Dead Leprechauns & Devil Cats

by Grady Hendrix

  Copyright, 2014

  Dead Leprechauns & Devil Cats: Strange Tales of the White Street Society by Grady Hendrix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

  Cover art by Eric Mueller.

  ISBN: 978-0-9834487-5-4

  Grady Hendrix is the author of Satan Loves You, a ridiculous novel about Hell that has brought strong men to tears. He has also written Occupy Space, a “scientific fiction” novella which has been known to cause spontaneous combustion and should not be read by those suffering from pregnancy, heart palpitations, or possessing weak minds. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, and his story “Mofongo Knows” appears in John Joseph Adam’s The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. Many of the tales in this volume have been read aloud as “audio books” by the good men and women of Pseudopod. His nonfiction has appeared in Variety, Slate, Playboy, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, the New York Sun and the Village Voice. You can follow every little move he makes at www.gradyhendrix.com.

  Books By Grady Hendrix

  SATAN LOVES YOU - managing Hell turns out to be a lot harder than Satan ever imagined, and now he must deal with professional wrestlers and chihuahuas in hats as he tries to save his underground realm from a corporate takeover by the Heavenly Host.

  OCCUPY SPACE - the residents of an economically depressed South Carolina town build a Redneck NASA to put a man into space.

  DEAD LEPRECHAUNS & DEVIL CATS: STRANGE TALES OF THE WHITE STREET SOCIETY - Shiver in horror at these steampunk tales of 19th century Men of Science battling the forces of the irrational and beating them to death with shovels. Killer Leprechauns! The true meaning of Christmas! Severed heads that sing!

  THE MAD SCIENTIST’S GUIDE TO WORLD DOMINATION - edited by John Joseph Adams, this anthology of mad scientist stories features Grady Hendrix’s “Mofongo Knows” the heart-rending tale of Mofongo, the mighty science ape with the atomic brain, now fallen on hard times and working the freak beat in a traveling carnival.

  For more information, please go to www.gradyhendrix.com

  Find me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.

  Can’t read?

  The White Street Society can help.

  If you are one of the millions of illiterate Kindle, iPad, Nook, or Kobo owners, we hear your plight. Perhaps you just like the pretty colors? Maybe you’re a baby? Either way, we have a solution. Half of the Tales of the White Street Society are available “free of charge” in “audio” versions, read in sonorous tones by the good people of Pseudopod, the premiere online site for horrible audio fiction.

  “The Hairy Ghost”

  “The Corpse Army of Khartoum”

  Unfortunately, you’ll have to get a friend or a bus driver to read “The Yellow Curse” and “The Christmas Spirits” to you.

  See more horrible tales of the supernatural at Pseudopod.

  Dead Leprechauns &

  Devil Cats:

  Strange Tales of the

  White Street Society

  Chapter One….The Hairy Ghost

  Chapter Two….The Corpse Army of Khartoum

  Chapter Three….The Yellow Curse

  Chapter Four….The Christmas Spirits

  To Amanda —

  It turns out

  that you did not

  weigh the same as a feather

  when thrown from a great height.

  My saddest day —

  yet what a victory for science.

  The Hairy Ghost

  We arrived at the White Street clubhouse at a quarter after eight and were led into the dining room by the inscrutable Charles, who promptly whisked our topcoats away into the mysterious bowels of that great brownstone. Our host, Augustus Mortimer, welcomed the three of us and we dined well on the club's excellent fare, none of us mentioning the nervous excitement we felt at being summoned, once more, to convene this meeting of the White Street Society.

  After dinner, we retired to the murky clubroom where Lewis stoked the fire into a crackling blaze while Mortimer distributed Russian cigars. Drake, his whiskers trembling with exertion, applied himself to the cork of a dusty bottle of excellent brandy and then passed around snifters of the amber liquid as we settled into our accustomed places. Mortimer raised his snifter and solemnly intoned:

  “Spirits for spirits,” and we simultaneously raised our glasses and drained them. The bottle was passed again as Mortimer addressed us.

