A Taste for Monsters by Matthew J. Kirby
Hurry.
“Farewell, Joseph,” I said, and then followed the prompting of the ghost I carried inside me as it led me past Thomas Barry’s Waxworks, soon to have another gruesome display, and then the Pavilion Theatre. The city seemed to rouse with a predator’s quality at my passing, though the rain kept hats down and collars up, turning all men into anonymous skulkers.
Hurry.
The possession of my body had left me with some volition, even as I was led. It was as though I were adrift in the current of a stream, but not one so strong I couldn’t plant my feet and stop my progress if I chose to do so. It was simply easier to let myself be carried, as though I were the passenger in the third-class compartment of my own body.
Hurry! She is still with me.
“With you?”
With my body. She still … works on me.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing the traffic to flow around me. “You mean she’s …” I couldn’t bring myself to say the rest of it. “How do you know?”
I feel it.
My innards coiled up tight. “I’m so sorry.”
Hurry. Please.
I resumed my walk down the street, my only consolation the fact that I was leading the spirit farther and farther from Mr. Merrick. I still had no idea what I would do when I was brought before the demon of Whitechapel that so many had hunted, nor how that confrontation might end. I still had no idea why I’d been chosen.
“Black Mary?”
Yes.
“Why do you haunt me when the others haunted Mr. Merrick?”
No.
“No?”
The others did not haunt him.
“But they did.”
No.
It was you.
We passed by St. Mary’s on the far side of the street, and my pace slowed as I thought about what she’d just said. “No, I am certain—”
All is dark, but here there is light.
Again her words brought my march to a halt, for that was what Polly had said to Mr. Merrick. “But I thought … I thought she meant him.”
No.
You.
The city rushed away from me, and I no longer felt the frigid touch of the rain, no longer smelled the manure of the horses, and no longer heard the bellow of the traffic. “But I am not—I am a …”
Yes. You know of loss. Our loss.
I knew not what to say. We are grateful. So grateful. I felt Black Mary’s malevolence returning, a heaving and terrible rage. But we must hurry.
“Yes,” I whispered. “We must hurry.”
We reached Commercial Street, and here the ghost guided me north into Spitalfields and the Evil Quarter Mile, a direction in which nothing in Heaven or Hell could have induced me to travel the day before. With Black Mary inside me, full of dire vengeance, I now proceeded without hesitation or fear.
I passed the entrance to Flower and Dean without even giving it a glance, and soon Christ Church and the Ten Bells pub came into my view. Black Mary led me down Dorset Street, which was as narrow and vile a rookery as any of its neighbors, and then through an even narrower passage, into a tight courtyard perhaps ten feet wide and fifty feet long. A single, sickly gas lamp sputtered in the rain to my left, stretching my faint, early morning shadow across the flagstone pavers and up the side of the nearest lodging. I was wet through from the drizzle by that point, and shivering.
She is gone.
“What?”
She is gone.
“How do you know?”
That is my room. That is where she left me.
Black Mary pointed me toward a low doorway that my shadow then crossed, but I took not one step toward it. The door appeared old and perfectly ordinary, but I tried not to imagine the horror and ruin of Black Mary’s body, just on the other side. I knew well what mutilations Leather Apron had wrought when risking capture in the open streets. A wave of nausea crested near my throat when I imagined what depravities the murderer might have inflicted on the tissues and organs of Black Mary’s body while undisturbed in the privacy of her lodging.
“Whatever is on the other side of that door,” I said, “I will not see it.”
It doesn’t matter.
I took another look around me at the shabby tenements, a common outdoor pump their only source of running water, refuse and filth choking the corners of the court, the squalor in which Black Mary had lived and died.
“What was your real name?” I asked the ghost.
Mary Jane Kelly. But she is destroyed. I am Black Mary, and I will have my revenge.
I cast a final look at that desolate place and fell back through the passageway onto Dorset.
Evelyn!
“What is it?”
She is near. She flees.
“Where?” My gaze flicked to and fro, up and down the street, even as my heart launched upward. “Where is she?”
This way.
The pull on my sinews felt more urgent than it had at any point thus far, almost painful, and I sensed Black Mary’s fury mounting.
Kill her. Rip her. Bleed her.
I reached Commercial Street and let the ghost draw me back down it, struggling then to keep my pace commensurate with her strength and ferocity. The city had fully awakened by that time, though it still yawned and trudged heavily in the rain and mud. I kept my gaze forward, scrutinizing the swelling crowd, expecting the ghost to alert me to the one she sought.
Hurry. Kill her.
“I am hurrying,” I said, and quickened my gait to a trot. We had nearly reached Whitechapel when I noticed a bent old woman shambling along, and Black Mary yanked me toward her.
There.
“Where?”
Kill her!
I disbelieved it. “Her?”
Yes! Kill her!
I hastened to a sprint and charged up behind the old woman, compelled without thought, my heart a tinker’s hammer stroke. As I caught her up, I grabbed her shoulder and spun her around to face me with such force it nearly tipped us both over.
