‘She was in town selling lace,’ he told the men standing near him. ‘She was with a girl called Gertrude.’
‘Gertie,’ Maggie repeated, recollecting the name.
‘That’s right, Maggie. What happened?’
‘He was waiting in the shadows. We were going to catch the coach out to Saggart.’
Maggie reached for Solomon, clutching at his arm, her face suddenly frantic.
‘Tell Jack to come and fetch me, Sol. Run along and tell him, I’m ready to go home. Go on now.’
‘I will, Maggie. I will.’
Solomon looked helplessly at Merriment.
‘I think there’s a couple of ribs bruised,’ she told him. ‘I can make up a plaster.’
‘She can stay in my bed,’ Solomon said.
One of the men stepped forward and coughed a rasping, chesty cough. He turned out to be the night watch and in all the hue and cry he had managed to lose his cudgel. He clutched his lantern close to his thigh. His round face was full of folds of flesh, like a pug dog, his ancient eyes drooping, the lower lids hanging, the exposed rims scarlet and weeping.
‘Ask her where her money is?’ the old man suggested.
‘Where’s your money, Maggie?’
‘I don’t have it,’ Maggie said, hissing and jerking away from the touch of Merriment’s fingers. ‘I lost it and me basket. He took Gertie, whisked her away and he tried to fetch me with him, but I say me prayers.’ Then her eyes darted quickly. She dropped the glass and, as it rolled noisily along the floor, she clasped Solomon’s hand and uttered in a low terrified whisper, ‘Where’s Gertie, Solomon? Where’s she gone?’
‘The Dolocher took her,’ Janey Mack whispered, her huge eyes blinking with horror. The night watch and the three men with him stood motionless. Two women, who had been watching Merriment assiduously, looked meaningfully at each other but said nothing.
Solomon came to his feet.
‘We have to set up a search party. We’re looking for a young girl. She’s wearing a pale cloak. Long hair. Fair, I think.’
Solomon wracked his brain, trying to conjure up the image of Gertie, but all he could remember was a speck, a young blur waving at Maggie as she approached.
‘Right-oh,’ the night watch said, ‘we’ll work in threes, considering there’s a villain out there.’
‘Time is of the essence. Get as many neighbours together as you can. See if we can get more beadles over here.’
Solomon grabbed a lantern, shepherding the crowd out. They splintered off into groups, dividing the area into quadrants and setting up a meeting point to report back to.
Maggie Fines sat in the chair, her head lolling as she rocked back and forth. She looked at Janey Mack accusingly and, pointing at the little girl’s heart, she asked, ‘How can it be that the dead are up and walking?’
*
‘Over here,’ someone hollered.
The rain came down in sheets, driven sideways by the rising wind. Two men were hunched over a long, pale streak and Solomon knew as he ran towards them that Gertie was dead. A lantern was placed at her head, throwing enough light to illuminate her pale face and staring eyes. She lay half naked in the gutter. Her belly had been cut and her intestine bulged from the gash. Her bare breasts looked blue and were streaked with rills of muddy water. Her skirts were twisted and soaking wet, her thighs were bloodstained and her feet were bare. A simple chain with a carved wooden cross hung about her neck and her hair spread into a fan of amber gold. She was sixteen years of age at the most and the last look in her eyes was one of abject horror. Solomon threw his jacket over her, shaking his head with disbelief.
‘Has to be her,’ he whispered.
‘She was strangled,’ the night watch informed him. ‘The marks around her neck.’
Blue patches like darkly eclipsed moons clustered around her throat.
‘She was raped, poor thing,’ a woman said as she lowered Gertie’s skirts, made the sign of the cross on the young girl’s forehead and began reciting the Confiteor. Solomon swallowed down the surge of bile rising in his gullet and wondered how he was going to tell Maggie Fines. He was about to stand when something caught his eyes. It shimmered a moment when he moved the lantern, and swinging back to inspect it, he pointed behind the praying woman, asking her, ‘What’s that?’
Underneath the sloping branches of a shrub, something sparkled wet with rain. The woman reached her hand in and screamed, jolting back.
