The Best of Penny Dread Tales (3 page)

Standing next to my creation, I attempted to eavesdrop more and drink less. Two topics of conversation buzzed about the room. People spoke of the Aeolian Company and the advancements they had made in the self-playing piano. The general agreement was that such a device might be superfluous. Who could not play the piano? Why have an expensive machine for such a task?

The other piece of conversation was far more sinister. The body of a woman had been found in Whitechapel, horribly murdered.

I recalled Davyss’ strange visit from the night before but quickly discounted my suspicions. Sad to say, the population of my East End slum was not blessed with longevity. Death was common. At times, even welcome.

Mrs. Edmund Reid spoke in whispers, for this incident seemed different. Her husband was the Detective Inspector working on the case. “Inspector Reid was very tremulous when he came home this afternoon, and that is why he could not attend this exhibition. The horrid, unimaginable details of the crime have shaken my husband to his foundations. Is Whitechapel filled only with the bestial and the wanton?”

No, Whitechapel is mostly filled with the hungry
, I wanted to say, but I refrained. A huge grandfather clock chimed four, and it was time for Christine’s performance.

Davyss stepped out. “My friends and colleagues, brothers and sisters of Phoebus Apollo, today you will see a dream fulfilled. My dream, and the dream of my associate, Mr. Percival Lewand. Countless hours has Mr. Lewand worked to bring us this modern miracle. Not just an automatic piano, but an automatic piano with the sensitivities to move us as no other musician could. I present to you, Mr. Lewand and his creation, Christine.” With a flourish, he tugged the sheet off the automaton. A number one vial of blood was loaded. Her gears were set. All she needed was the music.

I moved forward, not having the courage nor sobriety to make a speech of my own. Every eye in the room fell on me. I wheeled over a tall stand with a hook holding a long continuous scroll of perforated music. I triggered Christine’s lever, then fed the first part of the scroll into her cylinders. As she played, the paper would unwind giving her an uninterrupted stream of ones and zeroes.

The music I had chosen was from the incomparable Liszt, his
Piano Concerto No 1
.

Sweat pinched my eyes. I had tested the blood from the number one vials briefly, and yet what if this time it did not work? If she failed to perform, I would be a laughingstock.

But Christine played, and played beautifully. So sad, so very sad, that soon no one was unmoved. Even during the more jovial movements of the piece, she played them with such a fragility and melancholy that I found myself on the verge of tears.

Once she finished, everyone stood to applause. A standing ovation! We were a success! An unbridled success!

After many minutes of shaking hands and basking in praise, Davyss pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. “Next Saturday afternoon I have a friend who owns a theatre. He wants Christine to play as a prologue to a guest symphony. Already people are asking if they can purchase a Christine.” From his pocket, he pulled out several inches of pound notes. “Mr. Lewand, this is only just the beginning.”

Smiles filled me like sunshine. “Will we be playing the number one vial again?”

Davyss leered. “Oh, no. Fresh blood. I know what Christine likes. The fresher the better, full of passion, lust, and a raw longing for life.”

***

I was free to continue my experiments with the number one blood. I found that every song emerged from Christine’s fingers brimming with melancholy, no matter what modifications I made. I gave Christine Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
, and her playing was anything but joyful. Where had Davyss procured such blood? And why had the donor been so sad?

Long hours I spent testing and encoding new pieces for Christine to play. All the while eating beef and drinking tea. I could not discern how the blood worked, but work it certainly did. I rejoiced in what I had created and what my benefactor had improved upon. I felt like a blessed Pygmalion, or a more fortunate Daedalus, destined for a seat on Mount Olympus!

Once again, Davyss pounded at my door in the very earliest of the morning hours on the Saturday of our next performance, September 8th. I had to wrestle myself out of my blankets to let him in. He had three vials of blood, all marked number two. His manner was far more subdued, almost peaceful.

“The number two should prove to have some interesting results,” he said. “Interesting indeed.”

“Since we have three vials,” I replied, “I will test them, and then find suitable music.”

He smiled. “It does not matter what piece she plays, as long as she plays with blood full of raw passion.” With that, he disappeared into the gloom. Dawn colored the horizon.

