The Harvest Man (10 page)

“Which children’s that?”

“Never mind. Just get me there as quickly as you can. They’ve already been through enough. They needn’t spend the night in the wood after all.”

B
lackleg led Hammersmith to a narrow street in a neighborhood full of empty crumbling shops and people asleep under tents and awnings. Gas globes gave a faint radiance to the human shapes in the mist around them. Hammersmith saw a child eating something that resembled a squirrel, and a woman with scabs on her face reached out to him as he passed.

“A penny for a roll wiff me,” she said. “A ha’penny, even?”

Hammersmith shuddered and looked the other way, but Blackleg stopped and gave the woman a coin. When he rejoined Hammersmith a moment later, he seemed embarrassed.

“Gotta help each other,” he said. “Nobody else will.”

“But that woman . . .”

“She’s got a baby to feed, don’t she?”

“Does she?”

“Her name’s Liz and her baby’s name’s Michael. The folks on this street are all the family she’s got. Now shut up with that look on yer face and follow. Don’t get lost or you’re not gonna find yer way home from here.”

Hammersmith glanced back, but the woman was gone. He wiped the palm of his hand over his face and rolled his shoulders, then hurried to catch up to Blackleg, who was already halfway to the next corner. The criminal didn’t look back, but marched purposefully to a building three doors down from the end of the street. It appeared to Hammersmith to be an abandoned textile factory, but smaller than any that he had seen before. The entire structure leaned to the west and the upper story was half gone. He could see birds roosting in the exposed timbers of the roof. Blackleg beckoned for Hammersmith to follow him down an alley that ran between the warehouse and the next building over. A wedge of gaslight disappeared three feet beyond the alley’s mouth and Hammersmith hesitated. Blackleg was a scoundrel and a murderer and he had never guaranteed Hammersmith safe passage. Still, to turn around and go back would be an admission of defeat. He might as well give up any lingering notions of being a policeman and instead settle in as a clerk or a shopkeeper. He took a deep breath and plunged into the shadows.

And almost bumped into Blackleg, who was standing against the wall in the dark.

“What is it? Why have you stopped?”

“It’s behind me,” Blackleg said. “You took a minute there. Thought you was lost.”

“Just wary,” Hammersmith said.

“Good. Wary’s a good instinct. Now c’mon.”

He turned and, with a grunt, pulled himself through a half-open window. Hammersmith watched him disappear into the blackness of the warehouse. He shrugged and shook his head and jumped up onto the sill. He turned and sat, dangling his legs over the edge, then scooted forward and let himself drop into the room. He landed gently, but felt the impact in his chest, as if he’d broken open his wounds, doused them in kerosene, and set them on fire. He took a moment to gather himself and heard the sound of his heavy breathing echo off the nearby walls. When he felt he could move again, he looked all about him in the inky dark, but couldn’t see a thing anywhere, just a grey rectangle behind him where the window led back out into the alley.

“Blackleg?”

“Here.” A moment later, Hammersmith heard the
scritch
of a match against a striker and saw the orange flare of a lantern being lit. Blackleg closed the shutter and swung the light in Hammersmith’s direction.

“Keep coming, bluebottle. It’s over here at the other end.”

“We’re liable to run into something. Or fall. This floor’s probably rotten all the way through.”

“It’ll hold you. It holds me just fine, and you figure to weigh about as much as one of my arms, boy. Look.” The lantern jiggled and swayed about, creating chiaroscuro patterns across the walls and in every corner of the room.

“Are you jumping up and down?”

“Aye,” Blackleg said. “Showin’ you the floor’s solid.”

“Well, all right, then.”

Hammersmith shuffled carefully across the room. He pretended he was wearing skates, but the floor wasn’t as smooth as an icy pond. Floorboards had warped and buckled. They stuck up at odd angles here and there, as if peeled away and discarded by some angry carpenter. If he tripped, Hammersmith was certain he’d get a face full of splinters.

Eventually he made it to the far wall, where Blackleg waited with the lantern. The criminal nodded at him and produced a key from his waistcoat, which he held up in the flickering light. He bent and inserted the key into a hole in a door and turned a knob and the door swung open, disappearing as it moved away from them. Darkness exploded at them, an eruption of wings and high-pitched screeches. Hammersmith ducked and covered his head. In a moment it was over and Blackleg grabbed his arm, pulled him forward.