  “You will be surprised to learn that my absence of the past several weeks did not take me to sunny Spain, underdeveloped Mexico, nor balmy Italy. Instead, I have been, gentlemen, in Cow Bay, that epicenter of filth in lower New York.”

  “Whyever for?” Drake cried, expressing the astonishment we all felt.

  “Wherever the veil of our world is drawn back and glimpses of that other, uneasy shore are revealed. Wherever spirits haunt the steps of man, where time runs backwards, and dogs mutter, wherever the weird and mysterious bedevil our material plane there shall you find I, bedeviling right back. And, for reasons incomprehensible to the sane and hygienic, this time the veil was drawn back in...the ghetto.”

  We all shivered.

  “I have never encountered a case as blood-chilling as this one. Never have I, except perhaps once in Majorca, had my sensibilities so affronted as in a sodden tenement on Little Water Street. There, in the filthiest conditions imaginable, I confronted the worst case of the supernatural run amuck that I have ever had the misfortune to witness.”

  “Worse than the Infant Aerialist?“ asked Lewis, precipitating a chill to pass around the room at the mere mention of that silent marauder.

  “Worse, my old friend.”

  “Worse than the Devil Cat?” I asked, my tongue stumbling over the hideous name of the demonic presence that had terrorized a buttery in Connecticut and almost cost Drake his life.

  “Nothing is worse than the Devil Cat!” said Drake.

  “My friends, it is a case worse than that of the Levitating Head of Al Arak, more insidious than the Humming Book, more demonic than even the Devil Cat, dear Drake. This, my friends, is the only time you shall hear told of The Hairy Ghost. And you are the more fortunate for it.”

  We settled back into our chairs, hearts pounding, ears straining to catch every word as Augustus Mortimer recounted to us the following bizarre narrative.

  THE TALE OF THE HAIRY GHOST

  “One morning, overtaken by hunger and fatigue, I abandoned a rather pointed letter to the Times and repaired to a nearby hotel for breakfast. There my gaze happened to fall on a day old newspaper. Imagine how upsetting it was for me to read on the front page an account of the self-murder of one Dr. Ebenezeus Hagedorn in a hideous establishment known as Weeping House in the slums of Cow Bay.

  “Dr. Hagedorn and I had served one another, unofficially, as consultants on difficult diagnoses, usually through the post as he is the possessor of a singular personal odor: like that of a large, sweating cheese. Being Italian, it is to be expected, but even after years of association I was unable to acclimate myself to his unpleasant bouquet.

  “The article described, in rather poor taste, the discovery of Dr. Hagedorn dangling lifeless from a noose, in a cramped and fetid chamber, helpfully supplying me with the greasy abode's address. I intended to report it to the health authorities, perhaps encouraging them to burn it to the ground and incarcerate its occupants in lunatic asylums and prison cells, when a tiny paragraph at the bottom of the column caught my eye: The doctor was found with a great quantity of paper currency upon his person, but otherwise he had no possessions save the clothes he wore upon his back.

  “Why should that alarm you, Mortimer?” Drake asked.<
br />
  “Because nowhere does it mention his lucky lodestone.”

  “Lucky lodestone!” ejaculated Lewis.

  “Yes. Hagedorn never went anywhere without a tiny lodestone in his right front trouser pocket.”

  “Could it be theft?” I asked.

  “Why take the stone and leave the paper currency?” said Drake.

  “It could have fallen out,” I replied, trying to bring reason to this room.

  “That is possible,” said Mortimer, “were it not for the fact that the lucky stamp nailed to the heel of his shoe was also not mentioned.”

  “Worn off,” I said.

  “And the tiny gypsy charm he carried attached to his watch fob?”

  “But the watch itself was missing, according to your article.”

