GUD Magazine Issue 0 :: Spring 2007

by Kaolin Fire, Janrae Frank, David Bulley

  They fork from her feet.

  The house is perfectly quiet. Eliza knocks on the door.

  She knocks again.

  When nobody answers, she bangs on the shuttered windows with her fist. A shift—she is hot and cold at once. The night air is heavy as water in her lungs, but perspiration burns on her face.

  She bangs again. Then the door is open and Eliza steps inside.

  They are all asleep. She walks among the beds. The mother and father lie against each other, the man's hand resting on the woman's hair. The boys share a bed. The warm, insensible bodies lie abandoned under the drab blankets. They are so far away.

  "Will, wake up.” She shakes him. “Wake up. I have escaped. Will."

  But he is heavy as clay, inert as stone. She cannot rouse him. Her body begins to shake. She cannot hold out much longer.

  "Wake up, wake up."

  "Lady,” a voice says. Eliza is startled. The small voice breaks a spell. The home solidifies, the threadbare carpet, the pictures upon the wall. A tiny boy stands in his white shirt by the side of the bed. He stares at her, eyes round as pennies.

  "Lady,” he repeats. “Who are you?"

  "Robert?” she asks softly. “I cannot wake your brother.” The little boy turns from her slowly. He places his hands on Will's face. Instantly, Will opens his eyes.

  "Will,” Robert whispers. “A beautiful lady has come to see you."

  Will sits up suddenly. His eyes fix on Eliza standing like an angel at the foot of his bed.

  "Eliza,” he says. Eliza reads the questions running through his mind but she shakes her head.

  "Help me now,” she says. “Come with me."

  Will jumps from the bed, transfixed by the unexpected presence.

  "Where?” he asks. “What shall you do? Stay here. My parents will know what to do."

  But Eliza shakes her head, pressing her finger to her lips. She gestures him to follow. Will looks at Robert, uncertain.

  Robert says, “You must help the lady. Go now. There isn't much time.” He throws himself eagerly into her arms. She holds him while Will pulls on his clothes and boots, then returns the infant to bed, where he immediately falls asleep.

  Then they run out into the night together. She leads Will through the maze of streets.

  "We're going back to the house,” he says at last, in confusion. “Why are we going back?” His voice is anxious. He is fretting, almost in tears. But Eliza is resolute and he cannot break away. She takes him along an alleyway, into the darkness of the garden behind the house. In the garret window above, hot yellow light burns, reaching out to them. She raises her face.

  "I don't understand,” he moans. “What are we doing?"

  Eliza is afraid he has not the resolution to help her. Like a little boy, he sniffs and wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. She takes his hand. She presses the boy's palm to her chest, where the heart-beat is slow. She takes his face in her thin, cold hands and kisses him. His mouth is very moist and warm.

  Then the heart-beat stops. The darkness reaches up from the ground and pulls her under. She leaves Will with empty arms.

  * * * *

  A short, gasping scream erupted from the garret window. Will looked up towards the light.

  "Eliza?” he whispered. An impossible assumption. Had some measure of time escaped him?

  He heard a low chanting, voices murmuring in unison. He felt disoriented, as if some force were bending the fabric of the world so it failed to align correctly.

  He took a step towards the house. He shivered, something ice-cold rippling through him. Determined, he seized a deep breath, then ran to the house, but all the doors were securely locked. Desperately he searched for another way. He remembered a huge tree grew close to the garret. At the trunk, he scrambled in the darkness for a handhold, found a low branch, and pulled himself up.

  An old apple tree; untended, it had sprawled, branches pressing and rattling against the back wall of the house. But it was no easy climb. On the first bough, Will took off his jacket. It dropped from his hand, snagging on a branch to hang like a dead bird. In the cool night air, his body sweated. Twigs scratched.

  His body ached with the effort of testing and stretching. Halfway up, with fragments of bark stinging his eyes, and smarting from a hundred tiny lesions on his hands and arms, he nearly lost heart. The foliage was dense, but above he could see pearls of yellow light leaking from the garret shutters. The leaves stirred. The chanting ceased momentarily, and he strained to hear a low moan. He knew he could not turn back.

