by David Mark
‘Mentioned it specifically. Said you were a great helper and that you reminded him of his daughter.’
I pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit weird.’
‘No it’s not, it’s nice. People used to say nice things like that in the old days.’
‘Whatever.’
‘So, I’m doing a blog to whet people’s appetites. A special on Jean Denys, just like Christine wanted. Honestly, I feel bad. If I’d read her emails I might have had the idea ages ago. Never mind. He’s game, that’s the thing. I was really giddy about it all earlier on, but then with all the stuff happening …’
I patted her arm, the way you’re supposed to. She put her warm hand on the back of mine and looked at me the way you do when you’re trying to be likeable.
‘He might still pull out, of course. Or be really funny about how the show deals with his collection. I really don’t want him backing out. It was all I could do to stop Brendan burgling him.’
‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ I said, shrugging.
‘It’s just, well, it’s not far. And he said how ace you are. And maybe it might be fun and educational.’
I realized what she was saying. I could be helpful. Valuable, even. But I was broken in two inside. My friend was dead, and it was a school night and my mum would kill us both if we made poor decisions. Lottie needed it to be my idea. I thought about it for a moment then shrugged. ‘If you want to go see him now I don’t mind. There’s nobody in and you have your phone. Mum will be ages.’
Lottie grinned and squeezed my forearm. She had colour back in her cheeks. She swallowed down her Whore’s Drawers in a gulp.
‘Get your coat. We’ll run.’
I finished my lemonade and realized I felt happy. This was normal. This was my life. An adventure in the rain with crazy Aunt Lottie. A chat with a collector of blood and steel. I found my coat and Lottie zipped it up for me.
‘You sure this is all right?’ she asked, as she slipped her laptop in her rucksack then hung it on the peg at the end of the bar. ‘Look after this please, Tara. We won’t be long.’
As we left the Jolly Bonnet, a gust of wind screamed in our faces. It sounded like somebody shrieking in fright and it made the hair on my neck stand up. Somehow, it had sounded like my own voice; like a screech of pain and fear. I didn’t like it, though Lottie was too excited to notice. I gripped her hand tight and we jogged in the direction of Fournier Street and the great shape of Christchurch. The only thing I knew about the building is that the funerals of the Ripper’s victims had been held there and that its bells sounded pretty in summer and scary in winter. That night, as they chimed the hour, the noise was swallowed up by the grey clouds and tumbling sky.
We were damp and pale-faced by the time we reached the house. On the way, Lottie had told me her ideas for the web show. She’d even asked me whether I thought people would want to see a re-creation of the famous experiment. Whether there would be any problems with transfusing the blood of a calf into a willing participant. She reckoned students would do anything for money. When I didn’t laugh she told me I was sick and we both giggled at that.
She stopped talking so much once we got to Fournier Street. She might work with bodies and bones and blood but she could still get that creepy feeling like anybody else and the house we were visiting certainly looked pretty unwelcoming. It might have been the rain or the dark skies of the nearly full moon, but I got a little goose-pimply as we walked up the steps and knocked on the door. ‘Sort yourself out,’ said Lottie, quietly, and tucked my hair behind my ear. ‘Be nice. Be helpful.’
There was no sound from inside the darkened house. No footsteps or creaking of the door handle. Lottie knocked again. Lifted the letterbox and shouted his name.
‘It’s Dr Lottie! I got your letter. I’d love to chat. I’ve brought my glamorous assistant with me!’
She smiled as she said that. Then she pushed her hand through the letterbox. She turned to me, her eyes all bright and with raindrops on her face, and I was about to say something funny, when suddenly she seemed to lunge forward. She threw herself at the wood, smacking her face on the damp door. She gave a startled cry and then winced as if she had been bitten. She stared at her arm, wedged in the letterbox, and she didn’t seem able to compute what was going on. Then I heard a sound like a branch breaking and Lottie’s face twisted in agony and her eyes went glassy, like a doll’s, and rolled back in her head as she flopped forward and slumped against the door.
