Dr Campbell was naïve in believing the notion that he was invincible. He surely was not, as he’d come to learn in the following days. There were a few religious zealots (the rest of them were prostrating and praying in their churches) who had stood outside his clinic, while waiting their turn which would never come, who started another rumour. Whether it was indeed just a rumour or not remains a mystery to this day. They said to the horde of people amassed outside “This man here, Dr Campbell, he’s no human being. He’s the devil incarnate, mocking us and the foundation of our society, of our economy. Can’t you see? The robe he dons is blood red, exactly the colour of the devil as the Bible tells us. His eyes, if you’ve ever seen them when he’s not wearing the mask, they’re lifeless and hollow. Like he’s already dead. And he doesn’t give in to sympathy. He’s full of malice and contempt. Just like Lucifer whom God kicked out because he didn’t acknowledge the superiority of man! Dr Campbell is the devil himself! That, or he’s sold his soul to him!”
This rumour was far-fetched and very obviously a blatant lie, one last attempt to throw dirt at the already marred name of the doctor, but it caught like wildfire. Everyone was talking about it. What was more surprising was the fact that everyone was believing it with ease. Perhaps it was because they needed a reason to hate him beside the most obvious one; that he had refused them treatment. The crowd gained in strength, now that the religious zealots had joined them in order to witness and abhor the demonic incarnation that was Dr Campbell, and it became exceedingly difficult for the doctor to make his way to and from his home every day. But he had accumulated all the money he needed from all the affluent people who had come his way. And now there remained none, save for the damned poor. And there was no way he was going to treat them.
So, one dark night he packed his bags and made to abscond. Little did he know; the mob of angry rejects was lying in wait at the corner of the street. They saw him get in the horse carriage. Before the carriage could turn at the corner, they had it surrounded, armed with their flailing pitchforks and sticks of fire, screaming “heathen! Hypocrite! Out with you!”
He’d no choice at that moment but to surrender with his hands behind his head. The crowd beat him, punched him and shoved him to their heart’s content. Then they moved on to do with him what they had intended all along. They took him, without his armour of invincibility, to the shanty part of town and had him grudgingly treat the sickly and write certificates for the unaffected. Afterwards they took him, even though he cried and thrashed his arms wildly, to the pest house in the extreme outskirts of the city (for it was in the outskirts that most pest-houses were built) and had him see to the terminal patients. There was nothing he could do at that time but comply with the demands of his kidnappers. There was no authority to see and stop this misdemeanour and, frankly if there was, no one would have cared. It was in the pest house that he became afflicted with the very sickness he’d been treating. The bubonic plague consumed him within a matter of days, taking hold of the machinery of his body, making him anaemic, injecting within his body a lethargy that prevented him from moving. The mob who had kidnapped him dumped him in the pest house along with the lost causes. In all its irony, Dr Campbell lay in a bed of filth where numerous others had lay before and had met their fates, and awaited the escape of death. And it came to him just like it had come for the rest. It took him, grappling the soft of his soul with its unyielding scythe and gutting out his consciousness in one painfully brutal bout of blood coughing. He died. No one cried.
The pest houses had a deplorable, a morbid custom that was, despite all its barbarianism, a necessity. Once the house was brimmed with dead patients and sick people, and there was no place to send them or bury them, the foundations of the house were torn apart, brick and rafters too, and a giant hole was excavated as a mass grave for all the diseased and deceased. They dumped two hundred bodies in that pit, along with the rotting and disease impregnated body of Dr Campbell, and poured earth on top. The plague pit, the name heaped upon the numerous holes in town teeming with plague ridden bodies, didn’t need much earth to be filled seeing as how the dead took up most of the space. Dr Campbell had treated reluctantly, unwillingly a total of a hundred people. Those whom he did not bother to look twice at were far more in number. Thousands, if not hundreds. And he was buried along with most of them. Like an eternal penance to his sins.
The story is, and this one is more believable than the previous rumour, that his soul is eternally tormented by the spirits of the patients he did not tend to. And he has not crossed the threshold from this world to the hereafter. His ghost remains to this day tethered to the spot where he was buried, tethered by the spiteful spirits of the deceased.
Time fast-forwarded and cured the ailment that plagued London in the form of death, natural selection and progression. Everything returned to normal. People returned to the city. Development resumed. And in that far-off corner of London, on the exact spot where the plague pit had been, a wealthy landlord ordained for a house to be built around about the end of the twentieth century. The house, being on the outskirts, was flanked by fields on two sides, a small forest on the other and a distant suburbia at the front. However, the suburbia was a fair distance from the house. The architect hired for the building of the house clearly had poor taste and, as a result, the creation jutted out of the ground like an ugly sore pimple. Its apparent hideousness and the story of the plague pit earned the house its name of ‘Bleak House.’