  “Then what about the splinter of the true cross this fanatical papist wore beneath his shirt?”

  “Perhaps he didn't put it on that day?”

  “Or the vial of blessed water he carried in his waistcoat pocket?”

  “Carried away by rats.”

  “Then there is the tiny magnet he wore on a leathern string concealed beneath his copious beard. What of that, William?”

  “That, I admit, is very strange. But might not all of this be the work of rodents or light-fingered police officers?”

  “Perhaps my boundaries of the fantastic are not as broad as yours, my friend,” Mortimer said. “To me, a Dr. Hagedorn shorn of his numerous charms and talismans is a Dr. Hagedorn awry. And so, after finishing my breakfast — which was quite excellent I might add — I took myself down to Cow Bay to demand answers to this mystery.”

  “Was it...was it in the Five Points?” Drake asked, naming the very black, beating heart of corruption and poverty in New York.

  “Not in the epicenter, my friend, but very nearby.”

  “But how did you get there?” Drake asked.

  “I tramped southwards, down Manhattan Island. Thriving gaudy neighborhoods gave way to blighted streets overseen by dead-eyed buildings and crammed with a species of animal that bore only a passing resemblance to humanity. Gangs of children, maddened by depravity and rum, bit and tore at one another. Human excrement rained from the sky, spilling from broken windows by the bucketful. Insensate women lay sprawled in doorways, their garments disheveled so as to reveal gruesome portions of biology.

  “I finally arrived at a tall, narrow structure like a vertical kennel, sagging between its two more robust neighbors. An obese, unconscious Irishwoman, sprawled on her back, blocked the front door. I looked about for someone who might grant me alternate access and settled on a pinch-faced hag running her hands through the filth beside the rickety wooden steps.

  ‘Old hag, tell me —’ I began.

  ‘Yew wanna see the death room? Cost yew a nickel,’ she said.

  “I was rather taken aback at this crude reception, but the loathsome creature misinterpreted it as an attempt at haggling.

  ‘Four cents then, an’ thas’ as low as I go.’

  “Unsure of how to respond, I fished four pennies from my pocketbook and without a word she led me around to the side of the building, through a rough woolen blanket tacked over a hole in the wall of Weeping House, and into its putrescent interior.

  “The house was as black as pitch, its windows barricaded with dirty rags and broken boards, while all around me in the dark I could dimly perceive sleeping bodies. The floor was be-slimed with filth and with each step it oozed up almost to my shoe mouth. Pale faces leered at me out of the dark as I passed. The smell of boiled cabbage was rank and oppressed my soul. We passed from room to room, each packed with pallid shapes moving suggestively in the darkness. I observed leaking buckets of filthy water over which harlots would raise their skirts and relieve themselves, and into which children would dip their tin drinking cups. The house was permeated with a sense that the collective dregs of humanity were hidden here and they were up to something vicious, secret, and disgusting.

  “After winding through these intestinal corridors for some time we arrived at a door. The old witch brusquely pushed it open and stepped aside.

  ‘I doan go in,’ she said by way of reply to my unspoken query.

  ‘Madam, I thank —’ but before I had finished my courtesies she was but a dim shape, scuttling away from me down the hallway and swallowed up by the darkness.

  “I shook my head at the typical Irish rudeness of her manner, then stepped into the room, which was little more than a closet, illuminated by one broken and dispiriting window. The walls were covered with graffitoed crudities and childish attempts at anatomical diagrams. I even found a hole in the planking, beneath which was a rat's nest containing five blind ratlings, Hagedorn's lucky lodestone, and the leathern strap with the magnet on it which he wore beneath his beard.”

  “Ah ha!“ I said. “It was the rats!”

  Mortimer dismissed me with a languid wave of his hand.

  “I have no time for rats and talk of rats,” he said, and then he continued.

