The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  “It ain’t what you think it is,” he said. “Unless you thought it was jarred tomatoes.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt both relieved and disappointed. It would’ve been nice had those jars been pickling indisputable proof—even if it had made me puke.

  We turned to move on, then froze as footsteps clacked across the floorboards and came to a stop not a foot above our heads.

  We’d been talking low all this time, moving careful and quiet, but maybe not quiet enough.

  My brother and I stood there stiffly, both of us uselessly looking up. “Shit,” Old Red hissed with a start.

  He jerked his hand down, and the light snuffed out.

  The match had burned down to his fingertips.

  We spent the next few seconds in utter darkness, the silence so complete I could hear my heart beat. Actually, I’m surprised everyone in the house couldn’t hear it, it got to thumping so. Fortunately, whoever it was above us clomped off before it could hammer its way clean out of my chest.

  Another lucifer flashed to life, and Gustav started toward a cluttery pile of canisters and boxes and bottles a few feet away. As we drew closer, I could see they were clustered around a half-opened door.

  There was another room off the basement.

  The largest of the cans was on its side, the lid off, and a grayish powder spilled out onto the dirt floor.

  Old Red crouched down and brought his match in close.

  “What’s this say?” he asked, pointing at the big, blocky black lettering wrapped around the canister.

  I had to step around him and straddle the can to get a good look at the label.

  “DANGER,” I read out. “MAGNESIUM. HIGHLY—”

  That’s as far as I got.

  The next word was explosive.

  38

  The Dark Room

  Or, We Finally Get a Glimpse of the Big Picture

  I lunged out and smothered my brother’s match in my palm.

  I did my best to smother my resulting yelp, too.

  “FLAMMABLE?” Gustav guessed in the dark.

  “Even better,” I whimpered. “explosive.”

  Old Red was quiet for a moment.

  “You know,” he finally said, “one of these days I really do need to learn myself how to read.”

  “If you could just pick up the word ‘danger,’ it sure would help.”

  I moved slowly away from the canister, trying to shake the pain out of my hand.

  “You know much about magnesium?” my brother asked.

  “I know it explodes.”

  Gustav grunted out a “hmm.”

  “Hold on a tick,” I said. “Come to think of it, I do know something about it. Photographers use it for flash powder. That’d explain why Krieger’s got so much lyin’ around.”

  “Yeah…but not why it’s lyin’ in a heap on the floor.”

  A spark burned a hole in the darkness, and I saw Old Red squat down distressingly close to the ground—and the magnesium—with a fresh-struck match.

  “Hel-lo,” he said.

  The silver-gray magnesium powder wasn’t just spilling from its can. It ran off in a sprinkly trail along the floor.

  “Well, would you look at that?”

  Gustav pointed at the checked trousers he’d borrowed off Ragsdale. The rolled-up cuffs were covered with fine gray powder.

  I glanced down and saw my own shoes and pant legs were dusted up just the same.

  “The stuff must be spread out all over down here,” I said, “and you been tossin’ around spent matches like you was Johnny Appleseed plantin’ trees. We’re lucky we ain’t been barbecued half a dozen times over.”

  “Yup. Looks like Krieger’s got the place rigged to blow.”

  My brother turned to the pile of cans, bottles, and boxes nearby. Some were labeled magnesium, others ether, still others a seemingly benign paper. All of it, I had no doubt, would burn but good.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said. “There’s gotta be an easier way to get rid of evidence.”

  Old Red shrugged. “Depends on the evidence.”

  He started toward the door just beyond the clutter.

  As he stepped up close, something glistened, oily and metallic, at eye level—an open padlock hanging from a latch. Gustav lit a fresh match (after carefully snuffing the old one and depositing it in a pocket) and pushed the door all the way open.

  A swirl of bitter-pungent vapors assaulted my nostrils. It was a harsh, chemical smell, a perfume of vinegar and kerosene with a subtle splash of decay.

  Something else swirled out with it. Not so much an odor as a feeling, that queasy unease that wells up from some deep part of the soul that knows no words—the animal part that can sniff out menace before you even lay eyes on it. Dread, I guess you’d call it.

