A Taste for Monsters Read online

  “But these poor women. Is nothing being done? Does no one care about them?”

  “People care,” I said, but I knew the truth of it to be more complicated. The writers of papers and broadsides cared about their circulations, and the coppers cared whether they looked like fools, and the rest of Whitechapel cared if they had gossip-fodder, but whether anyone actually cared for the murdered prostitutes? “They’re looking for a man called Leather Apron.”

  “Leather Apron,” he whispered. “And the spirit’s name is Annie?”

  I nodded.

  “Two hours,” he said. “Perhaps we might do something to pass the time? Or else I shall go mad.”

  I was grateful for any distraction, as the talk of murders and Leather Apron had beat my nerves out of the bushes, so we went first to his model church, which looked nearly complete enough to hold services, and then we read from Emma. I found it difficult to keep my mind on the words, and though they left my lips I did not taste them, my attentions instead on the tolling of the mantel clock. An hour passed, and a half hour after that, the coming of the screaming spectre imminent.

  Eventually, my gaze left the book for the clock face in a glance that stayed, and Mr. Merrick noticed.

  “We can stop reading,” he said.

  “Very well,” I said, and closed the book without even marking the page with the ribbon.

  “Evelyn?” Mr. Merrick said a moment later.

  “Yes?” The clock’s steadfast little heart beat on, and I wondered how it could remain so calm.

  “I do not want her to come.”

  “I don’t, either,” I said.

  “Perhaps she won’t come.”

  “She will come,” I said. I knew it was better to expect the worst than to hope.

  When the clock struck half past five, I turned my eyes toward the door, and I ceased to breathe. I stared so forcefully at the door my vision failed at the edges, and there were moments it seemed the wood grain shifted and swirled, but I blinked and it returned to where it had been.

  Moments passed.

  Then I felt the pain in my jaw and sensed a presence moving out in the courtyard the way one feels an omnibus thundering by.

  “She comes,” I whispered.

  Mr. Merrick brought his good hand up to cover his eyes. “Please. No—”

  The door burst open as if kicked, and I nearly fell from my chair as a woman in black rushed into the room wailing. Before I could recover myself, she was upon us, filthy fingers reaching, her high shriek deafening and unceasing, her mouth gaping. I covered my ears and shrank from her, which only brought her closer and closer until I could see the fissures in her tongue, her face as twisted a mask of fear and torture as would be drawn on the cover of a penny dreadful.

  I wondered if she would snatch me, claw at me, or bite me with her teeth.

  Beside me, Mr. Merrick grabbed my arm and squeezed so tightly it hurt, but it reminded me that he was there.

  The ghost of Annie Chapman had seemed to drag in a surging shadow behind her, but I realized it was a cloak she wore, which billowed as though she were wandering a windswept moor. On she wailed at us without pausing for a breath, her voice violent, and I felt buffeted and powerless against it, filled with its anguish to my utter extremities.

  Her mouth seemed to stretch over me, her eyes shot with red, her dark hair writhing in the same invisible wind as her cloak, and in the moment I wondered if her voice alone could tear me asunder, I thought I heard a word in her screaming, or rather a name.

  John-ny.

  I could not be certain of that, for in the next moment she turned and rushed from the room in the manner she had come, and the door slammed shut behind her, leaving behind a wounded and violated silence.

  Mr. Merrick sobbed beside me, still clutching my arm. I turned toward him. “She’s gone.”

  He said nothing back to me, but simply sobbed and whimpered. I let him go on, and I didn’t take my arm from his hand, though I could feel he’d bruised it. Eventually, his crying ebbed and he released me in his own time.

  “Did you feel it?” he asked.

  I thought I knew what he meant, for her pain had made me as empty as a used eggshell. “It’s like she’s missing something. Someone.”

  “I cannot bear that again.” He clutched the less corrupted side of his face. “Am I cursed? Why do they come to me?”

