Whitechapel Gods

by S. M. Peters

  “Come along,” she said again. “We don’t want to keep the men waiting.”

  She had the twiddling pixie brogue of an underclass child, but the words were Gisella’s own. The girl could not have been there longer than three months. Could Gisella truly do this to them so quickly?

  “No,” she said, gently as she could manage, though her voice was shaking. She moved Emily aside and turned to face the hard, indifferent eyes of the woman who had raised her.

  Gisella held her face in a familiar expression of disdain, features chiseled as if from stone, skin stretched tight over thin bones. Missy had never before looked the matron in the eyes for more than an instant—none of the girls had. The moment that disinterested, superior gaze hit her, Missy felt her resolve wither and flake away. Her throat and neck tightened, and her breath came short.

  Obey! screamed her mind. Duck your head, do your chores, and look presentable and be a good little girl and be safe!

  She had kept out of trouble so many years by listening to that voice. It had guaranteed food, shelter, family, and woe to those who disobeyed.

  Gisella looked her over as if evaluating a dress halfway finished.

  “It seems obvious you are not ready to assume your duties and earn your keep. Nevertheless, I will be charitable. Emily, take her to the sleep room and lie her down. I will be there presently with some tea.”

  This time the girl managed to lead her from the parlour into the dreary and unfinished hall that led to the kitchen and the room that held hammocks for the girls. Gisella strode in after, filling the hallway with her presence. She was a looming shadow in the light of the parlour, impossibly large, powerful, immovable.

  I am going to the locked room where you were never allowed to go. I am going to mix my tea and make you drink it. I will rid you of the killer you are and make you a whore again.

  They passed the nondescript door of the locked room, where all of the matron’s poisons were stored.

  Killer or whore, then. What shall it be?

  Missy stopped again. Emily again slipped forward of her and turned back, an affronted look in her eyes and the smallest mist of confusion.

  “Gisella,” Missy said.

  “It is improper for you to speak to me in that tone, young lady.” Missy heard the jingle of keys in the matron’s hand. “Off to the room. You shall be deservingly punished at a time of my convenience.”

  Missy swallowed, moved her fingers, undid the clasp on her handbag.

  What is she but a sack of meat waiting for a bullet?

  An endless pivot, heels of her shoes grinding on dirt beneath them. “No, Gisella.”

  The matron did not bat an eyelash at this comment. She simply returned her stone gaze to Missy. “It was not a request, nor an option, young lady. Obedience is required of a proper girl. Mr. Worthingen of Cathedral has made an offer for you, and I do not intend to disappoint a client.”

  Missy looked into the eyes—flat, hazel eyes, stern and implacable. But also shot through with veins, lines across the irises like cracks in china, black spots here and there.

  “‘What has a lady, if not her reputation?’ Is that it?”

  “It pleases me to see you have been paying attention,” said the matron. “You are a black mark on my otherwise flawless professional record, young lady. I’ll have no more of your willfulness. Tonight I will move you on to the beng lie in its pure form and we will have not another disobedient word from you the rest of your days.”

  The handbag opened. Bare fingers slithered in and coiled around something cold. That cold spread into her.

  You are a killer now. You are a hawk, dear bird. You are a snake.

  And suddenly Oliver’s death made sense. Oliver had died to show her what she was capable of. If she could murder him, how could she balk at this?

  She drew out the gun.

  Emily yelped and sprinted into the sleep room.

  Gisella gasped. Her brows bunched together and she began shaking her crone finger. “You ungrateful shrew! How dare you, after all I’ve done for you!”

  “Shut up, you witch,” Missy said.

  Gisella’s eyes flared. “I took you in when you were a mongrel child and prey on the streets. You were headed straight to the Chimney, mark my words, and then you have the audacity to run off, and now this? I should have left you where I found you.”

  “Yes, you should have,” Missy said, jamming the gun into Gisella’s face, right at the end of her pointed nose. “Now shut up! I have a question to ask you and you are going to answer it.”

