Lord knew, she had let herself be swayed by it enough times already. Had a cupboard full of the stuff, here in the suite of rooms that were her residence as well as this office from which she took care of what business there was to take care of. This despite her bitter experience and best intentions, which did only go to show how persuasive their lies were.
“Something must have happened to him!” insisted Molly.
“What’s this now? Something happened to who?”
At the interruption of the nasal, familiar voice, Eliza pinched the bridge of her nose and tried not to groan. “No one knocks where you’re from, Mr. Rillings?”
“The door was ajar, so I thought fit to step on in,” he said, doing so the rest of the way. A tall, thin man, Roger Rillings was, partial to brown suits and bowler hats. His was a long-nosed ferrety face sporting a gingery moustache. He touched the brim of the bowler. “Mrs. Whitte … and Miss Blossom, isn’t it?”
“Something you require, Mr. Rillings?”
“Stopped by to pay my rent, is all, Mrs. Whitte,” he said. “Sold another of those stories you said was pulp rubbish. But if this is a bad time --”
“Excuse me a moment,” Eliza said to Molly, waving her aside. She fetched up her lodging ledger and set it on the counter as Roger swaggered up. “Not that horrid thing you read me, the one about premature burials?”
“That very one.” He grinned over at the girl. “Roger Rillings at your service, miss. Writer, reporter --”
“Pulp rubbish and scandal sheets,” said Eliza with a snort.
“And you, you’re a friend of Jack Blint’s, aren’t you? Haven’t seen him in a few days. I say, is that who you were talking about as I came in? Couldn’t help but overhear.”
“Couldn’t help but listen at keyholes.” Eliza turned the ledger to the correct page.
“He’s missing,” Molly said, looking glad to have a more sympathetic ear. “Not been seen by you or me or anyone since Saturday. When it rained so heavy? I talked with the Portnoy brothers, and they said as how he was at the park by the river like he is most days, only when the weather turned they saw him leave. Can’t find a soul who’s seen him since, and I’m a’right worried about him.”
“Have you checked his room?” he asked.
“I haven’t.” Here, the girl shot Eliza a baleful look. “She won’t let me.”
“You know the rules, Mr. Rillings. No lady visitors allowed. Besides, checked it myself, didn’t I? Five flights up, with my bad hip, thinking he might be in there sleeping off a bad drunk. But he wasn’t there at all.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Not but what he had much to start with. Only some clothes that’d be barely worth the rag-man’s bother.”
“Hmm.” He leaned an elbow on the counter as Eliza scratched the amounts into her ledger. “Remind me, now … Jack, doesn’t he have that art-case, the one he rolls around with him?”
“Yes!” Molly said. “Yes, he does, that’s him, that’s my Jack!”
“That contraption!” Eliza shook her head. “Banging it up and down the stairs at all hours of the day or night. Telling me how I ought to have one of those newfangled lifts installed, or a dumbwaiter at the very least … as if I could afford that …”
“Was it in his room? The art-case?”
“Didn’t I just say, nothing but some clothes? That case, he took it with him when he left, he took it with him practically everywhere.”
“Well, but now, that’s the odd bit,” Roger said. “Because I’m sure I saw it, or one just like it, in the side alley on Sunday morning.”
***
He felt a tingle at the nape of his neck whenever he was onto something, something with promise. Faint, but electrical, as if a wire-fine teslic coil were being held, or passed, humming, an inch from his skin.
Roger Rillings most definitely felt that onto-something tingle.
Jack Blint had indeed gone missing. Must have done. Missing, and not of his own volition. That, Roger knew in his gut.
Molly, Jack’s girl, insisted he never would have left without saying goodbye to her. On that score Roger held his tongue – she was a ripe little peach, to be sure, but men ran out on ripe little peaches all the time … usually when those ripe little peaches started in with the talk of wedding bells.
