Supping With Panthers (52 page)

‘What is it?’ I asked, as she passed it on to me.

‘Why, your medical bag,’ she replied.

‘Medical bag?’

‘You are a doctor, aren’t you?’ She laughed; then led me, before I could ask more, across the filth-littered quay. A carriage was waiting for us. We both climbed in; the wheels began to turn, slicing through mud. As we jolted, I heard the pulping of rotten vegetables and fruit. I looked out through die window – again, the shudder of physical disgust. The buildings like a fungus, risen from the dirt. People everywhere I looked – greasy, stinking, predatory; quivering sacks of intestine and fat. How was it I had never realised this before – how ugly the poor were, how loathsome, the way they dared to live and breed? We passed a tavern. I heard the smacking of lips and the splash and swirl of liquids down throats, the belching of gas, the animal laughter and slobber of chat. One of the men turned and stared at me. I wanted to vomit. His hair, Huree – his hair was damp with grease; his skin slimy; there was nothing in him, not the faintest spark, nothing at ad that seemed worthy of life. I leaned back against my seat.

‘For God’s sake,’ I gasped, ‘we must get out of here.’

Lilah stroked my brow.

‘Tell me,’ I insisted, ‘where are we going?’

She smiled. ‘Why, to Whitechapel, Jack. They are so wretched there. Don’t you remember? They need your help, your philanthropy.’

‘No.’ I shook again. Noise, noise ad the time, crowding in on me from the streets outside. The stench and the darkness seeping from the crowds. I could feel my anger on thin, insect legs, crawling across my every emotion and thought. It couldn’t be borne. I had to escape it, it had to be crushed I leaned out from the window. ‘Here!’ I cried. ‘For God’s sake, stop!’ The carriage began to slow. I slumped against the door; it opened and I staggered outside. I was standing on the pavement of Whitechapel Street. I breathed in desperately. Surely the air would cool me? But the beat of life was everywhere – copulating, breeding, defecating life. As remorseless as time, it sounded; as remorseless as the monstrous crawling of my anger, inching forward on its thousand insect legs, prickling the sponge of my livid brain. Each step now was like a needle’s stab. Deeper and deeper; deeper they would spear. The horror was within my skull, piercing behind my eyes. Not just in the street but in my very thoughts – their faces, their laughter, the scent of their blood. It would drive me mad. No one could survive such pain. And still my anger crawled, and spread, and stabbed.

I sought darkness. Leading from the main road was a narrow, unlit street. I hurried down it. For a moment, there was almost a silence in my thoughts. I breathed in deeply and leaned against the brick of a warehouse wall. How long would I have to stay there, I wondered? The thought of leaving the silence and darkness was unbearable. Lilah – she must have seen where I had gone. She would come, and drive me back, and take me away from this sewer with its bubbling, foetid life. Otherwise … No, no. I closed my eyes. I ran a hand through my hair. To my faint surprise, I realised that my other hand was still clutching the medical bag.

Suddenly I heard footsteps. I looked up. At the far end of the street was a solitary lamp. Two figures were standing beneath it, a woman and a man. The woman bent over and raised up her skirts; the man took her with an urgent, quickening grind. I could hear his breathing, very amplified; I could smell the humid stench from his genitals. He had soon finished. He dropped the woman down on to the pavement; then I watched him leave and heard his footsteps fade away. The woman still lay where she had fallen in the dirt; she hadn’t even bothered to smooth back her skirts. She stank: my nostrils were assailed by the odour of rotting fish, of underclothes sticky with semen and sweat. At length, she did stagger to her feet. I knew her: Polly Nichols – I had treated her once for venereal disease. She began to sway towards me. Her tattered dress was covered in filth; I imagined it would cling like a second skin: she would have to peel it off if she were ever to be naked, and clean again. The thought made me nauseous. For her own skin would be greasy, pitted with sores and bleeding spots: that would have to be peeled away as wed. She was big-boned. There was a lot of skin … a lot to be cleaned.

I stepped out in front of her, and she shrank back, evidently startled; then she recognised my face, and flashed a toothless grin.

‘Dr Eliot,’ she cackled. ‘Ain’t you looking smart?’

‘Good evening, Polly,’ I said.

Her breath stank of gin. It would be swilling about inside her now, in her stomach, her bladder, her liver, her blood. Rotten – every putrid, stinking organ, every putrid, stinking cell. The legs of the insect on my brain were now like claws.

