Whitechapel

by Sam Gafford

  “Now, Mr. Stephens won’t be able to take an audience with you for a little while yet: some family business of some sort or the other. But don’t worry, I’ll be here, and every time you start to run dry of the ‘magic juice’ I’ll be right here to give you more.”

  I could hear him laugh as he unlocked the door and left the room. My blood felt as if it were on fire and everything swirled around me as though I were lost in the centre of a hurricane. I howled, and eventually something answered from out of the dark.

  Chapter 56

  London is a modern Babylon.

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  Time had no meaning.

  I could have been out for an hour or a week. There was no way for me to tell. In the dark, my mind showed me visions. Unlike dreams, they made no sense, had no literal path or development. They jumped from place to place and event to event like a story told by a madman. My torment seemed to be the only plot.

  My eye circled around the faces of all my friends, who laughed and jeered and pointed at me. Their aspects were distorted as if I were seeing them through some odd glass that made them look longer or thinner or stretched out like fleshy taffy. The only constant was their mocking of me and ridiculing of my helplessness. I saw Ann and Arthur and Amy and The Brothers and Abberline and Mrs. Hutchins and my mother and father and brothers and sisters as they crushed me beneath their contempt. I cried and begged for release, but none came.

  Instead, my mind flashed onto the top of a hillside where strange little creatures danced and cavorted underneath a full moon. They were hideous things, disgusting aberrations of men with faces of pure sin and bodies that oozed and rolled about on the ground. There was a voice coming from somewhere, but I could not find its origin. It sounded as if it were above and below me both at the same time. The creatures followed the direction of the voice in their turning and gyrating and undulating, but they had scarcely begun to horrify when two shapes appeared on the hill. They danced around the others and were blurry and indistinct at first, but eventually came into brighter focus as if the dance of the little people were calling them forth from somewhere else.

  To my horror, I saw Amy and Ann standing atop the hill, completely naked.

  They moved in jerking motions as if their limbs were not theirs to command. The voice directed them in their movements and sounds. I tried to look away, but my gaze was fixed. As I stared, horrified, I saw the creatures climb over them and mount them in an orgiastic fury. It was like the vision I had experienced that night during Arthur’s party, but writ large and in agonizing clarity. I could see the expressions on Amy and Ann’s faces flip between ecstasy and disgust. Then their stomachs began to grow large and they screamed as something hideous burst forth from them with razor teeth and claws. The unholy spawn crawled towards me with looks of delicious hunger until my mind could take no more and collapsed upon itself.

  *

  “You’ve given him too much,” I heard through my darkness. “You, douse him and wake him up. I’m already losing patience with this.”

  I felt water thrown in my face and sputtered. My eyes were burning and didn’t want to open. Coughing, I forced myself awake and looked around me. I was still in the stone room and Edwards was back, but he wasn’t alone. Sitting on one of the chairs at the table was James Stephens, casually smoking a thin cigar. Off to my right I could sense someone else standing there, but my head and neck hurt too much to turn.

  “Finally,” Stephens said as he consulted his pocket watch. “I told you not to give him too much. I need his wits about him at least until I get want I want.” Stephens’ voice was smooth and cultured. He spoke with the easy comfort of the well-educated, and every word was dripping with contempt.

  “Right,” he said, “you there. Let’s make this quick, shall we? I know that you were the one who found the book that we hired that slug Cohen to steal from your shop. Right before he died, Cohen told you where the book was and how to find it.”

  “You’d have been better off if you just let my men take it from you that night,” Edwards boasted. “Then you wouldn’t be here. Instead of palming them off with this piece of crap.” Edwards reached into his coat and took out the very book that Arthur had ‘borrowed’ from the Golden Dawn that he had used to trick the muggers that night. Edwards tossed it on the ground with scorn.

  “Do shut up, Edwards. Your grasp of the English language actually causes me physical pain. Anyway,” he turned back to me, “you had the book for some time before you returned it to your employers. Time enough, I think, to have read it. Am I right?”

  I said nothing. I only glared at him.

  Edwards motioned and I felt a brick wall punch me in the face. The Gaffer had been the shadowy figure to my side. I knew that, but seeing him there only made me more determined. I wouldn’t say anything.

  “Did you read it?”

  I said nothing.

  The Gaffer punched me in the side. I felt something break inside me.

  “You might as well tell us, you know. This oaf can punch you all day and not tire. Or you might be more helpful if I had him punch someone else? That young girl you fancy, perhaps?”

  I clenched my teeth and winced through the pain.

  “Why do you care about her?” Stephens said. “She’s useless. Just another mewling quim like all the other women. They are disgusting carriers of filth and deserve nothing more than to be ripped apart.”

  “As you did to Martha Tabram?” I said, losing my control. “Stab them to bits and then get your pal, ‘Eddy,’ to finish them off? Is that how you get your jollies? No woman could bear the sight of you.”

  Stephens walked over and punched me hard in the groin. Everything went white with pain, and I felt myself passing out again.

  “Keep him awake,” I heard Stephens said, and more water was thrown in my face.