What stuck in his mind, though, was the art-case. Roger knew Jack; they’d tipped a few pints together. Jack was one of those to whom Roger went now and again when he had need of an illustration in a hurry. Lurid news stories – tragedies and crimes, the gorier the better – sold more papers when accompanied by a picture. Photographics were best, but the equipment was bulky, and expensive far beyond the means of a freelance like Roger … and the constables tended to not take kindly to anyone nosing about a murder scene with a camera and magnesium-flash. In those instances, an ‘artistic rendering’ would do, and Jack Blint was a clever hand at turning spoken description into drawing.
The same went for Roger’s fictions, which were of the type that featured resurrectionists unearthing cadavers in the dead of night, mad surgeons performing ghastly transplants, weaponized automatons turning against their human masters, and grotesque man-beasts pursuing terrified damsels across misty moors. Jack was not quite as adept at those, but another of their circle of drinking-mates, Henry Duchamp, was. If anything, too good. Scary, his stuff was.
No, wherever he went and whatever he did, Jack Blint would not be a man to abandon his art … his livelihood and true love. That case was his prized possession. No way under the heavens would he have up and left it behind, not of his own free will. Not left it in an alley, to be found by a pack of urchins, the contents strewn ruined, the case itself put to use as a jolly-ride in which those grubby juveniles pushed each other at a run up and down the lane.
What set the nape of Roger’s neck most to tingling, though, was how in the course of his askings-around, he came to the conclusion it wasn’t only Jack who’d gone missing from Garretton of late. Several had, so it seemed, in these past weeks. Ducking out on their debts, with nary a word to their nearest and dearest … not to be seen nor heard from again … not turning up elsewhere secure with some good new job … but simply vanished, vanished without a trace.
***
“Flowers, sir? Flowers, miss? Posies and violets, fresh this very morning! Flowers for your lady, sir? Flowers, mum? Tulips, daffodils, snapdragons and daisies!”
The words ran themselves by rote, Molly no longer having to think about them as she stood at her usual corner with her basket on her arm. She’d been blessed with a voice that carried well above the babble and din of Ainsleigh Station. A high, sweet, clarion voice, neither shrewish nor piercing. Only when one of the great trains arrived or departed would she be drowned out.
One such readied to leave the station now, an elevated triple-train, with its luxurious glass-roofed high-cars far above the bustling streets, its mid-cars all packed benches and standing room behind round brass-fitted windows like the portholes on a sea-liner, and the forest of poles with handholds and footrails that made up the under-hang suspended beneath.
Molly loathed the under-hang. There, the poorest folk clung for dear life like monkeys on vines, at the mercy of the weather. The women made sure to tuck their skirts between their legs and press their knees tight, or else louts below would have a fine view of their petti-pants. Some crafty souls would carry on rope or chain ladders, affix them to the hangs, and lower them so that their friends could leap, catch on, and ride for free … a dangerous thrift that often led to injury not only for them but for the hapless passers-by below.
The whistle shrieked. The engine bellowed. A steamy downdraft blew newspapers giddy-whirl along the gutters, flapped at garments, made men clutch at their hats and ladies their bonnets. The train pulled away from the platform. The elevated tracks swayed under its massive, moving weight. Its shadow slid, folding and bending, along storefronts. A boy lost his grip on a madly-swinging rope ladder. He fell, flailin
g, and smacked into the cobblestones. People parted around him without a look.
“Flowers, fine and fresh flowers, get your flowers here!” Molly called. “Carnation for your lapel, sir? Flowers, pretty posies! Sprig of lavender? Yes, mum, thank you, mum!”
“Moll!” A voice even higher than her own cut through the crowd-noise to reach her ears. “Moll, come quick, come and see, you’ve got to come and see!”
She looked around, spotting her younger sister darting around a bevy of maids-of-work with parcel-laden shopping-carts. “Pansy? What in the world --?”
Yellow braids bouncing, dress and apron hiked to her knees so she could run, fleet little Pansy shot across the street and narrowly missed being run down by a horse-trolley. The driver shook his crop after her, yelling, but Pansy paid him no mind. Her face managed to be both ashen and flushed. Her eyes were wide, though whether with excitement or alarm, Molly couldn’t guess.
“Moll! Molly! Molly, quick!” Pansy reached her, seized her by the sleeve, and tugged.
