by Kat Ross
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. Rivers had told me not long ago, when she saw I was in a brown study. “Myrtle may be famous, but you’re the pretty one. I imagine the young men will be lining up to ask for your hand.”
I knew she meant well, but it turned my depression into cold fury. That night, I’d cut all my hair off. I informed my bewildered parents that I’d rather be sent to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island than be married off at eighteen. Six months later, it had finally grown back some and just brushed my chin. Loyal friend that he was, John insisted that it suited me perfectly, although he grew quiet when I declared that I would never be any man’s wife.
“Tell me about this séance, Harry,” Edward said as we stepped out onto Tenth Street. “I’ve been to a few myself, and I thought them no better or worse than a two-penny magic show. However, some girls of my acquaintance take these otherworldly communications so seriously, they will not make any major decision without consulting a medium first.”
“I’d be delighted to,” I said, “but unfortunately, of the three people who were there, one is dead, one missing, and the last unable to recall much beyond some mumbo-jumbo in Latin, followed by what he called a foul wind.”
Edward had inherited a fortune from his grandfather three years ago, when he was just fifteen, and his shiny black barouche and driver waited at the curb.
“Harry’s client said he felt a presence in the room,” John chimed in. “Something malignant.”
“He never actually said the word malignant,” I protested as we climbed into the carriage, which had two facing benches—John and I taking one, Edward the other.
“Oh, fine, but the clear implication was evil.” John stretched the word out into about six syllables. “She was reading from a grimoire, so she could have been trying to summon anything.”
“It seems—” Edward began.
“Don’t tell me you believe any of that eye-wash,” I cut in, addressing John to my right. “I think you’ll find our killer is a man of flesh and blood, as much as you are.” I gave his chest a little poke for emphasis. “Becky Rickard didn’t spontaneously combust, or die of some mysterious fright. She was stabbed with a perfectly ordinary kitchen knife.”
John paid me no mind, speaking to Edward, whose head swivelled between us as though he were watching a match of lawn tennis.
“Imagine,” John said as we headed east on Eighth Street toward Broadway, “just for the sake of argument, that this Madame Santi believes she has instructions to summon a demon which will make her and Straker rich beyond their wildest dreams. Both of them are in dire straits. They’d once been respectable, and if not exactly wealthy, at least comfortable. Now they’ve hit rock bottom. Santi is a fraud, Straker a bankrupt pauper. She obtains a grimoire, perhaps from a former client. Somehow, she crosses paths with Straker and entices him to join her. She didn’t count on Brady being there, but it doesn’t really matter as long as he doesn’t interfere with her plans. So she finds a place where they won’t be disturbed and starts the incantation, but she’s a chloral hydrate fiend and can’t keep it straight. Let’s say she took an extra-large dose before the ceremony to soothe her nerves. She makes a fatal mistake and unleashes something.” John paused as we entered the flow of traffic on Broadway, most of it heading uptown as the city disgorged thousands of commuters to satellite towns in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Westchester.
“Something?” Edward asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Something,” John affirmed. “It enters Straker and possesses him. Forces him to commit unspeakable crimes, for which he is then overcome with remorse.”
“Oh, that’s scientific,” I muttered.
“Arthur Conan Doyle would take my side,” he said. “Which is simply to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Don’t forget, Straker spoke of it ‘entering through the eyes.’ What else could he have meant?”
“Alright,” I said. “So where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” John conceded. “Hiding out somewhere, I suppose.”
I fanned myself with my hat as we jounced over a set of horse car tracks at Broadway and Canal Street. “Here’s an alternative theory. Someone kills Ms. Rickard, goes to Straker’s flat and washes up—hence, the bloody water in the shaving basin—and leaves with his uniform. Now, this person could be Straker himself or someone else entirely, I’m not sure yet. If the former, then I agree with you, John, that he has gone into hiding. Assuming he is still in the city, which, considering his limited means and lack of family, is quite likely, we must try to imagine where he might go. If it is the latter, then poor Straker is either abducted or dead himself.”