“Bats,” Blackleg said. “They won’t hurt you. C’mon.”

They moved together into more darkness.

“There’s stairs here,” Blackleg said. “Might be slick with bat shit. Watch yer step and stay with me.”

“Oh, I’m following you. No plans to run off on my own.”

“See that you don’t. I wouldn’t wanna have to try to find you in here.”

Hammersmith kept one hand on the wall and put his other hand on Blackleg’s shoulder and they started to move down.

“Wait,” Hammersmith said. “Give me a moment, would you?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t . . . well, it’s tight spaces. They bother me.”

“Well, they should, too.”

“And I don’t like to go below ground level if I can help it.”

“Who does?”

“And I don’t care much for the dark.”

“You’re not alone in that.”

“It’s just . . . I need a moment.”

“We can turn back,” Blackleg said. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway.”

“But what’s down there? What are you so intent on showing me?”

“I seem intent to you?”

“Perhaps a bit.”

“I could tell you what’s down there. But it’s better to see it. Besides, if I tell you, you’ll wanna see it anyway, I think, so I say we either go on ahead down and I show you, or we go back and forget the whole thing.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No,” Blackleg said. “You’re the only bluebottle I know of who might give a good goddamn and I wanna show you what we got down there. But you don’t owe me nothin’ and I don’t owe you nothin’ and you can come take a look if you want to, but I ain’t gonna force you. That’s that. It’s your mind to make up as you please, isn’t it?”

Hammersmith took in a deep breath, filled his lungs with stale musty air, then blew it all out until he felt hollow inside. “All right,” he said. “But take it slow. It’s hard to breathe, isn’t it?”

“Not particular hard, no. There’s air down in there same as there is up here.”

Hammersmith gritted his teeth and took shallow breaths through his nose. He could see swirling dots of light from the corners of his eyes, but when he moved his head, they weren’t there. His skull felt like it needed to be oiled, like it had rusted in place at the top of his spine. He moved slowly down the stairs, grateful that Blackleg was maintaining an unhurried pace ahead of him. The criminal blocked most of the lantern’s light with his body, but Hammersmith could see the walls on either side of them as they slid into view below and then passed out of their bubble of light behind them. Blackleg’s silhouette moved with confidence, as if he had traveled this way many times before. Hammersmith heard nothing but the sounds of their feet on the stairs and it occurred to him that he really did trust the barrel-shaped criminal. While it was entirely possible he was leading Hammersmith into some kind of ambush, it seemed unlikely. The dread that Hammersmith felt came only from the darkness and the closeness of their surroundings.

When they reached the last step, Blackleg asked Hammersmith to stand still while he hunted up another lantern. A moment later, there was the scrape of a shutter and a flare of light and the combined illumination of the two lamps shone all round the dry stone walls of a small chamber. The wall behind Blackleg was filled by a wide black mouth. It was the only possible exit, aside from the stairway they’d just come down, and Hammersmith felt the air pressing in on him from all sides. The lattice of scars on his chest ached. He looked up, but the solid stone ceiling did nothing to assuage his fears. If anything, it seemed much too heavy to remain where it was. He felt suddenly certain it was going to fall on him, crush him, fill his mouth with dirt and pulp his eyeballs, break his bones and bury him there forever.

“You’re all right,” Blackleg said.

“How do you know?”

“If I’m all right, you’re all right. And I’m all right. Nothing’s happened to me here, and I’ve been down in this cave dozens of times.”

Hammersmith swallowed hard. His face felt hot with shame.

“I understand,” Blackleg said. “Lucky Eddy was in the mines afore he came over and made hisself a shofulman. You know shofulman?”

“Counterfeit money,” Hammersmith said. His voice was shaky. “A counterfeiter, right?”

“Aye. That. Wanted to put his operation down in here, but he couldn’t stomach it. He’d pass out and wake up screaming.”

“Did it get better for him?”

“If it did, he can’t tell us about it now. Got picked up by the rozzers and died in jail six months back. Don’t matter, nohow. You can put up with bein’ down here five more minutes, I think. Long enough to see what we got.” He jerked his head and swung the lamp in an arc, turned, and beckoned Hammersmith toward the great black hole in the opposite wall. “When it started, we didn’t know it was gonna be more than one, but we knew it were possible. So we brought her here. The first one. She was alive then, but not for long.”

