by Sam Gafford
While Amy slept, we argued.
Arthur was adamant that he would not allow Amy to be put through anything stressful, while I was determined that, once she regained her senses, she would have to show us the way to Mary’s secret place. I understood his position. In more reasonable times I would have agreed with it, but this was different. I was going out of my mind over Ann. I could not close my eyes without picturing her being subjected to the vilest of horrors. And always, always, was my feeling that time was running out quickly. Action had to be taken, and soon. So far, Amy was our only hope. If she could find her way back, where we had failed to find any trace of the room, then I hoped we could at least bring this horror to a close.
But despite all Arthur knew, all the implications of our failure, he would not relent. Amy was not to leave her bed. We could traipse all around London as much as I wanted, but he would not involve her in this any longer.
“She is already involved, Arthur, and you know it. Amy has been a part of this since the very beginning. Is it your guilt that causes you to be like this? Because, if you had spoken up at the very first, all this could have been avoided?”
“Of course it is!” Arthur shouted. “Her condition is entirely my fault. But she is here now, and she is safe and well, and I will not risk anything happening to her. Can’t you understand that?”
“Oh, I do, Arthur, I do. But is your grief any greater than my own? Even now, as we argue, Ann could be dying because we have not done all we could have to save her. It may be futile. We may already be too late. But I will not let it be said that I deserted her during her time of greatest need. Amy must guide us there, or all is lost.”
“Then I shall guide you,” Amy’s voice came feebly from the doorway. She stood there, in her nightclothes with a thin robe around her. Her face was paler than I had ever seen it, and she leaned on the door-jamb for support.
“Ann is my friend, too. I cannot abandon her now.”
Arthur leapt up and put his arm around her. “Amy, dear, you are too weak. You need to rest. Come back to bed.”
“Arthur, stop coddling me! I am not a child!”
We were both taken aback by the vehemence of her words.
“It is night now and not the time for such things,” Amy said. “I will rest some, and then we will leave after dawn. Prepare yourselves. You will not like what you find.”
Amy went back inside and shut her door. I could hear her turn the key in the lock. It was evident that she would not allow Arthur to countermand her decision.
We silently went back downstairs and tried to prepare as much as we could. Arthur spent the time reading through old books and manuscripts, while I cleaned my gun and loaded my coat pockets with bullets. I had forgotten about the ‘meteor knife’ that the Beast had sent me. Normally I would have shown it to Arthur, but now I felt an odd sort of comfort in knowing something of which no one else was aware. After having been kept in the dark for so long, it felt surprisingly good to have a secret of my own for a change.
In between sessions of studying the blueprints for possible avenues of escape, I managed to get a few hours of sleep. Arthur kept himself going on black coffee which he brewed himself, alone, in the kitchen.
The night dragged on interminably. Even though I craved sleep, I feared the things my dreams would show me, so the little rest I did achieve was not refreshing. I was like a raw nerve, waiting to be poked.
When dawn finally arrived, the house began to show signs of life. I could hear Rose bustling about in the kitchen, and the smell of food reminded me that I had not eaten for at least a day. Above, there was the sound of Amy moving about and getting ready. Scarcely a minute after I had devoured a plate of eggs and sausage along with a large cup of coffee, Amy descended the stairs.
She was dressed in a sporting outfit, looking as if she were expecting to spend the day in the country. I knew, however, that it had been chosen for ease of movement—and that made me wonder how much more she had remembered of her time with Mary that she had kept to herself.
“Well,” she said, “are we ready?”
November 4, 1888
We made an odd company of three as we left Arthur Machen’s house that morning. Arthur brought along an old revolver that he had inherited. I could tell that he disliked guns and had taken this only out of necessity. Growing up in the ‘wilds’ of Cornwall as I had done, guns were a way of life—and death. Arthur’s weapon was serviceable. I was more concerned about his ability than anything else. “If you need to shoot anything,” I said, “just get as close as you can first.”
Amy was armed with a small, thin dagger that she had been using as a letter-opener. It still had a sharp point, but was useless for anything other than close work. For the first time I wondered if I should have called in some markers with Lusk and gotten a few of his boys to join us. Although tempting, it would have added yet another unstable element to a situation that would already be chaotic.
So we three set out for Whitechapel on a bright November morning with frost still on the leaves. None of us spoke during the cab ride. There was little need to do so. Arthur would have protested and demanded that Amy go home, and she, just as strenuously, would have objected and refused. The argument was concluded before a word had even been spoken.
I, for my part, looked out the window, wondering how such evil can exist on such a beautiful day.
*
The hunt took much longer than we expected.
Amy could only remember the general vicinity of the entrance and not its actual location. I argued that, because of the blueprints, it had to be somewhere near St. Mary’s, but she did not recognise anything in that area. So we slowly widened our search.
