The Intuition: Part 24, What the Thames Holds
A Horror Story
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Grigore Corbinescu sat propped against his pillows, his hands wrapped about a steaming mug of broth, and listened to Marcu Borja reading from the Book of Psalms. The words were both comfort and scourge. It was day; Corbinescu could feel the angry eye of the afternoon sun hunting him, even through the mass of lowering clouds, even in the dim, candlelit confines of his wagon. He sipped his broth and wished it were something more substantial. Something red and percolating with life.
He shook his head. Those thoughts would not do. Afflicted as he was, he must not entertain the lusts of the devil that possessed him—yet, it was a fact that he wearied of this withered existence. Borja’s voice droned on, the beautiful text weaving a spell upon the air. A sweet cocoon. A snare that held him fast. Outside, something scratched at the wagon, a faint mouse-like sound that Borja did not hear. The prince tipped his head and heard a whisper.
“Prince Grigore, I know you can hear me. I would speak with you, but I have been forbidden to approach. If you would command Borja to allow an audience …” The whisper faltered before the voice pressed close, hissing, “I must go.”
Corbinescu heard furtive scurrying and his visitor was gone. It was the doctor, what is his name? Falke! The man who stabbed me with his needle in the chapel. The prince sipped the foul, unsatisfying broth. Turn-about is fair play, he thought, his lips trembling on the verge of a smile.
“Marcu,” he rasped, “I have a request of you, my friend.”
Tom caught Falke by the arm as the doctor scurried from the shadow of the prince’s wagon.
“Here, what skilamalink are you up to, Dr. Quack? If Borja catches you ‘round his precious prince, he’ll have your hide for drawers.”
Falke wrenched his arm from Tom’s grasp, a snarl twisting his face. “Are you spying on me, Cooper? Looking for news to run with to Dovedale?”
“Billy’s got no interest in your loopy doings. Nor I.” Tom gave his lapels a tug. “Your usefulness, such as it was, has run its course. I thought to caution you, for your own good, like. Borja’s more like to split your fool skull than ask your pleasure. But you have it any way you like.”
Tom shook his head and continued his prowl of the camp. He’d slept for a few hours, uneasy in his dreams and unable to dive deep into the sea of slumber. He was all turned around, riding all night through the frigid woods, sleeping in a tent all day, surrounded by characters out of a bogey story. He’d been in a funk about Will again in a way he hadn’t done since the bad times two years ago.
He’d peeked in at the dollymop’s tent and seen Will curled in sleep under the furs, his head on Elke’s lap. At least someone was able to sleep. Tom could not understand Will’s obsession with the girl. He thought of Li Hua of The Golden Monkey, and the devastation her treachery had unleashed. Billy’s a keg with a short fuse, he worried. I hope the missy knows what she’s about or there’ll be Hell to pay. This whole daft journey had the Devil’s hoofprint on it, and as far as Tom could reckon it was only going to the dogs at a steady pace.
He spat, turning his steps toward the rollicking cookfire. There was stew in the pot, and Tom’s growling stomach urged him on. If Falke was of a mind to act the camp lunatic, he’d have to look to his own skin. The doctor reminded Tom of Algood, another crazy old bat who’d all but ruined Will with his dark enticements. Did all medical men have pudding for brains, the soulless sods? Billy sure does get caught up with them, he thought. Tom shivered as he plucked a tin plate and a spoon from the stack near the fire, memories and grim determination tangling together in his mind.
London, East End, 1888 - September 10
“Billy, where you been? I thought we was going to give this gaff the scoot; hop the boat train for Paris. Look, I got me beret all ready. Mrs. Crumm said a sailor what was staying here left it and she let me have it.”
Tom brushed the flat cap with the backs of his fingers. It had belonged to a boarding sailor, and Mrs. Crumm had shown it to him when he first rented the room in her house. There he and the truth parted ways, for he had lifted it from her room when she left to do the marketing. The old magpie hadn’t even noticed its absence.
Will cast a glance at the cap, then went to the table where the newspaper lay in dog-eared, coffee-stained ruin. He leafed through it, stopping to read the sensational accounts of “fiendish barbarity” in what The Star was calling “the Leather Apron Murders”.
“What is this,” he murmured, mesmerized by the gruesome tales of mutilated bodies. He knew not whether to be alarmed or amused.
Tom peeked over his shoulder. “Don’t you know, Billy? The whole place is on its ear over the dead women what’s being found in every nook and cranny. Sliced to ribbons, they are, and gutted like hogs. The Star is hammering away at this Leather Apron shite, some poor blighter what’s been sneaking about showing the girls his knife and nicking what swag they’ve got about them. Looks bad for him if the peelers get hold of him, and they’ve been out in mobs since the last killing.”