Solomon had to kick it out. They all looked down at the pale mound quivering in the hissing lantern light next to Gertie’s head. There were striations of red muscle marbled with white fat in the mound, and when they turned it over, black dark bristles beaded with small globes of rain fanned out, hideously grotesque.
‘It’s a lump of rotten flesh!’
And Solomon shivered, afraid of everything that the pound of flesh implied.
11
Pyrrho of Elis
Solomon tapped softly on the back door. Merriment opened it, her blue eyes wide with expectation.
‘Well?’ she whispered.
‘Dead. Raped.’
‘Oh.’ Merriment’s hand swept to her mouth. She watched Solomon as he sank into a chair, shaken utterly and completely to the core. He was battered in body and mind. He was soaked through, his feet were spattered with mud, his breeches, shirt and jacket dripped, rivulets of water slid off the ends of his hair. But more than anything it was his pinched, haunted expression that alarmed Merriment. She fetched a blanket from a cupboard and handed it to him.
‘How awful,’ she said quietly. ‘I really am sorry. Where?’
‘One of the side streets near Smock Alley.’ Solomon could barely stop his hands from trembling. He looked blankly at the walls as he told Merriment about Gertie’s bruised neck.
‘She was brought to the Lying-In Hospital, to be cleaned, put in a shroud.’
Solomon looked at the blanket.
‘The poor thing.’ Merriment patted her heart. ‘It’s dreadful.’ She pulled the cork out of a cut-glass decanter. ‘To have met with such a cruel, violent end. Her parents will be devastated. Such horrible news.’ She poured two glasses of fortified wine, gazing a moment into the shadowy shelves where jars of ointments stood in neat rows.
‘What a night.’
She offered Solomon the wine. ‘You’ve had a dreadful shock.’
He took the glass, faintly dazed, and slumped back into the chair.
‘You should get out of your wet clothes,’ Merriment suggested. ‘Wrap up in the blanket, get warm.’
But Solomon didn’t move. He stared miserably into the fire, his eyes glazed with tears. He hid his face, barely able to contain his misery; he felt cursed and destroyed and overwhelmed by everything.
‘You all right?’ Merriment asked.
Solomon nodded bleakly.
‘What a thing to see,’ he muttered. ‘What a thing for someone to do. She’d been cut open.’
Merriment grimaced, stopping in her tracks.
‘Slashed her belly.’ Solomon held the side of his head. ‘Like what Olocher did to that girl.’
He looked mournfully up at Merriment.
‘She was so young. Last time I saw Gertie she was running and waving.’ Then he remembered Maggie. Solomon’s head rolled back.
‘Is Maggie . . .?’ He couldn’t finish the question.
Merriment paused. ‘She’s,’ she began, then, sighing, said, ‘I don’t know. Her right pupil is blown out. She’s got a fever and I’m not sure I have the skill to siphon off a haemorrhage.’
She tried to soften the prognosis but knew enough not to get Solomon’s hopes up.
‘The body can rally, you know. Maggie could easily make a full recovery. It’s just . . . fever is tricky. She’s sleeping now . . .’ Merriment trailed off.
Solomon sat for a while peering into the flames, a thin trail of vapour rising from his damp feet. All was grim and grey and miserable. Merriment sat quietly opposite him, concerned,
encouraging him to drink what she had given him.
‘You look . . .’ she started, gazing at Solomon’s distressed profile. He looked grief-stricken and shattered.
‘Drink a little more,’ she said softly.
And he sipped, silently locked in an agony of emotions, the wine slowly softening and blurring the edges of his self-loathing and shock. The silence spanned out between them. The warmth of the fire, of Merriment’s patient gaze, of the fortified wine, worked on his agitation until, after a long spell of listening to nothing but the flames fluttering in the hearth, Solomon began to feel his mind release a little, his breath relax. He let go. Let go of Billy Knox and Pearly, of Jenny sneering, of Maggie balled in a bloody heap in a doorway, of Gertie sprawled on the cobbled street. He sank into the subtle comfort of the anteroom, imbibing all the warmth, the tender looks from the woman across the way from him, the fire, the wine. Merriment poured him another glass.
‘This is a grisly business,’ she finally said.