  “Perhaps that is a question Professor Sidgwick can answer.”

  “That is still three days away,” he said.

  That meant three more visitations. “I’ll be with you, Mr. Merrick. You won’t be alone.”

  He sighed. “Thank you, Evelyn. You are an angel.”

  The word fit me all wrong, especially knowing what it meant to him, and I wriggled out from under it. “I’m not that, Mr. Merrick,” I said, for I knew better than anyone I hadn’t always acted divinely, and I certainly didn’t look it, as Matron Luckes had made quite clear.

  “You’re an angel to me,” he said.

  “If you knew what I’ve done—”

  “What have you done?”

  “What have I done?” I did not like to think on what I’d had to do. “I’ve lied. I’ve stolen. I’ve cheated. And I’ve hurt people.” My confession sounded almost belligerent. “I’m not proud of it. I did what I had to do. But I am no angel.”

  He closed his eyes. “And yet you are here with me now. That is what I know.”

  I couldn’t argue that, even though I wasn’t as ready as he was to believe that a single, possibly selfless choice could outweigh a plentitude of ignominious acts in the final reckoning.

  “Do you think anyone else in the hospital heard her?” he asked.

  “If no one heard her yesterday, I doubt anyone heard her today,” I said.

  He nodded. “I think I would like to rest now.”

  “Can I help you to bed?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll sleep here in my chair by the fire.”

  “Very good,” I said, then brought him a blanket and tucked it around him. It caused me not a moment’s pause to touch him thus, which caused me a brief moment of surprise. With all the time we’d spent in each other’s company, the landscape of his abnormal features had become familiar to me. “I’ll return with your breakfast later.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I left his room, and out in the courtyard greeted a day fully risen. Though cast with clouds, the sky shone with weak light from a hidden sun, which gently burned away the dread and pain from Annie Chapman’s haunting. I returned to my room, where I washed and dressed, and then went to breakfast with the rest of the maids. Their conversation still dealt almost entirely with the topic of murder, but had moved into the territory of speculation as to the motive and character of this Leather Apron.

  “I think he’s got himself a lame cock,” Beatrice said. “So’s he takes out his anger on the bunters. Why else he choose them?”

  It did seem possible to me that impotence could so frustrate a violent man.

  “Them ladies of that sort gets what’s coming to them, don’t they,” Beatrice said.

  “Or maybe it don’t have nothing to do with his lobcock,” Becky said, cheeks a bit flushed with embarrassment, it seemed, or perhaps anger. “Maybe he’s just evil, and he picks the women no one cares about so’s he gets away with it.”

  That made equal sense to me.

  “And why should I care about them, eh?” Beatrice said. “You ask me, they’s as much a part of the problem as the maniac. There’s a reason all he picks is whores.”

  “Thus far,” I said.

  The table fell silent for a moment at that.

  “They say he’s a Jew,” Beatrice said. “Police had a man in custody, and a violent mob nearly took him by force to hang. But turns out he were arrested on unrelated charges.”

  “Is the whole world going mad?” Becky asked.

  We separated shortly after that to our duties, and I waited some hours before I took Mr. Merrick his breakfast.
He was still asleep when I reached his room, but he woke as I entered, and we passed the day somewhat subdued by the experience of that morning and the awareness that we must endure it again. When Dr. Treves came for his daily visit, Mr. Merrick said but little to him, which seemed to concern the surgeon, and he suggested that perhaps it might be time again for a thorough medical examination. The matron even came that day, to my dismay, for I did not feel myself to be at my best, as I hadn’t slept at all the night before and felt the high tax on that.

  Nevertheless, the matron seemed pleased with me. “I hear good reports from Miss Flemming and Miss Doyle,” she said as she proceeded through an inspection of the room’s cleanliness. “As well as Dr. Treves.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, feeling very relieved.

  “Thus far,” she said, “I believe I made the right decision in hiring you.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” I said, though my own thoughts and feelings on the matter had become quite tangled and convoluted by the presence of the ghosts.