Will dropped the paper in a dirty heap on the table. “There have only been two,” he said, rubbing ink smudges between his fingers.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. His heart had begun to thump in his chest.
“What do you know about it, Billy? You been out all night for weeks. You seen anything queer?”
Will slid him a sidelong glance, cold and glinting as a razor. What it was not was innocent, and Tom slumped at the table, wringing the beret in his hands.
“Right,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll pack our grips and catch the train. Coppers has already been here, they won’t be back. By the time old Crumm knows we’re gone, we’ll be crossing the Channel.”
He stood and began stuffing clothing into a canvas gripsack. Will tapped his fingers on the tabletop.
“You go on ahead, Tom. I have some unfinished business to attend. I’ll catch up to you.”
Tom halted his mad packing. “Billy, I think you’ve done enough business here. Let’s get somewhere feels less like a frying pan with the fire stoked under it.”
Will turned and stared at him. “I have a … contract to fulfill. Payment to collect.”
Tom let out a long breath between his teeth and drew himself up. It had been a long while since he’d pulled rank on Will, but he was the elder of them.
“Billy, it’s done, d’ye hear me? Pack a bag and let’s leg it.”
He pulled Will’s grip from beneath his bed and tossed it onto the thin quilt. To his immense relief, Will began to fill it with his things, but Tom’s pulse galloped.
“I’ll nip out and get us a cab. Won’t be more than a tick.” He made for the door, stopping to bundle the newspaper into a ball and stuff it into his bag.
The bloody details fell out, like a stinking sack of guts, as they steamed across the Channel toward Calais. A whispered tale of murdered prostitutes, slashed bodies, slavering demonic helpers, and the ghost of Mary Dovedale spilled from Will as he sat with Tom over a breakfast of cold meat and eggs in the first-class saloon.
Tom goggled at Will, who sat back and sipped his coffee with extraordinary calm.
“That bloody porkie-teller Algood,” Tom sputtered. “He’s a stone cold nutter. Billy, you can’t believe any of this.”
But Tom could see that Will did believe it. He’d believed it enough to kill two women. And Algood—was he barmy from syphilis? The surgeon had been wily enough to dangle before Will the possibility of speaking with his mother. A flicker of rage licked Tom’s bones, and he was grateful for the rolling motion of the steam packet that assured him they were leaving such company behind.
Once in the bustling port, Tom was all for pushing on to Paris, but Will wanted to explore Calais.
“There’s no rush. Let’s put up at a hotel for a few nights.” Will gestured at the lively traffic along the quays and, behind them, the old watch-tower and the streets of the town. “First time on the continent, and with money in our pockets. I mean to see all I can.”
London, East End - November 8
“Shoulda known better,” Tom chided himself. “Shoulda known he wouldn’t leave off.”
He swung along Commercial Street, keeping his head down. He carried a basket of groceries and a small sack of coal to the cellar hole he’d rented in a tenement near the Ten Bells Pub. A month they’d been squatting there in filth and misery, directed by phantoms. Real or imagined, Tom couldn’t say. Nothing made sense anymore. He scurried down the wet stone steps and thumped at the door; two knocks, a pause, then two more. Will opened the door enough for Tom to squeeze through, and then he was in the bare cold room, setting the basket on the bench near the battered stove. Will went back to sitting in one of the two ladderback chairs in the corner.
“Let’s get a fire going and make some tea. I could eat a horse, and who’s to say I won’t be eating one,” Tom quipped as he drew forth two meat pies from his basket.
“Did you see him anywhere,” Will asked. In his hand was a little bauble of carved blue stone on a fine chain. “Her message is the same. Always the same. Stop him.”
His voice was low, intense as the growl of an unfriendly dog. His gaze was unfixed yet penetrating. Tom recognized the weird, disturbing look of the Intuition, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh. He’d seen the look many times since the early days of October when the port of Calais had been abuzz with the horror of two more English prostitute murders committed only moments apart on September 30. Now the papers had a new name for the killer. They were calling him Jack the Ripper.
“Billy …” What was he to say? “Algood’s gone from his house. It’s empty. Shuttered. For all we know, he’s dead of the syph. Maybe floating in the Thames.”
Will pierced him with the uncanny vision, looking through him to some other vista.