‘You have a disease,’ I said. I smiled. ‘Let me cure it,’ I reached into my bag. She never had a chance to protest. The knife sliced through the windpipe, and the blood came pumping out in a crimson, glorious stream. I knew at once, ripping her throat from ear to ear, that I had done the right thing. As her life ebbed away, my own came flooding back. The wash of blood was so sweet and good. My anger was dead: I could feel the insect shrivelling, its legs becoming straw; I laughed as it dropped off from my brain. I looked down at Polly. Her severed gullet was oozing and flapping. I cut the throat again, back to the spine …

I stared up to see Lilah. ‘Jack,’ she murmured, kissing me, ‘my darling Jack. What a wonder I have made of you.’ I laughed. I was drunk on her kisses, and the life that I had shed. I returned to the corpse and continued to slash. Lilah held me tighter; I melted on her touch. I cannot describe what she gave to me; words cannot approach it. But I did not need words. I merely opened, and accepted it.

A long time it persisted. The glee was still with me as we stood in the dark afterwards, watching the constables puffing on their whistles, the scurrying of the doctors, the nervous, eager crowds. How I laughed when someone fetched Llewellyn, my very own assistant, to certify die cause of death. If only he had known! And there I was behind him, with Lilah, unobserved!

We breakfasted that morning at Simpson’s, raw oysters and blood-red wine. Back in Rotherhithe, die pleasure was a glow which stayed with me for days – days, I say, translating it into the equivalent that you would understand, for to me, with Lilah, there was no such thing as time. There was only feeling, and so I judged by what I felt – the slave of ad I had sought to repress. Dimly I knew this, for beneath the fog my reason and my old self still endured. As the contours became clearer, so my horror began to grow; the more I understood what it was that I had done. Soon I knew nothing but abject self-disgust; it crushed me, paralysed me; I could scarcely bear to stir. And yet I was at last myself again; and knowing that, I could finally act.

I knew I had to escape. I left, not across the river but towards London Bridge. No one sought to bring me back. I was not deceived, of course. I doubted that Lilah would let me slip her clutches for long. But in the meantime, there were those whom I could try to alert. ‘Whitechapel,’ I ordered my driver as we crossed London Bridge. ‘Hanbury Street.’ I had to warn Llewellyn; I had to tell him, before my reason was extinguished again, of what had been done to my brain, of the monster I had become. But my reason was already fading, the further I journeyed from Rotherhithe; the insect’s legs were starting to crawl through my mind a second time. I clenched my fists, I shut my eyes; I fought to clear my thoughts of the stabbing pain. But remorselessly it grew; and with it, my desperation for the cure.

At last we reached the turning into Hanbury Street. The driver would take me no further; he was a decent man, he told me, and it was very late at night. I nodded, scarcely understanding him; I thrust ad the money I had into his palm, then staggered like a drunken man into the dark. The pain now was searing; but I knew there was only a short way to go. I would do it. I glanced at a woman leaning against a street lamp. It was fortunate, I thought, that I was so close now to the surgery; otherwise I would never have passed her by. I stopped, I stared at her. How ugly she was. She smiled at me. like the other one, she stank of unwashed crevices and sweat. The thought of her body, its life, made me shake. I wanted to shriek, the pain was so intense. One step at a time. One step at a time. I would do it. I was walking, after ad. I was moving down the street. It wasn’t very far.

‘How much?’ I asked.

The woman grinned at me; she gave me a figure. I nodded. Over here,’ I said, pointing towards the dark. ‘Where we can’t be seen.’

The woman frowned. I realised I was shuddering, and struggled to control myself. She must have misinterpreted my eagerness, however, for she smiled again and then took my arm. So she ready imagined that I wanted her! Wanted to explore her stinking, oozing slit! The very idea redoubled my disgust. The pleasure of killing her was almost greater than before. I hacked her throat to shreds; ripped the stomach, then pulled it apart. The intestines were still fresh to the touch; with what relish I scattered them over the ground! – tissue on dirt – dust to dust! I sliced free her uterus. How delightful it was, to see it flopping and sliding like a landed fish! There was no chance of life being grown within it now. I slashed at it a few times, just to make sure. Putrid and turned into dung, though, I thought suddenly, it might blossom with flowers- I pictured them in my mind’s eye: white, and sweet-smelling, and delicate – a pretty bloom to spring from such a source! I would take the uterus, present it as a gift. Lilah was at the end of the street. She received my offering with laughter and a kiss.

