Castle Rouge (16 page)

FROM A YELLOW BOOK

Trains make him uneasy.

He finds their motion sickening. The way the tracks eat up miles also upsets his usually steel stomach.

He is a prodigious walker, my large burly charge. It offends him to see means other than time-tested foot or hoof accomplishing such marvels of time and motion. What the modern world worships—speed, ease, luxury—he despises as weak and corrupt.

Therefore almost all in city life offends him. His is a soul born to expand in the mighty cathedral and natural Gothic arch of forest, in the empty chancel of deserted climes, under the heaven-thrusting spires of mountains.

As we move slowly into landscape that swells to encompass his needs and enthusiasms, he feels more sharply the strictures of his recent life, no matter how much he has smashed through them.

It is all I can do to confine him to the compartment.

At times I think he would leap out the window like a goat and go clambering with his kind over the huge boulders that strew the mountain meadows like the severed heads of stone giants.

According to the tales of his previous travels, he has trudged across most of the continent in the most forbidding of weather, from searing heat to ice-bitter cold.

I myself have tasted the extremes of heat and cold in the past, and prefer temperance in this one area. In all other arenas, I am with my beast: life is best lived to excess, in the lofty halls of those who abide by no rules, among the gods of Olympus or Asgard…or Heaven before our friend Lucifer left it to its Bearded Old Man landlord.

My lad is quite religious, in his way.

Given his unwholesome pagan appetites, I find this contradiction most amusing.

He knows I study him and is flattered by that attention in his crude, boyish way.

He thinks he will be a person of importance someday.

He is already unaware that he has earned a sobriquet that puts half the known world in a panic.

Jack the Ripper.

Or…Attila the Hun. Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible. They all spring from the same deliciously tainted fountain of humanity that I so adore.

It is what has made them famous. Immortal. Or simply notorious on the grand scale.

I crave notoriety, but I also desire anonymity.

What a quandary. No wonder I am forced to work through lesser tools.

He will crouch sometimes on the floor of the compartment, at my feet, like a great shaggy mountain dog. Even sitting on a chair is a civilizing burden he cannot long endure.

It would be amusing to try to make a gentleman of him. Yet that would take more time than I have. And, actually, I prefer the easier task of making a monster of a gentleman. There I have what is called a “head start.”

I smile to think of the chaos we have left behind in Paris.

The four dead women are the least of it.

It is like allowing a few drops of blood to drip into a pond. At first the large body of water appears to absorb the gaudy addition. Yet unseen the atoms of blood diffuse and spread out until, invisible, they tinge every wavelet that laps the shore. All waters, of baptism or birth or Mother Ocean, are tainted by the shed blood of the lambs and the lions. I see the thin crimson crust edging even the most holy spring. That has been my curse. And his as well.

It would be amusing to import this virile infection over water, to the States perhaps.

But there my boy would be too obviously a fish out of his bloody water. The East is in his veins, as is savagery. For a moment I toy with the notion of him encountering a Red Indian, surely one of the last savage races left on the planet.

The one upon our trail in Paris, for all his Wild West Show drollery, might actually be the match for him.

A pity I could not dally to make him part of my experiment. It is interesting that the Red Man shares with my beast a weakness for strong drink, a taste that first enhances strength and then, inevitably, saps it to the last pathetic drop.

Yet I have high hopes of my beast even on this score. Thus far the drink has only aided and abetted him. I am reminded of Mr. Stevenson’s intriguing Mr. Hyde, or a misshapen dwarf like Quasimodo, that pagan sprite of Notre Dame. One of world literature’s many monster-heroes, yet with the rotten soft-center of a Viennese sweet.

None of that for my beast. He murmurs as I stroke his unkempt head while he crouches beside me on the floor. I bleed in secret ways and that both calms and excites him.

I open my palm, where a brass fitting from a piece of luggage has carved away a small, burning tongue of flesh. He smells the blood, turns, licks it like a dog.

It is our Sacrament. His strange pale eyes meet mine. He wants what I will give him…when I am ready.