“But what of the organ grinder?” Edward asked, with a puzzled frown. “How does he fit into either of those theories?”
John and I looked at each other ruefully.
“Not a clue,” he said, and for once, I couldn’t disagree.
We turned off Broadway into the twilit world of the Five Points, where Edward’s fancy carriage drew more attention from the local denizens than seemed salutary.
“Let’s make this quick,” I said, as John offered up his hand and I climbed down into the overflowing muck of Worth Street.
The building where Rickard, Straker and Brady had convened that fateful night looked ordinary, if the decrepit skeletons that lined that block could be called so. Four stories of rotting wood towered over us, but our eyes were drawn to that portion below the level of the sidewalk where our investigation had led us. I could make out a tiny ventilation space perhaps two inches high and three wide in the outer wall, but the rest of the cellar was entirely hidden from view. I tried to imagine living in such a place, as I knew tens of thousands of the city’s most unfortunate were forced to do. It suddenly occurred to me that it might not be empty. Such cellars were widely used as nightly lodging houses, a small step up from the cold comfort of the streets.
Luckily, it didn’t take long to locate the proprietress, a tall, raw-boned woman with bluish veins tracing a map across her cheeks and the strong aroma of cheap whiskey about her. I noted smallpox scars on her neck and forehead, which she had taken care to cover with a cosmetic paste. America’s last serious smallpox outbreak erupted between 1865 and 1873. It hit four cities—Philadelphia, Boston, New York and New Orleans—so she could have been from any one of those, but her broad accent placed her as a native-born resident of the Lower East Side.
At first she was suspicious, though her attitude changed when Edward pressed money into her hand.
“Oh, I knew Becky,” she said, tucking the bills into a hidden fold of her grey dress. “She used my place sometimes, when she needed privacy. Always paid up front.”
“So you rented it to her last Monday night?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I can promise you, she was still alive when she left.”
“How can you be sure?” John asked.
“‘Cause she came up to see me.” The woman jerked a thumb toward her second-floor flat. “Said she’d left a bit of a mess and gave me a couple of extra bucks to clean it. Most wouldn’t of, but she did. Becky was honest like that.”
“What kind of mess?”
She scratched her hair, which was pulled into a loose bun. “There were a strange smell, like rotten eggs. She’d butchered a rooster, though not any way I’d seen before. Its neck weren’t wrung. Feathers were scattered about. That’s all.”
“Were there gentlemen with her?” John asked.
“I saw two. One looked like a real swell. I’ve seen the other around here before. They left first.”
“Can we see it?”
She squinted at us and sucked her yellowed teeth. “That’ll be another buck.”
John produced the bribe this time, and she led us inside and down a narrow, rickety set of stairs just as Brady had described. It grew very dark at the bottom and the proprietress took a kerosene lantern down from a hook on the wall and lit it. I could still detect the faint aroma of sulphur in the dank air.
“Ju
st through here,” she said, pushing open a wooden door. “It’s a funny thing. The whole building used to be crawling with roaches. But since that night, I ain’t seen a one of ‘em.”
The space that lay beyond was perhaps sixteen feet square and eight feet high. The table and chairs used in the séance were gone, replaced by a filthy straw mattress that had been pushed up against one wall. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and though I could see a single shaft of daylight through that tiny slit, the overall impression was of standing at the bottom of a grave.
We clustered in the doorway for a moment, reluctant to enter any further into the room. Then Edward surprised me by striding forward and bending down.
“Would you be kind enough to bring the light over here, madam?” he said politely, and the landlady was so flattered at being called madam that she fairly skipped over to him.
“What have you found?” John asked, as we gathered round a spot on the floor.
“I’m not sure,” Edward said. “What do you think, Harry?”
I peered in the dim light, then crouched down, heedless of my green silk dress. “It looks like a… scorch mark,” I said.