It had all happened too quickly for me to say or do anything. I just stood there, frozen to the spot, staring at Lottie as she slithered down the door.
There was the sound of a key turning in an old, creaky lock. Lottie moved like a spirit as the door opened, slowly, and the sweet, sticky smell of rotting meat spilled out on the great wave of darkness that seemed to roll out from within.
‘Come in, cica,’ said the darkness, and I felt cold, bony hands close around my wrist. ‘Let us put you back to bed …’
I jerked as if stung. Tried to turn away from the black shape in the black hat and black cloak; tried to run …
And then the mask was on my face and I was breathing in something that stunk like whisky and petrol and I was sinking to the floor, tumbling into darkness, listening to the desperate song of my own blood as it screamed into the cold night air.
MR FARKAS
Mr Farkas cannot remember entering this bedroom at the end of the long corridor on the second floor of the house. He cannot recall the walk up the stairs but he knows from the tightness in his chest that he has exerted himself. He looks down at himself and sees that he has dressed himself peculiarly today. He wears a long white apron that reaches down to his bare feet and as he moves his head this way and that he feels his scrawny throat rub against a stiff, starched collar. He pushes his hand through his thin hair and as his wrist passes his nostrils he inhales a scent of deep, floral perfume. He looks at his wrist as though his hand belongs to a stranger. Why does he smell of such a scent? Who has he touched? He immediately thinks of his wife, but then discounts the notion. She has never been one for perfume. Her scent is of the home; baked bread and furniture polish. His daughter, then. Beatrix. Cica. He knows at once that his little girl would never wear such an ostentatious aroma. She is a child. A princess. A cherub. She smells of fresh laundry and autumn. The girl, then. The one who helps him. Her latest fad, no doubt. A waste of her grant money and a blatant advertisement of her charms. He scowls at his hand. He will need to scold her when she returns this evening. After supper, perhaps. No, it would not do to spoil the evening by reprimanding her as soon as she returns from the auction house. She works hard, even if she is too headstrong for her own good. Too emotional by half. Can’t take a castigating without bursting into tears or losing her temper in return.
The blood does not lie.
Mr Farkas shivers and realizes he is cold. There is no heating in this empty bedroom and the wind blows in through the gaps around the window frames. He wonders when his wife began to let the house fall into such disrepair. Probably around the same time cica fell ill. No time to clean. Too many blood tests and plate counts and specialists and treatments. Too many trips to old Victorian buildings that stank of disinfectant and boiled vegetables. The house had not seemed important. Not when their cica was dying. Not when his cherub, the blood of his blood, was fading beneath her white sheet; the colour leeching from her skin to blend into the snowy linens in which she withered and shrank before him.
Mr Farkas sniffs his wrist again. The girl? He cannot recall having touched her. Theirs has not been an easy union these past months. He knows that he is largely to blame for their fractious relationship. He demands much of her. Too much. Has expected an almost slavish level of dutiful obedience since Beatrix fell ill. He tells himself daily that he should treat her with more affection, more as he would his youngest child, but his good intentions never seem to turn into action. He reaches inside his apron and withdraws his pocket watch. The yellow light
that spills in through the window allows him to see the ornate face and he has to force himself not to gasp aloud as he sees how late it is. Why is he alone? Where are his children? His wife? Why does he smell so? Why is he dressed this way? What did he enter the empty room to retrieve?
He is growing used to this feeling of displacement; of having been picked up and manoeuvred by an outside element. In recent months he has become increasingly accustomed to this sensation of returning to himself. He often finds himself blinking eyes that ache with tiredness and staring into surroundings that are alien to him. He finds stains upon his clothes that he has no recollection of creating. Sometimes he can smell foulness upon his skin or taste something bitter and chemical at the back of his throat. He feels as though whole pages of his life are being turned over two at a time. He has begun to see his body as a vessel or vehicle into which he occasionally seats his conscious self. At other times it serves as a carriage for something else.
