The Devil's Workshop (21 page)

E
unice Pye stood just inside the doorway and squinted into the gloom of the Michaels’ house. She listened very hard, harder than she had ever listened before, but heard nothing, no movement, no voice or rustle of paper or cloth anywhere in the house. And so she crept cautiously into the hall, past the coatrack and the little pile of mail on the floor. She left the front door open behind her and sunlight bounced off its painted red exterior, now angled into the hall, and shone deep orange against the wall next to her.

She moved her feet forward, one at a time, barely lifting them from the smooth uneven floorboards. She held her best garden hoe out in front of her with both hands. She knew there was
little she could do with it to threaten anyone or protect herself, but it made her feel better and safer to hold it.

The stairway was in front of her, along the right-hand wall. She stopped and looked up. There was a red runner that swam up the middle of the stairs, and she wondered briefly at the extravagance of it. She had a small rug made of rags and cast-off remnants next to her bed that Giles had given her on some long-ago Christmas Eve. She could not even imagine how much such a long strip of carpet must have cost. She blinked and held still and remembered why she was there in that house, and then she took a deep breath and moved forward.

Nothing stirred in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and so she turned her attention to the parlor door, which was now near to her left elbow. That door was standing open, and she could see a giant table painted black just inside the room. She moved two steps sideways and she was standing in the doorway with the table to her right. There were chairs around the table, four of them, but the chairs were empty. There was a bookcase against the wall directly ahead of her, behind the table and next to the fireplace. It held a collection of knickknacks and small painted family portraits and perhaps a dozen books of the kind sold by door-to-door salesmen to the lady of the house. Among the portraits she spotted two or three framed photographs of stiffly posed people in their Sunday finest. She wondered if Mrs Michael would ever be coming back to that house. She wondered if Mrs Michael was dead, perhaps buried in the back garden. But no, that was silly. Eunice had seen Mrs Michael leave the house
with three big trunks and ride away in a four-wheeler while Mr Michael was at work.

Eunice finally turned her head and looked at the two objects nailed to the mantelpiece over the hearth. She stared at them for a long time, hoping that they would turn into things one might normally see on a mantel, things that were not tongues. But they didn’t change.

She tore her gaze away from the tongues and saw Mr Michael sitting in a straight-backed padded chair next to the fireplace. He was tied there with mailing twine, and he was watching her. He held perfectly still and his eyes were open, and for just a moment she wondered if he was dead, but then she saw that his chest was rising and falling rhythmically. His hair was tousled and his eyes were red and his mouth was puffy and crusted with blood, much the way the mouth of the bald prisoner had been when she had seen him in the street.

She took a quick glance around the rest of the room, then laid down her hoe and rushed to his side. He turned his head to watch her as she approached, but didn’t make any other movement. She hunched over his wrists where they were bound to the chair and her gnarled fingers worried at the knots, which had been pulled tight and small like hard little seeds. She shook her head and whispered to Mr Michael.

“Rheumatism,” she said. “Can’t move my fingers so well as I might have done once upon a time. But don’t you worry. You sit tight and I’ll be right back.”

She scurried away back to the hall and clucked her tongue at herself. She murmured under her breath. “Of course he’s
going to sit tight, you silly old woman. Man can’t move if he wants to.”

She glanced up the stairs again as she passed them and went along the hallway to the kitchen. She tried to move quickly, but she didn’t want to be surprised by anything, so she stopped at the kitchen doorway and entered slowly, checking both corners by the door before she went all the way inside. Nobody was waiting for her there, but the back door was standing open. She went to it and looked around the empty garden before exploring the kitchen. It wouldn’t do to have someone walk in while she was distracted.

There was a knife block on the counter and the biggest knife was missing. There was a butt of ham and some bread crumbs on the butcher block. A honeybee sat on the ham. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and it buzzed around her head.

“Go on, little bee,” she said. “You don’t eat ham and I know you’re not gonna sting me.”

It lost interest in her and
zee
’d across the kitchen and zigzagged out through the open door. She selected the smallest knife from the block and ran her thumb along its blade to see if it was sharp. She nodded to herself and crept back down the hallway to the parlor, checked it carefully for new people, and then hurried over to the chair where Mr Michael sat in enforced patience, waiting for her.

The knife was very sharp indeed and made short work of the mailing twine. She rubbed Mr Michael’s wrists to get the blood moving in them again.

“Can you stand?”

Mr Michael nodded, but didn’t speak. Eunice looked at his mouth and then looked at the horrible tongues hanging above the hearth, and she blinked back tears at the thought of what the poor man must have endured.

