by Linda Nagata
She took my hand and smiled. My feelings for her had not vanished as I feared they might. On the contrary, I now felt a nagging need to be near her that totally disrupted my life when I was not. I had fed since our first meeting—an elderly down-and-out female I encountered in Newham—but I was ill-prepared, the kill was messy and I had been forced to leave the body in a Tesco’s car park.
Margaret had started calling me Dan. We had kissed, more than once, and in a manner that you might call serious. I had thus far not attempted any greater intimacy, mainly because I wasn’t sure I would be able to stand it. To penetrate her and yet not penetrate her, if you see what I mean.
Can you imagine fucking someone, someone you love, and at the same time feeling compelled to rip out her throat? For the hirudin, to couple with a human is to feed. Not to feed is not pleasure halved, it is pleasure torn out by the root. A coitus interruptus that passes beyond frustration and into torment.
The old woman I took from behind. I twisted a hank of her greasy hair around my hand and used it to pull her head back then clamped down so hard with my teeth that my jaws ached for several days afterwards. I was still ramming her long after she was dead, when she’d been dead for at least half an hour and the stink of her fetid garments notwithstanding.
I thought of Margaret all the time that I was doing this. Afterwards I staggered away, my own clothes covered in blood and the woman’s urine.
“Everything’s fine,” I said to Margaret. “Stephen and I were just having a chat, weren’t we, Stephen?”
“You’re so good with him,” said Margaret, and sighed. “He’s been strange recently.”
“What do you mean, strange?” My nostrils flared, catching the milk-warm scent of her skin, cleansed with sandalwood soap. How would you know? I thought. He’s always strange. He’s insane. For the briefest of instants I felt like shaking her. She seemed to be confirming my fears and I wanted to punish her for it. I bit down on one side of my tongue. The pain and the taste of the blood calmed me a little.
“I don’t know. Did he say anything to you?”
“Say anything?”
I left the question hanging in the air, hoping that my puzzled repetition of her words would drive home their strangeness. We both knew that Stephen did not speak. Why should he have spoken to me?
It seemed to work, or at least to satisfy her. She shook her head and embraced me and we went back upstairs.
I hoped that would be the end of it. But as I walked home that night I heard Stephen Gensing’s words ringing out at me from the pavement with every step.
I know you’re one of them.
His words, the words of an invalid, could have meant anything. But for the first time I felt unsafe in a hostile world.
You will have heard of the Ferndene Road murders, and if you haven’t you can look up the details online. For me they took on gravitas because the killings occurred less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the Gensings’ home in Camberwell. For those with a less personal involvement the only point of interest about these murders is that the killer was never identified. In cases of serial murder, if the killer is not caught there is always a lingering sense of fascination, the feeling that he is still out there and may strike again, even if (as in the case of Jack the Ripper, for example) the murders happened too long ago for that to be feasible.
Serial killers are often sanctified as monsters. In truth—and I have encountered a fair few of them, so I know—they are merely pathetic. Their chief personal attributes are gross social inadequacy and an abnormally developed sense of cunning. In their cunning they are more like beasts, running almost entirely on instinct. I have never met a murderer I liked. Not of that sort, anyway.
The area around Ferndene Road was a maze of quiet residential streets, not so pleasant and well to do as the street in Herne Hill where the Gensings lived but by no means dissimilar. The houses were mostly respectable and well looked after, the homes of white collar workers and aspiring professionals. There were a lot of young families. It was not a place for vagrants and dropouts, and I was not surprised to read in the papers that the police had extended their search for the murderer westwards and northwards into the shabby bedsit lands of Stockwell and Lambeth. I understood why they were doing this, but felt certain all the same that they were wrong. Any strangers to Ferndene Road would soon be noticed. Any murderer who didn’t blend in would soon be caught. The killer had to be local, not from Ferndene Road itself necessarily but certainly from within the radius of half a mile.
I did not think these were hirudin killings. There was something too naive about them, too earnest.
