The Dolocher

by Caroline Barry

  ‘Damn.’ She gritted her teeth.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ Janey Mack whispered.

  ‘Come on.’ Merriment shooed her back inside and they both stepped into the anteroom to hold vigil over Corker’s frail body. Merriment glanced anxiously at the door, swallowing back her fears. Solomon will be all right, she reasoned. Billy Knox will be hiding out, gone to ground. He won’t be long.

  And convinced that Solomon would be home shortly, she sat by the fire, watching Janey Mack walk in circles around Corker, touching the young boy’s white face and fingers and fussing over his cowlick, trying to smooth down his hair.

  *

  Fearless with grief and boiling with a need to avenge, Solomon strode towards Christchurch market, his face locked in grim determination. The red moon hung low beneath the steeple, casting a malevolent ruby light. The statue of the devil that at one time had overlooked his stall emerged ominously out of the gloom, the black motionless figure of Lucifer baleful in the garnet moonlight. Solomon rushed past, hurrying towards the vague grey gateway that cut behind the ancient cathedral walls, the Answerer in his hand, the image of Corker’s dead face propelling him along the dreary, narrow passageway of Hell. Blind with rage he marched fearlessly through the dark alley, his footsteps echoing on the cold, still air. He cut onto Winetavern Street and down along Cooke Street. The city seemed deserted. Silent. Tense. Solomon moved quickly, coming to the gloomy, locked-up premises of the Cock and Hen.

  ‘Jenny,’ he hollered at the top of his lungs, hammering the door. His voice was frantic, raw. ‘Jenny, it’s me. Solomon Fish.’

  He listened, his breath quick and anxious.

  He thought he heard a pattering of steps.

  He hammered the door again.

  ‘Jenny.’

  The latch swung back. The door flung open.

  ‘Oh, Sol.’

  Jenny was dishevelled, her face blotched raw from crying. She looked frantically about her and pulled him through the door. The tavern was ablaze with candles. The light was blinding.

  ‘Sol,’ she whimpered, terrified, her fingers curled as she pressed her fist against her anguished lips.

  ‘What is it?’ Solomon clutched her arm.

  ‘I have to go.’ Jenny twitched. ‘I have to get out of here. Bring me to a boat. My bag’s upstairs, Sol, I’ll only be a minute.’

  She turned to dash upstairs, her body pitching forward. Solomon grabbed her, hauled her back, his eyes snapping to a corner. Divided by the wall jutting from a snug, he could see the shoulder of a man sitting with his back to him.

  ‘Jenny,’ he hissed, keeping his voice low, his eyes fixed on the man. ‘Where’s Billy Knox? Where’s his safe house?’

  ‘Oh Sol, it was awful. I hid in the cellar. I couldn’t come up. If you’d have heard his voice. If you’d have heard it.’

  Jenny began crying, her mouth opening in a raw, terrified, silent bawl. She shuddered, her whole body wracked with fear.

  ‘Jenny.’ Solomon bit down on her name, his jaw hard and determined.

  ‘Look what he did,’ Jenny snivelled, pointing a jagged finger at the man sitting across the way. Solomon dropped her arm and, raising the Answerer, he cautiously approached the sitting man, his breath coming in quick shallow drafts.

  ‘You,’ he called, expecting the man to turn.

  The shoulder stayed motionless. Solomon saw the jaw, the profile. He marched in front of the man and staggered to a halt, his head recoiling with disbelief, his breath catching, as he jolted backwards, confused.

  Billy Knox stared back at him with wide horrified eyes. His throat had been slit, the wound a dark jagged gap. The exposed gullet glistened purple and a white sliver of spine was visible as Billy Knox’s head leaned back against the wainscoting, his hands splayed on the table, his right index finger missing at the lower knuckle.

  ‘Jesus,’ Solomon gasped, raking his hand incredulously through his hair. Jenny clutched his arm, her eyes pathetically jerking around the room.

  ‘He didn’t know I was below,’ she stammered. ‘He tortured Billy Knox, asking Billy if he could see hell.’ Jenny swallowed and clutched her heart. ‘He said this was his town.’

  ‘Who said?’ Solomon gripped her shoulder.

  Jenny shook her head.

