A Taste for Monsters Read online

  “Mr. Merrick, may I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ve certainly asked questions of you.”

  My voice fell to a whisper without my meaning it to, and my heart beat apace. “Was it a … a ghost that came into your room early this morning?”

  Though his face remained rigid, I saw him swallow, and his gaze darted about the room, everywhere and anywhere but my face. “No one came into my room,” he said.

  “But I saw a young woman. She was—”

  “No,” he said, raising his voice. “No one came into my room.”

  I decided not to press him, for it obviously caused him distress, perhaps even fear, which made my own fear even worse. “Very well, then,” I said. “Would you, um, like to eat? I believe cook made a sandwich.”

  “No,” he said. “I am not hungry.”

  “Very well. Would you like to work on your model?”

  “No.”

  He was sounding like a petulant child, and in my state I didn’t have much patience for it. “Mr. Merrick, is there anything else you need from me?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, I shall see to your bedding.”

  He made no reply to that, so I gladly left him and took his soiled sheets to the hospital’s laundry, where I overheard the washerwomen gossiping in the steam about another murder the previous night but one street away from the hospital, on a narrow alleyway called Buck’s Row. The washers knew little beyond rumor—a prostitute, they said, like the Tabram woman who’d been stabbed—but at breakfast the next morning Beatrice held the East London Advertiser before her and gladly related all the known aspects of the crime. I didn’t want to listen, but Beatrice’s voice forced some of the details in.

  “Throat cut ear to ear,” she said. “Abdomen was completely ripped open, with the bowels protruding. They don’t know who she is, poor soul. Age thirty-five to forty. Five feet two inches in height.”

  “That’s awful,” Martha said.

  “Dreadful business, to be sure,” Beatrice said. “There be a demon at work in Whitechapel, and mark me, the police won’t do nothing about it.”

  “Don’t say that,” Becky said. “ ’Course they will.”

  “What, fuss over a couple of dead prostitutes?” Beatrice folded her newspaper and slapped it on the table. “Not likely.”

  I agreed with her on that point at least, for aside from the Salvation Army and other such Christian missions, the world seemed willing to leave the East End festering unto itself. While the rest of London brightened with electric lamps, gaslit Whitechapel remained the city’s black shadow. Nobody thinks or cares about their shadow.

  I turned toward Becky and whispered to her, “Has a young bride died recently in the hospital?”

  She lowered the dark skin of her brow. “That’s a strange question.”

  “Has one?”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” she said.

  Following my breakfast, I brought Mr. Merrick his and found him in somewhat better spirits than the day before, though he ate but little of his food. Miss Doyle and Miss Flemming came shortly to bathe him, and afterward I worked with him again on his church model for a time, and we raised another of its towers. Through it all, I felt as though the ghost of the young bride haunted our interactions.

  “Would you read to me again?” he asked as we surveyed our craftsmanship.

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “Perhaps your copy of Emma?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You mentioned it was dear to you.”

  I nodded. “It was my mother’s. She used to read it to me.”

  “I wish that I had one of my mother’s books,” he said. “She was a Sunday school teacher, you know. She was educated and very beautiful.” He pointed toward the mantel. “There is a small portrait next to the picture from the Princess of Wales. Would you bring it to me?”

  “Of course.” I went and found the painting. It was small, just two or three inches on a side, and quite battered, but the woman it portrayed was indeed lovely. “Is this your mother?” I said, handing it to him.

  He accepted it reverently with both hands, in the manner of a prayer book, appearing utterly mesmerized by the image. “Yes. She died shortly before I turned eleven. Since then I’ve kept this portrait with me at all times. It has been with me through all my travails.”

  “I did the same with my mother’s book,” I said. “And also this.” I withdrew my locket from inside my uniform and unclasped it from around my neck. “These are my parents,” I said as I opened it and showed him the pictures inside, feeling a sharper than usual stab of grief at the sight of them. Sometimes, the portrait of my father reminded me not of who he once was, but who he became. “You won’t tell Matron I wear this, will you?”

  “No. Never,” he said in seriousness. “Your mother was also quite beautiful.”

  I smiled. “And my father’s kindness back then made him handsomer than he was.”

  That brought Mr. Merrick’s eyes up to mine. “Kindness can make someone handsome?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It can make a person more attractive, at any rate.”

  “What else can make a man more handsome?”

  “Many things. Courage. Honesty. Loyalty.” Qualities my father had ceased to show me, in the end. I would never understand why.

  “Honesty?”

  “Certainly.”

  I thought I could guess what he was thinking then about his own attractiveness, but he said nothing more and I let go of the matter, for I knew very well there was a degree of ugliness against which no amount of kindness or virtue could balance the scale.

  “I think your mother must have loved you very much,” I said, to change the direction of our conversation.

  He nodded and returned his devoted gaze to the portrait. “She did.”

  “And what of your father? Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “No,” he said, with a cold and vast emptiness in his voice.

  “Oh,” I said. “I was also left all alone. It seems we have much in common, Mr. Merrick.”

  He stared at the portrait a moment longer, sighed, and handed it back for me to replace on the mantel. “I want to be honest,” he said. “So I must confess something.”