I knew her face, its leathery skin and severe frown intimidating and familiar from the night of the dock fire.
“The midwife,” I whispered, the import of the revelation creeping over me.
Kill her!
“Oi,” the old woman croaked. “Why you accosting me?”
She had dried blood caked beneath her fingernails, and a single brown droplet stuck to her craggy brow near her hairline, almost hidden by her cap. Others who chanced to notice those stains upon a midwife would have no cause for suspicion. The facts of the murders flew about me, assuming their formation. The victims, all women; their organs removed; a maniac with medical knowledge.
Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!
Black Mary thrashed within me as if trying to seize control of my arms, hands, and fingers. If I allowed it, I knew she would have them at the old woman’s throat, and if that happened, no one would have power sufficient to pry them loose.
“You an imbecile or something?” the midwife asked. “Speak!”
“I know who you are,” I said.
The old woman’s frown cut low enough to sever her chin. “Do you, now? You look familiar to me as well.”
“No,” I said, and lowered my voice so she actually leaned in toward me. “I know what you’ve done, you devil.”
She leaned back then as a shroud fell away from her, a kind of invisible veil I hadn’t known she was wearing, the last shred of humanity she wore like a garment, and beneath it I glimpsed something darker even than Black Mary’s eyes, darker even than the foulest back slum of Whitechapel.
“Do you, now?” she said again.
I stood there in the rainy, crowded street, unarmed before a murderer who had slaughtered and butchered five women and would no doubt think it an insignificance to do the same to me. It occurred to me that her long knife might’ve even then been secreted away about her person somewhere.
Kill her! Let me kill her!
“Ah,” the midwife sa
Before I could react, she grabbed my head and jerked it downward with shocking strength, wrenching my neck. My arms flew wide to keep my balance, and I felt an intense pain as she tore my shawl away with a fistful of my hair. Then she charged off into the crowd.
I watched her go, my scalp afire, my face exposed to the world.
She flees!
I needed to hide myself away or find something to cover my face, but I was out in the open with nothing to use as a shield. Had I the ability, I would have clawed up the cobblestones and bricks to bury myself in the street. The people around me who had seen the midwife’s attack stared at me. They pointed at me and leered with the expression Charles had worn as he’d assaulted me. I felt hatred and disgust from each of them, exactly what I had known and feared and fled.
Chase her! Kill her!
“I can’t,” I whispered, and I hurried into the nearest alleyway between two buildings to hide myself away. The corridor sloped downward into the shadows, and I followed it to its fetid bottom, as if swallowed by the street, and there I huddled behind a stinking fish barrel, clutching my head and rocking back and forth as I had seen Mr. Merrick do.
You must move!
I shook my head frantically, eyes wide as shame and pain immobilized me and ate me alive.
She will kill again! She will not stop until she has ripped the world apart!
“I can’t.”
You can.
“No,” I whimpered.
Yes.
“Don’t you see? I’m a monster. Charles—”
No.
“No?”
That is not why you hide.
“Yes, it is. My scars—”
No. He left you before your scars.
I knew of whom she spoke, and the pain inside turned my guts out, becoming unbearable. I could not face it, nor could I escape it, and I wanted to die to end it. “Please …”
You hide your pain behind your scars.
“Yes,” I said.
He is here. This is where he died.
I went as quiet as I had ever in my life been. Nothing in my body moved, and no breath passed through my lungs. I was there in an alley off Commercial Street. It did not seem possible, and yet I wished with all my strength it was.
“Father?”
A figure stepped toward me out of the darkness at the alley’s end. He moved in a way so familiar, yet forgotten, that it broke my mind open and spilled all my memories out onto the ground. The man I saw before me was the one who had left me that night. He had the same eyes, encircled by dark red, the same bend in his back, the same weariness in his stride. He came toward me without looking up to meet my eyes.
“Father!” I raced forward to embrace him, but Black Mary yanked me back.
Not yet.
“What? Please, let me—”
She yanked me back again, harder.
No.
“But why?”
You must ask him first.
“Ask him what?”
You know the question, and you must ask him. You must bring him peace.
I stared at my father’s spirit, so unchanged though I had grown, trapped by the tyranny of his own emotions. But I carried my pain as well. I had buried it deeper than my scars and deeper than my bone, and I had left it there. I waged a war with my scars instead of that pain, hoping to forget why it was there, blaming my disfigurement and the city instead. But the pain could no longer be ignored. It rose to the surface like a coffin in a flood, and I realized that pain was the true, deep reason for my fear of everything else.
I looked at my father’s spirit and I asked him, “Why?”
My father looked up at me. “Why what, daughter?”
“Why did you leave me?” I was a young girl again, holding on to him with my eyes shut tight. “Why could you not stop drinking for me?”
“Oh, my daughter,” the spirit said, and his chin quivered. “How can you ask me that? How can you think it was you?”
“But you left me.”