  Gisella huffed and folded her arms across her stomach. “Such presumption. You are a no-good devil child.”

  Missy poked the gun forward another inch. “Where is the hobgoblin man?”

  “And insane as well,” Gisella said. “He is nothing more than a figment of your disturbed mind.”

  “Where is he?” Missy slapped the matron across her wrinkled nose with the pistol’s barrel. Gisella reeled back, yelping, grasping at the blood that began to trickle out.

  “Put down that ugly thing this instant,” she ordered.

  Missy clawed Gisella’s shoulder with her free hand and dragged the old lady’s face against the barrel. “Do you think I won’t, Gisella?” Missy said. “Do you think me too weak? Or do you think it isn’t loaded?”

  Missy fired a shot into the ceiling, inches from Gisella’s ear. The old woman shrieked and clutched at the side of her head. Missy rammed the barrel back against her cheek. Something inside her grinned as Gisella jerked back from the heat.

  “Tell me,” Missy yelled.

  “Unhand me this minute,” the matron cried.

  Missy bit down with her free hand, digging fingernails into withered muscle and sinew. She forced Gisella’s head backwards and placed the gun against her forehead.

  “Tell me!”

  Gisella screamed and Missy struck her on the chin. Her old crone’s teeth clacked together and a chip broke from one. Gisella gasped and sputtered.

  You’ll never be anything, you rotten child. Born wicked.

  “Shut up!”

  Something cracked this time. The old woman cried and begged.

  It does not matter what you do to me, young lady. To your dying day you will be a whore, and men will have you whenever they please by dropping notes upon your doorstep, and you will always remember that it was I who trained you for it.

  “Shut up!”

  She broke the woman’s nose.

  I have already conquered you, child. You are a dog in truth, chewing on her master’s ankle—a rabid bitch not fit for feeding or breeding, merely for getting kicked.

  “Shut up!”

  She twisted the woman’s arm backwards until it popped.

  “Tell me where he is!” The words tore out of Missy’s throat, raw and painful and exhilarating.

  Gisella whined and cried and gasped out words.

  You are mine, you useless tart. Now and forever.

  A crack like that of a whip. The sharp scent of gun smoke. A thump and thud, with the swish of skirts.

  And the girls’ eyes: staring bright and glassy and so very wide from the parlour, and Emily’s from the kitchen, with not a word spoken by any of these ones in their perfect dresses.

  “I had to,” Missy cried. “It’s all I have left. You heard her, didn’t you? I’m nothing to her. I’m nothing at all.” She shook the gun. “This is all I have. Can’t you understand? She took everything else away from me.”

  The eyes stared, painted statues. A young girl began to cry.

  “Damn you all. It had to be done. Liz—” She reached out to the sharp-nosed blonde she knew so well. “You remember, don’t you? We used to talk about this. We used to lay awake and say how someone should do this to her, and to all the men. Don’t you remember?”

  Elizabeth swallowed, dropped her eyes, her hands shaking. She backed and hid behind another girl.

  “No, Liz, please.” Missy’s hands burst into shaking; tears rolled down
her cheeks. “You all wanted it, didn’t you? Didn’t you want to be free of her? Why isn’t anyone saying anything?”

  She cradled the gun against her chest and sobbed.

  You had your chance. You had peace and bliss and freedom, and you ended it all with a single cut. Your life has always been pain and you chose to come back to it.

  She lowered the gun, watching the barrel and cylinder move past her and glisten with blood.

  “The hobgoblin man is real,” she said. “I need to know where he’s hiding.”

  Some of the younger girls started to cry.

  “Shut up, all of you! It’s very important that you tell me.”

  The older girls turned to the younger to comfort them, led them away and vanished one by one from the arch of the parlour’s door.

  “Liz? Annie? Ethel? Don’t go. It’s not done yet. I’m not done yet”

  My life can’t end like this. I have one more thing to do.

