The Dolocher

by Caroline Barry

  Ethel nodded and, making a quick sign of the cross, she flicked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘Himself is in bed, snoring his head off. He only fell asleep when the sun came up.’

  ‘I left my belongings here.’ Solomon pointed to the kitchen. ‘Can I get them later?’

  ‘Course ye can.’

  ‘Will you get some rest before you open up?’ Solomon asked kindly.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Ethel rubbed her tired face.‘I’ve to put the stew on and do last night’s dishes, wash the tankards and check the cellars. And that lump up in the bed will be kicked out of it soon. People are comin’ in early for a drink and headin’ on before the curfew. The damn curfew is wicked hard on business, but sure, the lock-ins keeps things tickin’ over.’

  Ethel walked them to the door and Solomon and Corker squinted, the blinding light of the white world stinging their eyes as they stepped out onto the street. They said their goodbyes and for a while Solomon stood looking down at the deserted schoolhouse, his face locked in thoughtful determination. As he assembled the facts, he thought of Merriment and, inspired by the notion of a scientific approach, he knew where to go next.

  ‘Will you go back to the office, Corker, and start drawing Rosie losing her baby. If Chesterfield asks, tell him I’m working on something. I’ll be in the office later today.’

  Corker nodded, shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘Right ye are.’

  ‘See you around two-ish,’ Solomon said.

  Corker set off towards Skinner’s Row while Solomon turned down towards the Black Dog, passing a small crowd huddled around some stalls buying up stocks of bread and cheese, forecasting more snow to come and whispering about the awful attack over near Purcell’s Court.

  Solomon’s brows pinched together as he mulled over this strange new discovery. The pigs had been secreted in the schoolhouse. It had been a culling carried out by a Dublin gang who had efficiently brought the carcasses to the abandoned building and let the city think that the Dolocher had dragged the corpses to hell. Piqued by the implications, he made his way to the Black Dog and, slipping into a side street, he waited.

  He leaned against the teetering wall of the collapsing building perched on the corner and watched who was coming and going through the prison gate. A throng of ne’er-do-wells and grubby merchants passed back and forth. He saw tired-looking wenches carrying pitchers of white ale, a cobbler in a tattered jacket bent double under an enormous basket of wooden clogs. Wives and children called in to visit, some even bringing pet dogs and birds with them. He saw at least three Ordinaries come and go, and two undertakers, one leading an ass and cart carrying a selection of coffins. There were bread sellers carrying trays of loaves and fishwives with baskets of silvery stinking fish. A young chandler pulled a barrow of tallow candles behind him and limped his way into the yard. He saw Jessop loping his way out through the gate, this time without Fred following. Jessop veered up the street and disappeared through the crowd, heading for market, and behind him, wearing a new woollen jacket trimmed with beaver, was Hawkins the Keeper.

  Solomon arched forward, peering round the brickwork watching Hawkins saunter away, a ring of heavy keys jangling against his thigh with every step. Emboldened by Hawkins’ departure Solomon crossed the street and passed under the prison gate, swallowing as he climbed the steps, and pushed open the reception room door. Scattered over the benches and across the floor were groups of noisy visitors mingling with merchants, smoking tobacco and haggling over wares. The guards were relaxed and dishevelled, accepting mugs of sour ale and joking with the painted bawds who were leaving, and greeting the fresh supply of women who were coming in. The reception room was so crammed that Solomon didn’t have to explain himself to anyone. He slipped into the green corridor, surprised to find that it was bustling as well, choked with visitors and a line of tourists who’d come to see where Olocher had killed himself. Solomon was astonished to find his broadsheets tacked to the door frames of some of the cells, and amused and perplexed by the general sense of freedom permeating the gaol. A mottled old guard with a lazy eye rang a bell and called for silence. ‘Down this way here now,’ he hollered, pointing a brackish-coloured index finger. ‘This is where the Dolocher crept up.’ And he led a straggling group of sightseers down towards the nunnery, leaving behind a handful of hawkers and the resigned inmates to finish up their business. Solomon made for Charlie’s cell and was surprised to find a grizzled group of men playing cards over an upturned coffin.

  ‘What?’ a man with buck teeth snarled, his eyes flashing above the fan of cards in his hands. At his elbow was a beautiful cut glass filled generously to the brim with deep red Burgundy and in a crate by the corner were a dusty stack of at least twelve more bottles.