On sullen moonless nights people, passer-by’s and onlookers alike, have reported seeing a figure in the windows of the house. A figure that drew utter terror in the heart of those onlookers. A blood red phantasm with giant black tinted goggles in lieu of eyes, and a skeletal beak in place of his face. His attire from head to toe was red, like the colour of blood. And he beckoned to the watcher, the onlooker and the passer-by, beckoned them to come closer. Was it a plea for help or a call to the haunt of a monster to be hunted? It was unclear. What was clear was that Bleak House, in all its bleakness and its blood-splattered history, was haunted by a sepulchral, satanic entity. No native dared step foot in the vicinity of that place.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE
The Brink of Hell
“If you want to inculcate a sense of respected responsibility in a man, or in this case a woman, send them to a hostel. There are things in that communal dorm that will give you a fair share of life lessons, Jennie, life lessons!” Brad Boddington said to his daughter after she’d revealed to him that she was going to drop out of university for a semester and think it out by leaving the city, doing a job or two, and test-driving the world before actually diving in to it after her graduation. It was a lie. Her mother, Carla Boddington, was a no-bullshit woman who saw through it just like she saw through every other unreasonable decision her daughter made. When Jennie got admitted to the University of Leeds, for their undergraduate journalism degree, Carla Boddington disapproved of this move. There’s no such thing as journalistic integrity in today’s era, she had said. She had then added that if Jennie was so hellbent on living a life of toil and trouble, then she ought to get married, have a child in her early twenties before settling down with a husband who did not know what he was doing half the time. This was a jab at her own husband, Brad, and as remorseful a monologue as it gets about her own life. What she had misconstrued as love, and what she had mistaken to be a wise life decision subsequently, in her opinion, backfired on her and she did not want her daughter to go through the same. But Carla’s curtness prohibited her from being overtly affectionate with her daughter, despite her being their only child. She dealt with Jennie from the very beginning with a sturdy, strict and professional attitude, minus all the maternal informalities that naturally come with the package of being a mother to a daughter. The first time Jennie got her period, she ran to her parent’s room in the middle of the night, crying, thinking that a murderer had crept in the house and quite simply killed her. Why does it then bleed and hurt so much? She had as
ked her mother when her mom had reprimanded, instead of consoling, her for waking her at three in the morning. There was not an ounce of peripheral affection from Carla’s side, just like there was never an ounce of gratitude from Jennie’s.
Her father, Brad was the opposite side of the coin altogether. He loved his daughter like you’d love your Siberian Huskie. It got awkward really fast (when he’d say “where’s my Jennie-wennie?” and tickle her tummy even after she’d grown into a full woman) but Jennie knew that her father, whether knowingly or unknowingly, was overcompensating for the lack of love from her mother. And she adored him for that, despite all its awkwardness. That’s why she did not break the news of her dropping out and going to London to her mother before she did to him. And the man, bless his soul, was all for it.
Why was Jennie dropping out of college and taking a break from what was supposed to be the best four years of her life? Her mother. They all lived in Leeds, in the part of town where all the rich, nice people lived, and the university was too close to home for Jennie to even consider moving to the student dorms. Besides, what would have been the point, except for an increased expenditure? She did not want to do it. Then there were the studies. When she had enrolled in this degree, she’d thought that it would be like she saw in the movies, where a battle-hardened veteran sat in front of the class with a half-scarred face and a cigarette at the corner of his lips, yarning about his journalistic adventures in Vietnam while all the students hung, mesmerised, on is every word as he told them about when he was taking pictures as heavy hellfire rained from above and thunder erupted from below. But in real life this was not to be the case. The only exciting (or what passed for it) thing that any of her teachers ever told her in the three years that she’d spent begrudgingly at the university was a thirty-something straight out of rehab, tenured teacher telling them that she had shook the hand of Robert Downey Jr. And then she trailed off about how Robert was an underrated star with the face of Zeus and the body of Thor, and blah blah blah. The education part about the university was absolutely off-putting. She had no friends. Those she called friends were basic people who survived for their digital endorphin rushes. Snapchat stories, Instagram selfies, Facebook check-ins, and Twitter rants. That’s what their lives revolved around and there was no more depth to it than that. Everything about this place was suffocating Jennie. Except for her father, of course. What everyone, her teachers, ‘friends’, mother and peers, thought was a rash decision was actually something she had poured much thought in.
You see, when she was well into her sixth semester, there came a point where it felt to Jennie that she would not continue further. Every day she had to come home to a mother who disapproved of her every move. Every morning she had to rush off to college where everyone was apparently so immersed in their ego-bubbles that they didn’t notice her. Her grades were suffering. Her mood was getting worse day by day. She started looking at job-boards on the internet, looking for something suitable to give her the respite that she had long craved. A week before her midterms, she found an ad in a London yellow-pages website seeking a nanny. The job listing stated that they needed an au pair. Jennie had to google what it meant. The rest of the advertisement made it clear. A family living in the exurbs of London, who had only very recently moved there, were looking for a live-in au pair for an indefinite period to help with the house.
Anything to get out of mine, Jennie had thought as she sent the email in response to the advertisement.
Jennie was not academically astute. Not even if she wanted to. She had managed her O and A levels just fine and the first three semesters were alright too. But when it came to outperforming her peers, she was not very bright. What she did have was personal relationships with people in the field, actual journalists, reporters and editors of newspapers, based on her interest in practical skills over generic coursework. And these people admired her for that. A reporter from the Daily Telegraph even said to her, “You know, if you really want to travel the world and just write, you can be a blogger for our website. It does not pay as well as actual journalism, but hell, it’s good money and the amenities are to die for. Also, you get a cool badge!” during a career fare. Those relations, she did not realize, were soon going to come in handy.