We returned to Rotherhithe. The pleasure persisted as it had done before. No other mental function could counter the delight; memories of the world beyond the warehouse walls were blotted out by it, and details of my life there now seemed hopelessly remote. I only truly understood this after meeting with Lady Mowberley again – Lady Mowberley, I say, for I could barely recall her true identity at first, nor even how I had known her or ever seen her face. It appeared before me one evening, though, as I was staring into the flames of an incense burner, tracing patterns of blood in the fire; suddenly I could see her before me, this barely-remembered woman, risen it seemed from a world of my dreams.

‘Jack,’ she whispered. ‘Jack.’ She smoothed her hand across my brow. ‘Do you not know me?’ she asked.

I frowned. She seemed a phantom, unreal. But slowly I did indeed begin to remember her, and how desperately I had once searched for her, and at the memory of that I had to laugh. Was it ready true that I had fought her in the cause of preserving human life? Of
preserving
it?

She assured me that it was true; then she joined in my laughter. ‘I apologise,’ she said, ‘but as you find now for yourself, there are certain needs we have no choice but to obey. Do not blame me, Jack, and do not blame yourself. We are Lilah’s toys. I fought it once too, on the mountain peaks of Kalikshutra, so long ago now, it seems, so long ago, when I first felt her teeth and lips against my skin, and her thoughts inside my brain – my Lilah – my beloved, bewitching queen…’ She paused; and reaching out for me, stroked my cheek gently with her nails. ‘Yet now,’ she murmured, ‘if I had the choice – I would not return to being mortal again. I have learned too much – felt too much. Why – I have toys of my own. You remember Lucy?’ She smiled. ‘I am sure she would want to send you her regards,’ She paused; but I did not understand; for my brain felt too dizzy to recall Lucy’s name. My companion frowned; then smiled, as though she had understood. ‘I am sorry, Jack,’ she whispered, ‘that I deceived you for so long – and yet I – you –
we
cannot help ourselves,’ She kissed me on the lips. ‘We cannot be but what we are made.’

‘You deceived me,’ I echoed suddenly, in puzzlement.

She frowned. ‘Why, do you not remember?’ she asked.

I glanced past her at the flames of the incense burner. Faintly a memory stirred, of another fire in another room. ‘You came to me,’ I murmured. ‘We sat in chairs beside my hearth. Is that not so?’

Lady Mowberley, or Charlotte Westcote as I could now remember she was called, smiled at this. ‘We wondered how long it would take you,’ she replied, ‘to suspect the client who had hired you on the case.’

‘We wondered?’

‘It was not I who devised the game.’

‘Game?’ I stared at her wildly. ‘It was a game?’

Charlotte inclined her head.

‘Whose?’

‘Surely you can deduce that?’ she asked. ‘No?’ She laughed, then turned and gestured. ‘Why, La Señora Susanna Celestina del Tolosa.’

I looked and saw Suzette – not the little girl, but the woman I had glimpsed before: graceful, haunting, beautiful. ‘No,’ I whispered, shaking my head. ‘No … I don’t understand …’

Suzette smiled. ‘But you will, Doctor – you will.’ She crossed the room towards me. ‘You are scarcely yourself at the moment, after ad. But when your pleasure fades – then you will remember, and for a brief while be Jack Eliot again.’ She took my hands, stroked them. ‘You should be proud; you entertained Lilah and myself a great deal.’

‘Entertained?’ I struggled to remember through the fog. A story somewhere? In a magazine? Something she had talked of and persuaded me to read? I began to ask her, but Suzette rose again and with a gesture cut me off.

‘Over the centuries,’ she told me, ‘I have composed many enchantments – many games. You gave me the chance, though, to practise something new. We were certain, you see, that you would eventually discover the trouble George was in. Your old friendship with him – your powers of observation – your experiences in Kalikshutra … yes; it was inevitable that the case would attract you in the end.’ She glanced at Charlotte, then smiled and took her arm. ‘When Miss Westcote learned of you from George, we were initially disturbed by the reports of your background and your powers. We had spun a tight mesh around Mowberley, you see; and yet you, it now appeared, might untangle it again. I wondered whether to dispose of you – and then, I happened to chance on
Beeton’s Magazine.
Surely you remember it, Doctor? Sherlock Holmes? The first consulting detective in the world?’