I took out one of the same envelopes I had used to scrape up the ash from Straker’s flat and swept a small amount of the blackened dirt inside. Then, behind me, John gave a soft cry. He’d found another mark. We fanned out and discovered no less than five of them, equidistant from each other in a rough circle. I gathered a bit from each and was tucking the packets away when John seized my wrist, bringing it to his nose.
“The smell, Harry, it’s coming from the dirt.”
I frowned. I’d almost stopped noticing it. “The sulphur, you mean?”
“Yes. And there’s another word for it.” He released my hand and, for the first time in all the years I’d known him, John looked genuinely disturbed. “Brimstone.”
5
For the next fifteen minutes, we examined the cellar thoroughly, but there was little more to discover there. I noted some dark reddish stains in the center of the room that could have been dried blood, but that simply corroborated both the landlady and Brady’s account of a rooster being slaughtered. I knew I wasn’t alone in craving some fresh air. The place had such an oppressive atmosphere that it seemed time stood still. We could have been down there for minutes or hours.
Our hostess had beat a retreat back to her second floor flat as soon as it became clear that no more money would be forthcoming. John kept glancing with undisguised longing at the stairs, but he gamely helped Edward and me to examine every inch of the walls, floor and ceiling before gathering up the lantern and following in her footsteps.
“Revelation,” John said as we piled into the barouche and the driver cracked his whip, urging the horses onward towards the relative safety of Broadway. “I don’t know the exact quote, but it’s the bit about the lake of fire and the mark of the beast. Sulphur and brimstone.”
“She probably set it up as some kind of effect,” I said. “Rickard, I mean. That could have been the foul wind Brady spoke of.”
“Perhaps,” John said. He still looked troubled.
“At least we know he was telling the truth, about some of it, at least,” I said. “John, don’t you know a few of the fellows who work at the morgue?”
Dusk was settling over the city streets, the gaslights flickering on with a warm yellow glow. On that fine summer evening, the dense forest of telegraph and electrical poles that had crippled the city during the Great Blizzard was enjoying its final lease on life. In less than a year, they would all be felled as the lines moved underground.
John nodded absently. “Yes, I’ve gone to observe autopsies there on several occasions.”
“Why don’t you go down tomorrow and see if anyone’s claimed Becky’s body?”
“It’s Paul’s birthday, but I can go in the afternoon.” Paul was one of his brothers. “It also might be worth another trip to Leonard Street to talk with Straker’s neighbors. See if they remember any visitors. I feel as though the man is a cipher.”
“Excellent idea,” I said. “Just be careful. We’ve been lucky so far, but outsiders asking too many questions can get into serious trouble down there. Now, Edward. Do you think any of the girls you know subscribes to the Banner of Light?” This was the most popular weekly publication of the Spiritualist movement. “We need a listing of local mediums.”
“I can certainly ask around,” he replied.
“If you could do it this evening, we’ll get cracking first thing. Why don’t you come by around ten o’clock tomorrow and pick me up?”
Edward promised to do so, and took me home first, as John’s Gramercy Park address was on the way to his own townhouse on East Thirty-Seventh Street. Mrs. Rivers was bustling about the kitchen and humming to herself when I entered. The mouth-watering aroma of blueberry pie emanated from the coal oven.
“Did you have a nice walk in the park, dear?” she asked as I pulled a chair up to the kitchen table. “I see you made yourself lunch.”
“Yes, lovely,” I lied. “How was your afternoon?”
“Oh, I popped by Fulton Market for some fresh berries and cream and then I met a friend for tea. Why, what on earth happened to your dress?”
I looked down and noticed for the first time that I was absolutely filthy from the waist down.
“I tripped and fell in the street. But I’m perfectly fine.” The strangeness of the day, combined with the heat in the kitchen, made me suddenly very sleepy. “Tell me, Mrs. Rivers. Do you believe in hell?”