It was painfully easy to work out who the murderer was.
The first murder happened less than a fortnight after my abortive conversation with Stephen Gensing and the second less than a fortnight after that. Both murders were carried out by strangulation. The first victim was a man named Roland Meake, a twenty-three-year-old music student who had taken lodgings south of the river because it was cheaper and because his landlady, a Mrs. Jetta Vries, owned a fine Bechstein upright piano that Mr Meake was free to use whenever he liked. Meake looked a bag of nerves, the sort of man you might think was fated to be a murder victim and somehow knows it. The second victim was Geraldine Swithin, thirty-five and happily married, a senior sales assistant on the cosmetics counter of a local department store. Her photograph showed her smiling. In contrast with Meake she looked confident and at ease.
Although both victims lived on Ferndene Road they were not related and so far as the police were aware they hadn’t even known one another. They looked alike though, uncannily so. With their fair skin and blond hair and widely spaced, slightly protuberant eyes they also reminded me of someone and after some thought I realised that both Meake and Swithin resembled Margaret’s cousin Emma.
The Gensings had discussed the murder of Roland Meake with eager enthusiasm but the killing of Geraldine Swithin filled the house with disquiet. Lionel Gensing forbade Margaret to leave the house by herself and although she protested it was easy to see that she was actually quite frightened.
“You mustn’t worry,” I said to her. “I’ll have to keep an even closer eye on you, that’s all.”
“Even closer?” Her eyes were wide. “Do you promise?”
“I most certainly do. I won’t let you out of my sight.”
I caught her around the middle, sliding my hand between the cloth of her skirt and the small of her back. It was the first time I had touched her anywhere below the waist and it made me feel weightless with hunger.
That evening I went back to New Cross and masturbated furiously over the smiling photograph of Geraldine Swithin. When I had finished I used the inside pages of the newspaper to clear up the mess.
It was now September. The thought of long winter evenings crammed into the Gensings’ sitting room drinking hot cocoa with Margaret, discussing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience while Martha Gensing pressed her husband’s shirts and rubbed herself against the edge of the ironing board filled me with a desperate ennui.
The house of the murdered woman on the other hand began to compel me. In the days following the killing it became increasingly forlorn-looking. The curtains remained closed and the lawn was badly overgrown. I thought the husband had probably left for other lodgings or to stay with friends.
I got into the habit of saying goodnight to Margaret then doubling back from the Tube station and prowling the streets relentlessly until the early morning. It was not long before the lozenge-shaped grid of roads between Milkwood Road and Denmark Hill became fused with certain synaptic pathways within my brain. I came to know every house, every driveway, every unfenced lot and overgrown back garden. I paid particular attention to Ruskin Park, the green tongue of land that lapped the main length of Ferndene Road along its northern contour. There was a children’s playground there, and a group of tennis courts, but mostly it was just grass and trees, a large area of undesignated space. I felt certain that the
park was central to the murderer’s personal geography.
Often I would see Stephen Gensing. He skirted the park warily, keeping close to the railings. He gave no sign that he recognised me or that he was even aware of anything other than his immediate surroundings. But I knew that he was putting on an act.
Margaret was falling in love with me. Her smell changed and she began talking of deferring her entry to Cambridge, the two of us spending a year together travelling in Italy.
“It’s such a cheap place to live,” she said. “Especially in the south. We could teach English, learn Italian, study art.” She lay back in the grass, her mind full of frescoes and fountains, and I humoured her because it was the easiest thing to do and because it was still pleasant on occasion to pretend to imagine a life where the things that Margaret wanted would be possible. In truth, I knew, what she was saying added up to a kind of madness, mainly because being together all the time would give me no opportunity to feed. But that was not the only impediment. The falsity of our position was beginning to grate on my nerves. The hirudin female is brutal and selfish and, when it suits her to cultivate such an attribute, merciless in the application of her intellect. The human female on the other hand is mostly kind. The thought of Margaret’s essential kindness made me weary. I began to long for infected places. My exhausted senses, clogged with the rancid grease of soured attachment, yearned for the sewers of Venice, for the oil-streaked, polluted waters of the Rhine estuary.
