I turned to the bed, where my coat lay across my monstrous discovery. “I would have only you, Henry, present for this.”
“This, George, is highly irregular.”
I nodded. “I would concur were that not such a horrible understatement.”
“What do you mean?”
“Under my coat is a discovery, some form of primitive life or birth defect, which, if made common knowledge, would terrify the nation.”
Henry looked puzzled.
“I guarantee it. This poor woman has carried in her womb, the offspring of some vile, base creature. This resulted in her most horrible death. This creature, it seems, feeds upon human flesh.”
“A cannibal?”
I shook my head. “This is no human. This is an animal. And it is to be studied. It is to be secret.”
“You must be mad, George. Why would you want to keep such a thing?”
I picked up my coat to reveal the outstretched baby, lying alongside its mother.
“Oh George,” Henry said, taking two steps back. “George, what have you found? How was that thing came to be inside Judith?”
I smiled at my friend and said, “Do you really require a doctor to instruct you?” I moved to my box of equipment and removed a bell jar 20 inches tall. “Help me prepare this, Henry.”
Soon, my operation was complete. I sat with Henry for a while in the doss, the jar safely covered and stowed in the carriage. “The party for the inquest should be here soon,” Henry said. “What the hell will you tell them?”
“I will say that a very cancerous growth had taken hold, swelling so as to take on the appearance of a pregnancy. Having sought no medical attention for this unknown cancer, her organs were eaten away, resulting in this gruesome death.”
Henry looked at me with supplicating eyes. “George, shouldn’t the authorities know the truth?”
“Absolutely not, Henry. Not until I have discovered more about its origins. Now, can you keep this secret – even from Charlotte?”
Henry nodded his head slowly. “I can. I don’t approve, though. If you put anyone else at risk in order that you can achieve fame and fortune, I will have to make known what has happened here.”
“Tell me, how could anyone else be at risk?”
Henry pointed to the door. “That thing has a father.”
We sat in silence until the inquest party arrived. They looked over the body of the prostitute. Somebody muttered, “One less to worry about.”
The whole affair was wrapped up very quickly, very neatly. Who would question the word of the attending physician?
They removed the body from the doss. The landlord complained about the mess.
The young girl who had alerted us in the first place stood staring at a striped skirt, which had belonged to Judith.
Charlotte said, “Go on, take it.”
The girl did as she had been permitted, bundling the item under her arm.
I was horrified but tried to muster a tone of stern disapproval. “I presume you are taking it for Judith to be buried in?”
The girl looked up at Charlotte. Charlotte turned to me. “It belongs to her now.”
“I won’t hear a bit of it!” I boomed. “Put that back at once. Is it not enough that the poor wretch has lost her life? Not enough that her body is so destroyed? Now we must add to her indignity by sending her to the grave in a soiled and tatty nightgown, must we?”
Charlotte ushered the girl to the door. “Judith won’t need it where she’s going. This will get the lass a few pence down the Petticoat Lane rag fair. These are desperate times, Doctor. No reason she should have to go down the same line as Judith just to make sure she doesn’t freeze to death.”
Ashamed, I maintained my silence.
Charlotte touched my arm. “I know you have charity in you, Doctor. I know you understand.”
Three.
“So you see, Father Haddon, though I may live to be one hundred, I feel I shall never sire a child of my own,” I concluded my story. The priest had sat rapt for the duration and had taken not a single sip of his whisky.
“It is an… interesting tale, George. An interesting diversion to say the least.” Father Haddon rose from his seat, more concerted now than he had been during the telling of the tale. “And let me guess,” he said, pointing up at the bell jar containing the inverted lamb, “this would be the happy little fellow here.” Haddon allowed himself a guilty chuckle.
“No Father,” I said, leaving my chair, to walk across the study. I lit another gas jet to illuminate a corner of the room as yet shrouded in darkness. There in the yellow light, on a wooden stand of its own, was a tall bell jar, twenty inches tall, filled with a swampy liquid, through which was visible the creature which had eaten its own mother.
Father Haddon had followed me a few steps past the desk, drink in hand. He saw the frightful creature, curled into a ball, suspended in the fluid. Gangly limbs connected by a jagged spine and protruding ribs. There were no eyes in its head, just a translucent bluish white skin.
Haddon stumbled backwards, as though assaulted by the vision. He fell back against the desk, knocking my glass the floor. The high-pitched smash of glass caused a stirring within the jar, the limbs stretching and contracting as though the beast was waking up. “It lives! My God George, what have you done?”
Haddon squeezed his glass so tightly that it shattered in his palm, causing thick drops of blood to run freely down to the floor. His eyes were fixed on the creature, though, and we both observed the face pressed against the glass, two slits for nostrils flaring and closing like the gills of a fish.
“Surely not! George, surely it can’t see me!”
“Of course not. She has no eyes,” I assured him. “She can smell your blood.”
“Even through the glass?” he gasped.
It was then that the translucent lips widened into a monstrous grin, needle teeth displayed in purple gums, then a second row, then a third row, each set pushing the last set forwards, the jaw peeling back into the neck and the forehead rippling and peeling backwards.