She patted him on his arm and helped pull him up. He clutched the back of the chair and leaned hard against it, and they waited for the feeling to come back to his legs. When he could walk, she led him out of the parlor and turned right and guided him down his own hall to the door, which was still standing open. She was so anxious to leave that house that she practically pulled him out into the sunlight. He stood blinking in the tiny front garden while she pulled the door closed behind them. She didn’t hear it latch, but she turned and took Mr Michael by the arm and led him into her house and put on a kettle for tea. While she waited for the water to heat, she went and got a roll of gauze bandages, a little bottle of iodine, and the pint of rye that Giles had always kept in the back of the cupboard. Then she broke open her jar of pin money that she had saved from sewing work. She would need pennies to pay the neighborhood boys.

She was going to send out as many runners as she could afford. She was going to send them to Scotland Yard and she was going to send them to HM Prison Bridewell. She wanted every policeman and warder in London to come and look at the tongues hanging in the parlor next door. She would only feel safe when they had caught the Devil and sent him back where he belonged.

J
ack was hungry.

He sat at a table, far back in the main room of the pub, ignoring what went on upstairs, and when the wench came to ask what he wanted, he tipped his hat forward, dropped two of Elizabeth’s coins on the table, and asked for as much as that would buy.

He sat and waited and watched the people interact. He felt nothing but a distant fondness for their messy flesh. They were his life’s work, and he hoped to someday understand them.

When his food came, the wench had to pull over another table to
make enough room for all the plates and bowls. She asked him if he wanted anything else, and he could see the smirk hiding behind her smile. He wanted to leap up and take a scalpel to the corners of her mouth, peel back her cheeks, and expose the ugliness within, but instead he smiled back at her and said, “No, thank you. This will do.” And watched as she walked away with a sway in her hips. He had money and she was advertising her like of it.

He took a bite of kidney pie. Delicious. It was too hot and it burned his tongue and made the roof of his mouth sore, but he ignored the pain and took a sniff of the blood sausage. That turned out to be cool and sliced wafer-thin. His mouth was still sore and so he ate it carefully, and it was perfectly spiced.

He took a deep draught of ale, wiped his hand on his sleeve—or, more precisely, Elizabeth’s sleeve—and took a look around the room. Many of the people there were watching him, but they quickly looked away when his gaze fell on them. One woman didn’t look away. Her hand was on another man’s elbow and she was pressed close against him, but when he looked at her, she raised her eyebrows and he licked his lips. She was his for the taking.

He wondered about the meaty organs grinding and churning inside her. He knew how beautiful they must be, glistening and wet.

And he looked away at the glob of pork on the plate in front of him, encased in fat, cold and dead and salty. And he ate it.

There was more than he could hold. He had not eaten, really eaten, in a year, and his stomach had shrunk. A few bites of this and that, and there was no room left in him. He turned his gaze inward and wondered at his own organs, wondered how well they were digesting
the food he had just eaten. Wondered whether he should chew more thoroughly or whether he had done the job.

He did not look at the women again, but stood and walked out of the pub and away.

He hoped someone would finish his food. He hated to waste anything, but he clearly no longer had the appetite he’d once possessed.

D
ay!”

He was dreaming about a time when he was nine or ten years old, fording a brook in Devon with his trousers rolled up past his ankles . . .

“Walter! Can you hear me?”

There was someone with him, another boy standing in the water, but the sun was behind him and the boy was a rainbow halo blur that was talking, shouting at him . . .

“Walter, did he hurt you?”

His words made no sense because they were flavored like orange custards. Day was not fond of orange custards. He turned from the other boy and walked upstream, watching as the water broke against his shins and soaked the ends of his trouser legs
where they were rolled and heavy. It became harder to walk and the boy behind him was hollering about something and the lovely sunny childhood afternoon began to seem tedious. His arms were sore and his legs hurt with the effort of pushing back against the streaming water and he wanted to go home.

And so he woke up.

“Walter?”

“I’m here. I’m awake.”

“Oh, thank God. I thought perhaps . . . Well, I wasn’t sure you were still with us.”

Adrian March’s voice came from someplace nearby, behind the wall.

“I don’t know where I am,” Day said. “But I think we’re still in the tunnels.”

“We are. He’s got us in these cells we made in the catacombs.”

“Your gentlemen’s club, you mean.” So he was, as he had assumed, shackled in one of the alcoves underground. “Adrian, I think there’s a bag over my head. Something made of cloth. I can’t see anything.”