  Old Red walked through the door.

  I didn’t follow my brother so much as the light.

  The room beyond was long and narrow, the far end draped in impenetrable darkness. For all I knew, there was no end, and the room simply stretched on forever, a black tunnel to nowhere.

  Just beyond the door was a table covered with beakers and tongs and shallow tubs. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the “dark room” of a professional photographer. A few feet away, against the opposite wall, was something equally innocent: shelves lined with books.

  Gustav and I moved closer, and I began reciting the titles. They started out innocuous enough—Justine, Juliette, Fanny Hill—but turned more lurid the further we went.

  “The Romance of Lust. Memoirs of a Coxcomb. The Lustful Turk. My Secret Life.”

  Old Red waved a hand at the rest of the books. “So they’re all of a kind here?”

  “Sure. I don’t see no Bibles or cookbooks or…wait.”

  A section of slender, tattered, obviously well-read volumes caught my eye.

  “‘Leather Apron,’ or, The Horrors of Whitechapel,” I read out. “The History of the Whitechapel Murders. The Whitechapel Atrocities. The Whitechapel Terror. Jack the Ripper; or, The Whitechapel Fiend.”

  There were four or five more, all of them variations on the same words.

  Whitechapel. Jack. Ripper.

  “That cinches it,” Gustav said grimly.

  “Not in a court-of-law way, it don’t. We still ain’t got proof positive.”

  “Feh,” my brother said. Then he said, “You’re right.”

  The already low light of his match flickered and dimmed, and he put it out altogether with a quick shake.

  “How many of them things you got left, anyway?” I asked.

  Old Red’s face appeared in a fluttery yellow glow. “After this one? Three.”

  “Three? Shit.”

  If we didn’t find what we were looking for in the next couple minutes, we’d end up feeling around for it in the dark.

  A hatbox was on the shelf, acting as a bookend, and I quickly slid it out and tossed off the cover. Inside was an assortment of “postcards” of the kind you’d never mail to your Aunt Polly. Yet they weren’t anything I hadn’t seen before, thanks to bunkhouse pals who collected such “Parisian novelties.”

  Gustav snatched the hatbox from my hands. “Alright, alright—that ain’t nothing.” He shoved the box back on the shelf. “Dammit, there’s gotta be some real evidence down here somewhere.”

  He whirled around and took a few fast steps that almost put out his match. The crackle of breaking glass stopped him in his tracks.

  “Christ almighty…”

  When the light flared up stronger again, I saw what my brother was looking at.

  There was a blank space beyond the worktable and shelves, all of ten feet where there was nothing but dirt floor and magnesium powder—and, strewn about willy-nilly as if tossed carelessly through the door, five photographs, the frames shattered. Just past the scattered pictures, at the edge of the light, a single wooden post jutted down into the middle of the room.

  It was a beam, one of the big oaken shaft
s that made up the skeleton of the house. Attached to it were what, at first, looked like rusty-brown tin cups hanging from an iron loop about five feet off the ground. The wood beneath the ring, I noticed, was splotched with dark stains.

  It took me a moment to realize I was looking at manacles. And dried blood.

  And, at last, proof.

  Old Red knelt down and picked up the nearest of the photos. It was a group portrait, like the pictures of the San Marcos Gamecocks and the Marching Beavers. Only this one showed a gaggle of young women lounging around a bed, all of them clad in white chemises or knickerbockers. They looked weary and worn, but most managed to work up a sleepy smile.

  Squirrel Tooth Annie was among them, as was Big Bess. I recognized the bed, too. It was the big four-poster in the “Bridal Suite” at the Phoenix.

  Written across the bottom of the picture were the words “A happy staff! September 1892.”

  We sorted through the other photographs, finding them much the same. Tired women gathered around a big bed. Squirrel Tooth and Big Bess were in them all. The other gals came and went.

  As for the inscriptions on the photos, only one thing about them ever changed. It was always “A happy staff!” Always September. The years, though, went from 1889 to 1893—that last with a smear of blood on the fracture-webbed glass.