“Abomination!”
The teeth scraped and chattered against the glass and the creature thrashed its limbs around as though trying to topple its glass home.
“Come here,” I said to the priest. He complied, numbed in terror. I drew a few drops of his blood into a pipette and took a small glass button out of the top of the jar, which opened a small aperture into which I dripped the blood.
Coppery clouds spun in the murk, and the creature tilted its head back, teeth gnashing, a long, thick, forked tongue flicking back and forth.
“Can we leave the room, George? I feel I have seen enough.”
I smiled and turned the gas jet off, returning the jar to darkness. “Let me tend to that wound.” I returned to my desk a picked a wadded bandage out of one of the drawers. Unfolding it on the table, I invited the priest over as I located my tweezers. “The boon of gaslight, father, enables me to find the glistening fragments of glass with relative ease. If you could bear to remain in the room a few minutes more.”
“Of course. I mean, it’s just a lot to process really, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “It certainly was for me.”
I proceeded to pick the glass out of Haddon’s hand. He seemed to become more composed. “I’m sorry about the broken glasses, George. I hope Margaret will forgive me. I will of course make full recompense.”
“Do not worry yourself with such trifles, Father. Accidents happen. Plus, you have fed my pet. That will sustain her for weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“Yes.”
“When you told me the story, you said that the woman died in 1856.”
“Yes.”
“Then you have kept this creature alive and in this state for three years?”
“Indeed,” I confirmed. “By feeding her ever such a little, I ensure that she lives on, but grows hardly at all. I must admit, the thickness of the jar has increased over the years. She
does seem to be getting stronger.”
“She?” Father Haddon gasped.
“Yes, I have been able to determine the sex of the creature.”
Father Haddon pondered this for a while. “You mentioned Henry Burton was a friend of yours.”
“He was.”
“Really?”
“Yes. We never really spoke again after that whole affair.”
“Yet he was your employer, or business partner, was he not? It strikes me as strange that during this whole story you have mentioned nothing of the fact that they found the body of your former friend in the Thames last week.”
I continued my work, managing to steady my hand against the shake that swelled up within it. “I was not aware. Though I am not surprised. He seemed unsteady a few years ago. The cut-throat nature of his shipping business… all of that.”
Father Haddon nodded his agreement. “No, that wouldn’t come as much surprise, perhaps. But perhaps what would, is the fact that his body appeared to have been bled dry.”
I dropped the tweezers. I stared at the priest. He stared back intently. Then he smiled. A knowing smile.
The child whispered to me. She liked the taste of this one.
I darted to the corner of the room and kicked the stand, sprinting for the door as the glass shattered behind me. I slammed the door shut, fell against it with my head in my hands and listened to the terrible screams and piteous moans from within, wondering what Margaret would make of all this noise.
End of Part 1.
Part 2:
Dr Blessing’s Rapture, Or, The Beast And The Bell-Jar
In which Dr Blessing is forced to face the end of his world.
One.
I have told you how my tale of sorrow began, but that was by no means the full story. The next part of my tale is a little more complicated than the first. More complicated because I had come to understand so much more about the child I had taken from Judith Cloonan’s womb and a strange new branch of medical science had begun to develop in front of my eyes.
More complicated too, because that was when I became aware of other parties, who had developed an interest in my situation. Their stories I shall try to interweave with my own, from what information I have managed to gather over time. I shall convey this to you as best I can in the time allowed.
I swore an oath to do no harm, but that seems like a lifetime ago – like someone else’s life entirely.
I had not dreamed all night, or had forgotten the dreams the instant I woke up - into real life, into the nightmare. I had slept on the chair in my study for God only knows how many hours. At my feet beneath my desk lay the crumpled handkerchief I had fastened over my mouth to protect me from the worst of the gas. It was evident that I had succumbed at some point and had staggered to my chair before collapsing.
I rose unsteadily to my feet and opened the heavy curtains to inspect the London sky on another black-grey morning. The damned soot! I sometimes wished that I could have risen on wings, above the muck, above the clouds, to escape this foul place. To escape this foul situation. To escape… No, not her. I could never leave her.
Turning on my heels I glanced around the room and I took in the scene. A dead priest lay on the floor, wrapped in a rug, dried blood spattered here and there on the wooden floor. Father Haddon. Poor man. A nice man, but his death had been entirely necessary.
I turned to my left to see thick chunks of broken glass and the stained wood where preserving fluids had soaked into the floor overnight. And there on the pedestal, in a larger bell-jar than before, safely surrounded by fresh fluid, there she was. My baby, the child I have since come to call Panacea.
Entirely satisfied by her feast, she slept in the fluid. Despite her feed being only hours before, she already showed signs that she was growing. Panacea’s bones stretched her translucent, milky skin. The violence of her appetite seemed completely forgotten as she lay curled in her home, safe, secure and content.
I wondered how long I would be able to contain her.
Already powerful enough to overcome a man, her strength increasing with every full feed, I knew that my position as her guardian grew more tenuous every day.
