Mayhem (21 page)

‘He is not well,’ I said. ‘He has taken some of the drug you use. It helped him …’ I did not know whether I wanted validate my next words by speaking them aloud, but I had no choice, for it was the truth. ‘It helped him to lead us here.’ I took Kosminski’s arm and gently led him inside, seating him on the wooden chair next to the blazing fire.

‘I have something that will calm him.’ From within his robes, the priest pulled a small bottle and held it out. ‘Drink this. One swallow.’

‘Liquid?’ Kosminski’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where from? Is it from the river—?’

‘Do as I say,’ the priest growled. He was a forbidding
presence and the little hairdresser took a swallow before hastily giving the bottle back. The effect was almost immediate. He became calmer, quieter, and now I could understand how the priest could remain so in control when under the influence of the strange drug. When he had seen enough, he must have trained himself to take some of this liquid – but what was it? Another drug, of course. How could anything any man said be relied upon when he was so often not himself? But here I was anyway, searching out one madman because of the words of another.

I looked around the small room that was so bare of possessions. ‘You do not have a Bible?’ I said, frowning. I had expected to see one beside the bed, or at least on the table – I would expect as much in most gentlemen’s houses, let alone a priest’s rooms.

‘The Lord and I do not need words.’ He grunted and sat on the bed, forcing a groan from it as it took his heavy weight. ‘I am trained by the Church. I am part of an order of the Church – but the Church is not my home.’

‘I do not understand – you are a priest?’ I sat on the other end of the mattress and turned inwards, so that the three of us were quite huddled together with the stranger at our centre.

‘I come from the grey area between good and evil, born with an unnatural gift. Perhaps this gift came from God, or perhaps from the devil. For my part, I choose to serve the Lord with it, to join the order and
fight the old evils that hide among us. But wicked deeds must sometimes be done in God’s name. I would not speak to the Lord and share these with him; the guilt is mine alone. If I must forego my place in Heaven for the work I’ve done in this world, then I will make that sacrifice.’

He cut a strange figure in the flickering firelight. It was as if the flames of hell were already burning around him. I did not wish to know more of the deeds of which he spoke. I was already more than slightly concerned that I might find out first-hand.

‘What unnatural gift?’ I asked.

‘The gifts come in many guises,’ he said. ‘Mine comes as visions.’ He nodded at Kosminksi, who was watching the priest with his mouth slightly open, as if he could not quite believe his own eyes. ‘Not like his,’ the priest continued. ‘I could not see into your head and lead you here. What I see – I see what is
really
there. I see creatures and people as they really are. I can sometimes
manage
them, bend them to my will for short bursts of time. At first, as a child, they all thought me mad, but then the priests came, and when they saw what burdened me, they took me and trained me. Now, like my brothers, I travel to where I am called, to hunt the evils that ordinary men find so hard to see.’

He stared into the flames for a while before carrying on, ‘Each one of us is different. But each brother has a skill; something that connects us with evil. That is why our souls are no doubt damned.’

‘I have to admit, I find it all very hard to believe,’ I said honestly. ‘Even with what I have witnessed tonight – how I got here. I am a man of science first and foremost. I believe in logic and reason.’

‘And yet, still you are here, with us.’ He smiled, his white teeth bared and sharp. ‘I think you are touched with the gift too: a damned soul.’

‘I am afraid I do not share your visions,’ I said. I felt suddenly defensive, and fought the urge to loosen my collar in the heat.

‘No, perhaps not, but you do not sleep, and you have become restless. You suffer anxiety. You know that it is among us.’

‘I have always suffered with bouts of insomnia,’ I protested, but he held a hand up to stop me.

‘This one is different. I know these things. I have seen you in the dens. More than all this, though, is your obsession with this killer. Everyone else seeks this flamboyant “Jack”, but not you. Somewhere inside, you recognise the work of true evil.’

‘Are you saying Jack is not evil?’ I wanted to transfer the focus away from myself. There was a limit to what I was prepared to believe in one go. My anxiety was simply a condition, as was my insomnia. I was not the first to suffer from either, and I would not be the last.