Throughout the incendiary heat of that late summer Margaret talked of Donne and Spenser and Hopkins with a passion that was close to hero worship. She liked to speak of the intellect as if it was the driving force in our relationship, and yet her body odours told me something quite different. I could now see how like her mother she was really; everything that had bewitched me before, the daemonic otherness that infects some human youths as they pass through the hair’s breadth interstice between the mindless solipsism of infancy and the dull-witted obeisance of the human adult had slipped from her like a caul.
When she was menstruating it became all but impossible for me to be near her. Menses blood is loathsome—harsh as iron and ragged with clots—but the rust-red smell of it set my teeth on edge with hunger and put me in a mood so foul it was hard to hide. I told Margaret that I sometimes suffered from migraine headaches, and more than once I left her early, or telephoned to say I was too ill to visit.
I went to Ruskin Park instead, where I would sit on a bench through the long humid dusk, watching, watching like a hawk and trying not to think about what I knew Margaret was doing in her bedroom right at that moment.
Those dainty little fingers cricked, blood under her nails.
Stephen Gensing reeked of his secrets, the stench hanging thickly about him like a rotting shroud. His furtiveness had increased with my surveillance, and I understood that I was caught up in a chess game of the most dangerous kind. Whether Stephen was trying to expose me or to become me I never knew. I knew only that it was time for me to leave.
The story of Søren Kierkegaard and his fiancée Regine Olsen is well documented. The philosopher, terrified that the consummation of his sexual desire will emasculate him as a thinker, dumps his beloved and spends the rest of his life concocting elaborate excuses for ratting out on her. It’s rubbish of course. It wasn’t sex that threatened his intellect, but the loss of autonomy that follows in the wake of marriage. If he’d been born a century later he’d have fucked her and then moved on.
People were more into God then, of course, Søren Kierkegaard especially.
The essential dilemma in Kierkegaardian philosophy is the conflict between individual destiny and moral duty. Kierkegaard was a natural ascetic, and yet he felt pressured to settle down, to marry, to father children even. Can you imagine compromising your entire destiny because you happened once to like the way a woman’s profile shimmered in the watery mauve light of a Copenhagen dusk? Kierkegaard shouted no with the whole of his being and so did I.
In the end Kierkegaard abandoned Regine for Melancholia. I imagine his muse as one of the parasitic water nymphs you can still sometimes find living under the damp stones at the edges of stagnant rivers. Uncoiling, eel-like, her unwashed hair limp and tangled between her shoulder blades, her filthy knees grip his pumping buttocks like a sprung trap. I’ve known hirudin women just like her, their minds polluted by needs a human could never intuit except perhaps in those mercifully brief moments of panic that come just before you break free of a recurring nightmare.
They invariably torture their victims, and are creatures I prefer to avoid. I spent that winter in Copenhagen, which is a small city and therefore not the safest, but I got by. I sent Margaret a postcard of Niels Kierkegaard’s famous pencil portrait of his brother, together with Lars Anner’s excellent translation of Either/Or. I slept a lot, and in the spring I relocated to Madrid.
The third victim’s name was Rachel Pirie and she was fifteen. She went to school in East Dulwich, and lived in Frankfurt Road, just round the corner from the Gensings. Reports of her murder described her as ‘an extremely promising student’ who had won prizes for English and Geometry. We had high hopes for Rachel, one of her teachers, a Mrs Boscombe, was quoted as saying. You really couldn’t meet a nicer girl.
She was also uncommonly strong, although there was nothing about that in the newspapers. I came upon her in the shallow ditch that ran along behind the broken down cricket pavilion in Ruskin Park. Stephen Gensing was sitting astride her, attempting to strangle her with some kind of improvised ligature. He was red in the face from exertion. Rachel Pirie was bucking and struggling in his grip like an unbroken colt. Had I not turned up when I did, I think there is a good chance she would have escaped him.