I got to work right away. The number two made Christine’s music rage. Even mellow, melodic pieces came out jagged and hateful. I chose a piece for her to play to match the furor in the blood. Chopin’s
Nocturne in C minor, Op 48, No 1.

Our next performance drew an even greater audience. The theatre owner was ecstatic. After Christine’s wrathful playing, I found myself in the foyer near Mrs. Reid. “They have found another body in Whitechapel, murdered in a similar fashion.” The woman’s face was positively colorless. “My poor husband cannot sleep. Truth be told, neither can I, with this murderous madman on the loose.”

I glanced up to see Davyss listening intently, a little smile playing on his face.

I could not wrest my gaze from my benefactor’s self-satisfied visage. Suddenly I had an explanation for his strange visitations and the warm vials. The blood, number one and number two, it had come from the women killed in Whitechapel. And Davyss had murdered them.

Cold horror drowned me until my heart froze solid in my chest.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Lewand?” Davyss asked.

I shook my head, glanced away. Futile were my attempts to swallow all of the shock and loathing I was feeling. I could scarcely breathe.

***

For the next few weeks, gin rode on my back like a devil with a switch. Every time I thought to call the police or contact Inspector Reid, the devil would strike me. No escape. I would drown with Davyss in a swamp of blood. And still, whenever my Christine would play, I found myself moved because we had captured the lightning and sorrow and emotion of life. To experience such passion was only the turn of a key away.

Rarely sober, my mind began to play tricks on me. I would awake to hear Christine playing a piece, but no, that was impossible. She sat empty of music, no ones or zeroes for her cylinders to interpret, bathed in the blood of Whitechapel women.

One night I woke in the pitch black of my basement, a horrible notion filling me that something was very amiss. I lit a candle only to find the space in front of my piano empty. My first thought made me utter a syllable of despair. Someone had crept in and stolen Christine.

No. I found her in the corner, her three-toed foot soaking in the perpetual puddle that covered that side of my room. I wheeled her back to the piano, wondering why in my drunken stupor I had moved her. I dried her foot carefully.

Another night, I woke to the sound of her gears moving. This time, she was in front of the door, fingers reaching, toes pressing, playing at a piano that wasn’t there until her gearing unwound completely. The music in her back was Chopin’s
Funeral March
. I tightened the lever at her neck and adjusted her leg again. A malfunction in the knee hinge must have inadvertently pushed her to the door.

Our next performance was on Sunday, September 30th, and again, in a far larger venue.

I looked in the newspapers for another murder, but none came. I knew the reason. Davyss would wait until the evening before our concert to give Christine fresh blood. With my silence, I may as well have been murdering the women myself.

I still had some of the sad blood, filled with death’s lamentation. Listening to Christine playing the number one, it was as if I were dying. Gin took care of that. Days of inebriation, two week’ worth, and on September 29
^th
, I paced through my basement apartment, splashing through the rainwater there, beating dilapidated pianos with the leg of a bench, furious over my own avarice and cowardice. And still the gin beat me into submission with a switch of fire.

I waited for Davyss to come. I did not have long to wait. At midnight, the knock came on my door.

I flung it open, revealing the villain in his coat. This time, he had a small case filled with six vials, three marked as number three, three as number four. Two women had been butchered, all because I wanted to eat. Because I had vainglorious dreams of wealth and fame.

Our eyes locked.

Like the last time, he was mellow, his whole manner one of passive relaxation.

“May I come in?” he asked.

Wordless, I acquiesced.

Once inside, Davyss’ voice came out even. “Mr. Lewand, you think that I am murdering women in Whitechapel so that Christine’s playing will move the hearts of her listeners. Is that correct?”

I nodded, stifled a belch, though I knew he could ascertain my level of intoxication by smell alone.

Davyss smiled. “Oh, Mr. Lewand, that is not the case, I can assure you. At the hospital I have access to all types of blood. Do not let your imagination get the better of you.” He paused. “And do not let alcohol become your master. You have worked too hard and too long to be locked up as mentally incompetent due to excessive intemperance.”

