by Viola Carr
Sleep crooked its bony finger, beckoning. She blinked gritty eyes, longing for her warm bed, the illusion of safety. But if she surrendered to sleep . . .
Her teeth chattered. Need for the elixir cavorted through her flesh, a dizzy dance of thirst. Stubbornly, she bit her lip, the sting shocking her back to reality. Lizzie had made trouble enough today. As for Finch’s sweet-purple remedy . . . No, she must stay awake. Keep Lizzie at bay.
Listless, she wandered into her consulting room. No fire burned. She was economizing on household expenses. She huddled in her shawl and lit the lamp by the blotter. Electric light licked the edge of Moriarty Quick’s trade card. Potions! Lotions! it sniggered. The best in town!
She scowled and flipped it over. “Silence,” she ordered.
It didn’t reply.
Beside it curled a telegraph ticker tape.
NIL INFO RE: PROF QUICK. WILL KEEP LOOKING. HG.
A new letter gleamed, too, Marcellus Finch’s usually neat handwriting scribbled in haste.
Do NOT engage with that man. Promise me.
She’d no intention of engaging with him. But her nerves wriggled. So that rat Quick did know his alchemy. Finch could have elucidated. Tomorrow, she’d press him, discover what he knew . . .
Unbidden, her fingers crawled to the locked drawer, and turned the key.
Mr. Todd’s letters glistened in the lamplight. Fascinated, Eliza stroked the paper. Always so pleasant to touch. That chemical scent, recalling his crimson hair. Eve strolling in the garden, oblivious, while behind her, the serpent wrapped lazy knots around a tree and grinned.
As if Eve were tempted, without even knowing the darkness was there.
Lizzie squirmed inside her, an angry black shadow. Still there. Still yearning for freedom.
So where was Mr. Todd now? Perhaps he’d already slipped into comfortable homicidal habits. Murders happened by the fistful in London every night. A few more would raise no notice. In her mind, he stalked his prey in foggy twilight, stealing over dark-lit cobbles. Ker-ping! Steel on ivory, a shriek, a hot crimson splash . . .
The letter tilted in her fingers, and out dropped the card she’d found inside.
MR. ODYSSEUS SHARP
Crazy laughter waltzed up her throat. The night they’d met, he’d shown her his startling portfolio. His Odysseus and the Sirens showed a man struggling in agony, roped to the mast, ears stuffed with wax. Leave him, and he’d die from want. Release him, and he’d leap overboard to his doom.
On the back, in Todd’s delicate left-slanted hand, an address on Fleet Street.
Was this her salvation? Tell Harley Griffin, have Todd arrested. This time, so-called insanity wouldn’t spare him a hanging. He’d kill no more. Lives would be saved, likely hers included.
Simple.
Unless it was a trap.
Her thoughts rattled, pebbles in a tin. Why would he reveal his new name and whereabouts to her? Already, she’d failed to dispatch Mr. Todd when offered the chance. Then, at his trial, she’d testified he wasn’t responsible for his crimes. Left him rotting in Bethlem Asylum, at the mercy of electroshock and ice baths, when a sane man would have swung on a rope at Newgate and good riddance.
And then, he’d escaped Bethlem because of her.
Guilt splashed burning wax over her heart. She believed in fair treatment for lunatics who broke the law. But was Todd insane? Or just a beast in human guise, a dark-hearted demon who delighted in death?
She bit her lip, torn. Honestly? Yes, Todd had charmed her into forgetting he’d slit the throats of seventeen people. He was an intelligent, witty, charismatic man. A tragic romantic with talent to burn. Who wouldn’t be a tiny bit smitten?
But Todd was damaged, vulnerable, deserving of pity and help. She’d acted reprehensibly. Instead of ignoring his flirtations as a professional should . . .
Cold sweat chilled her. Was she no better than those corrupt asylum keepers of legend, who took advantage of their dim-witted charges, slobbering over them in the dark where no one would see?
But her soul still tingled with the memory of that night at Bethlem when Todd had escaped. The Chopper’s awful laboratory bathed in eerie lightning, that terrifying almost-kiss on the brink of death. A maniac Mr. Todd might be, but certainly no fool. He’d used her weakness for him to fashion his escape. Calculated her confusion to the last trembling fraction of an inch.
If he now imagined himself obsessed with her—his fragile mind twisting along bizarre, broken pathways—she’d only herself to blame.
