated between striking keys and taking spoonfuls of mush.

  When the bowl was empty, Hawking said, “Ask me what I’m working on.”

  “Is it about my father?”

  “No, that’s your job. These are notes about Hunter and Smellie, the fathers of British midwifery. Their work, hundreds of years ago, saved the lives of countless women. Does that sound noble to you?”

  “Yes,” Carver answered. “Sure.”

  “Don’t be so dull. Say, good heavens, what saints! Or, frankly I care more about a wart on my ass! Better yet, ask why a detective should even be interested.”

  “All right. Why—”

  Hawking cut him off. “Because they were murderers. They needed fresh corpses for their research, so they ordered the deaths of scores of women, some pregnant. Still noble?”

  “No,” Carver said. “They were criminals.”

  “Define criminal,” Hawking said.

  “Someone who breaks the law.”

  “The men who founded the United States broke British law. Benjamin Franklin said, we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. Was he a criminal?”

  “No… well, yes, but… those were unfair laws that had to be broken.”

  “So, to be a man like Franklin, you sometimes have to break the law?”

  Carver hesitated. “Yes.”

  Hawking wiped his lips and tossed the napkin into the bowl. “I was too harsh last night, boy. I forgot your sense of right and wrong comes from dime novels. The lines aren’t as clear in the real world.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Carver objected.

  Hawking narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t say you were. Put words in my mouth and I’ll bite your fingers off. Even the best mind can tumble into an abyss when its expectations are thwarted.”

  “A what? Abyss?” Carver said.

  Hawking rapped the table. “Abyss. I’ll make it simple. True story. A woman was sitting in a theater enjoying a play when suddenly, a fire truck drove across stage. It was part of the play, but because she didn’t expect it, she screamed. Thing is, once she started screaming, she couldn’t stop. They dragged her from the theater and brought her here, where she was deemed incurably mad. Any idiot would know she wasn’t, but they had no idiots on staff, only doctors, alienists. That was two years ago. It was only last week I secured her release.”

  “But… why was she screaming that much if she wasn’t mad?”

  “She thought she knew the world, and in her way of thinking, real fire trucks don’t appear in plays. She couldn’t handle living in a world where they could. That was her abyss. You’ll have yours one day, I’m sure. But for now, time to clean. Your belongings will be here this afternoon.”

  Carver didn’t completely understand, but the lesson was over. For the next several hours, he worked, piling books and papers in the shelves on one wall, models along another, instruments at a third, and so on. Grateful the room had walls to spare, he even secured a space for himself, sectioning it off with what at first looked like a tabletop, but turned out to be a room divider.

  After a break to retrieve lunch, he returned to find two attendants assembling a mattress frame. Carver’s belongings had also arrived. To his surprise, Hawking was leafing through his small collection of detective novels.

  “Allan Quatermain, Nick Neverseen, and Holmes, Hol
mes, Holmes,” Hawking said. “Fan of Doyle?”

  Carver nodded. “I’ll say.”

  “Ever been able to solve one of his cases based on the information in the story?”

  “No, but Holmes is the genius.”

  “Doyle’s the genius. It’s a cheap trick. The reader never has all the information, so Holmes can make up the answers at the last minute. You’d be better served reading another Holmes, H. H. Holmes, the multi-murderer. He was nabbed last year by a Pinkerton, Frank P. Geyer. Now his confession is being serialized in the Philadelphia Inquirer. How’s that for a fire truck crossing the stage?”

  Carver knew about that killer, despite Miss Petty’s efforts to keep him from the stories. Holmes had been accused of over twenty murders, many committed during the Chicago World’s Fair. He’d lured his victims to what the papers called a “murder castle.” The thought that he’d be writing articles repulsed Carver as much as it fascinated him.

  “Do you think he’ll tell the truth? Confess?”

  “No, but a bit of the liar always slips into the lie. It will be a good way to get into his head, the method used by my favorite fictional detective.”

  Carver was surprised to hear Hawking liked anything, but the hunched man put down Sherlock Holmes and searched among his shelves. Finding a slender volume, he tossed it to Carver.

  The title was The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

  “C. Auguste Dupin, by Edgar Allan Poe—inventor of the detective story. Dupin used ratiocination, combining logic with imagination to become so familiar with the criminal that the detective, in a way, becomes him. Think you can do that, boy? Become mad to find the mad? A thief to catch a thief? And worse?”

  Carver thought about it. Did he mean really steal? What did he mean by worse? Kill to catch a killer?

  Hawking regarded him as if he could read his thoughts from the furrows on his brow. “I’ve had enough of watching you try to think for one day. I’ve patients to visit. Lie in your new bed, read that book. Tomorrow bright and early you’ll return to your beloved New Pinkertons and start searching for your father. We’ll soon see what you’re willing to do.”