  I wanted to black out, to pass into sleep and non-existence, but I hung on and forced myself to stay aware.

  “So,” Stephens said, “you did read it. I thought as much. Which means that you know who I am and you think you know all I’ve done—but you’re so, so wrong. All you know is some of my little escapades with Eddy, the simpering fool. You think that that whore was my first kill?” Stephens laughed, and even Edwards blanched at the sound.

  “How many?” I asked.

  Stephens took a long, slow draw on his cigar, held the smoke in his lungs, and then patiently exhaled it.

  “I’ve lost count. It’s amazing what one can do when you no longer care about punishment.”

  “You mean,” I taunted, “because Daddy fixes them all for you.”

  It was the first time that Stephens lost his cool. He slapped the table hard and bellowed, “That jackass is not my father! Oh, they tell me he is, but I know that a pedantic, venal fool like him could never be my father. No, I was sired by the devil himself, and I have done his work well.”

  Clearly, Stephens was mad.

  “I’ll turn you in,” I cried weakly. “Go to the papers. You’ll hang.”

  Stephens shook his head at me in pity. “The limitations of the weak-minded never fail to disgust me. No court will ever try me. I am as above them as I am above you.”

  “Then why,” I said slowly, “does it matter who has read Eddy’s diary? After all, what difference does it make?”

  He realised his mistake, and I could see that I had caught him. Stephens would not have gone to such elaborate lengths to trap me if there wasn’t something about me that scared him. Exposure would still ruin him despite all his family’s money.

  Stephens’ answer was to signal the Gaffer, who proceeded to use me like a fighter’s dummy. I couldn’t count the blows and, because I was still bound, couldn’t block them either. The Gaffer kept punching until Edwards pulled him off of me and forced him to back away. My universe was nothing but pain, and I let it pour over me.

  “Give him more drugs,” I heard Stephens say. “But keep him alive. I still need to know who he is working for. He co
uldn’t have known to look for me without help.”

  This time I welcomed the opium, as it erased all my pain and swept me down the river of nepenthe. I refused to acknowledge the visions that came then and, closing my eyes, paid no mind to them. But I could not shut off my hearing, and the scenes they evoked crushed my heart until I began to wish that the Gaffer had killed me after all.

  Chapter 57

  I wander through each chartered street,

  Near where the chartered Thames does flow;

  A mark in every face I meet,

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  In every cry of every man,

  In every infant’s cry of fear,

  In every voice, in every ban,

  The mind-forged manacles I hear:

  How the chimney-sweeper’s cry

  Every blackening church appals,

  And the hapless soldier’s sigh

  Runs in blood down palace-walls.

  But most, through midnight streets I hear

  How the youthful harlot’s curse

  Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

  And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

  —William Blake

  At some point while I was unconscious, I soiled myself. By the time I woke up, my trousers were dry but the ammonia smell of the urine remained. My throat was dry and cracked, and I felt as if I hadn’t eaten in days.

  My eyes could only open halfway, but I croaked out a plea for water and bread. I could barely hold my head up. Still, it seemed that there was someone shuffling around the room and, a few minutes later, I felt someone trying to get me to drink.

  I was still bound, but leaned forward as much as I could and desperately tried to get more of the water. I heard a voice softly say, “Slowly, now. Not too much at once.”

  Rough fingers pushed a small piece of stale bread in my mouth, and I gobbled it down greedily. He helped me wash it down with more water and I heard someone else leave the room.

  “Listen,” the voice whispered in my ear, “just hold on until tomorrow. All right? Think you can do that? Tomorrow.”

  I looked up and, through a blurry fog, thought I saw someone I knew.

  “Netley?” I said. “Is that really you?”

  He shushed me, and I could hear someone coming back into the room. Netley moved away out of my vision.

  “Now,” Stephens said as he sat back down on the chair, “shall we try again?”

  *

  I had no idea how much time had passed. I think it had been a while. Stephens continued to question me and grew frustrated over my refusal to answer. His questions revolved over how much I knew, who else knew it, and whom I had been working for. I lied about practically every bit of that.

  Stephens would not accept my answers. He knew about Arthur and guessed that, whatever I knew, Machen knew as well. Nor did he believe I had been working on behalf of The Brothers, because my obligation to them was completed once I’d returned Eddy’s diary, so there was no need for me to dig further.

  The Gaffer would hit me and I’d black out for a while and then be brought back to wakefulness. At some point, I think that I realised that Stephens had changed his clothes. He still wore a stylish suit, but it was of a different cut and colour.

  “You’re not doing yourself any good, you know,” Stephens said. “All you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable and making it more painful for yourself. Look around you: this is where you are going to die. Here, alone, in a miserable pit of a room, forgotten by everyone.”

  I shook my head. “No, I die on a hilltop in Wales. Everyone tells me so.”

  Edwards sneered. “You’re not going to get anything more out of him. Let’s just bring that friend of his down here and get it out of him instead.”

  “Hear that?” Stephens asked. “Edwards votes we just kill you and get it over with. I already know what the Gaffer wants. So what about you? What do you want? Do you want us to bring your writer friend down here? Or maybe that young girl you were following? Do you want them sitting here, where you are now?”