  “Might we speak outside?” she said, but did not wait for my reply before she turned toward the door. I followed behind her, and out in the courtyard she spoke in a hushed tone. “And how do you find Mr. Merrick?”

  “Well, ma’am,” I said.

  “What I mean is, are you able to tolerate his condition?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You do seem to have a fortitude your predecessors lacked.”

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded as if at some silent appraisal. “I am impressed by you, Miss Fallow.”

  It was the second time someone had said as much to me, and I curtsied. “I’m flattered, Matron.”

  “Continue in your duties as you have been, and your position here at the hospital can be assured should … circumstances change.”

  I wondered what she meant by that, but merely thanked her once more.

  Matron Luckes nodded toward Mr. Merrick’s door. “As you were.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” With that I curtsied and returned to my duties.

  Later that evening, I ate my dinner quickly and hurried to bed to catch what little rest I could before Polly’s coming. With the certainty of it, and knowing what to expect, I was actually able to sleep. I did not even stir when Becky and Martha came in, and later awoke to a feeling of utter disorientation of the hour and the day. Following that sensation, I suffered a panic that I had overslept, but it faded at the realization it was but two thirty. I rose and decided to bathe.

  “Evelyn?” Becky whispered from her bed in a voice both rasped and confused.

  “All’s well,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Her head fell back to her pillow, and I went out into the corridor toward the bathroom.

  Our wing of the hospital, at that hour, was utterly silent, save the echoes of my own footsteps that followed me, making it sound as though I were being stalked. I even thought I sensed someone behind me and turned back to look, but found myself alone in the dim light.

  It then occurred to me that if ghosts were real, as I had learned they were, then the hospital might be haunted by other spirits and apparitions, and some of them might be dangerous.

  I felt a chill, then, and hurried on to the bathroom, where I closed and locked the door, and thereafter I moved very quietly, so as not to wake the dead. I filled the tub with hot water, which seemed to splash thunderously, and quickly submerged myself in it, feeling quite alone and vulnerable.

  Every drip of water from the spout and every slosh I made echoed loudly in my ears, and with my eyes closed against the soap and water I imagined phantasms stalking the edges of the room, bandaged patients with horrific injuries. I even thought I heard someone take a grunted breath behind me, and the water went frigid, but when I craned slowly to look, holding my breath, I found no one there.

  After bathing, I dried myself and dressed quickly, shivering in my gooseflesh, and then hurried to Mr. Merrick’s room, where we took up our vigil. The waiting, though I knew what to expect, still was not an easy thing. We distracted ourselves once again with reading, but the effort was halfhearted, and after but a few pages Mr. Merrick interrupted me.

  “Did you hear Annie’s spirit say a name?” he asked.

  I placed my finger on the page and looked up from the book. “I did.”

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder what that means. Could that be the name of the monster who killed her?”

  I thought about that a moment, and then decided against it. “I don’t think so. She cries in longing. We both felt that. I think she mourns for this Johnny.”

  “I wonder who he is.”

  “Her husband? A beau? The paper said little about her.”

  “Perhaps I can ask her.”

  “Mr. Merrick …” I thought of Annie’s wailing and her tortured face, very frightened at the thought of trying to communicate with her. “She doesn’t seem like Polly. I know nothing about ghosts, but she seems a different kind of revenant. I doubt she’ll speak with you.”

  “I can try,” he said.

  He tried again with Polly when she appeared, but his consolations and assurances once again seemed to have no power to comfort her, and she vanished with the same despair as she had come. When Annie Chapman came raging into the room, I could but recoil from her screaming, open mouth as I had before, but Mr. Merrick somehow bravely raised himself and his voice.

  “Annie Chapman!” he shouted.

  At the sound of her name, her screaming ceased, and she stared at him with eyes afire, her mouth still agape.

  “We want to help you,” he said. “Who is Johnny?”