I turned my attention back to the priest. He had to be disposed of, somehow. And then my mind poked through the remains of the previous night and found further questions, further anxieties. These relating, chiefly, to Father Haddon’s revelation that he knew I had been with Henry Burton on the night he died, and that Burton’s body was found to have been drained of blood when it was fished out of the river. I wondered, if Haddon thought that I was possibly the last person to see Burton alive, had he shared his theory with others? Had a suspicious third party given the information to him? Or had he simply seen us on the street and had taken a chance with his words?
Casting my mind back to that night, even if Haddon had merely seen us on the street, it was incriminating to some degree. The blazing row we had. Henry arguing, “You have become obsessed with that creature!”
I had protested, “She is fascinating, and does she not have the right to live?”
Burton had learned of my experiments with the mice and rats. “What is it you hope to prove? What benefit can this possibly hold for mankind? I told you this would be a secret only so long as others are not at risk – so long as this was not for your own reputation and fame. I see clearly your motive, George! Your hubris! You ought to be ashamed.”
“Who could possibly be at risk? Who could be harmed?” I asked. “Is she not safely ensconced in my study at home?”
“Charlotte told me that something was wrong in the hospital the other day! You had something to hide – there was something in your private chambers that you did not want her to see,” Henry had snorted. “I think you and I both know what that was.”
“Preposterous,” I had exclaimed.
“You have put my wife at risk! You swore to keep it locked away in your study! I insist that you destroy that… abomination this very night!”
That was when the idea had become so clear to me. I leaned on the wall, hands over my face. “You’re right, you’re right,” I sobbed. “It’s like she has some hold over me. I must break free. I must. You are right.”
Henry had patted my back. “There, there, old boy. We shall put this right. The two of us. Let us go up to your study, tonight. Now. We shall dispose of that demon together.”
“Your presence will make me twice the man, and equal to the task, Henry. For I alone am weak, too weak to free myself of this curse.”
Poor Henry.
I remember Henry once telling me of a carnival he attended when he was a young man. At this carnival a band of gypsies had set up a sideshow. He told me that at the sideshow there was one attraction that had caught his attention. It was called the magic mirror, or the cursed mirror, or something. He said that those who entered the tent and gazed into the mirror were never the same again. Some said the mirror revealed the image of a demon, trapped in the glass. Some said the mirror showed them the future. Others said the mirror showed men the most horrible aspects of their nature and they emerged utterly insane, soon to commit horrific murders.
I told him that he was the insane one.
He told me it was quite true. He said that he looked into that glass and saw exactly what he was capable of, saw his future wealth and the deeds he would have to commit to achieve it. He said it was that same day he ran away from home, away from the path his father had chosen for him and took to the sea to engineer the destiny he had seen within the glass.
Of course, he returned. He returned with wealth that his well-to-do father had only dreamed of.
I learned to believe him, for I have looked into such a glass, and as I observed my reflection merge with the features of the sleeping creature within, I could see my true nature and could somehow see my destiny.
I snapped out of my daydream and back to the task at hand – how to get rid of the priest. I glanced at my pocket watch, it revealed the time to
be a little before 6am. I realised then that the watch had stopped and that it was probably much later. I would be expected at the hospital, I would be missed.
A knock at the front door. The maid answered the door. I heard Niamh’s voice, she had come looking for me. I heard Margaret’s voice. Niamh had been invited into the house.
Footsteps on the stairs. I grabbed the key from the door, and slipped out onto the landing, deftly turning to lock the door behind me.
“Good morning, Doctor Blessing,” Niamh called in her cheery tones.
“Good morning, Niamh,” I said, returning her cheer. Though forced, I believe my cheer was convincing enough. The last thing I wanted was a day’s work, what with the priest’s drained corpse lying in the study. The study to which, of course, I held the only key.
How long before someone noticed the priest was missing? How long before they came looking for him? Presumably it was known that he was a frequent guest for dinner in my home. I began to wonder at my own gullibility, allowing the man so close merely because of his station.
“What brings you here, my dear?” I asked the girl.
Niamh’s expression revealed she was focussed on my appearance more than my words. I did look a sight, too, with stains of preserving fluids on my crumpled white shirt, hair ruffled from distress. I am certain I still smelled of alcohol.
“There is a queue outside the hospital, Doctor. Doctor Collier was worried that you might be unwell.”
I patted the child on the head. I had admired Niamh since meeting her three years before, when she was only eight. She was but a waif then, protected by ladies of the night – one of whom had borne the child who lived in my study. In some ways that night, when I had tended to the whore Judith Cloonan, I had gained two daughters.
For propriety I had paid for a room at a clean, tidy boarding house near the clinic, where Niamh could live in comfort hitherto she could only have imagined. Margaret had begged me to let Niamh live with us, a child for her to love and fuss over. But, I had argued against this. How could we select a waif off the street to raise as our own? With the assortment of barely trained servants we had taken on through Charlotte Burton’s arrangements, we would, I argued, essentially create a situation where the servants would serve one who was in many ways, beneath even them.
The Cabinet of Dr Blessing (The Dr Blessing Collection Parts 1-3): A Gothic Victorian Horror Tale Page 3