She gave me a squinty look, like she was wondering if perhaps I might have struck my head after all, but our housekeeper was used to strange questions by now. “Hmmm. That’s a tickler. I’m a good Christian woman, of course, and I do believe in Judgment Day. Those who are virtuous and do right by others shall go to their everlasting reward.”
“But what about the bad ones?” I said. “The sinners? What happens to them?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Have you been reading Connor’s abominable stories? I don’t know how the boy sleeps at night. There was one about a man who got eaten by cats. Cats!”
“I haven’t, but it sounds like you have,” I said, grinning.
“Oh, I’d never!” she exclaimed, but the flush in her cheeks said otherwise. “Now, as for sinners. Well, the Bible says they will go away to face eternal punishment. You know that from Sunday school, Harry.”
“I know what it says. But do you believe it? The stuff about…fire and brimstone? Demons?”
Mrs. Rivers hesitated, her dark, clever eyes searching mine, and for a brief moment, I wondered if I’d misjudged her all these years and she wasn’t the doddering old lady she appeared to be. Then she stood up and used hot pads to lift the pie out of the cast iron stove. She set it to cool on the windowsill, softly humming Lift High the Cross.
Mrs. Rivers poured us both glasses of iced tea and sat back down.
“In my seventy-two years in this world, I’ve seen many things. Extremes of both good and evil. Take the Kelly family of Kansas. I read all about them in the papers last year. On the surface, perfectly respectable ranchers. They often welcomed travellers for a meal at their farmhouse in that desolate region called No-Man’s-Land. The mother would cook while the 18-year-old daughter Kit would chat with the visitor. Soon, the father and son would appear, and all would gather round the dinner table.”
I vaguely recalled hearing the name Kelly, but I had been sick with a bad fever for several weeks just before Christmas of 1887 and missed out on much of the news at that time.
“What do you think happened next?” Mrs. Rivers said, primly sipping her tea.
“I suppose they were murdered horribly?” I guessed.
“Indeed. But in a most ingenious fashion. You see, the poor man’s chair would be placed above a carefully concealed trap door, and at the signal, a switch would be thrown and they would plunge into the Kellys’ pitch-black basement. The lucky ones died in the fall. The others…” She tra
iled off and shook her head. “Well, when the family fled one day, some of their neighbors came poking around. They soon discovered the remains of three people in the cellar, so decomposed that they could not be identified. Four more bodies, including a woman, were found buried beneath the stable, and three more near the barn.”
I imagined suddenly falling into a lightless hole filled with rotting corpses and felt a shudder of revulsion pass through me.
“And they were hardly the first,” Mrs. Rivers chattered on. “The Benders—surely, you’ve heard of them? Kansas, as well. What is it about Kansas? In any event, ordinary churchgoing people. Except that they lured visitors to sit in front of a curtain placed so that the back of the poor soul’s head made a slight indentation, at which cue John Bender Sr., who was standing behind the curtain, would bash them on the back of the skull with a sledgehammer, toss them down into a hidden pit, and then slit their throats. Just to be sure, you know. Nine in all! Including an infant and an eight-year-old girl. And they got away with it. A posse went after the Benders, but they were never found.”
Mrs. Rivers let this unnerving fact hang in the air for a moment. “What can we call such creatures as the Kellys and the Benders? They look like us, speak like us, but their hearts are as black as the anonymous graves of their victims. Are such beings born or created? I don’t know. But you asked me before if I believe in the devil.” She smiled. “The answer is yes, dear, I do. And so, I think, should you.”
We both turned as Connor entered the kitchen in his usual style, not unlike a small, scabby tornado.
“I smell pie,” he said, collapsing into a chair.
“It’s cooling,” Mrs. Rivers said sternly. “And it’s for after supper.”
He scowled and took something out of his pocket. It was about eight inches long and pinkish-grey and tapered to a point at one end. He began coiling it around his index finger as Mrs. Rivers looked on in mounting horror.
“What is that?” she asked faintly.