He will kill for me, but mainly for himself.

That is why I love him as no other.

Save one.

10.

A Stray Chicken

One of the most dangerous classes in the world is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless…a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed
.

—
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, SHERLOCK HOLMES IN
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX

FROM A JOURNAL

This crude shed has neither the formal stone bier, the refrigeration that quells scent, nor the neat wooden clothing pegs of the Paris Morgue.

The girl’s body lies atop a crude wooden board on saw-horses.

Wind whistles through the fir slats of the shed and plays among her locks of hair. She smells both sour and sweet, like some German cooking. My stomach lurches.

I can understand how the people of these remote villages believe the dead could walk. Her skirts tremble in the torchlight, touched by the wind but not breath.

Quentin Stanhope has gone before us like John the Baptist, announcing our advent. I only hope we do not catch up to him as a head upon a tray.

The stern German police official is stoic about showing two women the savaged body of a third woman.

“Her name was Liesl,” he says in English stilted enough that I must translate it for my journal. “She sold flowers at the train station. An orphan, perhaps seventeen. Her flowers were scattered around her and her money was gone. There is not a copper left to pay for her burial. She had flowers but no funeral.”

“But she wasn’t found near the train station,” Irene says, staring at the dead face as if she might recognize the features could they only speak, move.

“
Nein
. In a cave a short walk from the rail yard. A cave fit for dogs. Or wolves and bears.”

“Wolves and bears,” Irene repeats, in her deepest, darkest stage voice.

The man nods. He has a fleshy face that shadows work ruin in. He likes his schnapps and his sauerkraut and dumplings. He believes that caves fit for dogs and wolves and bears are best avoided. I can read all that by the smell of beets and peppermint on his breath.

“You have not removed her clothing,” Irene notes.

“The wounds are obvious. The torn throat, the slashed bosom.”

“We would like to be alone with her.”

His face curdles with puzzlement and distaste. What would women want with a dead woman?

“Prayers,” Irene explains, for a moment looking as modest and implacable as a nun.

It is enough.

He bows out of the shed, leaving us to the flickering torch and the features that flicker with deceptive life.

“I pray,” she says, looking at me, “we do not find what we expect.”

I can’t do it. I know what she wants to know. I am as eager as she to know it. But for the life of me I can’t do it: lift the dead creature’s oddly sentient skirt, look like any lewd man on her privates, violate her in death as well as in life.

Irene draws up the cloth like a curtain, her face stone.

It is only two superficial slashes, in an “X.” I turn away, cover my mouth, choke back my rising gorge. Is Sherlock Holmes pursuing such grisly examinations in London now? Or only cold, cerebral trails?

“Wolves,” Irene spits out. “Caves.”

“Is it the Ripper?”

“He has no time now. No…leisure. No time for pseudo-surgery. It is rip and tear and move on. Perhaps because we chase him.”

“Us? We’re responsible?”

“No.” She brushes her brow as if to remove cobwebs only she can see. “He would do what he does without us.
To
us, if he could. He does not discriminate. But somebody does.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody wants us on this trail. On his trail.”

“To catch him?”

“Or for him to catch us.”

“Us? Me? They know about me?”

“You are the internationally famous Nellie Bly.”

“Not that international. Yet. Why don’t they want Sherlock Holmes?”

“I’m not saying they don’t, but Dr. John H. Watson is not missing, that I know of.”

“Who is Dr. John H. Watson?”

“Sherlock Holmes’s Nell.”

“He has a friend, that man?”

“You’re surprised?”

“He struck me as utterly self-sufficient, but…when he left our rooms, after—”

“After?”

“After he’d tried to convince you that you were up to facing Nell’s loss.”

“Did he try to do that?” Her tone was dreamy, distant.

“Try to convince you? Yes! You wouldn’t listen.”

“I couldn’t hear then, not even Sherlock Holmes. That was…clever of him. A pity I…missed it.”

“You missed much in those hours. You were as lost as Nell.”