  “That’s how he picked ’em. The gals he wanted for that.” Gustav jerked his head at the post and manacles. “They’d round up the chippies for him to choose from like heifers at auction. We must’ve come to town right before this year’s cull: He’d taken the new picture but hadn’t got around to the choosin’ yet. That’s what he was pretendin’ to do when he plugged Ragsdale, I’d wager. He was sayin’, ‘That one there. She’ll do.’”

  “But there ain’t no picture for ’88, when Adeline died,” I pointed out.

  Old Red nodded slowly. “She was different. The first. Practice. Krieger set out to be Jack the Ripper, only it didn’t go so smooth for him as for Jack. Stonewall either saw him at it or caught him red-handed. And it wouldn’t be Ragsdale and Bock’s way to take it to the law, nor to pass up a buck, neither. So they started in with blackmail, and from there it turned into more of…a business arrangement.”

  “One girl a year,” I said. “Must’ve cost Krieger plenty.”

  “No coal for the furnace, lettin’ folks buy into his private library, turnin’ part of his fine old house into a photography studio.” My brother nodded again. “Yup. He was bein’ bled dry.”

  “Well, I guess he finally stopped the bleedin’—only now his ‘fine old house’ is about to go up in flames, and if it does, we won’t have squat to prove any of this.”

  “Yup.”

  My brother put out his match and didn’t hurry to light another. We’d run through two just looking over the pictures.

  There was only one left.

  I’ve never experienced such a total darkness as at that moment. It was the kind of black that makes you forget what light is. It wasn’t just complete. It seemed infinite.

  “Ain’t no way around it,” Gustav said. “We’ve gotta—”

  There was a shrieking-loud squeak somewhere above and behind us—the squealing of rusty hinges—and light spilled down into the cellar.

  Old Red hurried to the dark-room door and pushed it closed as far as it would go. Then he crouched down beside the keg of magnesium in the doorway just as we heard the first step on the stairs. I crept up behind him.

  We watched as light spread across the basement, listened as the footfalls on the creaking stair-slats grew louder. Then at last we saw Krieger.

  Mrs. Krieger, gliding through the cellar with an oil lamp in her hand. I’d been so preoccupied with her husband, I’d forgotten the lady entirely.

  She was wearing a black cape over a dark blue walking dress, and her graying hair was pinned up in a mound so big it was less “bun” than “loaf.” The lamplight shining up from beneath accentuated the long, straight lines of the high collar squeezing her neck, making her head look like a hot-air balloon straining to escape her body.

  Her expression was placid, blank even, free of fear or suspicion. She hadn’t heard us.

  Indeed, she moved with her usual ghostly grace, quiet and calm, the only sound a soft shushing from her skirts as she knelt before the biggest of the basement’s steamer trunks. After setting the lamp down atop another locker nearby, she unclamped the trunk’s locks, lifted the lid, and reached inside.

  A moment later, when Mrs. Krieger closed the steamer and stood to go, I caught a glimpse of something pure white and pillowish tucked under one arm. She took a single step toward the stairs, then seemed to change her mind, turning and moving deeper into the cellar instead.

  She didn’t go far—just a few feet—and she stopped and shook out the white material she’d been toting. It was long and billowy, and she pressed it close against her body.

  Her back was to us, yet I finally got a good look at what she’d come down to fetch, for Mrs. Krieger was staring into the cracked glass of the big mirror propped up not far from the coal chute. The flowing white fabric looked like a shroud at first, but the more I stared the more I could make out sheer lace and the sheen of satin.

  It was a wedding gown. Seeing herself with it—recalling herself in it—put a wistful smile on Mrs. Krieger’s chalky face. Then the smile was gone, and I noticed something else in the mirror.

  Two sets of eyes glistening in the gloom, reflecting the glow of the lantern. Two ghoulish faces striped by the light cutting through an open door.

  Our eyes. Our faces.

  She could see us.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Krieger said.