  “What is that?” I asked, though I knew what he was about to say, and I thought of hollow, mournful eyes.

  “I lied to you.”

  I swallowed. “Oh?”

  “When I told you no one came into my room the night before last. Someone did come.”

  My heart cantered, driven by a rising dread at the memory of the young woman, and I winced at a twinge of pain in my jaw. “Who was it?”

  He hesitated and glanced toward the door. “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t know her?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t speak. She simply stood there, by the mantel, looking at my pictures and cards. I think she …”

  I waited, but he never finished his statement. “You think she what, Mr. Merrick?”

  “I think she may have been … a spirit.”

  The word, coming from him, was a cold, wet eel coiling in my stomach. “A ghost?”

  “Am I mad to think so?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think you’re mad. I admit I had the same thought when I saw her.”

  “You did? I am relieved by that, at least.” Fear then frayed the hem of his voice. “She came again this morning also and stood at the foot of my bed. I … I believe she will come tonight.”

  If I had not seen the phantasm for myself, I would have doubted Mr. Merrick’s ghostly visitations as the product of his dreams, and I wished I could so disregard them. To acknowledge them as supernatural rendered me powerless and terrified.

  “I am afraid of her,” he said. “I don’t want to see her alone.”

  I knew, then, what he was about to ask me, and I wanted to leave his room before he could.

  “Will you be here with me
?” he said. “When she comes?”

  “Mr. Merrick …”

  “Please, Evelyn.”

  His voice had such a plaintive vulnerability that I couldn’t help but agree to return in the early morning, at half past three, the hour at which the ghost had manifested the last two nights. A rising dread grasped at my heels the rest of that day, and later drained away my appetite as I sat with the staff at dinner. That was just as well, since Beatrice had acquired a copy of the evening Star and read aloud what the police had learned about the murder of that poor woman the morning before, whether any of us wanted her to.

  “They say the killer must be some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder,” she said. “That’s three women, now, each of ’em with an abandoned character. All were killed on ill-lighted off-turnings from Whitechapel Road. Clues to the murders are entirely lacking. But one—”

  “What’s her name?” Becky asked.

  Beatrice appeared irritated at the interruption. “Whose name?”

  “The murdered woman.”

  “Oh.” Beatrice scanned the paper. “Mary Ann Nichols. Sometimes called Polly. Says she was a prostitute, a drunkard, and a thief.”

  Becky tapped her chin with her index finger. “I like the name Polly.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Beatrice leaned away from Becky a bit and stared hard at her. “That all you’re thinking about after what I’ve been reading?”

  “No.” Becky scowled at the older woman. “What’s it to you, anyhow?”

  Polly.

  The name made the woman’s death more real to me. I didn’t want to hear the argument going around at the table, so I rose and went to my room. There, I lay down on my bed still clothed, for I knew I would be getting up in a few hours to go to Mr. Merrick as promised, and tried not to think about the ghostly young woman. A short while later, Becky and Martha returned to the room shivering with gossip and speculation over the murders.

  “A maniac, he is,” Martha said. “One of the porters told me the police is looking for a man called Leather Apron.”

  “Leather Apron?” Becky said. “He wear one or something?”

  “Yeah. Been ill-treating judys on the street for weeks, apparently. Bashing them up something fierce.”

  “Leather Apron,” Becky said again, and shuddered.

  I thought better of telling them about Mr. Merrick’s visitor, especially Becky, and before long, they had gone easily to sleep, while fearful thoughts spurred my wakefulness late into the night. I didn’t have any notion of what to say or do in the presence of a ghost, and I hoped to God Almighty the apparition didn’t come, and if she did, that she’d prove somehow to be nothing but a mortal woman of flesh and bone.

  The sleepless hours passed more quickly than I’d have liked, and at the agreed-upon time I rose from my bed and slipped out of the dormitory into what was becoming an increasingly sinister Bedstead Square. It was a cold, desolate night, the kind that wouldn’t just turn its back on terrible goings-on, but would stand by and watch. I trembled as much from the chill as from my trepidation while I crossed the courtyard, quick as I could. I did my utmost to make little sound, as if to avoid drawing attention to my passage and keep from stirring dark things from slumber, and even so imagined eyes upon me from within the shadows.

  When I reached Mr. Merrick’s door, for the first time I felt his room was not a place from which to flee, but a place to escape from the square, and I entered gratefully, even knowing what it was I might yet face there.

  “I wondered if you would come,” Mr. Merrick said, sitting in his peculiar armchair near the fireplace, the embers low and red.

  “I gave you my word,” I said. “I wouldn’t break it.”

  “Thank you, Evelyn,” he said.

  I pulled a chair over from the table and placed it next to him, where I then sat, and we both faced the door.

  “Did you believe in spirits before now?” Mr. Merrick asked.

  “No,” I said. “Well, not the haunting kind, leastwise. I do hope the spirits of my mother and my sister are in heaven, wherever that is.”

  “And your father?”

  That was a difficult question to answer. “I hope he has found peace, too,” I said. I certainly hadn’t been able to provide him any, though I had tried. I had hidden his drink, and failing that, I had washed his clothes and cleaned him up. I had done my best to care for him, but it hadn’t been enough.