  ‘His voice, Sol, he kept whispering. I heard Billy fight him. I hid. I crouched behind barrels. Made myself small. Snuffed the candle. “This is for pointing with,” he kept saying. I think it was Billy’s finger he was talking about, I don’t know. All I could hear was Billy gasping. Jesus, Sol, the sounds.’

  Jenny’s eyes darted towards the cellar door.

  ‘I think he sat before Billy watching him die, talking to him. Whispering at something, saying, “I am, I am. Listen to me, I am.”’

  ‘Who was it, Jenny?’ Solomon squeezed her arm tight. ‘Who did this to Billy?’

  Jenny swallowed, shaking her head, her mouth contorting with fear. ‘I think it was the devil, Sol.’

  Solomon dragged her to the bar, opened a jar of whiskey and poured her a dram.

  ‘Drink it,’ he hissed. He gulped down a shot himself and glared over at the corpse of Billy Knox leaning back against the snug wall and dragged the back of his hand over his mouth. Who the hell was the Dolocher?

  ‘The Cut,’ Solomon hissed.

  ‘Dead.’ Jenny knocked back another glass, her face tight with fear. ‘Found three hours ago: that’s why Billy came here. Hiding out. He was alone. He was afraid, Sol. He knew something was after him. Said he was away to London on the morrow. Said . . .’ Jenny couldn’t stop the tears. She shook her head, petrified, wringing her hands.

  ‘The devil kept whispering, “The only one who knows is the witch.” Kept saying he was going to take her money. Give her what for. I thought he meant me, Sol.’ Jenny’s face crumpled. ‘I thought he knew I could hear him and that he was going to do away with me. But then he said, “She knows me. Saw me in the backyard. Saw me with those witch eyes. I can’t have that. Can’t have that.” I could only make out bits and pieces, Sol. Sometimes he laughed, then one time he shouted, “Witch will want to make a pet of me. Witch and demon. Demon and witch,” and he sounded that angry, I tried to creep further away and I almost knocked a barrel over, and me heart, Sol, me heart.’ Jenny gulped down another drink. ‘He didn’t come down the stairs. I held me breath, sure he was going to creep down and do away with me. Sure I was to be cut up.’ Jenny swallowed. ‘He left. I heard him rustling. Hissing and whispering and then I heard the door close and I waited and I’m going, Sol, I’m leavin’ here.’

  Solomon’s heart stuttered in his chest. He jolted, the blazing candlelight searing white, bleaching the room as the recollection of Merriment’s words drove him forward: ‘I’ve seen his eyes twice, Sol: once outside the back door, and last night.’

  ‘Sol,’ Jenny wailed as he bolted away from her, throwing open the door and running into the ghastly moonlit night.

  *

  Janey Mack had laid her head on her folded elbows and fallen asleep whispering to Corker. Merriment had dozed off in her chair when the handle to the front door turned slowly and pushed open. Merriment shifted, opening her eyes, the sound of the bells tinkling somewhere at the back of her consciousness, half heard. The candles had burned to a stub and quenched. She fumbled in the darkness, raking the embers to expose the red coals smothered beneath a layer of ash. She fetched a candle and bowed before the fire to light it but looked up when she heard a soft click, bemused as the door handle slowly turned.

  ‘Sol?’ she whispered hoarsely.

  Janey Mack blearily raised her head. The door creaked slowly open. A tall shape slid noiselessly into the room.

  The Dolocher’s demonic skull, dark and unearthly, cast a grotesque macabre shadow up the length of the wall. His black bristling face revolved as Janey Mack screamed and sprang to her feet. Merriment teetered backwards, emitting a muffled groan. The Dolocher came slowly forward, his dark snout moist, his tusks glowing d
imly, his broad cloak sweeping over the floor. In one hand he held a severed digit between his forefinger and thumb, like he was dowsing, and he pointed it towards her.

  ‘Stop,’ Merriment whispered, her eyes falling to his other hand where a blade gleamed dully.

  ‘There she is, the witch.’ The Dolocher waved the severed finger, his voice a coarse faraway whisper coming from deep inside the black pig’s skull. Janey Mack screamed at the top of her lungs, pulling Merriment back, tugging at her to run. The door behind the Dolocher was kicked wide. Solomon lunged in. The Dolocher spun round, the blade in his hand glancing high as he swiped for Solomon’s arm, knocking the gun out of his grasp and pushing him back. Merriment pulled at the Dolocher’s cloak; it slipped loose, exposing the dark bristled flesh of a black pig carcass.