Not her responsibility, she’d thought. It made her laugh sickly. A coward’s lie. His every crime was her responsibility. Especially if he was killing to get her attention.
She had to fix this. No one else could.
Resolute, she pulled out a slip of writing paper and dipped her pen.
Mr. Sharp,
Her hand shook, ink splashing. She forced it steady.
Thank you for taking the time to write, and for your flattering sentiments. I viewed the Exhibition this evening—such a delight! What I saw was surprising, to say the least.
She chewed the pen’s tip, worried. What if someone was reading his mail? She must be careful . . .
The world is not as one might wish. You must know we cannot meet. But I should like for us to remain friends—and I hope the memory of my fond regard will comfort you, when your dreams take that darker turn. When you are troubled, I beg you, think of me, and have pause. It would make me most happy.
Yours is a unique and precious talent, Mr. Sharp. With each stroke of your brush, the world becomes more beautiful—and I trust with all my heart that the satisfaction you earn from your art can provide all necessary solace for your distress.
I remain, sir,
your honored friend
E.
Her skin crawled. She was taking a wild, reckless chance. Concealing vital evidence that could help apprehend a multiple murderer. If it backfired . . .
“No.” Disgusted, she shook her head. Her squeamishness was insufferably selfish. If she hadn’t let Todd escape, he’d be safe in an asylum right now, with medical staff taking care of him. Not at large, putting lives at risk.
His treatment—dare she say “cure”?—was her responsibility now. If she had to write all night, every night? That’s exactly what she’d do.
She sealed the letter and, with a sigh, set it aside to be posted. Her bleary eyes stung, and fatigue tugged her hand, urging her upstairs to sleep. Tomorrow they’d question Carmine Zanotti. She ought to get a good night’s rest.
But Lizzie pulled in her blood, too, a dark undertow, dragging her inexorably towards that secret cabinet, where the elixir waited . . .
Her mouth watered. Always warm, that elixir. Possessed of a wicked life of its own. That strangely bitter flavor, fiery in her gullet. Her senses exploding, shudders racking her blood, limbs twisting, muscles shrieking, bones crackling fit to snap. Ecstasy and horror throbbing as one . . .
Eliza had halfway risen before she realized she’d moved.
Her vision wobbled, flawed glass. Her corset crushed her breath away. Gasping, she fumbled for her buttons and popped the top clip. Air rushed in, blessedly fresh, and she panted, her chemise soaked in sweat. Not tonight, Lizzie. Go away.
She plonked onto the sofa, grabbing a book. The room was chilly, the lamp overly bright. The spidery text made her squint. Treatise on Dissociative States and Disorders of the Nervous Mind. Borrowed from Marcellus. Perhaps something in it could help Mr. Todd. But the letters scrambled like foreign script, indecipherable. Her attention crawled away, wrapping cold tentacles around darker concepts. Remy’s scent, the hot sweep of his lips on hers, his wolfish growl of desire . . .
She shook herself, and began the page again. The mantel clock ticked ever more slowly, each second stretching, seemingly eternal. Would morning never come?
Her head throbbed. Stubbornly, she wiped her spectacles. She wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t dream . . .
The l
ight lured and flickered, an electric will-o’-the-wisp, and as minutes dragged into an hour, the book dropped into her silk-clad lap, and she slept.
A SOUL WRAPT IN STEEL
AT LAST.
I suck in sweet air, wriggling like a skinned eel. Muscles scream, joints twist, bones judder and crack. In her sleep, Eliza drowns, struggling for the surface. I writhe and shriek, and my hair springs free, not blond but luxuriant dark mahogany. Our body swells and changes shape to fit me, a sniggering dark fairy twisting her face into mine.
Pop! Out I lurch. I stagger on the carpet, a ghost from a bottle, panting and sweating and finally whole.
In the mantel mirror, my reflection leers, caught like a guilty moment. I wink. Hello, Miss Lizzie. My chin’s sharper than Eliza’s, my cheekbones better defined. Pins spit from my crackling curls. My eyes glitter and darkle. My fingers curl to throttle Eliza, but I’m laughing, too, laughing like her crimson-haired loon under the moon, because I’m free.
Mischief springs my grin crooked. I kick a delighted jig. To hell with that glacial pink brew. FREE.
Not a moment to lose neither. Too long since she popped my shackles and let me play. I’ve catching up to do. An hour or more we’ve pissed away, and Remy’s long gone. Eliza’s golden dress squeezes my curves, too tight. I’m bursting out. I’ve places to see, things to go, people to do . . . and between you and me? I’m dying for a drink.