  “Doesn’t anyone know?”

  “I knows.”

  She turned. A small boy, no older than seven and dressed in stained tweed shorts and a crumpled cap, stepped forward from the sleep room.

  “I knows where ’e is,” the boy said. “ ’E took me there once.”

  Missy reached out a trembling hand, drained of colour.

  “Take me,” she said. Sobs choked the rest of her words, of sorrow and relief and gratitude.

  The little boy stepped past Emily, who was near tears but trying not to show it, brave thing.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Missy said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I ain’t afraid. The girls was always nice to me.”

  His little hand slipped into hers.

  “But ’e wasn’t nice. Not at all.”

  The thing that had been John Scared cackled and howled into the red sky.

  Moan for me, my love.

  He twisted and Mama Engine writhed. He grasped her and her desires ran amok, flashing hatred and lust and fear into his mind, which he drank like syrup. Her machines and her crows swarmed about the city like mad ants, devouring one another in their pleasures.

  I know you, my love. I know you to your last secret. I know every beam and organ and whim you have ever had.

  The mei kuan pulsed through him like his native blood. The calculations came automatically, showing him the far-reaching probabilities of each motion he made. He read his bride now instant by instant with a knowledge as complete as God’s.

  He held the diseased child under one set of his thousand claws and paid him little attention.

  It is a shame we cannot be alone on our wedding night, my love. He ground the child down. But I have done worse things in front of children.

  With the tendrils of his inflated intellect, he wound down deeper into her body, into her burning furnace-womb hotter than a star, hidden beneath a mountain of metal. He tore her wide, bathing in the heat, then filled her with a glacial seed.

  Ecstasy rushed through him, vibrating his every limb, shuddering to his core. He gasped and squirmed and blazed to new proportions as he finally tasted woman. Far away, his flesh body reacted in kind.

  Look to your husband, Lady. Even as I ravish you he sits like a dullard. I will never ignore you like that, my sweet, for you are mine and I claim you forever.

  He had her over and over, until her screams and his tore the red sky into strips of black, through which dripped the seeping fluid of other places. All sensation warped into his pleasure and for an instant he knew himself to be Almighty.

  He did not notice a lone soul cross his boundaries and enter him.

  Oliver took stock: broken hip, couldn’t walk; broken shoulder, couldn’t lift his arm. His neck wound had sealed again and he was running a fever of about one hundred ten degrees. He actually thanked those gods that had ravished him for the gift of their anaesthesia.

  Hews wasn’t so fortunate. The Boiler Men dumped him on the floor without ceremony. He had been badly beaten. He breathed short, thin breaths and lay unmoving where they dropped him.

  He was willing. He knew the risks better than I did.

  The thought brought him no comfort, only a deep loathing and sadness that anyone—anyone at all—had to die for this revolution. How could all these people be so willing and eager to give up their lives? He’d never understood it, this fever that men took into battle. When he’d organised the Uprising, he’d honestly believed that it could be done without loss. He’d believed that will and cunning and, well, rightness could carry them through. He’d never considered sacrifice. He’d never accepted it.

  Afterwards, he’d kept his crew quiet and safe for five years, fighting by night through theft, sabotage, espionage, always out of sight and away from confrontation. He’d kept them alive against all odds.

  And then he’d led them to their ends.

  Oliver squinted against the tears and tried to believe that Tommy had gone out as he wanted to, and that he was at the Gates with a smile on his broad face and not lying in pieces under the cloaks’ boots.

  “The allergic man always listens for the buzz of an awakening bee.”

  Oliver looked up. He knew exactly where he was. He knew the identity of the tuxedo-clad man standing across a marble floor beneath a hundred clocks.

  The baron of Whitechapel stood facing his altar.

  “A stone rolling down a hill is arrested by the presence of a tuft of grass. When that grass withers, the stone will move again; such is the inevitability of gravity.”