“Is that a threat?” I asked, hardly breathing.

“Oh, no,” he said, still grinning. “I would be doing it for your own good. As I have done for others who so desperately needed help with their drinking. Do you understand my meaning, sir?”

“I understand,” I whispered. His lies did not fool me. The truth of his crimes whispered to me through the tormented notes Christine played.

He left me with the blood of the two Whitechapel women. I read about them in the newspaper later that day. They were killed just down the street from my basement apartment. The newspaper had a name for the murderer, a horrible name, part fairly-tale everyman, and part description of how he killed the women. He ripped them open. He was a ripper. A monster. And I knew his identity.

Yet, because of the qualities in the blood Davyss brought me, our Sunday concert went perfectly, absolutely perfectly. In an effort to keep our Christine novel, Davyss declared we would not have another performance until November. Let six weeks pass so that word of mouth could make Christine’s next appearance the biggest, the best, and the most profitable.

Already, other pioneers of the self-playing piano, men such as Misters Wilcox and White, were asking Davyss to see Christine, but of course he refused them. As he also refused the Aeolian Company despite their offer of lucre. Christine was ours, his and mine, along with his deranged secret, which I could not tell a soul on penalty of incarceration in the London Hospital’s insane asylum.

Six weeks until another murder. Six weeks until our next performance, on Friday, November 9
^th
.

What could I do? Nothing. I drank gin. I listened to Christine play, not remembering what pieces I had given her. Impossible, that she could play without the perforated music, and yet, it seemed I would find scrolls of music in piles on the floor and her fingers still moved over the keys—her face only a porcelain mask, unmoving, unmoved, with the same blank expression I had painted on it.

I moved my cabinet player about nonsensically in my inebriation. How else could she travel to the door, to the wall, to the corner? One morning I woke with a start to find her looming over me, hands hooked into claws. I admonished myself as I moved her back to her place in front of the piano, thumbs above middle C.

Randomly, Davyss would come to listen to Christine play from the numbered vials. He would sit on a cast-off bench, eyes closed, and sometimes he would murmur from that poem, strange lines:

“What then am I? Am I more senseless grown

Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!

’Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.”

Christine would begin a new piece, and he would pace, then stop, as if remembering some fine evening of love, then he would cry such anguished tears, then laugh. In my gin-soaked fog, I would watch him in loathing, wishing him out of my sight. Even so, he would bring me bundles of money, which I stuffed into a suitcase next to my bed.

Blood money. In every sense of the word.

***

Thursday, November 8
^th
, the day before the performance, I was determined to stop him. I had kept myself away from gin in the morning so that I might be sober, so that I might go to the police and tell them the Ripper would strike again, that Dr. Martin Marquavious Davyss would strike again.

Every time I went to the door, I would turn back. I was shaking, delirium tremens a storm in my body. Would the police listen to me? Or would they have me sent to the insane asylum?

All day long, all night long, I suffered in my paroxysm. Christine would play, her fingers striking keys in a fury, but it was not music, it was madness. I would go to the door, she would stop. I would open the door, close it, and go back to pacing. And her playing would continue. Had I wound her gears? I must have. Did she have music to play? Of course.

One of Davyss’ acquaintances had given me an unpublished piece of music by Camille Saint-Saëns,
Le Carnaval des Animaux
, or,
The Carnival of the Animals
. I had encoded it for Christine, and she would play it, ferociously, filled with the blood of the innocent slain.

Thursday night passed into Friday morning. I clung to sobriety, thinking maybe Davyss had lost his desire for blood and murder. No knock had come on my door. Had he given up his wicked ways?

At noon on that Friday, scarcely an hour before Christine was due to be brought to her evening performance, a knock sounded on my door.

Davyss. Carrying a satchel. He shouldered off his overcoat to reveal hands half-washed, still stained a pinkish hue. Dried blood flecked his entire suit of dress. Words gushed out of his mouth in a torrent. “Lewand, oh, Lewand, I cannot wait to see how Christine interprets number five, for she was, well, I had time. I could take all the time I wanted with number five.”