He stopped and Hammersmith almost bumped into him. They were just inside the hollow in the stone wall, twelve feet across and ten feet high and eight feet deep. A long bench, carved into the rock, filled the niche. Three women lay on the bench against the wall, their feet pointed out at Blackleg and Hammersmith. The women were wrapped in rough blankets, their hair plaited in braids, their eyes closed, and their hands crossed on their breasts. The fingernails on the nearest girl’s left hand were broken and jagged, black beneath the tips. Hammersmith could see dark splotches on the blankets, deeper black at their centers, fuzzing out near the edges. Inky liquid that had soaked into the fabric, spreading out and drying in irregular patterns.

“Blood?”

“Aye, it’s blood,” Blackleg said.

“What happened to them?”

“Kilt. Somebody came on ’em at night, up there on the street, and cut ’em up bad. Left ’em there.”

“And you brought their bodies down here?”

“I didn’t. Some of ’em that found the girls brought ’em down here. Like I say, the first girl was still alive when they found her. They didn’t know what else to do.”

“Tell the police. Get a doctor.”

“We got a doctor. Got our own man what won’t go spreadin’ rumors. Knows how to keep a thing or two to hisself. Nothin’ he could do by the time he got to her.” Blackleg pointed to the woman in the middle. She looked to Hammersmith to be about nineteen years old, but the skin was slack on her cheeks and neck and he could see old bruises on her arms.

“But the—”

“We don’t go to the rozzers,” Blackleg said. “They come to us and it’s never good when they does. Present company excepted, ’cept of course you ain’t one of ’em no more, which is the only reason I care to show you this.”

“Surely you should have turned their bodies over to authorities after a time.”

“How long a time? We’re still decidin’. Been a year since this happened the last time, ain’t it? And the rozzers didn’t catch the bloke then, did they?”

“When did these new murders happen?”

“Been happening for three weeks now. One a week. Every Sunday morning in the wee hours, like a sorta blasphemy. Lotta the girls are scared to go out anymore. It’s just like it was.”

Hammersmith understood what he meant. It was like the summer of 1888 when Jack the Ripper stalked the alleyways of the East End.

“Come closer,” Blackleg said. He stepped up to the bench and moved the blanket from the nearest woman’s torso. Hammersmith averted his eyes, ashamed for the poor dead woman, but Blackleg caught him by the elbow and pulled him over. “It’s all right. I’m keepin’ it decent. Just looka what he done.”

Hammersmith sighed and glanced at the corpse. Blackleg had kept the blanket bunched over her breasts and thighs, but had exposed her abdomen. In the lantern light it resembled an eclipse of the sun, ragged yellow flesh ringing a black maw.

“What, what am I seeing here?”

“He took it all,” Blackleg said. “Took all her insides. Scooped ’em out whole. They’re gone.”

“This wasn’t the first one, the one who lived?” Hammersmith was horrified by the thought that anyone might survive for even a moment with such terrible wounds.

“No. That one he was gentler with, but he gets worse with every one he does.”

“I don’t want to look at any more.”

“This is the worst of ’em. I just wanted you to see.”

Blackleg moved the blanket back over the hole in the woman.

“What were their names?”

“Their names?”

“Yes,” Hammersmith said. “Who were they?”

“Well, this ’un’s Betty. Little Betty, they called her. There’s another girl named Betty who’s a good bit heavier. That one’s alive and well, thank the Lord. The one in the middle here’s called Alice. Nobody knew her much. Only been around for a few weeks and kept to herself. And that one at the end’s a complete stranger to us, but we took ’er down here with the others anyway. Still might be somebody who steps up and says they knows ’er.”

“You knew these other two, though?”

“Aye. I knew ’em. Knew Little Betty quite well, at that. I wanna say, it’s good of you to ask their names. Decent of you. Like they was people.”

“Of course they were people.”

“Not how rozzers usually treated ’em, though, even when they was alive.”

“Yes,” Hammersmith said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your business to be sorry. Let’s say no more about it.”

“All right. But this woman whose name you don’t know. She’s a stranger, you say. But she wasn’t the first one killed?”

“No. She was the middle one in order of the killing.”

“Was there anything else unusual about her?”