  Her wedding dress dropped to the floor.

  I stood and stepped around Gustav into the full light, talking fast in hopes of heading off a scream.

  “You have nothing to fear from us, ma’am, I assure you. But my brother and I do have reason to believe you’re in great danger. If you’ll just hear me out, I can explain why.”

  She turned to face me, and I was heartened by how serene she still seemed, how poised.

  I might actually pull this off, I thought.

  Then Mrs. Krieger drew something from a pocket concealed beneath her cape, and once she had it out in the open—and pointed at my chest—I knew why she could stay so cool.

  She was the one holding a gun.

  “Uhhhh, Mrs. Krieger,” I said, unsure what words might follow, except perhaps “please don’t.”

  “MORTIMER!” the lady boomed. “THEY’RE HERE!”

  39

  One in a Million

  Or, I Try to Open Mrs. Krieger’s Eyes, but It’s Me Who’s Blind to the Obvious

  “Ma’am, you gotta listen to me,” I said. “If you’d just step into this dark room here and take a look at—”

  “Oh, I never go in there.”

  Mrs. Krieger actually smiled shyly, apologetically, a proper hostess sorry to be interrupting a guest. Even one she was pointing a shooting iron at.

  It was a dinky little thing—a short-barreled .22 with no trigger guard. Useless at a distance, but deadly up close. And Mrs. Krieger was close enough.

  “Now…your guns,” she said. “Would you put them on the floor, please?”

  I pulled my Bulldog from its shoulder holster, bent down, and gently settled it on the ground.

  “Do you have any idea what your husband’s done? What he is?”

  “Guns, please!” Mrs. Krieger chirped, swiveling her iron to the left, toward my brother.

  I glanced back at him as I straightened up. He was still on the other side of the doorway, where the lantern light couldn’t fully reach him. His arms—and his holster—remained draped in blackness, but it was plain to see he wasn’t giving up his Colt.

  “MORTIMER!” Mrs. Krieger bellowed.

  There was no response—no distant “Coming,” no scurrying footsteps on the floor above. Wherever Mr. Krieger was, whatever he was doing, he seemed to be out of earshot.
<
br />   Mrs. Krieger brought her left hand up to brace her grip on her gun.

  “I really must insist,” she said to Old Red. “I may be a lady, but I’m not afraid to use this.”

  “So we’ve seen.” My brother unbuckled his holster and let it drop to the floor. “I gotta say, though—that didn’t look like nothing no lady would do.”

  Mrs. Krieger relaxed, going back to a one-handed hold on her gun.

  “Even a lady is expected to protect her husband,” she said.

  Which was when the truth finally chiseled its way through my granite skull.

  Ragsdale’s and Bock’s hats on their desks: removed for a lady.

  The little pocket gun that had killed them: a lady’s weapon.

  The lady in question: standing right before me.

  “Ragsdale and Bock…that was you?”

  “Mortimer’s arrangement with the gentlemen had grown rather strained,” Mrs. Krieger explained pleasantly, as if making small talk while waiting for the crumpets to come off the stove. “So he thought it best if I ended the alliance. It being, as your brother said, not something one would expect of a lady.”

  “Protectin’ your husband’s one thing”—Gustav nodded back at the darkness behind him—“but do you know what’s gone on down here? In your home?”

  “I don’t need to and I don’t care to,” Mrs. Krieger said. “All men have a darkness inside them. For the sake of civility, they keep it out of sight. But in private…from time to time…well…” The corners of her mouth turned down in a dainty grimace. “It’s distasteful, but it’s a wife’s duty to tolerate such things. Better that my husband indulge himself safely here at home than out on the streets. That’s a lesson we learned five years ago.”

  Old Red’s eyes went wide—and my own just about popped from my skull.

  “‘We learned?’” I said.

  “How long have you known what your Mortimer really is?” Gustav asked.

  The lady favored us with another prim smile. “That’s between me and my husband.” The smile faded.

  “MOOOORRRRRRR-TI-MEEEEERRRRRRRRR!”

  Again, there was no response from upstairs.