What’s that? Shut it with your god-rotted preaching. A woman’s gotta have a vice, and Miss Lizzie needs dirty habits enough to sate us both.
I toss her spectacles aside, glassy edges leaping sharper. I grab her dumb-arse letter—Odysseus Sharp, Christ, even his name wriggles my guts cold—and sneak into the hall. Shadows cling to her expensive rosewood furnishings. It’s a fine house, but I hate it. I hate its shiny façades, these grim middle-class walls trapping me in like a dungeon’s. I yearn to set it alight and screech like a harpy while the flames leap higher.
Her brass idiot crouches by the hall stand, his lights flickering with dim electric dreams. He mutters sleepy nonsense. “Rattus rattus . . . Make greater speed . . . Ratty-rat-rat . . .”
No one’s awake to spy me. Mrs. Poole and Molly the housemaid . . . well, maybe they knows and maybe they doesn’t. Close-mouthed, those two, like as twin peas. But Eliza gave ’em the evening. As if she knew she’d be doing bad things tonight.
I chuckle. Brittle Eliza, pretending she don’t count the hours. Tell me you don’t relish it, you lying girl, tell me you ain’t lurking like a ringworm beneath Lizzie’s skin, savoring every laugh and gasp and sweet-bitter swallow.
Crick! Creak! I hasten to the shadowy second floor, an awful hurry gnawing my bones what won’t let me rest. Now, it whispers, right now, this minute, I’m hungry, Lizzie, so very HUNGRY, why d’you make me wait? Eliza’s bedroom, her curtained bed a black shape in the dark. It smells of unburned coal and the lavender she uses to wash her hair. A good smell of home . . . but it itches my lungs, too, a poisonous arsenic rash. I won’t never belong. Just an impostor, thieving her life away.
I skid across the rug to the cold hearth. Crunch! Yank the hinged sconce above the mantel, and my secret cabinet swings open.
I pop the arc-light, and it sheds a reddish glow. The shady half of Eliza’s library, forbidden books on alchemy, experimental medicine, unorthodox science. Further in, my wardrobe, stuffed with bright colors. None of her dull grays for me.
A flick of silken ribbon, and her golden gown pools at my feet, a pile of guilty memory. I pop her tiny corset—damn, who knew air tasted so good?—and pull on mine, what shows off my womanly advantages, instead of pounding ’em flat like oatcakes. I push my twin beauties up and yank the laces tight.
What can I say? A girl fights with the weapons to hand. I ain’t got no ladylike façade to make ’em think twice. A second or two of distraction’s all I need.
Hmm. Red, red, or red? I choose a flirty piece in dark scarlet velveteen, skirts flounced up to show my ankles. Ooh-er, we’re dressing to impress tonight. I fondle our mother’s diamond necklace—I do adore how he sparkles so wild—but reluctantly I toss him onto the bed and clip on my glossy jet choker. Where I’m bound, folk aplenty’d cosh me senseless for sixpence. No sense dying for a flashy bauble.
On with my boots, buckle and button and pointed heels. I keep her pretty stockings—her best for her fancy tryst tonight, for all the good they done her. I grab a little red top hat and knot my bouncing hair. Toss on a flimsy red shawl—it’s damp and raw out—and I’m ready.
I blow the mirror a kiss. Miss Lizzie, you’re looking saucy tonight. Who could resist you? Certainly not the wolfish bloke we’ve got in mind.
In the cupboard by my feet, the elixir whispers, its black bottle glowing with eerie inner light. Only one left. I stuff it into my pocket, for Eliza’s found me out: I swig it when I feel I’m fading, when I don’t yet want to be dragged back into my shackled nightmare. Hell, she started this medicinal war. She can’t complain if I carry it on.
My sweet steel sister murmurs, too, a four-inch stiletto with a blackwood handle. I poke her down between my bosoms. She nestles, muttering warm discontent.
Hush, sister. We’ll find games for you yet.
Down the hidden back stairs I hop, a song on my lips. Along the dusty lane and out onto Southampton Street, where fog marches by, a parade of wispy ghosts. I tip my hat. “Evening, gents. Lovely night for a haunting.”
Hello, Miss Lizzie, they whisper. They lick at my ankles, twist between my outstretched fingers. They’re my friends. They see me. And that’s more than most.