‘I think Jack is a result of this older evil – another like us, perhaps, who can sense the presence. Someone with a wickedness locked deep inside that has been set
free. But Jack is human evil, and there will be others like him in the city who are pulled into the mayhem. The city is full of anger and crime this year, yes? More than others? The creature that has drawn we three together is not.’

‘There were stories of your Order,’ Kosminski said, quietly. I had almost forgotten the hairdresser was there. ‘The Roman one – the men of God who had no God. My grandmother told me, before she died, when I was very small. She had visions, and her grandmother before her also. It should only be in the women.’ His nervous tics had faded and he looked saner than he had in our entire acquaintance. I wondered again what was in the bottle the priest had given him. I also found myself wondering if it would help me sleep.

‘You two have never met before?’ I asked, even though I knew what the answer would be. There had been no recognition from the priest when we had arrived, and I could think of no good reason for them to concoct such an elaborate ruse.

‘Never.’ The priest shook his head.

‘Tell me more about this “
Upir
”,’ I said. ‘You spoke about it before.’

‘It is so old,’ Kosminksi muttered, his eyes lost in something only he could see, ‘and it stinks of the river. It is in the
liquid
.’ He spat at the flames suddenly as if terrified of his own saliva. ‘And there is so much
blood. I can
feel
it.’ A trembling beset his body, and even though he was sitting close to the fire, it did not abate.

‘It is a parasite,’ the priest said. ‘An ancient wickedness. Something from a legend almost forgotten. It is
rotten
. Old, earthy – but it is sentient; it wants our reactions to it. It wants us to hunt it. It enjoys the game.’

‘I do not understand.’ I felt myself sinking deeper into the mire between what was real and what wasn’t. ‘What is it? What does it
do
?’

‘It
feeds
on us. When it is weak, it sleeps on the bottom of the rivers. It will not be far from one, in case it needs to flee there. It cannot live without a host for long.’

‘A host?’ He had said this the last time I had been in this room, but I had barely listened then, so focused as I was on my own disappointment. Now, even as I fought the suggestion that I was being sucked into their madness, I wanted to know.

‘It attaches itself to a host – someone unsuspecting. It either moves to another when that host dies, or takes refuge in the water to regain its strength.’ His eyes burned like dark coals. ‘It lives in the space between the host and its shadow. Its presence, for ever just out of sight, eventually drives the host mad. It will control him when it wants to.’

‘Control him to do what?’ Once again I knew the answer even as I asked the question. I had seen the
limbs dragged from the Thames, the emptied and ruined torso in the vault at Whitehall.

‘To
feed
,’ the priest said. ‘It wants the soft flesh. The organs.’

‘And the river,’ Kosminski muttered, ‘it has to feed the river. It has to make the river its own.’

‘What do you mean, “its own”?’

‘In case it needs to escape there.’

In the hazy warmth of the room in the middle of the night, it all made a strange kind of sense. Part of me still screamed madness, but I was fascinated by what both men were saying.

‘But why leave the torso in the Scotland Yard building? Why would it draw attention to itself like that? Or does it not have thoughts?’

‘Dark mischief,’ the priest said, ‘just like all the other devils that my Order hunts down. It wants to taunt us.’

‘It brings chaos,’ Kosminski added, nodding just a little bit too fast. His tics would be returning soon. ‘Mayhem.’

‘And the strange opium allows you to see it?’ I asked.

‘Normally it is only visible in the moment it moves from one host to another.’ His eyes looked directly into mine. ‘Or when it is about to kill you.’

‘You know a lot about this creature, given that it seems a little shy,’ I said, but neither of them rose to my bait. Part of me had hoped to get some reaction out
of them that would allow me to leave here, to storm away.
Ancient demons?
I was still not sure my belief could stretch that far.