“He’s very much alive, Tom. Alive and rabid, prowling the dark alleys, living on rats and dead men like the ghoul he is, scrawling sigils in their blood on the walls. Dead men—he will go to the morgue.”
Will rose, one hand probing the air like a blind man, the other pressed to his forehead, trying to massage away the pain that nearly crippled him. Tom stepped in front of him.
“I’ll check it out in the morning, Billy. There haven’t been any killings in more than a month. It’s over. If Algood’s been crawling around after rats, they’ll have him jugged in the asylum. I’ll look there, too.”
Will sat and Tom went back to the stove and gave the coal in its belly a stir with the poker. He dragged the bench between the chairs and set the smoking meat pies on it. He held a fork before Will’s eyes.
“Here. Eat something, boyo. If your mum’s about, she’ll stripe me good if you starve.”
Will took the utensil and began to eat without another word or glance for Tom, who looked around the squalid room as though fearful he might see Mary Dovedale in the shadows.
November 9
In the dark, early hours of the morning, Will bolted upright in the flabby bed. The cellar was chilly, the air acrid with coal smoke. Will could detect another smell lurking beneath. Blood. Buckets of it, steaming and cooling, the meaty, iron stench of it thickening in his nostrils. Tom lay huddled beside him in all his clothes and greatcoat. Will shook him by his shoulder, and Tom lurched into wakefulness.
“What is it, Billy? You feeling all right?”
“We are too late. He has struck again.” Will turned his head, cocking an ear toward a whisper Tom could not hear. “Yes. I understand.”
“You understand what? You’re dreaming, Billy, that’s all.”
Will looked at him without seeing him. “I started this. I made it possible for James to carry on, and now I must stop him. He is nearby. I can feel it.”
Will threw aside the worn blanket and stood swaying. He gripped his head and, with a groan, fell back onto the bed. When he would have stood once more, Tom pushed him back and pulled the blanket over him.
“I’ll go. Can you … see where he is?”
“He’ll go to the river,” Will said, gritting his teeth. “Be wary of him, Tom.”
Tom climbed the stairs to Commercial Street and set out at a lope toward Aldgate and Wapping. A quarter moon squinted down on him from a clear sky, and by its light he soon made out a leaping, capering figure that danced in and out of the shadows with drunken glee. It swung a black bag to and fro. A surgeon’s bag. Tom kept pace with it, careful to avoid notice. He felt in his coat pocket for the lead-filled cosh he carried. The figure grabbed at a lamppost and swung around it in a giddy circle. The light fell full on its upturned face. Algood. Tom drew in a sharp breath. The man looked whole and hearty, his jaws besmeared with blood.
“You foul bastard,” Tom muttered, a shiver walking over his frame. Will had been right.
He closed the gap between him and Algood, keeping well in the shadows until he could see the muddy slopes of the Thames’ banks and the murky, fog-shrouded river. Algood moved with jaunty grace to the top of a watermen’s stair and looked down at slack water sucking at the mud like a toothless mouth. With a laugh, he pitched the bag out over the river. Tom was close enough to hear the splash. He drew out the cosh.
“Fancy seeing you here, Dr. Algood.”
Algood whirled with a snarl. His bloodied face glared with black and white starkness in the sooty moonlight. There was a blade in his hand. The rage that had earlier gnawed Tom’s bones returned. Algood leaped toward him as he swung the cosh with all his strength. He felt the surgeon’s skull collapse beneath it in a lethal divot. Algood’s knife clattered to the cobblestones, and he spun and plummeted down the slimy stair to rest among the detritus on the skinny shingle beach.
Tom looked down on the corpse, slapping the cosh against his thigh the way a cat might lash its tail. “Jack the Ripper no more, eh Doctor?”
Taking his time, Tom descended the watermen’s stair. He rolled Algood’s broken body into the water and watched it turn and sink. It might float later, but the hungry old Thames would have her way with it first. Tom spat after it.
“That’s for Billy, you rotter.”
Tom climbed back up and made his way to the cellar on Commercial Street. Whether he found Will recovered or not, he meant for them to leave for Paris today. He wanted no more of devils and ghosts and gutted street-walkers.
OK so by my estimation we have: vampires, ghouls, spiritualism, Jack the Ripper, and the Orient Express. This really is everything that's fantastic about the Victorian Gothic all rolled into one. Book version when??
So good Liz. So well done. Like all great stories, I'd rather this story not end! Got an estimate on how many more parts? I just realized a difference in reading this way versus a physical book, I have this habit of leafing through and counting down the remaining pages as I near the end of a book. Strange little practice I have. - Jim