The Devil's Workshop (27 page)

C
inderhouse heard a commotion down the hall, like someone dropping something. He kept the fist that held the scissors tight against the pantry door, holding it shut, and reached with his other hand for a low chair that was just within arm’s reach. It had a basket-weave seat and an embroidered back, all bright yellow and shiny blue, and he tipped it up and shoved it under the pantry’s doorknob.

Footsteps outside in the hallway, someone answering the girl’s scream for help. Cinderhouse opened the scissors, looking over the blades with an experienced eye. They were very much like the scissors he was accustomed to using, nice and sharp, hardly used and never dulled.

A man in a constable’s uniform, presumably Rupert, a
policeman in another policeman’s house, lurched through the kitchen door as Cinderhouse swept his right arm through the air in front of him, left to right, a magnificent gleaming arc. One of the scissors’ twin blades sliced through the flesh of Rupert’s throat and a gout of blood erupted across Cinderhouse’s face and chest. It leapt from Rupert to him as if it had been waiting for him, longing for him. He smiled and bared his teeth and felt the warmth of the other man’s blood on his lips.

Rupert clapped a hand against his throat and stopped its joyous rush. The blood bubbled out and over and through his fingers like a rill over its rocky bed. It flowed down the constable’s arm, soaking his cuffs and shirtsleeves and jacket. His other arm hung down at his side, his fist clenched tight around some small thing.

But young Rupert was still able to talk. The scissor blade hadn’t severed his vocal cords and he still had a tongue, lucky devil. And, as he talked, he continued to move forward, pushing Cinderhouse back against the long wooden table in the center of the room.

“Miss Fiona?”

The girl was banging on the pantry door, but the chair held. Rupert began to turn toward the noise, but his free arm was still held out at an angle, forcing Cinderhouse down and back, his spine bending at an uncomfortable angle against the table’s edge. He fumbled for the scissors, but his hands were wet with blood, and he felt the blade, possibly the same blade that had snicker-snacked through Rupert’s throat, slice into his right index finger. He couldn’t see how deep the cut was, but he dropped the
scissors on the table. He fumbled with them in the sticky pool already growing there and found the loop at the end of one blade. He stuck his first two fingers through the loop, ratcheted the blades apart, and drove one of them into Rupert’s thigh.

Rupert didn’t seem to notice. He continued through his turn and staggered toward the pantry. One arm still hung down at his side, the other bent up, his hand loose at his throat, his blood pumping sluggishly now, as if it had lost interest in the whole affair and was preparing for sleep. Rupert put one leg forward . . .

“Fiona?”

As if he had forgotten who Fiona was or why he should care.

He put out the other leg, that side of his trousers sopping with whatever blood had been left over for the lower half of his body, the cheap fabric there puckering and clammy. His foot hit the floor without the force of his body behind it and he stumbled and caught himself, one hand, the fist still bunched, against the pantry door.

The banging against the other side of the door stopped.

“Constable?” Her voice was muffled and distant.

“I’m . . . Fiona . . . I’ll do that.”

And Rupert fell forward toward the door and bounced off of it, reeled away into the kitchen. Cinderhouse, free from the table, leapt upon the constable’s back and drove him to the floor and stabbed him in the back. And stabbed him again and again, and his teeth gnashed and ground against one another, and he brought the scissors down again and through the thin fabric of the constable’s uniform.

And again.

Rupert stopped moving, stopped trying to crawl across the slimy red kitchen floor with Cinderhouse on his back. His hands scrabbled one last time in the syrupy blood, and then he let go of his last breath. Cinderhouse felt it go, felt himself sink down against Rupert’s rib cage. Rupert’s fist opened up and a spool of red thread rolled away from him, red against red, leaving a lopsided trail until it bumped up against a table leg and stopped.