  “John-ny!” she wailed. “I didn’t want to leave you! Forgive me!”

  “Who is he?” Mr. Merrick asked. “Is Johnny your husband?”

  Her wailing ascended to screaming once more, and Mr. Merrick collapsed away from her into his chair. We endured her torment for a few, endless moments, and then she tore from the room, her black cloak flapping behind her, and we were alone.

  “You are right,” Mr. Merrick said, breathing hard. “She is … quite unlike Polly.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I am,” he said. “But it saps my strength somehow. I think I would like to sleep.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But should I fetch Dr. Treves?”

  “No, I’ll be set right if I but rest.”

  “Very well,” I said.

  He slept most of the morning, and did not wake until I brought his luncheon. I was tired as well, but his weariness seemed to have a different quality than mine, and I grew more and more concerned for him.

  That evening, over our dinner, Beatrice related the newest developments in the hunt for the murderer, as reported in the Star. It seemed the man called Leather Apron was a Jew, after all.

  “Goes by the name of Pizer,” Beatrice said. “They apprehended him … but he ain’t the murderer.”

  “What?” Martha asked.

  Beatrice slapped the paper with the back of her hand. “It weren’t him. He got alibis, it says, and they let him go.”

  “Then who is it?” Becky asked. “Who’s the maniac?”

  “Some other Jew,” Martha said. “Right? The witnesses seen a Jew?”

  “Listen to this,” Beatrice said. “A man wrote to the paper and says the removal of the viscera and such suggests it be the work of a medical man. Says we should scrutinize all the nearby hospital porters.”

  A horror seized the table as the import of that statement settled over us. The London was the only hospital of note within Whitechapel, and certainly the hospital nearest the crimes. The author of that suggestion in the Star could’ve had no other institution in mind but ours, which meant the deranged maniac would’ve been one of us. I’d assumed the hospital walls would keep the murderer out, but what if he were already inside them? No one said anything for several m
oments. It seemed the table had lost its communal appetite, and that included myself.

  I rose to leave.

  “You going to bed?” Becky whispered to me. “Why so early?”

  “I rise early to help Mr. Merrick,” I said.

  “Help him with what?”

  I sighed. “With whatever he needs.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “You ain’t his slave,” she said. “But you’re smart. You keep this up and they’ll never sack you.”

  “That’s my hope. Good night, Becky.”

  “G’night, then.”

  I went to bed and rose a few hours later to go to Mr. Merrick’s room, where we repeated our ghostly ritual with Polly and the terrible Annie Chapman. Afterward, Mr. Merrick needed rest, and worried me when he slept most of the next day. Dr. Treves repeated his desire for an examination, against which Mr. Merrick meekly protested, and though I inwardly agreed with the doctor’s concern, I doubted whether his medical instruments could uncover the true drain on Mr. Merrick’s vitality.

  Then Wednesday arrived, and the knowledge of Professor Sidgwick’s coming somewhat eased the burden of Polly’s fear and Annie’s grief, and both Mr. Merrick and I looked forward to the afternoon with great hope that the learned man might be able to help.

  Professor Sidgwick was a slender man in a fine wool suit, with long smooth hair that curled about his ears, and a wide fleecy beard the color of steel that reached his chest. I resisted the desire to lift my shawl and hide my face, remembering the matron’s orders, but other than an initial, lingering glance, the professor gave me no special attention. After making the introduction to Mr. Merrick, it seemed that Dr. Treves planned to stay in the room for the interview, for he sat himself in a chair.

  Mr. Merrick looked at him in what I recognized to be distress, and then at Professor Sidgwick, and I blessed the new, strange man, for he appeared to readily appraise the situation.

  “Dr. Treves,” he said, his voice clear and slightly nasal. “Might I speak with Mr. Merrick alone? The type of conversation you intimated in your letter is often best undertaken in private.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Treves said. “Well, his speech can be quite difficult to understand, you see.”