The hours stretched by. Because Amy could not remember the exact place that Mary had taken her, we had to drive up and down many streets in Whitechapel. The morning became the afternoon and the shadows were growing long in the street. Eventually we had to stop and eat something. The cab needed to be changed, as the horse was by this point exhausted and could barely move. The three of us sat silently in an alehouse, munching on bread and cheese. I had no appetite for anything but had to keep my strength up.
As we were leaving the dark, comfortable warmth of the bar, a wind came up and swept down the street. I could have sworn that, borne on that breeze, I had heard something that sounded like laughter—not the type of carefree, joyous laughter of children but the mocking sounds of scorn and derision. Arthur noticed nothing but, from the turn of her head, I could have sworn that Amy had heard something.
“This,” she said hesitatingly, “this looks familiar.”
Arthur made to rush her along, but I held him back. Amy looked back and forth, as if she were trying to capture a scent of an old memory. Suddenly she broke off and started running down the road.
Without a word, we were quickly at her heels.
She moved down a darkened alley and then through a square which even I, after so many days prowling the East End, had never known existed. We passed through this into a small lane that led to a grey patch of lawn where children were kicking something back and forth. I tried not to look at what they had been kicking as we flew by.
Then Amy sprinted down a flight of stairs and up to a small archway that apparently led nowhere. She stood before the dead end and glared at it with a powerful malevolence and hatred of which I had not thought her capable.
“It’s here,” she said; “the entrance is here.”
We had been running at such a breakneck speed that I had little idea where we were or if we were close to St. Mary’s at all. Arthur and I began to examine the wall, but there was nothing there.
“You must be mistaken, dear,” Arthur said. “This is just a wall.”
Amy gave him a curt look and pushed him out of the way.
“There’s a trick to it,” she said and began to push on certain bricks in a particular sequence. Several times she stopped, muttered, “No, that’s not right,” and then started over again. The
sun was going down as she finally repeated the correct pattern: we could hear something moving behind the wall. The bricks fell apart, almost by magic, and an entrance appeared.
Arthur tried to block the way. “Albert, you come with me. Amy, you need to go home. You’ve showed us the path. Let us handle it now.”
I could feel the anger coming off of Amy as she silently pushed her husband aside and entered the darkness beyond.
We lit our lanterns and followed her down the lightless tunnel. The walls were all brick and mortar, but as we walked they took on an ancient look as if they had been laid many centuries ago.
“We have to hurry, Albert,” Arthur whispered to me. “Every minute multiplies the danger. We can’t tarry here very long.”
“What are you on about?” I asked, more than a little exasperated with him.
“This is the night of the full moon,” he said. “Mary will be at her most powerful.”
“All the more reason to find her,” Amy replied, fully aware of what we had been discussing. “Be silent now. I have to remember the way.”
We walked for what felt like hours to me. Always we were heading downwards. I could hear the sound of underground trains nearby and then, eventually, above me. From somewhere close came the sound of moving water. This was not the waste water of the sewers; it felt older, rawer, as if it were water that had travelled its entire life underground, never seeing the sun. When we turned a sharp corner, I could feel, rather than hear, a pulse running through the air.
Amy motioned for us to dim the lanterns and walked more slowly, more carefully.
The rhythm slowly became more distinct. It was the sound of a large crowd, groaning in unison. My breath was coming in short gasps as I knew we were finally drawing closer to Mary’s hiding place. Slowly, a sick light grew in the distance.
As we came closer to it, I could tell that it was some sort of firelight with flickers dancing along the walls. We were coming to a ledge of sorts, and the tunnel opened up wide in the distance. We were nearly there.
Amy was the first to reach the side and look beyond. She gasped involuntarily but could not have been heard over the crashing sound of the chanting and some sort of drumbeat. Involuntarily, she turned her face away.
I moved around her and saw a vision of nightmare.
Or, rather, one hideously familiar to one that I had seen before.
The path opened up to a large room below us which was certainly that which we had seen on the blueprints and had been searching for all this time. It looked almost Roman, as if it had been constructed during the time of their occupation of Britain centuries ago. The walls were brick and there were columns showing a Roman style reaching from floor to ceiling. There was what I could only describe as a type of ‘showroom’ space that occupied the middle and where a horde of those hideous little people gyrated and grunted. Against the back was a huge kettle-like structure that had some kind of grotesque skin draped tightly over it; it was being pounded by others to the beat of the crowd above.
But it was the scene around the platform at the head of the room that was the most terrifying and shocking.
There was a raised dais atop of which stood a large table or altar made completely of marble that had become discoloured and dull through age. I could see markings on the side; although seeming familiar, they were unknown to me. Flames burned from large braziers that framed the platform. There were three creatures swaying around the altar. I could no longer believe that they were any sort of human any longer. Mary was behind the top of the table, gyrating and chanting along with the group below her in the pit. On her left was a taller version of the creatures that writhed in the pit. On her right was an amorphous blob of flesh that could not hold its form properly. When it could, it wore Arthur’s face and body, which identified it as the dhole that Mary had made of Arthur so many years ago. They were all naked and covered in blood and ordure.