  I had very little resolve left. There was no doubt that Stephens would do what he threatened and, despite my confusion over Ann, the last thing I wanted was to deliver her into the hands of this misogynist madman.

  And why should I stay quiet? What had it gotten me? I had been used and deceived by virtually everyone I knew, so why did they deserve my loyalty? Every part of me hurt and I knew that Stephens had been right: one way or another, I would die here. If I confessed, they might actually kill me, which would be a relief.

  Half concussed, I looked up and was ready to tell Stephens what he wanted to know, but then a loud noise came from the other side of the door.

  Stephens motioned to Edwards, who quickly left the room—and then everything exploded into chaos.

  What looked like a battalion of policemen burst into the stone room, throwing Edwards aside like a discarded toothpick. The Gaffer roared like a bull elephant and charged the group, but they had come prepared. Pistols at the ready, they fired at the rampaging beast over and over again. At least five men emptied their guns before the creature bent a knee before them. Finally, one P.C. stepped forward and shot the Gaffer straight between the eyes. He fell back, and his brains and blood mixed upon the floor.

  A group swarmed over Stephens, and I was stunned to see Netley leading them. Stephens screamed out at them, kicking and howling about their daring to lay a hand on him. I could feel someone behind me, cutting my bonds. Finally free, I attempted to lunge at Stephens but could barely move a foot before my limbs gave out beneath me.

  Netley threw a sack over Stephens’ head, and several constables helped drag him out and away. I could not walk on my own, so I was half carried from the room. Looking back, I saw Edwards clasped in irons and the lifeless corpse of my torturer on the floor.

  Up we ran over several flights of stairs, eventually gaining the street through an old, rusty, and forgotten gate. It had been a maintenance entrance for the underground once, but time had erased it from common memory. I looked up the street and saw a carriage that I remembered. It was Netley’s cab—the same he had used on our adventure on what felt like aeons ago. Stephens was being loaded into the cab, but he continued to protest and threaten the lives of everyone who dared accost him in this manner. A deft application of a billy-club rendered him finally silent, and he was tossed into the vehicle which, with a quick flick from Netley to the horse, ran frantically into the night.

  I attempted to protest, to demand that Stephens be locked up and arrested, but the minute I wriggled free of the policemen and took a few minor steps, the world spun around me and I collapsed into the street.

  Chapter 58

  Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

  —Lord Dunsany

  By now, the darkness had become comforting to me. I knew it as well as I knew my family home back in Cornwall. I knew which parts were safe and which were not. Although I tried not to be pulled into the areas of torment, there were times when they reached out for me. I had many visions. I saw Arthur, who was at times friendly and compassionate and at other times desperate and depraved. I saw him ripping women apart and grinning as he did so. Sometimes it would be Polly Nichols or Annie Chapman or Martha Tabram, but other times it would be Ann or even Amy. There would be times when I would see Ann, Amy, and Mary Kelly in licentious embraces; other times Ann would appear and offer herself to me, but she was nothing more than a vessel for hideous corruption. Disease would flow from her lips and skin, as she sighed my name all the while. Then there were the little people whose purpose I could not understand. They appeared to be without morals or consciousness, but little more than beasts. They would speak to each other in grunts and had a written language that was more akin to pictographs than any established language. Sometimes they would greet me as one of their own and press me into join
ing in their revels, but other times they would attack and abuse me as if the sight of me was making them ill.

  Eventually I began to rise and the darkness became lighter and lighter until, at last, it lifted altogether. My eyes opened painfully and I could feel areas on my face that were swollen. Breathing was hard and, lifting the bedcovers, I saw that I had been tightly bandaged around my abdomen. Looking about, I saw that I was in a hospital bed, but despite the presence of other beds in the room I was completely alone. A nurse was humming in front of an open window as she busily went about cleaning and straightening things that had been perfectly fine before she had touched them. I tried to call out to her, but all that came out was a pitiful moan.

  Startled, she turned around and gaped at me. She was a larger woman with red hair tied up efficiently under her nurse’s cap. If pressed, I would guess her age to be around thirty. She smiled happily and immediately came over to my bed.

  “Well, look who’s decided to join us?” she said in a sing-song voice. “How are you feeling?”

  I tried to speak, but my mouth was swollen and nothing decipherable came out of it.

  “Now, don’t try to talk too much. You’ve suffered a terrible beating and need to rest.” She took my hand and checked my pulse. “I’ll go get you some soup and send the doctor in to see you, all right?”

  Without waiting for my answer, she breezed out the door. As it swung shut, I could see a P.C. standing outside the door, and he peeked in quickly.

  In a few minutes, a well-dressed man came into the room. He was probably on the other side of fifty, with mostly grey hair cropped close on his head and a Van Dyke moustache and beard. He was smiling, but I couldn’t tell if that was genuine or just expected.

  “Mr. Besame,” he said, lightly touching me on the arm as a method of greeting, “how wonderful to see you awake. You were in quite a state when the police brought you in. Do you know where you are?”

  I shook my head.