She shook her head. Threw off that despairing self of hers, even the memory, as a snake would shuck a dead skin.

“We will all be lost if we do not track and stop this criminal. He is rushed now. He has become used to being ignored, forgotten, overlooked. No more. He kills like a wolf on the run…to where? To somewhere that he can revert to his usual practices.”

“You make it sound like a…an art form.”

“It is a form, I’m convinced of that. Not so mindless as it seems.”

“But it must be. No mind could conceive these attacks and remain sane.”

“Didn’t you absorb your Krafft-Ebing? These killers are perfectly sane until they kill. They are Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes. On one hand the rational, organizing mind. On the other, the rampaging, tearing emotions.”

She turned me to face the torchlight, to watch it flicker in her living features as it had danced on the face of the dead girl moments before.

“Don’t you see it? The great rationality of Sherlock Holmes, for instance? Don’t you sense the insanity that lingers beneath? The more that Reason rules, the more Insanity runs rampant beneath the surface. We are all like that. We are all just this far from being like that. Look at your rage toward your violent stepfather Jack Ford! You testified against him in a court of law as a child. Why do you subject yourself to madhouses and brothels except to expose other Jack Fords? Look at the rage of Jack Ford. You lived with a madman, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. You made Nellie Bly to hunt him down. You are with me now to find another incarnation of him. Don’t tell me I am an unnatural woman to protect mine, to fight the darkness that gouges at my kind. You are me, and I am you. And we both can become Jack Ford or Jack the Ripper if we let ourselves.”

“No. I will never admit that.”

“Then you will never catch Jack the Ripper, however many headlines you covet.”

“I am more than headlines!”

“Prove it. Come with me even though you believe the hunt pointless.”

“I…don’t.”

She looked at me. I did not look at her.

“Come with me,” she said as softly as a siren, mocking my reluctance and my hunger at the same time. For a moment, I wondered if this was how Jack the Ripper felt, reluctant and hungry. And why. “You will be sorry, but you will get Jack Ford at last.”

“He’s dead,” I said, meaning to object.

She only shook her head.

11.

Cold Comfort

He has always been of unstable mind and a person whom one would expect to become actively insane from a comparatively minor cause
.

—
DR. W. ORANGE, SUPERINTENDENT, THE BROADMOOR CRIMINAL LUNATIC ASYLUM
, 1883

FROM A JOURNAL

At the train station, Irene consulted the schedules.

Or she appeared to.

She approached the ticketseller, a broad man of sixty with old-fashioned muttonchop whiskers as broad. Fortunately, he spoke some English, so I was able to follow the conversation, which quickly became one of Irene’s casual interrogations.

“We need tickets to Frankfurt,” she began, “but—”

He paused in shuffling through his papers.

“We were supposed to meet my brother here and travel on together. I wondered if he had bought a ticket yet. In the past day or two. He may have arrived here before me.”

“Many men who could be your brother or another’s have bought tickets in the past two days, men enough to be brother to half the Prussian army.”

Irene smiled apologetically, with a helpless tilt of her head.

“My brother is rather headstrong. He may have grown annoyed because I am a trifle late. He is a man of middling height, dark-haired…but, Hortense!” She turned to me. “You have the portrait of Henry, don’t you?”

At this cue I drew a cabinet photograph from my capacious handbag. When the small book opened, one side of the glass showed a photograph of Irene, the other a pastel portrait of a man.

“Henry.” Irene beamed proudly.

“This is not a photograph.” The ticketmaster leaned through his archway to squint at the likeness.

“Henry is afraid of cameras. So silly, but true. He could be persuaded to sit for a sketch, however.”

I had to swallow a grin. Irene’s first act on recovering her wits after Nell’s abduction had been to drag me to a café in Montmartre, where a rather seedy artist nursing absinthe had listened to our long, joint, and sometimes conflicting descriptions of James Kelly, also known as Jack the Ripper to the Paris police, and had finally drawn this likeness to our mutual satisfaction.