  ‘Charlie?’ Solomon wavered on the threshold.

  ‘We diced him,’ the man with the buck teeth chuckled, his brown eyes slanting with vicious delight, ‘and we put his bits and pieces in here.’ He walloped the coffin so hard with his palm that the glass bounced and teetered, splashing over the cards.

  ‘Aye, here.’ The kerfuffle sent chairs knocking back, and there were a couple of punches thrown and a lot of yelling. Solomon slipped away, looking in all the rooms as he passed, catching snatches of prisoners chatting. In one room a corpulent man wearing a dazzling necklace dictated his autobiography to one of the Ordinaries. There were prisoners buying soap, getting drunk, weeping, swiving, praying. Instead of heading for the nunnery, Solomon made his way upstairs and was surprised to find the upper floor eerily quiet.

  A lone lantern hung on a hook, its feeble light mingling with the paltry daylight that slipped through the tiny Diocletian window high up at the far end of the corridor. All the doors into the various rooms were closed. The silence made Solomon’s skin bristle. He tiptoed past several rooms, listening for the softest of moans, for whispers, for snoring, for any sign of life. He tested a door handle and held his breath as the door slipped quietly open. Inside was a deranged-looking old man tied to the bed, his clothes torn, his face cross-hatched with fresh scars.

  ‘You’ve not come back,’ the old man whispered confusedly, the whites of his wide eyes flecked with burst vessels.

  ‘I’m looking for Charlie,’ Solomon ventured.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the old man agreed and Solomon quietly shut the door and tried the others. In each room he found anaemic-looking inmates, all terrified, all injured, all cowering. One man offered him money; he unfurled his palm and exposed the corpse of a mouse. ‘A guinea, sir, the charge for my freedom.’

  Solomon took to tapping on the doors and whispering into the doorjambs, ‘Charlie.’

  Finally someone whispered back breathlessly, ‘Yes?’

  Solomon turned the handle, the door creaked open and there, sitting on a tattered cot, wearing a shirt and wrapped in a blanket, was Charlie. His young face was white with terror; his fine blue eyes sparkled with confused horror. Solomon crept in and quickly latched the door behind him.

  ‘Please, don’t hurt me,’ Charlie whimpered.

  ‘Charlie, it’s me.’

  ‘You sent the lady with the pistol,’ Charlie said, dropping the blanket and revealing his arm splint. ‘She told Hawkins she’d be back to see me, and if he so much as touched a hair on my head she’d tell Beresford and Beresford would sack him. You should have seen Hawkins spewing lies and smiling and trying to be courteous. He went to touch her and she pulled the pistol on him. Showed him she was no doxy. Hawkins went puce trying to be contrite, saying how she got the wrong end of the stick and that he never meant to insult her womanliness and then . . .’

  Solomon cocked an eyebrow, interested to hear that Merriment had defied Hawkins. Could that be why . . .? he wondered, a theory coalescing as he considered all the facts.

  Charlie trailed off mid-sentence, his face frozen, his eyes still.

  ‘What was that?’ he whispered. ‘Did ye hear that?’

  Solomon shook his head.

  ‘I wanted to ask y
ou a few questions.’ Solomon lowered his voice, afraid he would soon be found out. He leaned forward, but instead of interrogating Charlie, he furrowed his brow and whispered, ‘You do know the door is open.’

  Charlie nodded. He was about twenty years old, and now that he was sober his manner betrayed a hint of aristocratic breeding. His room contained a Chinese locker and a painted commode, and to one side of his bed was a sturdy chest, open and filled to the brim with books. Leaning against one of the leather-bound volumes was a statue of Mercury carved from black onyx, holding a gold caduceus.

  ‘You can escape,’ Solomon told him.

  ‘All the doors are open,’ Charlie whispered, his long mouth twisting with revulsion. ‘The curse of Tantalus,’ he hissed. ‘They do it on purpose. Tempt us to risk bolting. Say that our freedom is a whisker’s breadth away, that we can dare to try and leave. But the minute we are caught, and they swear we will be caught, they will flay us alive. They beat one man to death for having the gall to try to escape. None of us will contradict them. Hawkins is omnipotent. He has a lackey in every nook and cranny in the city.’

  ‘Does he?’ Solomon’s eyes narrowed.

  Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘We are damned.’