  Up he climbed, his mind blanked to everything but the painful ascent. The gardens of London spread below him in the darkness, the web of walls and alleyways, the arteries of roads, the distant beads of gas-lights in a string. How peaceful it looked. How still. And yet within how many walls were children marked with hunger, blighted with overwork, how many mothers had nothing but gin to tease the palates of their infants. He looked again, seeing a hellish patchwork of need and disease, the cesspits, the mills churning in the east, scattering smoke and stink.

  Hanging high above the city, he suffered a sudden vertigo. The ground seemed to drop away. The wind billowed suddenly with a slow power, catching hold of the damaged shutters and shaking them. Candlelight flickered inside, but he needed to climb higher to look down into the room.

  The branches were thinning now and might not support him. Still, he inched further out until he perched no more than four feet from the window. The shroud of darkness still clung to him. He looked into the room and swallowed hard.

  Eliza was laid out on a table, surrounded by dark figures dressed in long robes. Her body, held by ropes at her wrists and ankles, jerked in the throes of a fit. Will's sketches of the spirit images and Jane's portrait had been placed about her. And there were dozens of mirrors, casting the images and the candlelight back and forth, distorted and inflamed.

  Bishop stood over Eliza. He forced medication into her, while the others continued chanting.

  He called out, “Hear me, spirit voices! I will know you. I will know the creature that lurks inside this girl, that pulls her down into madness."

  He cast handfuls of some black dust across a row of candles, a line of fire erupting as the dust burned.

  Eliza screamed, straining against her bonds. As he watched, Will saw darkness visibly closing in all around the garret. He counted about seven men, besides Bishop and Jane and the poor wretch spread on the table. He could no longer discern the branches of the tree in front of him, nor the brickwork of the house. Just the light from that one room.

  He looked into a cauldron, a pocket inferno in an infinite night.

  Bishop circled the table, reciting incantations Will could not understand. Then Bishop called out, “I know that you can be drawn away. By capturing your likeness, we have captured you. But you escape us each time and return to the host. If mere paper does not hold you, if flesh and blood is needed, then that is what I offer."

  Bishop threw off his robe. Jane Marks stepped forward. From a large wooden dish, she poured a red fluid over Bishop's shoulders. Will recoiled, thinking that it was blood. Then he whispered, “No, it is only paint."

  The group continued chanting, some circling.

  One of them brought forward more of the wooden dishes, placing them within Jane's reach. She dipped a rag into one and daubed a light auburn colour across Bishop's right shoulder-blade—the colour of Eliza's hair. Then away to the left, a pale pink colour, almost white, like her skin.

  Eliza became calm.

  With a fine brush, Jane etched in solid black lines. Will's eyes widened. Darkness crept along the floorboards in the room. Did they not see it? No, they were transfixed by the dark play enacted above Eliza's prone form. He tried to call out but his voice could not penetrate the heavy air, sounded distant even to his own ears.

  Eliza's likeness grew more convincing with each passing moment. Will knew Bishop's intention; Bishop thought himself stronger than she, strong enough to c
ontain the demon. An organic canvas. But Will suspected that Eliza had an inner strength far greater than Bishop's.

  He wanted to warn them, but could only watch as the tableau unfolded.

  A black shape swallowed the picture. For a moment the scene was entirely dark and all sound blotted out. The candles guttered—and rose again. A woman screamed—Jane, he thought. He struggled to make out what was happening. A dark figure rose from Eliza's prone form. A twisting, sinuous substance, dense like fleece. It was drawn, slowly, from Eliza's mouth. She choked and struggled, her jaws strained wide. Her eyes rolled back in her skull, white as eggs. A ribbon of blood unravelled at the corner of her mouth. Against their bonds, her bones cracked and creaked.

  How long, how long could she bear it? Will was gripped in an agony of indecision. The others, shocked from their ritual, stood and stared at the thick, unearthly fabric rising up from the tethered girl.

  Then Eliza's mouth snapped shut. A long sigh, audible, escaped from her lips, and her body seemed to shrink upon the table. Her face was white and blue.