  The pistol shot cracked loud and sharp, the room blazed blue, the atmosphere scorched a moment by an icy phosphorescent light as the walls seemed to oscillate. The Dolocher stood a moment, the amputated finger drooping, before his legs buckled. He thudded to the floor, his head noisily clattering as his large pig jaw cracked on impact and a pool of dark blood spread across the flags.

  Solomon hunched, clutching his bleeding arm, blinking through the gunsmoke as Merriment spun round to find Janey clutching the Answerer, her gaunt face frozen in an expression of terrified resolution, her huge eyes wide with shock.

  ‘I killed him,’ she stammered and, dropping the pistol, rushed into Merriment’s arms, burying her face as she bawled. ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Good girl, Janey.’ Merriment squeezed her tight. ‘Good girl.’

  Solomon staggered forward, checking that Merriment was not hurt.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked hurriedly.

  Merriment nodded. It was all over.

  Solomon wiped his hand over his brow, stepping over the corpse on the floor. He pulled away the rancid pig’s skull and the cape of pig skin that hung around the Dolocher’s shoulders and looked down at the contorted features of the corpse. The dead man had a large jaw and blue eyes, and his lips were pulled away from his teeth. His gums were speckled with the telltale signs of gum disease.

  ‘You know him?’ Merriment asked, touching Solomon’s shoulder.

  Solomon shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I never saw him before.’

  Epilogue

  They buried Corker two days later.

  The church was packed, which surprised Chesterfield Grierson more than it did Solomon. Corker may only have been fourteen years old, but his personality was such that he had inveigled his way into so many situations with such ragamuffin charm that he was well known and well liked. All of the stallholders at the Christchurch market turned up for the funeral; even Jody Maguire made an appearance. Effie and Janey Mack wept the loudest and all his sisters sang a heartbreaking hymn while his mother stared stony-faced as the coffin was lowered down.

  ‘Will the rain get inside his coffin?’ Janey Mack asked, her large eyes beaded with tears. Merriment squeezed Janey Mack’s hands.

  Janey Mack looked over the gravestones as she walked out with Merriment, fastening her shawl with her free hand.

  ‘I once had a notion, that maybe when we were older, we were thinking, I don’t know how it came up, but he told me about it.’ Janey Mack looked guiltily at Merriment. ‘Before I was sure of me place with you, ye understand.’

  Merriment nodded.

  ‘We were thinking of joinin’ the East India Company and goin’ to take a look at some hot countries.’ Janey Mack shook her head. ‘I don’t think we’d’ve done it, though. Not when push came to shove. He said he’d go to India on account of wanting to see a tiger with his own eyes.’ Janey Mack bit the inside of her cheek, her chin puckering. ‘I can’t go to India to put a flower there to remember him by. I’m not sure how I’m goin’ to get to London to do it.’

  ‘We’ll plant him a rose bush,’ Merriment suggested. ‘In a pot, outside the back door, to pretty up the yard. And if we ever move we can take Corker’s rose bush with us.’

  ‘That’d be nice,’ Janey Mack agreed, watching Corker’s sisters miserably filing through the church gate, their poor tired bones wrapped in threadbare rags. ‘We’re not going to move though, are we, miss?’

  Merriment shook her head.

  Anne and Stella gave Janey Mack a bag of fudge to take home by way of some small comfort.

  ‘We bought them between us,’ Stella said. ‘We know what good friends ye were.’

  Solomon collected donations and paid Ethel over in the Boar’s Den three guineas to put on a good spread for Corker. The funeral party lasted well into the night, with Corker’s mother toasting her beloved eldest son with a tankard of gin.

  *

  The Dolocher’s corpse was laid out in the largest lecture theatre in the College of Surgeons and the public were invited to call in to see if they recognised the man who had shocked the city for so long. The pig’s skull he had worn on his last attack was pickled in an enormous jar and morbidly displayed next to the corpse, while a queue of eager onlookers filed past and shook their heads.

  Chesterfield Grierson pressed a scented hanky to his nose and glared at the passing crowd.

  ‘It’s decomposing,’ he complained. ‘This fellow will have to be autopsied soon. If we leave it any longer he’ll fill with gas and, I don’t know, erupt.’