The banging on the other side of the pantry door started up again, but Cinderhouse ignored the noise. He stood and set the blood-slick scissors on the tabletop. He listened for any other sound in the house, for anyone else who might be coming to see what had happened. He heard a woman scream, once, and felt a moment of blind panic, thinking that Jack had somehow followed him here, but the scream had sounded far off, and no one was approaching down the hall beyond the kitchen. He and the girl and the body of the policeman seemed to be alone.

He examined his finger where it was cut. The two edges of skin and flesh gaped apart, smooth and even down the middle of the finger, all the way to the first knuckle. He could see blood welling up and out, but couldn’t tell how bad it was. The finger was already covered with blood, dripping with it, some his, some Rupert’s.

He pulled the sopping white coverlet out of the basin of water on the table and wrapped it around his hand and gasped. He had forgotten that the little bitch was soaking the thing in salt water! He sat heavily on the chair against the pantry door and felt it creak beneath him. Salt water in the basin. A trap for him. She
was a crafty girl, and comely. A valuable prize to be had. After he had finished his business.

“What did you do?” Her voice soft and frightened behind the door. “Where’s Constable Winthrop?”

Cinderhouse pursed his lips and looked around the kitchen. Perhaps there was notepaper and a pencil somewhere in a drawer or a cabinet. But even if he found it, even if he wrote a note to the little girl and pushed it under the door to her, she wouldn’t be able to read it in the dark. Still, he stood and paced about, twisting the balls of his feet so as not to slip when he walked through the smeared and pooling blood. There was no notepaper, but he did find a key on a shelf in the cupboard closest to the kitchen window. It was tucked up against the side and he took it out and looked it over. He walked back to the pantry door and tried the key in the keyhole under the knob. It was a perfect fit.

“Rupert! Rupert!”

I should be very surprised if he answered you,
Cinderhouse thought. He chuckled, a rasping sound in the back of his throat, and wished he could share this joke with his new girl.

“You’ve made a mistake, sir! This is the house of Detective Inspector Walter Day. Whatever you’re doing here, this is the wrong house. He will find you and arrest you.”

Cinderhouse nodded at the closed door and smiled again. It wasn’t the wrong house at all. He turned the key and heard a confident snick as the lock slid into place.

“No! You can’t do this!” And then louder: “Father! Father!”

He pulled the chair out from under the knob.
Father? Who might that be? Walter Day?

He picked up the spool of thread and grabbed the card of needles from the table and carried the chair over to the body on the floor. He sat down again, poked at the body with the toe of his boot. It was as dead as a person could get. He used his foot to roll the constable over. Rupert’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling.

Mustn’t have that.

Cinderhouse slipped off the chair onto his knees. There was no point in worrying about the blood. He was covered with it, head to feet; it was dripping from his chin whiskers. He broke off a length of bloody red thread with his teeth, wet the end of it with his lips, and poked it through the eye of a needle. He tied a knot in the thread’s hanging end, then bent over the body and stuck the needle through Rupert’s left eyelid. He pulled it through and around and hummed to himself as he began the work of quieting Rupert’s accusing eyes for good and all.

I
t’s not time to rest,” Kingsley said. “Push again.”

“I can’t,” Claire said. “I won’t. I’m tired.”

“Well, you may be tired, but nature hasn’t given you a choice. You’ll push or you’ll die.”

“Just take it out.”

“If I do, you’ll surely die.”

“Please stop saying that I’ll die.”

“I’m sorry. It’s my hope that I might motivate you to avoid death.”

“Well, you’re scaring me.”

“Yes.”

“No more.”

“Once more.”

“Only once?”

“I think once might be enough. I know you can do it. Just one more time.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned forward, her hands tight around the bedposts behind her, and she screamed and she bore down.

Kingsley held his breath as he saw the furry crown come into view. He did not consider childbirth to be a miracle. It was a natural animal occurrence, and he would prefer that a midwife be in attendance.

Where was Fiona? He had heard a racket downstairs and assumed that the clumsy constable—what was his name?—was tripping over himself in an effort to collect basins and heat water at the fireplace. He hoped the boy hadn’t burned himself.