  The spirit hovered above her, gathering substance. A face assembled itself, a suggestion of limbs, a mouth. It possessed its own faint yellowish radiance, sulphurous, which made the candles dim.

  Its eyes fixed on Bishop, and the painting adorning the expanse of his upper body. Will fancied the creature smiled. But Bishop's courage failed. He drew back. Ineffectively he covered himself with his arms. He shook his head. The spirit's eyes flared, like white-hot coals. A cloak lit upon Bishop's shoulders, a menagerie of animals and birds squawking and lowing. They peeped from the bulges of Bishop's flesh, moving under the surface of his painted skin. He staggered forward, crashing into a row of mirrors, which fell to the ground, shattering. He began to cough and retch. He choked, bent over, his hands clutching his own throat. A bird pushed its way over his tongue and through his teeth. It flew from his mouth, twittering, around the room. Then another, and another. The room was full of panicked birds banging against the walls. Jane Marks shrieked again and the men fell about in disarray, waving away the birds as Bishop thrashed and writhed on the floor.

  Then the birds were gone.

  And Bishop sat up, breathing heavily, in a pool of fleshy red vomit. His customary wig had dropped to the floor. He had a large ulcer on the side of his head.

  Then the spirit turned, its body undulating like silk. It fixed its gaze on a man visible behind Eliza's head. It was Edgar Marks, his hood fallen back. Marks shook his head, seemingly baffled. The spirit mewed. A long hand stretched from the spirit form, seizing Marks by the throat. Effortlessly it lifted him up and threw him back against the wall.

  Havoc broke loose. A fat man, the gentleman Will had seen in the coffee house dining with Bishop so many weeks ago, collapsed in a curious heap on the floor, as though the knots of his joints had unfastened. Jane Marks hammered on the door, struggling with the locks, trying to escape. But the door refused to budge. Downstairs, on the lower floors, the lunatics were silent.

  Jane Marks’ pots of paint upturned on the table, smashed by an unseen hand, spilling pools of blue and pink and auburn. The candles fizzed and flared. The creature reared up and snapped forward. One of the men looked down in astonishment at the gaping hole in his chest.

  Then darkness again. The voices ceased. Will could hear no pleas or cries. The garret was pitch black, thick as felt, blocking him out. But he could hear heavy thumps. The walls shook. The moments stretched. Inside the room the pounding went on and on. The random percussion of flesh and bone against the resistant surfaces of wood and stone. And what of Eliza, caught up inside?

  Then the sound stopped. Everything was still. A single candle flame rose over the table, close to Eliza's face. Her lips were white as chalk. Her hair glittered, threads of gold.

  Will gasped. His chest hurt. How long had he held his breath? The darkness shifted over her body. The spirit. It was still there, tied by a thread.

  Some slight sound escaped Will's lips and the spirit looked at him through the broken shutters. It perceived his presence, perched precariously in the tree.

  The creature curled. Balled like a fist it punched the broken shutters, sending splinter shards out into the night. Will screamed. He was pushed from the tree. His body reacted instinctively. Hands, fingers, nails, he grasped and clutched at the tree, scrabbling for a tenuous hold to save himself. But the spirit continued its attack relentlessly. It plucked and bit, prising his fingers from the branch. Still struggling, he fell from the tree. Down and down. He banged into branches. Twigs snagged his hair and clothes and raked his face.

  "Eliza!” he shouted. He tumbled away from the branches, into open space.

  He fell for a long time. He waited for the ground to rise and meet him, curiously tranquil now. Strange fingers pressed inside his skull. The being riffled through his thoughts, tipping out the drawers of his memories, pawing over oddities, a day's gems, the hidden detritus at the back of his mind. The angels sang in Peckham Rye. His family laughed over stockings and tallow candles. Robert touched his face. And suddenly Will began to sense something of the creature's nature. Angrily it tried to assert itself, pushing into every corner of his mind. Like so many fragments in a window of coloured glass, Will's psyche shattered under the creature's onslaught.