  ‘It’s been two days,’ Solomon sighed, ‘and no one knows who the hell he is. Someone had to know him.’

  He stared at the corpse covered with little more than a sheet: the edges of the Dolocher’s dead flesh was slowly beginning to tinge with patches of blue and yellow, his abdomen had begun swelling as the juices in his intestines fermented and expanded. Solomon watched one woman laugh and nudge her friend, while two men seemed to be betting one another about the amount of teeth in the Dolocher’s head.

  The people coming to view the Dolocher’s corpse ranged from the simplest and the poorest to the most elevated and refined. Even Judge Coveny dropped in and took a moment to chat to Solomon and clack his tongue.

  ‘Oddest damn thing I ever heard of. Mind you, if you’d met Olocher, now there was a man linked to the devil if ever I met one. Had the most sinister eyes and a kind of electricity about him, charged the air with a peculiar sort of prickling discomfort. Unnerving scoundrel, so he was. And there’s his demon.’ Coveny waved his silver-tipped walking cane at the discolouring cadaver and sniffed. ‘The malfeasance carried out by that rogue there was inspired by a very special kind of blackness, if you ask me. Damned Dolocher. Let’s hope this is the end of it.’

  Judge Coveny had brought his young nephew to inspect the corpse and took the opportunity to lecture those near him about the corrosive vices that an unschooled imagination can manifest.

  ‘Temperance and rational thinking, that’s what we must encourage. Idleness and ignorance generate this sort of stuff. You should all read more books.’

  Someone added, ‘And go to church.’

  This remark made Judge Coveny cough and splutter.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he growled. ‘Blithering nonsense.’

  Solomon sat on one of the student benches of the lecture hall, looking down on the trailing queue, scribbling notes into his notebook and wondering when Chesterfield Grierson would be back with his mutton pie when he spotted a shock of white hair in the crowd. He jumped to his feet and tripped down the steep steps, weaving through the queue until he stood before the shaking man and extended his hand.

  ‘Boxty.’ Solomon smiled.

  ‘Mister Fish.’ Boxty’s numb face grimaced. ‘I only heard today of yer encounter and me misses brought me here to see if I might know who it was did this to me; we were away.’

  Boxty’s wife smiled; most of her teeth were missing.

  ‘You can skip the queue.’ Solomon took his elbow. ‘Come with me.’

  He waved at a soldier standing guard and hurried Boxty as quickly as the lame man could move towards the cadaver laid on the cold, hard a
utopsy table.

  Boxty’s uneven eyes glared down at the corpse, his twisted mouth curling up at one side as he gasped in disbelief.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ he hissed. ‘It’s Martin. Martin Coffey from the Black Dog.’

  *

  When Solomon got home that afternoon and told Merriment, she couldn’t believe it.

  ‘It’s sinister,’ she whispered incredulously.

  ‘I know,’ Solomon agreed. ‘It seems he came up with the idea to pay off some of his debts. Martin Coffey owed quite a bit of money and he wanted Hawkins off his back. Dreamed up the Dolocher and started robbing people. He organised the pig slaughter and it was at that point, I think, that he intended to get rid of all opposition, and stitched Hawkins up.’ Solomon paused and shook his head. ‘Then something, I don’t know. He got a liking for it. Some other aspect.’

  He tried to frame the unprecedented quality of Martin Coffey’s sadistic cruelty. ‘He seems to have identified with the demonic qualities of the Dolocher and just taken to killing, as Fred said.’

  Merriment nodded and sighed, ‘Which brings us back to Olocher and his predilections. It does make you wonder if something was whispering to both of them, if they came in contact with something otherworldly, or, were they naturally evil?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Solomon shivered as he paced the anteroom, agitated with excitement. ‘That’s the subject of my next article. I was thinking of opening like this: “In the dark recesses of a subterranean cell a condemned murderer whispered to his degenerate guard and a demonic notion sprang to life, as Martin Coffey with unparalleled cunning and unequalled ingenuity plotted to carry out a reign of terror that would scandalise and horrify an unsuspecting city . . . ”’

  Merriment raised her eyebrows, kissing Solomon as he passed.

  ‘Sounds like the opening to a novel,’ she said.

  Solomon stood back and cocked his head to one side.

  ‘Do you think I should write a book?’

  Merriment raised her brows and shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Janey Mack ran into the anteroom grinning.