The vigorous jerk almost caused Molly to upend her basket, which would have spilled all her flowers to be trampled or stolen, not to mention the handful of coins she’d earned that day. She clutched it to her bosom and gave Pansy a glare as sharp as a slap. “Careful, you ninny! My flowers!”
“Bother and bugger the bloody buggering flowers!”
“Pansy Louise Blossom!” cried Molly.
“Forget them, I meant, forget them, you’ve got to come quick, now!”
“What is it? Is it Pa? An accident? Ma? The baby?”
Pansy shook her head so fast her braids whipped her cheeks. “It’s bodies, Moll! The drill-borers what’s been putting in the cablemain down Finchley Street, they found bodies! And they say, Moll, I heard someone say how one of them might be Jack!”
At that, Molly did forget the bloody buggering flowers. She flung her basket aside, coins and all. Forgot modesty as well, hiking her own dress and apron to the knee, showing her woolen stockings to anyone who cared to look, as she set off at a full run.
Her heart hammered in ways that had nothing to do with the exertion. It hammered like as if against cold iron, hammered with fear that Pansy might be right. Jack, her Jack, her dear charming Jack … dead? It couldn’t be! Something must have happened to him, yes, something dire to make him disappear without a word, and leaving his precious case behind, but … but not this. He’d gotten in a brawl, ended up in hospital, maybe. Prison, even, wrongly accused. Crimped by a sailing-master or airshipman, force-impressed into the crew. Bad as any of those fates were, they could be come back from.
She ran, and Pansy ran hard at her heels, caring not a whit for the angry shouts of whoever they bumped or jostled. Soon they were home to Garretton, then turning onto Finchley Street. It was torn up in a long open trench, scaffolds set everywhere. They were putting in a cablemain, as Pansy had said. When it was finished, it’d bring the electric to Garretton – their mother went faint at the very hope of saving up for a clotheswash – but no more work would be done today, that much was obvious.
The drill-bore machines sat idle in their cradles. Workmen in digger-hats and dirty boots clustered together at the far end of the trench. Junior watch-officers had their hands full with trying to keep back the crush of the curious, the numbers of which swelled by the second as word spread. Those whose upper windows overlooked the trench leaned out to peer unobstructed into the trench. Some seemed to be charging money to let people clamber out on the eaves or slanting rooftops.
“Let me by!” Molly said, attempting to wend her way through the barricade of broad backs and bustles.
It was no use. She could have screamed with despairing rage, but just then a hand caught her by the shoulder. She turned her head to see that man, the reporter, in his brown suit and bowler hat.
“Is it true?” she asked, clawing at his arm. “Is it true, are there bodies, is it Jack?”
“This way,” Roger Rillings said. He drove a path, pushing, shoving, ignoring the curses engendered by his actions. Somehow, he brought Molly to the sawhorses marking the edge of the trench.
He pointed, but she did not need him to. Bodies. A piled tangle of them, some still half-buried in the mound of loose earth to one side of the trench. Stiff limbs jutting at strange angles, clothes torn, skin filthy, faces twisted in the most hideous of grimaces.
No one seemed to know what to do. The only actions any of the workers still down there took was to wave away buzzing clouds of flies, and jab sticks at any rat bold enough to venture out for a sniff or a nibble.
Though … some rats … some rats already … already must have … the gnawed tips of dead fingers … empty eye-sockets … shredded lips and bitten cheeks … and … their chests …
Molly screamed loud enough to hurt. Her hands wavered upward, whether to plead to God or pull out fistfuls of her own hair she had no idea. Then she went over the sawhorse in an ungainly lunge, skirt to her waist, a stocking snagging, a shoe falling off. The reporter reached out but she flung his arm aside.
The sawhorse tipped into the trench. Down Molly went with it, roll-sliding, scraping palms and elbows, getting grit in her teeth. She fetched up at the bottom with a bone-jarring thud. For a moment, she lay stunned, the sawhorse across her middle, blinking up at all the shocked looks.
“Christ’s britches, get that girl out of there!” someone ordered.