“I had my own demons, it’s true. But you, daughter, you were my angel. Even so, there wasn’t anything you could’ve done. It wasn’t your fault I was lost. But you found me now. Can you ever forgive me for leaving you?”
“Of course, Father. I love you. All I wanted was for you to stay with me.”
“I wish I had,” he said. “More than anything, I wish I had.”
My vision blurred with tears.
“I lost you,” he said.
“You didn’t lose me.” I wiped my eyes, and when I blinked them open, my father had changed. He resembled the younger, happier man in the locket portrait hanging from my neck. “I love you.”
Now I was allowed to rush into his arms, and he embraced me with his warmth. I cried and squeezed him hard.
“I love you, my beautiful girl. Be happy.”
With that, he was gone, and I was left holding myself in the alley. Black Mary allowed me to sob for a few moments more before she spoke.
Now you must hurry.
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through my pursed lips. The old pain I’d just unearthed was gone, the hole left behind filled in, and now I found I had less fear of the crowd and less shame for my scars. I looked back out of the alley, toward Commercial Street.
Hurry.
“Right.” I took a step toward the light. “Let’s go after that old bitch.”
The stares and whispers continued as I walked down the street, but I ignored them, and I disregarded even the curses that occasionally landed upon me and fell away. I still felt somewhat naked without my shawl, out of habit, but my appearance actually had the effect of making my passage easier, for the crowd parted around me.
“Where is she?” I asked Black Mary.
Ahead. Keep going.
I scanned the pedestrians’ backs ahead of me, searching for the bent shape of that midwife. When I reached Whitechapel, I found it jammed with early morning delivery vehicles of all kinds, and the omnibuses had begun operating, the metal railways glistening in the rain. Then, in the same moment Black Mary whispered in my thoughts, I spotted Leather Apron standing there, waiting for a break in the endless traffic to cross the street.
It is her.
“I see her,” I whispered.
The old woman still clutched my shawl in her gnarled hand as I moved silently toward her, stalking through the traffic with my glare locked upon her. She occasionally turned and looked over her shoulder, but each time I managed to slide from her view, and before long stood but a few feet away from her.
Kill her.
I wanted to. My anger and hatred of her were undeniable, but when I thought about actually carrying out an act of murder, even of her, I faltered.
Kill her!
“I don’t think I can,” I said, low enough to pass under the sound of the rain.
You must!
“I am no killer,” I said.
Then let me do it!
“What?”
Give me your arms. Your hands. Let me take my revenge!
“That will not bring you peace,” I said.
I am not like the others, Black Mary said. I did not come to you for peace.
A break in the traffic appeared in the distance, which would soon make the midwife’s escape possible. I trembled as I watched the opening drawing closer, and saw the murderess move a step to meet it. Another moment would’ve given her the opportunity to flee, and make it necessary to hunt her down again. Even then, I wondered what I would do, for I doubted I would find myself any more capable of murder at the second opportunity, or the third, than I was in that moment.
She will escape! Black Mary’s voice became a ferocious snarl. Let me slay her!
The tension in the ghost surged, vibrating my whole being as though the stream had become a torrent, and I felt my feet slipping on the riv
Now I will kill her, Black Mary said.
A large omnibus drew near, fully laden with at least thirty passengers, both atop and within. Just as it reached us, Black Mary dove forward as if stumbling, slamming hard into the midwife’s shoulder. The old woman lurched forward and spun around, arms outstretched, but lost her balance and fell on her back, onto the metal rail directly before the omnibus wheel. The vehicle lurched as it ran her over, and she howled, sitting nearly upright, watching the metal grind through her belly, leaving her nearly cut in half. It had happened so quickly, only then did someone scream, and the driver had already stopped the omnibus.
The midwife’s blood filled the railway channel, her gut a mess of torn flesh and fabric. Her legs twitched a little, but she flailed her arms, her neck strained upward, her mouth opening and closing, looking and sounding like a fish flopping and dying on a dock. Blood soon spouted from her mouth, and she collapsed, convulsing but a few more times before going still.
Black Mary relinquished my body then, and I took back my faculties and the power over my limbs.
It is done, the ghost said.
I could barely breathe, let alone speak. Many of the passengers of the omnibus had disembarked, and the crowd circling the vehicle and the corpse had multiplied. Shouts went up for the police, and for a stretcher, but it was plain to everyone there that such efforts would be to no avail.
“She just fell on the tracks!” the driver shouted, sounding frantic.
“She was pushed!” said a man nearby me. “I saw it happen with me own eyes!”
I wanted to turn and run, but the calm voice of Black Mary said, Be still.
“But they saw me!” I shouted inwardly, knowing my singular features would make it impossible to hide.
No. They saw me.
She was right, for when a policeman arrived a moment later, the witnesses all reported seeing a blonde or red-haired woman who had since vanished. I gradually got away from the scene of the accident, fighting through an unceasing tide of blood-spectators that poured in to catch a glimpse of the body. Once free of it, I turned up Whitechapel, toward the hospital.