  Solomon got straight to what was on his mind.

  ‘Did Hawkins kill Olocher?’

  The question made Charlie frown. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Just investigating something,’ Solomon whispered. When he stepped forward to sit on the bed, Charlie flinched and withdrew into the corner. Solomon put up his hand, showing his palm.

  ‘Shh,’ he whispered. ‘I found Boxty, the first night the Dolocher appeared.’

  Charlie swallowed and nodded at this piece of information, his sleek black hair falling down over his eyes, his pale fingers clutching at the grey blanket that encircled him.

  Solomon asked, ‘The night Olocher committed suicide, was Hawkins here?’

  Charlie shook his head emphatically.

  ‘No, that night Martin Coffey was on instead. He said Olocher slit his own throat. He was mad with rage. He and Hawkins had a right set-to. Hawkins went to hammer him and Martin kicked him so hard in the crotch that Hawkins fell over and wept for his mammy. I heard the whole thing. The Dolocher taking Martin was the Dolocher finding one of his own. Martin was a bad man.’

  ‘Was he?’ Solomon sat on the hard edge of the bed and stared at the straw strewn over the flagstone floor. ‘Do you think Hawkins killed Martin after the beating?’

  Charlie sucked on his upper lip, thinking this over. ‘The Dolocher got Martin.’ Then he breathlessly added, ‘I saw him.’ Charlie stared earnestly into Solomon’s face, letting his last statement land.

  ‘You saw him?’ Solomon whispered. ‘The Dolocher? You saw the Dolocher take Martin?’

  Charlie tentatively touched the fingers of his left hand; they poked out from the hard wood splint wrapped in a creamy bandage.

  ‘I saw the Dolocher, before Martin went missing and after Boxty had a stroke. He was laughing. I was drunk out on the corridor, weeping at my predicament, and when I looked up, there he was leaning down over me, laughing. I saw his tusks, his rotting flesh. He told me to get up. “Charlie,” he said, “you’re a blackguard and a wastrel,” and he dragged me by the hair and flung me back into my cell.’

  Charlie blinked and a stray tear trickled down the side of his face.

  ‘This place is wicked. I’m wicked. I shall roll in the fires of hell, for I’m lost to this world.’

  Somewhere in the far distance they heard a door slam. Charlie gave a little whimper and hid his face with the blanket. Footsteps receded and a second door shut, followed by a protracted silence.

  ‘He spoke.’ Solomon contemplated this new piece of information, his eyes narrowing as he collated everything he had heard. The Dolocher could speak, had blue eyes and knew the prisoners by name. The demon’s preternatural qualities began to diminish, straining under the weight of new information. ‘He knew your name?’ he said, tugging the blanket away from Charlie’s gaunt face.

  ‘The devil knows the black secrets of the heart. Why wouldn’t he know my name?’

  Solomon’s expression darkened. He sat for a moment considering.

  ‘What are you in for, Charlie?’ he asked.

  Charlie’s blue eyes searched the air vaguely, like he couldn’t remember why he had been imprisoned. ‘Seditious pamphleteering,’ he said finally. ‘And I’ve managed to extend my sentence by not paying Hawkins enough for my lodging. The man says I owe him two hundred pounds.’ Charlie’s pale face blushed. He began to shiver involuntarily. ‘I’ll never see daylight again.’

  Solomon sighed and stood up to leave.

  ‘Have you no family?’

  Charlie swallowed back a chunk of tight tears. ‘I am dead to them. My incarceration brought great shame to my parents. They packed up and went back to London, left me to my politics, left me to rot here, never spoke one kind word or offered one kind gesture.’

  Solomon knew it was by stealth and sheer good fortune that he had managed to avoid being flung into debtors’ prison, and looking down at Charlie trembling in a knot on a miserable prison bed, he saw how forlorn and desperate a situation could be compounded by the harsh cruelty of others.

  ‘When the Dolocher comes,’ Charlie said, staring bleakly at the floor, ‘and he will come, because he knows my name, I will take his hand and walk with him. He can rip me limb from limb and then this will be over.’

  Solomon wanted to touch Charlie’s shoulder, wanted to say something to give him a shred of hope.

  ‘I will see what I can do,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  Charlie turned his face away, hiding his upset.

  ‘Don’t,’ he mumbled. ‘Leave me alone.’