  “I looked around this forsaken room and wondered what on earth could have brought such a great, albeit odorous, man as Hagedorn to this pit of poverty. I must admit I was tempted to join a reform movement and burn this filthy hovel to the ground immediately if I could have ensured that cremation would not release harmful gases into the atmosphere.

  “A creak of the floor caught my attention and I turned sharply, expecting to find my guide creeping up behind me with a jackblack in her hand and murder in her Irish eyes. Instead, I beheld a waif with a waxen pallor, protruding bones and papery skin, crouching inside the doorway. Her furtive creeping was arrested when she saw me. Raising herself up to her full height she fixed her watery eyes on me and said:

  ‘Harry don't like you.’

  “I was about to strike her for her insolence when her face slackened and she swooned. I stepped forward to catch her, then noticed spittle running from her mouth, and stepped back just as quickly to avoid soiling my clothes. Fortunately she was very light and the fall did her no great damage. With an empty room at my back, an unconscious child at my feet, and no way of locating my guide or escaping from Weeping House I was in a tight spot.

  “After due consideration I decided to make for the street. Unfortunately the dim hallways proved to be more than my match and I found myself passing deeper and deeper into the filthy core of the blasted house. Ghoulish faces babbled, ‘Arby, arby rose,’ at me as I ran by, and I saw such scenes of depravity in my peripheral vision that I shudder to recall them even now.

  “Finally I heard distant voices raised in excitement and I directed my steps towards them, eager not to lose this slight spoor of humanity. It shames me to confess it now but I was not a little afraid at this point that I would never see daylight again. When I rounded that final corner and saw a knot of broken-down inebriates gathered around a doorway my heart raced as if confronted with the Heavenly Host itself. A cry of greeting on my lips, I stumbled towards this clump of subhuman excrescence who were mumbling to themselves and staring down at a fallen form. They turned in terror as I approached them, and my relief turned to dismay as I recognized the fallen figure as the emaciated trollop who had assaulted me earlier. She had somewhat recovered and was in the doughy arms of my guide. Turning her baleful gaze upon me, she coughed up a sticky brown substance.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I’m a doctor.’

  ‘She sez yew left her on the floar,’ snarled my decrepit Virgil.

  ‘She is obviously hallucinating. She is a sick girl and belongs in a sanitarium.’

  ‘She’s got fits, that's awl,’ the creature said.

  ‘She seems well enough now. Tell me, Miss...’

  ‘Miss Kathy,’ the girl said.

  ‘Miss Kathy,’ I said, kneeling down in her general vicinity. ‘Tell these...people how you attacked me and fell to the floor on your own.’

  The wizened crone who had brought me into this hellhole narrowed her eyes.

  ‘She says y
ew left ‘er on the floor. What kind of man be ye’ oo’d do sech a thing to an innercent child like ‘er?’

  “The crowd of derelicts mumbled assent from behind their yellowed falls of unkempt facial hair. I realized instantly that I must take charge of this situation or risk being trampled and sodomised.”

  “Sodomised?!?” cried Drake.

  “Yes, dear Drake, for it was immediately clear to me that this crowd was composed in no small part of sodomites. Their lack of energy, their sallow skin, their unkempt hair. The sure signs of sodomy were writ large upon their broken bodies.

  ‘Look here, you old harridan,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full height. ‘I am a gentleman and a doctor and I am used to being addressed with the respect due my position. Now show me to the kitchen. We shall lay this hapless creature on the table, boil some water and examine her. Then,’ and here I made my eyes flash quite menacingly, ‘you shall answer some questions.’

  “My speech had the exact opposite effect than what I had intended. The woman cursed and formed her hands into claws, and the men shuffled forward en masse, many of them wielding boat hooks and cudgels. I retreated until my back was pressed against the doorframe. The rabble continued their lethal advance, and so I shot one of them. Crying out, he fell backwards and his fellows froze as one. They looked at their fallen comrade, then withdrew to a respectful distance. I could tell the attitude of the crowd had changed significantly.