The baby emerged amid a slurry of fluid and Kingsley caught it, felt her body pushing it toward him. He snipped the cord and expertly tied off the end. He turned with the infant girl in his hands, but there was no towel ready, no basin of fresh water, nobody to help.

Fiona should have stopped in by now to check on Claire.

Claire slumped, exhausted, back against the bed, and Kingsley used a face flannel from the washbasin on the table to wipe the baby down as well as he could and warm her, and she made the same tentative movements that he had seen from dozens of healthy newborns. She gurgled and tested her new voice, and he came around the side of the bed and rested her in her mother’s arms. Claire managed a weak smile and touched the baby’s face with her fingertip.

Kingsley went to the bedroom door and opened it, poked his head out hoping to see Fiona, but the hall was dark and empty. He went to the top of the stairs and heard the doorbell ring below him just as Claire called out to him from the bedroom.

“Doctor! I think something’s wrong.”

J
ack asked the driver to stop as soon as they reached Primrose Hill. He got out and strolled away from the two-wheeler with no destination in mind and a clear sense of anticipation. Fate would provide. Fate and the city.

And so, when he turned the corner, he was not surprised to see a man standing at a door at the end of the street ahead. The man was very tall and very thin and, Jack thought, quite beautiful. But he was dressed in a shabby blue uniform that appeared to have dirt pressed into its many creases. The jacket might have been taken from a corpse. Lying on the footpath behind the man was a boy’s bicycle, cast hastily aside. This could be no one but Sergeant Hammersmith.

Hammersmith was pounding on the door of the last house and took no notice as Jack passed behind him in the lane.

“Claire!” Hammersmith said to the door. “Fiona! Someone answer!” No one did, and Hammersmith began to frantically pull the bell cord.

Jack turned the corner and passed out of sight
of the agitated policeman. There was a low fence behind
the house, just above waist level, and Jack hopped it,
landing neatly on the other side of a nettle bush.
The instruments in his medical bag clattered against one another, but the clasp held tight.

Jack strolled across the garden, staying as close as possible to the house’s rear wall without snagging his trousers on the nettles, and peered around the edge of an open door. He was looking into a kitchen, which seemed to have been decorated in the fashion of an abattoir. The floor was pooled with congealing blood, and a fine red spray had coated most of the vertical surfaces that Jack could see. A pair of legs belonging to a prostrate man extended out of sight behind a long wooden table that was too
large for the room. There was another door at the far side of the room, and another man was passing through that door now, walking away from Jack down a hallway. Even from behind, Jack had no trouble recognizing his foolish little fly. He shook his head and clucked his tongue and carefully sidled into the room.

Cinderhouse did not hear him or turn around. The fly was hurrying toward the front door, directly in front of him along the hallway. The doorbell was pealing in the most annoying way, and Jack could faintly hear Hammersmith’s voice on the other side of the house, still calling out women’s names.

It occurred to him that he might very well have saved Walter Day from a bit of trouble by detaining him belowground on this fine spring afternoon.

Jack stepped over the largest plash of blood and around to the other side of the table. He looked down at the dead man who had decorated the room with his blood. The man didn’t look familiar. He was young, but it was difficult to tell more than that because his throat had been torn open and his mouth and eyes stitched shut. Jack frowned at the dead man. He had been transformed, that was certain. But there was no artistry in this. It was savagery for the sake of savagery. A waste of sticky blood.

A thumping noise distracted Jack and he turned toward yet another door, next to the one leading out into the hall. This second door, which Jack presumed separated the pantry from the rest of the kitchen, was closed, and someone was pounding on it as if in response to Sergeant Hammersmith’s attack on the front door. Jack stepped closer to the closed door.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” said a girl on the other side of the door. “Is someone there?”

Oh, little fly,
Jack thought,
I told you to leave the children alone.

“Your back door was open,” he said. “There’s a terrible mess out here. What’s happened?”

“Be careful. There’s a very dangerous man out there.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right.”