Mr Farkas rubs at his forehead. There is dried blood upon his brow. He winces as a scab tears and as he looks at the teardrop of inky black blood upon the tips of his pale fingers, he has a sudden recollection of having seen something similar before. Blood on skin; ink upon the page; quills scratching upon fine white paper; blood and ink, melding into one vision … quills, feathers, goose feathers full of blood; precious blood, spilling on to his skin as the syringe punctured vein …
‘Cica …’
Mr Farkas breathes the word and then his legs seem to buckle as the weight of recent memory crashes into his consciousness. He reels as though the bare floor is the deck of a trawler in heavy seas. His daughters. His wife. Those months. Those terrible, terrible months, when he did those terrible things.
Mr Farkas staggers back and touches the bare wall. This was her room. His child. His darling. His gift. His fingers fumble at the light switch but the room continues to bathe in darkness. There is no bulb at the end of the electric cable that hangs high overhead like a severed noose. Did he rid his house of her possessions when the doctors said there was no hope? He cannot recall. Did his wife take them? Sell them? Give them away? He was too busy. Too busy trying to keep their child in his world. Busy with his needles and his cats and his dogs and goose-feather hypodermics. Busy honouring and worshipping and cherishing the blood that flowed in her veins, even as he drained it from her and into the chalice in his trembling hands …
He slides down the wall. Crouches in the dark, pressing his knuckles to his head. He wants to remember. Needs to better understand those final days. When did his mind betray him? Where is his wife? His daughter? The stolen child. The one who called herself a cuckoo and held his hand steady as he placed the leeches upon her belly and began to pray.
Memory thumps into Mr Farkas’s mind afresh. Blue hair and big lips, glass jars and smooth stones. The sensation of bone cracking beneath the weight of his knee. The feel of her as he dragged her inside. And her! His cica! He remembers. His spirits begin to lift as though a sun is rising inside him. He saw her. Saw his child. He had made a terrible mistake. The child in his cellar had been an imposter. He had freed her and sought out his true blood. And she came, willingly, to his door. The blue-haired woman had responded to his simple letter and brought his child home. She has been so ill. Been through so much. She needs her rest. He had put her to bed. Helped her on her way. Changed her into a simple nightdress and smoothed down the blankets over her slumbering shape. He had come upstairs to find a storybook. He wanted to read to her. This was his pleasure. To comfort her as she lay dying. To forever exist in this moment of perpetual goodbye; her blood in his veins and his in hers, and everything perfect and peaceful as it was meant to be.
Mr Farkas wipes his face. He feels better. His cica lives. He has vague recollections of having done this before. Of recreating his dying daughter over and over. Of filling the veins of other children with her blood and covering their faces with her death mask, but he dismisses such a notion. To do so would surely be the actions of a madman.
He leaves his dead daughter’s bedroom. Retreats down the darkened corridor and begins to walk down the stairs. On impulse, he visits his own bedroom. He switches on the light and allows himself a moment of utter delight as he considers his collection. It is a dazzling display; floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with preserved body parts. He lingers for a moment in front of a display case before reaching out and selecting a bone-handled scalpel fleam. Made in 1850, with a rounded, tapering tip, it is, like all of his curiosities, a splendid thing. He enjoys the weight of it. It cost him a lot of money to secure it but he has never been frugal when it comes to securing the specimens that speak to him. He looks at the implement as though it were a lover, then switches off the light and leaves the room. He whistles as he walks down the corridor and the bottom flight of stairs. He steps over the form of the woman with the blue hair. Her arm is broken and twisted at a hideous angle. The shock alone would be enough to keep her unconscious but he had plunged a hypodermic full of morphine and laudanum into the back of her hand as she reached through his letterbox and he will not have to consider her for some time. She did well to drag herself this far.
Mr Farkas feels a thrill as he crouches down in the kitchen and pulls up the hatch in the floor. The smell of her is already flooding the house. The smell of his child. His cica. His blood. He knows he will enjoy this evening. He will read to her. Tell her stories of his childhood. Tell her about the great philosophers and scientists and pioneers who advanced the world. He will wipe her brow and kiss her cheek and when the pain becomes too much, he will give her something to help her sleep.