‘There is a lot written, and there are myths and legends. The country people understand, those who live side by side with nature. I was sent by the Order to a village in Poland, where an English traveller was believed to have inadvertently freed the beast from the riverbed. He had escaped by the time I got there. I tracked him through Europe.’

‘How do you intend we find him in this heaving city if the police are having no luck?’

‘The host will have been sick after the
Upir
attached itself to him. The illness will still come in bouts between killings. The villagers also said he was a young gentleman – perhaps you can use your medical connections to see if any strange illnesses in such a man had been treated before the first of these murders that now plague you.’

‘I can try,’ I said, ‘but I must be honest with you. I am not sure I can believe in your story. However much I might see truth in it here, in the middle of the night, by morning I know my reason will be restored.’ I
hoped
it would, at any rate, though I could not help but remember how Kosminski had led me here. There was nothing natural about
that
.

The priest smiled at me. ‘You search for the
man
, in that case, Dr Bond. You do not have to believe in the
Upir
. As long as we find the killer, that is surely all that matters?’

I had no argument to that.

26

London. November, 1888

Elizabeth Jackson

‘It’s none of your business, Annie!’ she shouted at her sister before turning and half-walking, half-running down Turks Row. Her golden-red hair hung tangled down her back where it had come free from her bonnet.

‘You’re a disgrace!’ Annie fired at her back. ‘A shameful disgrace.’

Annie always did have to have the last word, and if it could be a hurtful one, then all the better. Elizabeth’s cheeks burned, and she swallowed angry tears. At least having to run after the unexpected argument had chased away the freezing cold, for a few minutes at least. She rounded the corner and leaned against the wall, her shoulders slumping slightly. Why did she have to go and bump into Annie, of all people? She let the tears flow, rubbing her cheeks with a grubby hand.

Her family did not understand – of course not; who would? Why would she leave a perfectly good job to work the streets, give up a nice warm attic room to doss down in a flea-filled lodging-house? What could she tell them? Certainly not the truth:
he came back
.

She couldn’t tell them James had come back, that he was getting married and moving back into the house where his parents had died, because they wouldn’t understand why that would matter. And she certainly couldn’t tell them what he had done to her in the streets between her house and his. She rubbed her belly and the ruination growing inside and as she remembered the terror of that moment when he had
changed
from one person to another, the tears fell heavier and she started sobbing. He would come for her again if he could find her; she knew that – but this time it would not be her body he would want – it would be her blood.

Promise me you’ll run
.

She needed to leave Chelsea; the ease with which Annie had found her proved that.

She wondered if she would ever be able to run far enough.

27

London. February, 1889

Dr Bond

If 1888 had been a lion of a year for crime, then 1889 was starting as a lamb, and I was not the only one relieved at that. The search for Jack had thus far been fruitless, but at least he had not killed again, and slowly, life in Whitechapel and across London was returning to normal. Jack was silent, and there had been no more dismembered bodies pulled from the river either. We were in a hushed lull of hopefulness.

Inspector Moore, who, along with the rest of the Force, was finally being able to return to his normal duties, called it right when he said that they were all praying that both killers – if they were indeed separate – had either died or moved on. If they could not be caught, then they could at least go and plague someone else’s city.

I hoped he was right; I hoped we could finally put all this madness behind us, but my continued sleeplessness and bouts of anxiety made it hard for me to relax or let go. I almost regretted my alliance with the priest and the strange little hairdresser – for one, should Moore ever find out that I was meeting secretly
with a man once considered a murder suspect, this would not bode well for my career, and possibly even my liberty. And as long as there were no fresh murders around, it was easy to start considering their ideas madness once again.

All the same, every fortnight or so I would find one or the other waiting for me outside my home or at the hospital, or there would be a letter through my door, arranging a time, and we would go to the dens, take the strange opium and walk the streets of London together until dawn broke. Then the priest would share his elixir and we would return to our homes. I knew they were frustrated at my relative inaction, but first we had had Christmas, and then, in late January, Juliana and James had wed, and there had been a fine celebration. I had been distracted – I had
wanted
to be distracted.