Heaving the sawhorse aside, Molly scrambled to her feet and ran. More men reached out, workmen, dirt-caked boots and grimy hands. She fought her way past, tripped, lost the other shoe, recovered, ran on, stumbled, and fell on torn-stocking knees beside Jack.
Her Jack. Her poor, dear, dead Jack.
With his chest ripped open and a flyblown, bone-splintered, gaping red-black hole where his heart should have been.
***
Onto something, onto something indeed! The tingle at the nape of his neck had been right! Not that Roger had doubted it, but the story in all its gruesome detail soon exceeded even his expectations.
Five men dead, dead with expressions of incomparable pain and horror on what was left of their faces, dead with their ribs split and their hearts torn out!
Torn out … and nowhere to be found.
As if taken.
Or worse.
Devoured!
Oh, the morbid thrill! Oh, the horrified panic!
A murderer stalking their streets! No, more than a murderer. A maniac! A lunatic! A cannibal, some savage brute brought back from an expedition to darkest Africa! Or a beast, a wild animal escaped from captivity, with a blood-hunger for human flesh! Or worse yet even than any of those! A monster, a devil, something altogether inhuman and evil on the loose!
The papers went mad for more.
Roger Rillings was delighted to oblige. He investigated reports of neighbors acting suspicious, strange noises, sightings of mysterious figures, missing persons. He interviewed wives claiming their husbands stayed out until all hours of the night and came home shifty-eyed, unwilling to own up to where they’d been. Something as simple as a delayed train or forgotten appointment could stir an anxious frenzy.
The authorities were less than forthcoming, dismissing him with stern ‘police business’ nonsense. So, what precise information he lacked, he felt obliged to fill in on his own. Didn’t he owe it to his readers? It set him up tidily, too, flush with cash, between what the papers paid and having eager listeners line up to buy him drinks in exchange for tidbits … if he embellished here and there, could he really be blamed? A man had to think of his career, his future.
Roger spoke with the friends and families of the dead men who’d been identified, their grief adding a nice personal element to the tragedy – though perhaps nothing would top the description of Molly Blossom wailing over the cold, mangled corpse of her sweetheart. Her now-heartless sweetheart, that was, and were there black-humored jokes about that! How when someone said, “eat your heart out,” that wasn’t quite what they had in mind …
&nb
sp; Bit of a shame the girl ended up being carted off to Hartsbrook over it. Pretty little thing like her wouldn’t fare so well in the asylum. He should check in on her there in a month or two. Be a nice follow-story, that.
But if anything stirred the pot most, it was the whisper of the uncanny. Official brush-offs and ‘police business’ dismissals aside, Roger picked up plenty of tidbits. For instance, public outcry and demand into investigating the possible supernatural aspects made them call in a paranormalist, as well as various scholars and members of the clergy, to ease the general panic.
Easing the general panic, however, did not sell quite as many papers.
Determined to leave even more of a mark, Roger coined the moniker of ‘The Garretton Ghoul’ for the killer. Within days it was common use all across the city. People were frightened to leave their homes after dark, lest they be the next victims. Parents wrung good behavior from recalcitrant children with the ominous warnings – don’t pinch your sister, Johnny, or we’ll put you out tonight and the Ghoul will have you!
Henry Duchamp did up some fine, spine-chilling sketches of a most wicked-foul creature for him, hunched and hairy like an ape, with a pushed-forward muzzle and the snaggled teeth of a rat. In one of the illustrations, it crouched over an eviscerated corpse, shreds of bloody meat hanging from its jaws. In another, a dinner party of bestial maniacs sat around a long table, in formal wear, with a gruesome repast laid out before them on fine china and white linen. Roger had written a fine series of articles to go with those ones, ‘Feasts of Flesh’ he called them.
He’d even been to Hartsbrook once already in the course of this, to interview three killers who’d dined on their unfortunate victims. One of them compared the taste to that of a rare pork roast, salivating as he said it. And Roger’s detractors claimed he was a hack who never did his research? Take that!
Machina Mortis: Steampunk'd Tales of Terror Page 22