  He tumbled again, clutching desperately at emptiness. Was he still falling, in an unending embrace with this creature? It knew Eliza well. He could sense her presence still. He took strength. He found her memories and gathered them up. Then memories of his own. Piece by piece he reassembled himself. And he felt the creature turning away, trying to escape, driven by a desperate hunger.

  The ground received him gently. The garden was soft and safe as his mother's lap. The cool grass soothed his hot, damaged skin. Way up, the moon came into focus, clear and bright. The trees curved over him. The garret was dark, the night still. Then a thin white angel slipped from the window. She looked very frail and new. Her wings were white as flour, like gauze. Treacle-coloured hair fanned.

  The dark force hurtled upwards, towards the frail spirit. Will could see it, like a bull. Would it overpower her again? But it faltered and thinned, dispelled and drawn apart.

  It vanished.

  Eliza smiled a ghostly smile. “Goodbye, Will,” she called.

  She drifted on the currents of air above the city. She laughed, floating and turning, carried over the garden.

  "Eliza!” he shouted out. “Will I see you again?"

  He began to run, trying to keep up with the translucent being rising away from him.

  "Yes, Will, yes!” she called back, her voice very tiny now. She began to sing. The delicate, joyful songs of the dead echoed in William's heart.

  * * * *

  Will walks among the crowd—more a rowdy mob. They push and shove each other. They jeer. And laugh like the insane. He sees a gin bottle raised eagerly to a mouth missing teeth.

  "Come on,” the man cries out, waving the bottle as if it were a flag. “Show us what we've come for."

  On this blisteringly hot day, late in August, they are here to celebrate a hanging.

  He has travelled from Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, if not to celebrate then at least to witness. It was good of Mr. Basire to let him leave early this day. In a curious gesture of good faith, Bishop has signed a bill for a premium of fifty guineas, enabling him to enter the workshop of the master-engraver. It was not the painter's studio Will had hoped for, but still it was a good choice. He felt confident he could use the medium to capture his visions. So many visions, now. And some day he will be known as one of its finest craftsmen. He is sure of it.

  There will be thirteen hangings this day, though only one is known to him. Dr. Charles Bishop, charged with the murder of seven fellow doctors and an artist and the poisoning of his sister, Eliza. All of them found dead in the locked garret of his home.

  "Read the true story,” a voice cries out.

  He buys a copy. A sensational account, print
ed for distribution this afternoon. Ink has spread on the soft, cheap paper and odd letters indistinct. A Full and True Account of A Gentleman Apprehended for Murther, the Practise of Witchcraft, The Perversion of the Honourable Profession of Science, and The Cruel and Unnatural Treatment of his Sister.

  The tale is packed with salacious details. Will reads that a young man informed on Bishop, telling the authorities exactly what to look for. The murderer will be hanged, and then buried at a crossroads so the ghost may never find a way home.

  They haul the man up on to the platform. The crowd cheers. Bishop struggles. He is gaunt, all flabbiness gone. His finest suit doesn't fit now, but he has a new wig and a clean white shirt. The months of incarceration have reduced him. Or perhaps something else has taken its toll. Will is uneasy about the justice of the sentence, considering the truth, which bears little resemblance to the account he holds in his hands. Perhaps Bishop had genuinely hoped to help his sister, the sick Eliza Rose.

  Even now, he cannot decide where the true sickness lay.

  "Do not torment yourself, Will,” she says. She can see the windings of his thoughts. “Do not pray for him. He doesn't merit pity."

  "There is not a soul among us that cannot be pitied,” Will answers softly. Sometimes he tires of her.

  He visited Bishop, in Newgate. The noise and stink of the prison filled him with dismay, the press of unwashed bodies in the cells, the uproar, the scraping of fetters on stone floors. For the first months, Bishop had paid the rent on a cell in Keeper's House, away from the poorer criminals. Towards the end he was moved to a plainer cell, when his money failed, though he never descended to the lower wards, to the stew of lice and typhus.

  "Will, my boy,” Bishop said. He was sitting behind a plain table, an uneaten cob of coarse bread on a wooden trencher before him. “I did not expect to see you here."