Solomon nodded, frowning as he recollected the lump of flesh ghoulishly glittering in the rain, the black spiked bristles menacingly echoing with Boxty’s account of the Dolocher.
‘It’s the devil’s work,’ Solomon said flatly, ‘an evil act born in a putrid soul.’
Merriment watched him sink into his dark thoughts, his eyes half closing, the corners of his mouth pulled down by sadness.
‘It is evil to have cut a young life so short, so horribly,’ she softly agreed. But Solomon shifted in his chair.
‘What if . . .’ He looked into the flames dancing in the dark hearth. ‘There was a lump of flesh, with coarse black hair, the same as the piece I found in the Black Dog.’
Solomon looked over at her, for a long time studying her face, the eggshell delicacy of her skin, the plump broadness of her lips, the defined edges of her cheekbones, the intelligence of her brow. And as he stared, Merriment understood clearly what he was implying, yet sat quietly, giving him room to explore the idea that perhaps, somehow, a fiend had emerged from the debtors’ prison on Cooke Street and was now prowling the dark alleyways of Dublin.
‘I cannot shake the idea,’ Solomon said bleakly, ‘that Olocher has somehow returned from the dead. The witnesses, the evidence . . .’ He turned away to stare into the fire, contemplating the tortures of hell. He was in his own hell, locked in misfortune and put upon by thieves and bullies. He was shadowed by forces that brought him ill luck and misery. He was wretchedly hounded and plagued by hardships and adversities and so uniquely obstructed from life’s opportunities that it took nothing more than a little nudge to convince him that a demon sat on his back. If he in some small way could sense an evil shadow cast over his own existence, it did not take too much more reasoning to suppose that a devil could erupt into the physical world and carry out its own dark desires.
Merriment let him sit for a while mulling over the preternatural possibilities of the Dolocher until at last she said, ‘There cannot be a demon.’
‘Why not?’ Solomon glanced sideways at her. ‘Because it goes against reason? Because if there is a devil, there’s a God, and this new science will collapse? Because you don’t want to believe it?’
‘All of those things,’ Merriment answered, ‘and none of those things.’
Solomon shifted uncomfortably but didn’t speak. Instead he listened while Merriment told him a story from her seafaring days.
‘We’d been sailing off Port Royal.’ As she spoke, Solomon’s shoulders seemed to slump and soften, lulled by the tone of her voice. ‘We’d had such a run of bad luck. Stupid things like unfettered barrels that broke loose and shattered one sailor’s leg. There was a breach in the hull. A plague of weevils in the biscuit. Really, the usual stuff. But the men took it badly, believed the trials we had been experiencing were omens. They read portents in the clouds and began to fix all their frustration on one man. A single sailor with a deformed arm. They blamed him, said he was attracting the misfortune. And when we were attacked by pirates, which by the way the region was notorious for, they lynched the poor man, hung him from the yard arm, all of them standing mute while he screamed his innocence.’
Merriment stopped, pausing as she remembered trying to rush to cut the poor man down. Beresford had hauled her back and hissed at her under his breath. ‘Stay, or you’ll swing beside him. This is the law of the sea, and unpalatable as it is, it will purge our bad luck.’ And because she still wanted to save the poor sailor, Beresford glared at her and reminded her of her own precarious position. ‘Bad luck to have a woman onboard. Don’t give them ideas. This should quell their ardour. Stand fast.’ And so she stood and watched.
She pushed away the recollection of the poor sailor crying for mercy and topped up her wine glass, sighing as she tried to convince Solomon that Dublin was in the grip of some kind of demon fever.
‘You didn’t see the things that I’ve seen,’ Solomon muttered in response, and Merriment sat deep into her chair and rested her head back, listening to the wind beginning to rise outside. The wood hissed in the fire, the candle flame stuttered a moment, sending fluttering shadows skipping over the wall while they both sat contemplating the darker aspects of human nature.
‘Did you ever hear of Pyrrho of Elis?’ Merriment asked, lengthening up, her face suddenly animated.
Solomon shook his head, his blond curls shivering a little.
‘He had four questions that he recommended we should always ask to really know and understand a thing.’