Even that was not the worst.
Lying atop the altar was Ann. She was in a trance and neither moved nor blinked. She was completely naked and, clearly, extremely pregnant. The firelight danced off the sweat on her immense belly, making it sparkle.
I could not accept what I was seeing. This was Ann, but it was impossible for her to be pregnant—and especially this pregnant. She had only been missing for over a month, and the woman I saw before me had clearly exceeded her ninth month. If she had been pregnant when I saw her last, it would have been impossible not to notice.
My mind wanted to scream at the thought of what might, at that very moment, be gestating inside her.
Chapter 78
Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London town.
Halfpence and farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
—Unknown
November 4, 1888, somewhere under London
I stumbled back, floored by the enormity of what I had seen.
Arthur looked around the corner briefly and came back with a face so pale that it appeared not to have a drop of blood left in it.
“Did you see?” he whispered. “Those little piles of red around Ann—they’re the pieces they took from the bodies of their victims. It’s all part of the buildup to this, the Scarlet Ceremony.”
I regained my feet and stood up. Glancing around the corner, I could see that Arthur was correct. My focus had been on Ann and not the items around her.
“How can she be pregnant?” I asked. “It’s not possible.”
“It’s not natural,” Arthur replied. “Mary did this somehow.”
Amy coolly looked around the corner.
“If we’re going to do something, it needs to be soon.”
Arthur, to his credit, rose to the occasion.
“We’ll need to edge down as close as we can get. Perhaps we can dump one of the braziers on this hideous ‘audience.’ Albert, you take care of that thing beside Mary, and I’ll handle the dhole. Then we’ll remove Mary for once and for all.”
He turned and looked at Amy with such an expression of love and respect that my heart broke for allowing Amy to accompany us.
“Amy, dear, while we’re distracting them, we need you to grab Ann and get her out of here. Do you think you can do it?”
She nodded and they kissed deeply, for we had no idea if any of us would leave this place alive.
I gave them the moment and peered around the corner again. The dhole creature was now dancing about with something shiny in its hand. Looking closely, I could see it was a knife. More precisely, it was a Lister knife, which was what Abberline had suspected the Ripper of using and pictures of which had been in the newspapers. Our time was running out.
Motioning silently along, we turned the corner and headed noiselessly down the sloping path to the bottom.
I was in the front, Arthur behind me and Amy last. We each held our weapons in our hands. Arthur and I had our revolvers and Amy clasped her dagger tightly. We were doomed fools but kept going anyway.
When we reached the bottom, we kept tight to the wall and the few shadows that were there. The creatures in the ‘audience’ pit paid us little notice. They were intent upon their own frenzied dance, where they either copulated with or beat one another. I was seeing my séance dream come true.
We were within five feet of the stairs to the altar when we were finally spotted.
The creature on the platform, possibly the only one there with any sense of ‘human’ left in him, saw us crouching and cried out a word of alarm. Instantly, the place exploded into a battlefield. Arthur pushed a brazier down on the smaller creatures, who screamed in agony as they scrambled away from the fire in terror. I squeezed off a shot at the thing on the platform, but it went wild as he ducked.
Mary ignored everything. She had placed her hands aside Ann’s head and was chanting even more wildly. Ann’s back arched up, displaying her pregnant belly as a target.
The dhole stood beside her, his hand raised and the Lister knife ready to strike.
Behind Mary, the air began to shimmer and warp.
I fired at the dhole, hitting him in the chest. The shot pushed him back and away from the table. Arthur leaped forward and was on the creature in an instant.
“Amy!” I shouted. “Quickly!”
I ran up the stairs and threw myself at the creature to the left. He countered with a solid punch to my head which spun me around like a top, and then he was on top of me, biting and clawing. Amy was right behind me and trying frantically to pull Ann off the table.
The creatures in the pit were going mad with fury and fear. They shouted and howled like animals locked in a zoo, but eventually they began to advance around the burning embers whose flame was quickly dying out.
Mary screamed. It was like hearing something being ripped apart from inside. She had become aware of something interrupting the Scarlet Ceremony. Arthur continued to wrestle with the dhole, which had now locked in his false Machen face so that it appeared as if Arthur were fighting himself. It was the living embodiment of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Amy was continuing to try to pull Ann away, but Mary would not relinquish her hold. Ann never said a word or made any movement to help or hinder her rescue. I prayed that her mind was not already gone.
Above Mary, the air had split and formed a rip that waved as fumes do in the sun. A noxious air was spilled through that tear and was racing around the room like a tornado. It ripped and bit at us but seemed to ignore the others. Mary’s head snapped back, and the same voice that had come out of Robert James Lees at the séance answered her through the rift and took up the chant.
The creature and I continued to struggle, and I was reaching for the dagger in my coat when I felt something reaching and grabbing my ankle. Suddenly I was pulled off my feet and down into the pit by the other creatures, who quickly overwhelmed me. I was able to grab my gun and began shooting at them one by one until their grip began to lessen.