  And Solomon slowly and carefully opened the door, crept out into the corridor and snuck quietly down the stairs. The tour was now squashed into a condemned man’s cell, with a further twenty or so voyeurs crammed in the corridor, all trying to hear the man’s last words now that he had only hours to walk the earth.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll swing. Tonight I’ll dine with the Dolocher. I’ll give him yer best. Tell him to shove yer righteous faces right up his gaping arse.’

  ‘Have ye no remorse?’ one woman ventured.

  ‘Only sorry I didn’t take my women two at a time.’

  There was an uproarious cheer and the condemned man burst into a bawdy song, roaring the chorus, while the tourists laughed and joined in. Solomon pressed his way through the reception room and out into the wintry afternoon.

  The bells of Christ Church pealed through the intermittent snow. Twelve rings. Midday. Solomon fastened his cloak collar and made his way to Ormond Street, his brain organising and rearranging the titbits of information he had gleaned last night from Fred and Jessop and this morning from Ethel and now Charlie. Merriment’s words rang in his ears: ‘But he has weight, structure, bones, flesh, can feel pain.’ Emboldened by a growing conviction, he marched through the city.

  The snow thinned to fine powdery flakes as he turned down New Row onto Cutpurse Lane and then onto High Street, his heart pattering unexpectedly. Even in daylight he couldn’t help but feel his chest tighten as he remembered the Dolocher leering down over him, a living macabre gargoyle suspended above him in the darkness. He carefully examined the tall buildings to his right and left, and noticed, sandwiched between the high wall and the weavers’ meeting place, a singular building, an old Dutch Billy house. It was four stories high, with a distinctive cornice of Portland stone carved into elegant baroque swirls that framed two dormer windows. The front door was to one side and painted cavalry blue. It was humble and without a fanlight. The second-storey windows had no ledge but those on the third and fourth floor did, and Solomon stared, recalling the backlight of buttery yellow that had illuminated the Dolocher’s head.

  It dawned on him that the miraculous and unexpected emergence of the Dolocher through a wall, floating high above him,
could well have been the demon lifting a sash window to look out at the street below. And the terrestrial nature of the explanation filled him with a curious excitement. Everything began to make sense. He needed to tell Merriment.

  He let out a long sigh and hurried across the road to survey the house, the preternatural qualities of the Dolocher evaporating, while a sinister theory exploded fully formed in Solomon’s mind. He wrote down the address and headed away, slipping his notebook and pencil into his pocket.

  It stopped snowing, but the sky was thickening with fat yellow-tinged clouds. Blue smoke trailed from the chimneys and the world looked beautiful; every imperfection, every squalid setting, the rooftops, the roads, the trees, all were covered with white. Children ran about screaming, flinging snowballs and sliding down Lazer’s Hill in makeshift sledges. Small birds puffed up their breasts and pecked wildly at any stray speck on the ground. And hanging in the butcher shop windows on Ormond Street were sides and hinds of pork, with severed pigs’ heads decorating the sills and large signs jokingly advertising Try a Bit of Dolocher, Makes a Fine Supper! Solomon paused, looking at the prices, before stepping into one shop and joining the long queue.

  He bought a side of ribs for half the usual cost and heard a cluster of women talking about how the Dolocher had cut out an unborn child and taken it away.

  ‘Happened down near Smock Alley last night,’ one woman said, shifting the toddler in her arms to her other hip. ‘She was with her lover, rushing home before the curfew when the Dolocher attacked.’

  As his meat was being parcelled up in brown paper, Solomon listened to the chatter, amused that Merriment had been mistaken for a man, no doubt because of her breeches and her pistol.

  ‘Dolly Shelbourne’s husband says the apothecary is a witch, brought the Dolocher with her back from sea.’

  Solomon was intrigued by the circuitous ramblings the imagination could take once an idea took hold. It was a plump woman with wild red hair who set the queue straight.

  ‘Dolly Shelbourne’s husband’s as pious a missionary that would bore the ears off yer head with his constant quoting. How his mother didn’t throttle him in the cradle for his pontificating ways is a wonder to all and sundry and she the greatest hell-cat ever to walk the streets of Dublin. How a Bible-thumping pious Joe like that should emerge from such a jilt is a riddle the devil himself can’t figure, and as for Misses O’Grady’s misfortune, I am only delighted she didn’t perish on account of her havin’ reinvigorated my Ned.’