The reply to her mail came on the same day. On a Wednesday. She had taken the day off college, much to the displeasure of her mother, and had decided that she’d break the news if she got a positive response to her email.
The reply was short and concise. It took two lines to say that they were very interested in working with a young woman such as Jennie and that their decision would be based on a Skype interview. She responded by saying that she would be thrilled to do a Skype interview. It would mean that she had to get in shape. For the past few months, inspiration had driven itself out from her life such that she had altogether abandoned any measure of sprucing, makeup or decent attire. In the journalistic world of eccentric reporters with their funny hats and baggy jackets holding pens, notepads and extra camera batteries, this was not as much of a concern. You’re supposed to be more concerned with the story that you’re following than worrying about the latest Chloe lipstick. Your words sell here, not your face. If that’s what you are after, you might as well have gone in to show business, her professor had said in her earlier classes.
The Skype call came shortly after she had sent her reply. A man was sitting in an office chair in a seemingly luxurious office trimmed exclusively with mahogany and elm. He had a decent face and an agreeable go-get-it attitude. He looked to be in his early thirties. Jennie did not have much of a taste in men (her last boyfriend, again much to the displeasure of her mother, was a bartender at the student bar just outside of the university). Her interviewer who, according to the emails and the advertisements, was Martin Walker, was an appealing man.
“Hello Jennie, how are you doing?” he asked. It was more of a “can you hear me?” that often takes place on Skype calls than it was small talk. She nodded and replied, “I’m good Mr Walker, and yourself?”
“Wonderful.”
She shifted uncomfortably and looked at the door of her room from the corner of her eye. Her parents had made it a rule, shortly after she had grown into a woman, not to come into her room. But there was no telling what her mother might do. She had a nasty habit of barging in on Jennie’s affairs.
“So, Jennie, we looked at your profile and your resume and we’re very inclined to hire you. The list of references that you sent look very solid indeed, and I’m sure if we contact them, they will provide stellar remarks about you,” he said. What was he doing? Jennie thought. It was she who needed the job, why was he buttering her up?
“Thank you, Mr Walker,” she said.
“Please, call me Martin,” he replied. Then he leaned in towards the camera, such that had he done so in person, it would have caused Jennie much discomfort, but thank God for the internet. “So, Jennie. As mentioned in the advertisement, we need someone for an indefinite term, and we are going to need you to be a jack of all trades. Don’t worry about not being the master of any, because we’re not looking for that. My wife, she’s fallen ill of sorts, and my daughter, who is seven, needs someone, an able adult, to look after her. You’ll be doing that, and you’ll also be making sure that my wife, Mary is provided for. She’s a journalist, so I can only imagine that you’ll get along nicely.”
“That’s wonderful,” she reciprocated. Jennie tried to smile to show that she was friendly, but all that she could manage at that moment was a grimace at best. Fortunately, he was not looking at the screen.
“Have you been to London before?” he asked her.
“Nope. Leeds, born and bred,” she said.
“Ha-ha!” a fake laugh, “that’s nice! I think you’re going to enjoy living in London with us. And while we are at it, we will make sure that you get your fair share of recreation.”
She nodded and smiled again. Going out recreationally was not her thing. If anything, she was as intro
verted as a person can get. Her sole interests were books, fanfictions of said books, and blogs that brooded on whether climate change was in fact real or not. Granted, she knew those blogs were puff pieces published for the sole sake of generating internet ad revenue, but they were unwittingly funny. It was a kind of humour that she had grown to appreciate. She imagined a middle-aged tipsy writer, somewhere in his mother’s basement, writing away in hopes of making a dollar per article, while injecting a line of snarky banter here, a line of black humour there. No one was going to read those articles. It was all just page-filling clickbait at best.
“So, I imagine you must have some questions for us?” he asked, after waiting some time for her to come out of her thoughts.
“Yes. Do you expect me to cook, too?”
“Of course, that would be a plus. My wife cannot do so, so I have to cook for the family. I have no problems doing that, but if you can cook it will give me time to do my work and such,” he said.
“Then that does it. How soon can I join you?” she asked. She knew her way around the kitchen. Cooking for herself in the middle of the night was something she had become good at. Spaghetti, bologna, cheese crackers, shawarmas, grilled cheese sandwiches, and when her parents were out of town she’d bake a pizza which she would eat all by herself while streaming Netflix.
“You can come along this Saturday. I can pick you up from Heathrow. If you need accommodation in your travel budget, I can send the money. Anything you need, really,” he said.
“Why didn’t you hire someone in particular?”
“Well, it’s a bit awkward. All those who applied were considered ineligible by my wife. Most of the applicants were middle-aged men who had been unemployed for quite some time. I doubted they would be a good influence on my kid. You’re different in that you are young and, if I am correct, ambitious. I take it you are taking some time off college, as you put in your application… I understand. This situation will be temporary,” he said.
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