  “Do you think your family has been watching you?” Mr. Merrick asked.

  It took a moment for me to answer him. “I hope not,” I whispered.

  He seemed not to have heard me. “My mother is an angel now,” he said. “She died of pneumonia.”

  A few coals slumped to ash in the fireplace, and the ruddy room dimmed by a degree. I rose and went to add more fuel from the coal hod but found it nearly empty. It seemed my earlier nervousness had so distracted me I’d neglected to fill it. The room had a gas lamp on one wall, so I lit that, and felt somewhat comforted by the increase in light, a fevered yellow though it was.

  “That’s better,” I said.

  “Angels watch over us,” he said. “That’s what they say.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “It was my mother brought me here. Away from the workhouses. The beatings. The hunger.”

  “The exhibitions?”

  “That wasn’t always bad,” he said, staring into the fire. “The Silver King treated me well, and I made friends among the other freaks of nature. Sam Roper had these two midgets, Dooley and Bramley, and they looked after me.” He paused and chuckled. “Those two could make a mockery of anything. But …” His laughter abruptly ceased. “London’s taste for monsters changed. The police shut us down, and I went to Belgium. Then that man robbed me … I had nothing. I don’t know how I made it back to Liverpool. But that was as far as I could go. The crowd at the station … pressing in, shouting at me, kicking me. I was nearly senseless. I collapsed, and I thought they would tear me apart. And then I found it.” He turned toward me, his eyes aglow. “Dr. Treves had given me his card, you see, a year earlier. Truthfully, I’d long forgotten it, and I still cannot explain how it came to be in my pocket that day. But I showed it, and Dr. Treves came for me, and now I’m here.”

  His story had robbed me of breath.

  “It was my mother,” he said, returning his gaze to the coals. “She put that card in my pocket.”

  I could not have disputed him even had I not partly believed he was right.

  “Perhaps this spirit coming to visit me is an angel like my mother,” he said.

  I did not believe an angel would cause the disquiet I had felt upon seeing her, but I still could not dispute him, and we both fell silent after that in the gentle warmth of the fire.

  “Perhaps she will not come,” Mr. Merrick finally said, after some time had passed.

  “Perhaps it’s because I’m here,” I said.

  “You think she—”

  The gas lamp dimmed, or seemed to dim. I could not say if it was my eyes failing or the light, but a spreading darkness choked the corners of the room, and then I felt an ache in my jaw. It was the same pain I had experienced upon seeing the ghost the first time. Then a devastating sadness fell upon me, followed by a terror that shoved ice into the deepest reaches of my body.

  I gasped.

  “Evelyn?” Mr. Merrick said, sounding in every way like a child.

  I fixed my eyes on the door, which seemed suddenly insubstantial, straining to see through the barrel of tar that was now my vision. “Mr. Merrick,” I whispered, my voice nearly impossible to find, “I think she’s here.”

  I heard him swallow hard, and then whimper.

  Having sensed what lurked outside, I expected the door to be thrown open, or to splinter apart, and I waited for that to happen. But it didn’t. Instead, after an endless moment, the door handle moved. I watched it, fighting the urge to rush and grab it and hold it fast, but I knew no mortal hand could prevent its turning.<
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  Mr. Merrick covered his face with his hand and shook. “She’s coming. She’s coming,” he said.

  The latch clicked, the door swung slowly open without a sound, and then I saw her.

  It was the same pale woman, the same ghost, wearing her wedding gown, her gray eyes hollowed out by despair. Her presence extinguished the last flame of heat in my body, leaving me lightless and cold, my jaw throbbing with blinding pain.

  She entered the room, and I leapt to my feet, fighting the panic that urged me to run as she drew nearer. I’d heard stories of violent, vengeful spirits that clawed and beat and even dragged people across the floor. The only thing that kept me there in that room was the realization that Mr. Merrick could not run, and I would not leave him alone with that thing.

  She reached the far edge of the mantel and there she stopped, looking about the room, paying particular attention, it seemed, to Mr. Merrick’s cards and pictures.

  Mr. Merrick finally brought his hand down from his eyes and looked up, tears glistening in the firelight on his cheeks. “Wh-who are you?” he asked, his musical voice sounding nearly undone. “What is it you want? Can—can I help you?”

  The ghost turned to regard him, and then closed the distance between us, standing near enough I could have reached out my hand to touch her, though that was an utterly horrifying thought. Instead, it was she who bent down toward Mr. Merrick and extended her hand toward him. He couldn’t move away, and I could do nothing but watch as she laid her palm against his cheek, after which a visible tremor worked its way down through him.

  “There is light here,” she said, her voice as forceful and ephemeral as the wind. “All is dark. But here there is light.”

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  “Polly,” she said.

  The name struck me all of a heap. It was the same name as the woman murdered but two nights ago, and it occurred to me then that these visitations had started the morning after the dock fire, the same morning Polly Nichols had been killed. But the living Polly had been a woman in her forties, and this ghost appeared not much older than twenty.

  I marshaled my voice. “Were you murdered, Polly? Is that who you are?”