I skip towards the distant river. Moonlight strains through the fog, a piss-yellow gleam. She’s nearly full, this greedy moon, which accounts for Remy’s temper, if not for his crack-brained notions. She and I are done. It’s you I want.
We’ll see about that, my fine captain. You might think you want Eliza, her quicksilver wits and modest manners, a civilized wife for a civilized man. But close your eyes in the dark and listen to your moonstruck heart. Ask the wolf what he wants . . .
My vengeful muscles shudder, and my rage whispers murder. Think I weren’t watching, Eliza? Think I’d never notice when you kissed him and liked it? He’s mine, and you can bloody well let it alone . . .
A thought rattles, and I groan. Shit. Forgot her letter, didn’t I, to the red-haired loon. Left it on her writing desk, instead of pissing on its ashes as I’d planned. If her housekeeper posts the stinkin’ thing . . .
Unquiet breath prickles the back of my neck.
I whirl, poised. A footstep? A rustling skirt in the tail of my eye? I squint into blinding fog. Eliza’s overwrought nerves, is all. Delusions of persy-cootion.
A solitary coach clip-clops by. The driver hunches beneath his lantern, his whip a black sting. A lushington staggers, singing raucously, glassy eyes rolling in opposite directions. “While soft . . . the wiiind . . . blew downnn the glade . . . and shoook the golden bar-leyyy . . .”
A crusher in a long blue coat strolls by on his beat. Fog licks his hat, wreaths his silver buttons.
I wave, grinning. “Top o’ the evening to you, cuntstable.”
The copper waves his truncheon. “Move along. No place for your sort.” He ignores the drunk, for clearly the fellow’s quality and can do as he please. One rule for us, another for them.
“Screw you. How ’bout your sort, you poxy butt-flapper?”
“No solicitation on the street, missy. Now git.”
“Ain’t no lady, so I must be on the game, is that it? As if you don’t buy yerself bangtail when the fancy strikes.” I flip him a two-finger salute. “Get this up ya.”
“Look ’ere, you mouthy skirt—”
“Rather not, if it’s all the same. Wouldn’t blow your measly pipe for a hundred quid. Ha ha!” And I run.
Boots thud after me, but I skip into a side street, and poof! I’m gone like a bad dream. Vanished into the wet gloom on a splash and a giggle. Ha! Don’t want me anothe
r night in the Bow Street lock-up. Quaff what elixir I might, when my time runs out, I’ll once more be Eliza. And then what?
In less than a quarter hour, I reach New Oxford Street. Coal-greased shop windows, brass carriages with purple electric coils crackling in the fog. Dung collectors scrape the street, plopping their noisome treasure into buckets. A buyer for everything, be it rags and bones, dead men’s clothes, used dripping, or the stuff they call “pure” for the tanneries, what the rest of us know as dog turds. The penniless don’t let nothing go to waste.
I fight across the thronging arc-lit street and turn down a grimy lane, what narrows into a dark alleyway, what twists down crooked steps into a pitch-black tunnel splashed with mud and shit, and between one noisome breath and the next I’m in hell.
True darkness reigns in the rookery, a forsaken maze of lanes and cesspits where sun don’t never shine and even the moonbeams slant high overhead. But my eyes adjust like a cat’s to the night. I skip and slip-slide over puddles and muck. The stench churns my guts, but it’s invigorating, too, like air you can eat, only no one ever fought off the bloody flux by breathing.
Drunken tenements totter, threatening to crush me. Rags hang limply over shutterless casements. In a doorway, a pile of ill-clad urchins snoozes. Their little fingers is blue, faces pinched. One’s got a goat’s trotters for feet. Inside, a woman screams gin-soaked curses. People grunt and snore and holler. Beneath a cracked lintel, a girl’s on her knees in the mud, sucking some fat bloke’s prick.
A scrawny fellow wallows and wails in a piss-stained puddle. Waist-down naked, just a holey frock coat soaked in gunk, and a scaly snake’s tail for legs.
I grab the sorry bastard’s armpits and haul him out afore he drowns. A haze of stale gin nearly floors me, and suddenly Snake Man whiplashes and snaps for my ankles, crocodile jaws drooling black venom.
I leap away, missing his hidden trip wire by a bee’s dick. The trip wire connected to a rusty spring-loaded scythe. That puddle fakement? Snake Man’s catching his supper.
“You rat-fucking twerp.” I slam my boot into his skinny ribs, but my idiot face burns. Jesus on a jumping bean. Hit the dirt in the last shower, did I?