Solomon turned his torso so that he could look at Merriment, engaged by her solidity, wishing he had her firm belief in scientific methodology, her measured stoicism, her conviction that the walls dividing the natural from the supernatural were strong and firm and impenetrable. His eyes slipped a moment to her lips, sliding down to the notch in her throat. He had to fight to pull his gaze away, to stop himself from muttering ‘you’re beautiful’.
‘The first question we must ask,’ Merriment told him, ‘is what is it? Define it. Then we must consider what the thing is made of? How are we related to it? And after that we must enquire what is our attitude towards it?’
She leaned forward, the wine in her glass a ruddy glow between her pale fingers, the top button of her shirt was open and the collar had slipped back to expose the long, soft line of her neck. For some time they both sat silently applying Pyrrho of Elis’ logic to the current case. Solomon was the first to give his account.
‘What is the Dolocher?’
His eyes searched the flagstone floor, the answer coming in broad waves, punctured by long pauses.
‘A demon. A creature from the paranormal depths. An amalgam of dead things, human and swine, somehow animated by a wilful desire to seek revenge, to murder and destroy. A corpse revitalised by an insatiable hunger. A cadaver sliced open by surgeons. But before that, did Olocher make a demon or attract a demon? Did his wicked heart construct the demon from the pit of his reeking lusts? As Olocher sat muttering in his prison cell did he summon up enough bile to infuse his own flesh with an occult essence that was so powerful that by the time he was lying on the surgeon’s table, he had transformed his body, transfigured it with such great evil that like an automaton his cadaver was galvanised to continue fulfilling Olocher’s compulsions, raping and murdering and haunting Hell? Or did something latch onto him, use him like a parasite, and manipulate his corpse, turning it into an instrument for a swine-headed fiend intent on murder and revenge?’
Solomon let Merriment pour him more drink. He felt strangely better, as the crimson light in the room cosily enveloped him.
‘What was Pyrrho of Elis’ other questions?’ he asked.
‘How are we related to the thing and what is our attitude to it?’
Solomon nodded, licking the taste of wine from his lips.
‘So the Dolocher is a demon’ – he held up an index finger – ‘made of dead flesh and dreadful deeds.’ He raked his fingers along his cheek. ‘How are we related? Well, that’s easy, we a
re its quarry. The Dolocher hunts us out and our attitude is one of fear.’
Satisfied, Solomon smiled sardonically at Merriment and said, ‘Here we are in the eighteenth century confounded by demonic forces. What a time.’
Merriment nodded but disagreed. ‘And if it is not a demon all your supposition collapses and crumbles away.’
‘Trouble is,’ Solomon countered, ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.’
Merriment pinched back a disbelieving smile. ‘I can’t argue with your logic. If it looks like a demon and acts like a demon, then it’s a demon. But’ – she swept her hand over her glass – ‘I have had patients in the past with strange ailments: the symptoms pointed at an illness in a certain organ when in fact the disease lay in another part of the body. Nature has a tricky, slippery quality.’ She let her eyes rest on Solomon’s hands. ‘We need to keep a cool mind, to sift the facts from the clutter of information that diverts our attention.’
‘By clutter, you mean the murder of Gertie, the attack on Maggie, on Florence, on Ester, the striking down of Boxty and the dismemberment of Martin Coffey? Isn’t that rather a lot of evidence to brush aside because you cannot countenance the idea of a demon?’
Merriment sighed, her head falling thoughtfully to one side. ‘Put like that,’ she said, taking a sip.
‘Now you have to wonder . . .’ Solomon wanted to reach for her, wrap an arm over her shoulder, have her sink into his chest; instead he sat forward in his chair and asked, ‘Are we resisting the evidence, the eye-witness accounts, the murder victims, because our faith rejects the very existence of a devil? You the “sceptical chemist”, the scientist, want to quash the very idea of demonic forces because how can you bring religion into scientific experiment; and I want to deny the Dolocher because, God damn it, if there is a devil then there is a God and that won’t do. That won’t do.’
‘You want to deny?’ Merriment seemed genuinely amused; her eyes sparkled as she smothered an incredulous chuckle. ‘But you have argued vehemently that the Dolocher is a demon, that the creature exists.’
The Dolocher Page 19