I looked down at the girl, her legs splayed and her heels drumming as she tried to gain some leverage on the damp ground. There were marks on her neck, ugly red welts where the ligature had slipped and then been tightened again. Her eyes bulged. There were flecks of saliva on her cheeks and at the corners of her mouth.
I knew that if she got away, Stephen would end up spending the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. He would be safe there, surely, he and all his weird ideas with him?
Triumph, silver-hot as burning chrome, flashed up in my mind. I quashed it before it flared out of control.
I could tell you that I did what I did out of compassion for Margaret, to spare her the knowledge that her beloved lunatic of a brother was a multiple murderer, and a pretty hopeless multiple murderer at that. But the truth is that I acted out of disgust. I loathed the sight of this stupid little choking girl, terrified in her last moments as my victims have never been. Her hair clung to her forehead like duckweed. Her lips pulled back from her teeth as she gasped for air she was never going to catch.
Rachel Pirie was fair and pale, just like the others. As Stephen Gensing strained and heaved on top of her I knew it was Cousin Emma he was thinking of. I remembered my tense little chess games with my mother and experienced a painful shiver of fellow-feeling.
“Mind out,” I cried. I shoved him aside and he exuded a pained little grunt. I was rough with him, hurt him probably, though I didn’t mean to. The spike went in low, grating slightly against the Pirie girl’s collarbone, but perhaps because she had already used up most of her energy she was unconscious in less than five seconds. Blood began to bubble up from around the base of the spike, covering my hands like warm gravy. The urge to feed at this point would normally have been insurmountable but for the first time in my life I felt a bitter distaste. I do not normally kill children unless I have to, and this killing had about it the air of a botched job, a last ditch solution to a problem that should not have existed in the first place.
I wanted it over with. That was all.
I licked the palms of my hands to clean them, breathing hard, then stood up and looked around. The cricket pavilion was surrounded by bushes, the ditch rank with the odour of nettles and dog faeces. It seemed that for the mo
ment at least we were by ourselves. I just hoped we could not be seen from the road.
“Get out of here, Stephen,” I said. “You have to stop doing this. They’re going to catch you next time. If they have any sense they’ll throw away the key.” I snatched the ligature from his hand. It was a crude thing, a length of nylon fishing twine with a short strip of dowel rod tied to either end. I put it in my pocket, resolving to dispose of it later, and miles from here.
“This isn’t for you,” I said to Stephen. “Best leave it to the professionals, eh?”
I wondered how he had managed the other two murders. Either he had been lucky, or he had simply picked the wrong victim in Rachel Pirie. Such things do happen. I had no idea if he would try and kill again. Nor did I care.
Did I miss Margaret, you ask? I know it was better that we didn’t say goodbye. Kierkegaard wrote Regine Olsen a long letter breaking off their engagement and he never heard the last of it—tearful confrontations, threats of suicide, the lot. I watched Stephen Gensing until he turned the corner into Herne Hill Road—I wanted to be sure he was heading home, you see—then returned to the New Cross flat for a change of clothes. I took what money I had, packed my few possessions and fled the scene. Forty-eight hours later I was in Venice, where I fed off a male prostitute before passing out in the basement of a boarded-up pensione. I slept for the best part of a week.
I did think of her when I woke, I must admit it. But I knew the feeling of loss would fade, as soon it did. In the interim I comforted myself with the delusion that I might return to her at any time if I wanted to. I could claim illness, or madness, or both. It wasn’t as if I’d actually told her we were over. We could pick up where we left off.
There are still days when I believe that, then laugh at myself for my own foolishness.
I saw her once, years later, an old woman sitting in a deckchair on somebody’s patio. She raised her head as I passed, shaded her eyes from the sun with the back of her hand.