  He turned then, facing Oliver’s bright eyes with his dull ones. The tuxedo was crisp and clean, as was the white shirt beneath, the whole a ghostly vision lit only in the sizzling flares of Oliver’s eyes. Upon an altar behind him sat a black top hat and cane. Through the skylight windows on the ceiling, Oliver could see only blackness. Where was the light of the Stack?

  Baron Hume approached with stately and measured steps. His wing tips clicked on the floor, and Oliver suddenly realised that none of the clocks were ticking.

  “Could a rain choose which plants to nourish? Could a fire choose which houses to burn and which to let be?”

  The baron halted and stared down at the two of them, hands clasped behind his back. “I choose to be a man.”

  Oliver didn’t know if he was supposed to reply. When he had been silent for some time, the baron continued.

  “The skin of trees has passed beneath your nails. It has grown to a galvanic jewel and clings now to your flesh like the teeth of a remora.”

  Oliver realised what he was talking about and fought the urge to check his pocket and see if the device was still there.

  “I don’t have it,” Oliver said.

  The baron inclined his head forward in what could be mistaken for a knowing expression.

  “As hidden as the stars near the moon, you bear the fate of the soundless wall, at the behest of the colours swirling in water.”

  Had they searched him? Had they taken it away?

  Oliver stalled: “I don’t work for her.”

  The baron stood straight again.

  “You clean the crocodile’s teeth, and the beast does not eat you. It is simple.” He glanced upwards. “Day passes the world to night’s gentle hands, night returns it to day. Thus there is time and turning.”

  Night and day? He and I?

  Oliver said nothing, feeling the situation out. Baron Hume folded his hands together in front of him. “You are knives shredding the pages of a troubled mind. You are the death of the words written by a shaking hand and a dying soul.”

  Oliver blurted it out: “Your prophecies?”

  The baron nodded. Oliver gasped as his memory hit him over the head with the obvious. This was the same man who had written the verses of the Summa Machina who had cried and railed against his own weakness even as the Lord and Lady consumed him.

  He’s not an enemy, Oliver thought. He’s just another of their victims.

  His mind started churning.

  “What are you asking?” Oliv
er said. “Do you want the same as we do?”

  “A hare shivering in his hole also profits from the ceasing of the thunderstorm.”

  Instantly, all of his fatigue was forgotten. Oliver tried to stand and remembered that his leg would not work.

  “I need to get to the Chimney,” he said. He at last patted his pocket and found a comforting lump within. “It’s the only place it will work. Can you help me get past the cloaks and the Boiler Men?”

  The baron’s gaze drifted slowly to the pocket where Scared’s device lay hidden. Oliver’s heart jumped into his throat, as he realised he might have just betrayed himself.

  Hume only looked aside a moment, as if considering, then spoke. “Raindrops will wash away once loosed from the cloud. The ticking little scrubs and the burning ones are so many ashes, and the wind will carry them over the hills.” He looked back. “But the lost souls listen only to the whispers in their own darkness.”

  Oliver tumbled that in his mind a few minutes. “Your darkness?”

  The baron nodded. “What use has a gardener of a hole that cannot be filled? Only the echoes call it home.”

  Hume turned once again to face the altar, and walked in measured strides to just below the quartz clock, then halted, lowered his head, and stilled.

  Oliver settled back and wondered how far Providence would string him along before crushing him down.

  Beside him, Hews stirred and burbled some words past the blood on his lips. Oliver leaned towards him, tried to reach out with his broken arm and found he couldn’t.

  “Hewey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, lad,” he grumbled. His eyes fluttered open, revealing themselves to be bloodshot and watery. “I didn’t quite catch the end of it. What did he say?”

  “He…well, I think he promised that he would help us to the Chimney,” Oliver said carefully.

  “He always was difficult to understand. I assume he hasn’t gotten any clearer.” Hews made no effort to rise. “Where is he now?”