As he descends into the darkness of the cellar, he wonders if this is how animals feel. Whether they can smell one another’s blood. Whether fathers in the wild have a natural disinclination to procreate with their own offspring. He would like to write a paper about such an issue. Would like to transfuse the blood of Lion A into Lion B to see which partner Lion A’s father would prefer to mate with.
Mr Farkas begins to descend.
As he feels the stone and the mud upon his bare feet, a sensation of peace enters Mr Farkas’s bones. This is his place of sanctuary. His place of remembrance and rebirth.
The girl in the bed looks out through the eye holes in the death mask. Beneath the unmoving lips, her own mouth has been bound shut with muslin. The image which Mr Farkas looks down upon is one of radiant peace; a beatific immortality. It is the face of his daughter, preserved in the hours before she died. He leans down and kisses the hard, unyielding cheek. As he does so, he feels a moment’s annoyance. Beatrix’s eyes should be blue. She must have changed them. Contact lenses, perhaps. A modern affectation. Yes, that is the sort of thing she would do.
Mr Farkas shrugs as he sits down in the rocking chair and turns up the oil lamp. He will not worry about such things now. Will not allow it to spoil this moment. Glancing at the array of medical equipment upon the shelves at the foot of the wrought-iron bed, he knows only too well that such imperfections can be fixed.
He clears his throat and begins to read. When the muffled sound of screaming reaches his ears, he merely raises his voice.
MOLLY
As she runs past the Blind Beggar, Molly tries Lottie’s phone again. It continues to go to voicemail. She gives a little squeal of frustration and it is echoed by the shriek of brakes as she runs out from between two cars and a black cab has to slam on its brakes. Unheeding, she sprints across the road, finding gaps in the slow-moving traffic, staring at her phone and desperately thumbing through the list of most-called numbers to seek out a familiar contact. Were anybody to ask why she is so convinced that her child is in danger, Molly would not be able to answer. She has had her tarot cards read and her tea leaves analysed but has never truly believed in anything paranormal or psychic. She simply knows, deep inside her core, that there is something deeply significant about Hilda’s similarity to Meda. Something that had not struck her until Karol started to tell her what he had kept hidden.
Molly jabs her finger in her ear as the phone begins to ring. Tara answers on the fourth ring.
‘Tara, it’s Molly. I need to speak to Hilda please.’
‘Sorry, she’s not around at the moment. She’s popped out with Lottie.’
Molly squeezes her hands into fists. She stops still, then reaches out a hand for support. Her palm touches damp brick. She feels dizzy and nauseous, as though her heart is trying to climb up her throat.
‘Where has she gone? I’m trying Lottie’s number. She’s not answering. Why isn’t she there? It’s late …’
‘Hang on, I’ll see if she mentioned to anybody where they were off to.’
Molly can hear her blood rushing in her ears. Can feel each pulse beating against her skin like the beak of a bird trying to escape the egg.
‘Brendan walked in just as they were leaving but he said they didn’t have time to talk. I heard her going on about some broadcast they want to do. Blood transfusions, or something. Apparently Hilda could be a big help, or something. I’m sorry, is there something wrong?’
Molly ends the call and puts her hands to her face. She realizes she is crying. Her tears are warm amid the raindrops. She does not know whether to run for home or to the police station or back to the hospital. She feels utterly lost and does not know where to seek direction.
‘Concentrate,’ she tells herself. ‘Focus.’
She screws up her eyes and promises herself that when she opens them she will know what to do. Counts down from five as her thoughts tumble over and against one another and her head fills with images of her child being skewered with feathers and masked with the flesh of the dead …
‘Molly. Fuck. Get in.’
She opens her eyes and becomes aware of her surroundings. She is opposite the bagel shop on Vallance Road, blue lettering on chocolate-coloured brick and a huge painting of the original baker, all strongman moustache and starched collar. She feels a sudden loathing for the man she has never met. Feels a hatred for her obsession with nostalgia: with looking back. Hates her clothes and her style and her infatuations.