“He locked the door. Can you open it?”

Jack shrugged and glanced around for a key, but he didn’t care very much whether the girl stayed in the pantry.

“I don’t see a key,” he said.

He set his black leather bag down in a relatively clean space on the table and opened it. He leaned to one side and looked down the hallway. The tailor was still there, hesitating, his hand on the latch, while Hammersmith battered at the other side of the front door.

•   •   •

K
INGSLEY
HAD
ALREADY
STARTED
to turn back toward the bedroom when he saw a bald man appear at the bottom of the stairs, facing the door. The man was covered in blood and he was twitching. Kingsley felt torn for a moment, then hurried back to the room. Claire was clutching the bedsheets with one hand, her face pale, her baby squirming in the crook of her other elbow.

“Claire,” he said, “what you undoubtedly feel is the placenta coming. It will not be difficult to deliver.”

“It feels just like before. Not easy at all.”

Kingsley found a scalpel in his bag. He didn’t want to tell Claire that there was an intruder in the house. She might panic. And he couldn’t move her. She needed to remain calm.

“You’ll be fine for a moment, Claire. Just breathe slowly and evenly and I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t leave me!”

He went to the bedroom door, swallowed hard, and ran to the staircase. Fiona was somewhere below and the stranger had an awful lot of blood on his suit.

Behind him, the baby began to cry.

•   •   •

“W
HO
ARE
YOU
?” the girl in the pantry said. “I don’t recognize your voice.”

“I’m . . .” Jack hesitated, then glanced at the black bag on the table. “I’m a doctor.”

“Can you see . . . Is there a constable out there somewhere?”

“Oh, I see him.”

Jack looked through the bag and found what he was looking for. He removed a flannel the size of a handkerchief and a small glass vial. He unstoppered the vial and poured a bit of the colorless liquid onto the cloth, careful to keep it far away from his face. The fumes were powerful. He set the vial back on the table and stepped out of the kitchen just as someone ran down the stairs ahead of him at the far end of the hall.

•   •   •

“W
HO
ARE
YOU
?” Kingsley said.

But he didn’t wait for an answer. He was afraid he might lose his nerve if he hesitated, so he barreled straight at the bloody bald man and knocked him back against the wall next to the front door.

“Don’t move,” he said. Then: “Fiona!”

He looked around wildly, hoping he would not see her body on the floor, shouting as loud as he could, and hoping she was able to respond.

“Fiona, are you all right?”

He had the scalpel in his hand, kept it near the bald man’s throat while he reached over with his free hand and unlatched the door. Sergeant Hammersmith immediately burst into the room, but stopped cold when he saw the bald man, who glared at Hammersmith with fear and rage in his eyes.

“Hongermiff!” the bald man said. “Gie!”

The bald man wrenched himself away from Kingsley as Hammersmith lunged toward them. Too late, Kingsley realized the stranger was holding a pair of sewing scissors. Kingsley brought the scalpel down, trying to stop the bald man’s forward motion or even cut the scissors out of his hand. He sliced through the tendons of the man’s arm as it swept around, and the scissors buried themselves in Hammersmith’s chest.

All three men stopped moving and stared at the handles of the scissors, miraculously stuck to the front of Hammersmith’s shirt, a black enameled double loop magnetized to his body. Then a red stain crept outward from a buttonhole and a thin tributary made its way down the shirt, toward Hammersmith’s belly. The sergeant looked up at Kingsley with a reverential expression. He opened his mouth and a bubble of blood burst against his lips.

Hammersmith fell to his knees and toppled backward against the doorjamb.

Upstairs, Claire screamed and broke the silence.

Dr Kingsley realized that someone was standing behind him and began to turn just as a pair of rough hands grabbed him and stuck a cloth over his mouth and nose. There was a sharp odor
and then the room was washed away and he felt himself falling as if he were watching someone else at a great distance.

He thought perhaps he heard Claire scream again, but she was also far away and he couldn’t move and he floated off into a dark and dreamless ocean.