“It’s probably the hood we used on him. Has he hurt you?”

“I’m chained here. My wrists and ankles.”

“I am, too. But give me a moment. I’ve got my cufflinks on, the set with the lockpick hidden inside.”

Day bent his wrist against the shackle around it, curled his fingers, and strained until his fingers cramped.

“Funny,” he said.

“What is?”

“I’m wearing those same cufflinks, remember?”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t reach them. I’m trying, but my sleeve’s been pushed too far up my arm.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here, if given the time.”

“Are we alone here?”

“I think so. Griffin stopped screaming more than an hour ago, if my sense of time hasn’t deserted me.”

“Who is Griffin? Is Griffin the one who did this to us?”

“No.”

“Is he one of the prisoners?”

“No,” March said. “Well, yes, actually, I suppose he is, but not in the way you mean.”

“Are you able to get at the pick?”

“I’ve already got it. It’s just a matter of bending my wrist properly so I can get at the lock on this shackle. Once I get an arm free, the rest will be simple. I’ll be over to fetch you soon enough.”

“Do please hurry.”

“Believe me, I’m doing what I can. Now be silent so I can work at this. It’s not easy picking a lock that is about one’s own wrist.”

“Godspeed, Adrian.”

“If he comes back, if he comes before I finish, keep him busy. Make him talk.”

“Saucy Jack, you mean.”

“He called himself Jack, but I never knew whether it was his real name. He seems to have taken a liking to you.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“It’s no great mystery, my dear boy. The man has been caged for months. You’re the first person to actually listen to him. You are, quite literally, a captive audience. You must continue to listen, to provoke, to distract him if you can. But do be careful.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Day said.

“Why not?”

“All he can do is kill me.”

“That’s not all he can do.”

“What else is there?”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Walter. You really should be afraid of him.”

“How did you catch him?” he said. The sound of his own muffled voice echoing in the little cell was, at least, better than silence.

“After all those months of chasing Jack, he fell asleep in Mary Jane Kelly’s bed.”

“That was his last victim.”

“Yes. We found him there, covered with her blood, head to toe.”

“That was quite a stroke of luck for you.”

“It wasn’t luck.” There was a long silence before March spoke again. When he did, his voice was so soft that Day could barely hear him. “We used that girl. She was bait for Jack. We were supposed to protect her and we failed.”

“Your Karstphanomen make a lot of mistakes.”

“What we do isn’t very precise. It’s not a science, you know.”

Day said nothing.

“No,” March said. “You’re right. We failed poor Mary Jane and we failed last night. Our ideals are sound, but I’m afraid we are not all up to the task.”

“So Mary Jane Kelly lured him in . . .”

“And we were meant to be waiting for him, but there was a miscommunication. Much as there was at the prison.”

“You may have a traitor in your mix.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Then you’re all incompetent and misguided. Do you believe that?”

“We are not incompetent. We thought it all out very carefully and we had Griffin inside the prison. He was our second plan, in case the first went wrong somehow.”

“And what about Mary? Was there a second plan in place to protect her?”

“We learned from her. Her sacrifice was not in vain.”

“Because you caught Jack?”

“We did.”

“Only because he fell asleep. I’ve seen what he did to them. Everyone has. Jack spent so long dismembering that girl that he practically handed himself over to you, isn’t that right?”

March cleared his throat as if about to respond, but then said nothing.

“And yet you didn’t arrest him,” Day said.

“How could we? What we had seen, we who hunted him and cleaned up his messes, it was all too much. We couldn’t let him do those things and just . . .”

The images of Jack the Ripper’s victims flooded Day’s head. All the postmortem photographs and artists’ reconstructions. It was overwhelming. Day felt dizzy and nauseated. He fought against blacking out again.

“It was wrong, what you did,” Day said. “It was selfish.”

“I know.”

“The public still fears Jack. You left your fellow policemen to deal with the aftermath of your actions, all of the public’s fears and insecurities. Everybody thinks he got away.”

“Well,” March said, “he did, didn’t he? And now he’s going to kill us if we can’t get ourselves free and stop him.”

“We’ll get out of here. We’ll catch him again and we’ll turn him over to the proper authorities. And then I’m still going to place you under arrest.”

March fell silent. Day concentrated on breathing. In and out, through his mouth, no deep breaths. He had threatened to arrest two people despite being shackled to a wall in a cave.

He was counting on March to get him free, but Day’s mentor had no good reason to help him now. He was afraid he would die there, deep underground, his body lost forever.

But Day was a detective inspector for Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. And if he was going to die, at least he would do so with some integrity.