End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  It had been nearly ten years since Blank was last on the grounds of Lambeth's asylum for the blind. The arm of a woman had been found there, apparently the mate to another arm found floating in the Thames at Pimlico two weeks before, and both apparently the property of the limbless torso discovered on the building site of the New Scotland Yard two weeks further on. It had been the Torso Killer's second victim, and the killer had gone to special lengths to scatter the puzzle pieces far and wide.

  Now, nearly a decade later, the School for the Indigent Blind was once again the site of a gruesome discovery, but this time, instead of a lonely arm, it had been an entire torso, albeit one limbless and headless.

  Blank and Miss Bonaventure were met at the school gate by an attendant who, unlike his charges, was quite definitely sighted. And on seeing the approach of two strangers, however well turned out they may have been, so soon after the unpleasant discoveries of the previous week, the attendant seemed in no eager mood to allow them admittance.

  Blank smiled easily, as the large man blocked their path.

  “And what do you lot want?” the man grumbled. He had the large hands and thick neck of a laborer, and though his hair had gone to gray, his whiskers very nearly white, Blank could tell that the man had worked for a living before securing his present employment. Had he been drawn to this vocation for family reasons, perhaps, finding himself the father of a blind child or perhaps having been the child of a blind parent himself? What road led a man who seemed more suited to work by the strength of his hands and the sweat of his back to oversee an asylum devoted to the care and comfort of the indigent blind? It was a mystery, and Blank had an insatiable appetite for solving such, but he also knew that he had more pressing matters to attend, and that the question of the overseer's provenance would likely have to remain unsolved.

  “We're here about the recent…unpleasantness,” Blank said, his expression open and inviting. He pulled a calling card from his pocket, completely white and featureless front and back, and presented it for the attendant's inspection. As the attendant leaned forward for a closer look, a hum thrummed deep in Blank's throat, a subharmonic just below the range of human hearing. Then he spoke, mindful of the cadence and pitch of his words, the thrumming persisting as an undercurrent, the two vocalizations interweaving like the threaded tones of a Tuvan throat singer. “If we could just trouble you for a few moments of your time, to show us where the…remains…were found, we can look after ourselves from there.”

  The overseer's face, which had been closed and guarded, softened by inches. “Well, the police have already come and gone, and they said not to talk about it with any…”

  “We're not with the Yard, but I assure you that we are completely within their confidence.” Blank gave an easy smile, and the barely audible hum shifted in tone.

  By now, the overseer's guarded expression had completely melted and been replaced by one of trust. “It's right this way,” the overseer said, absently handing the calling card back to Blank, who pocketed it. “It's just a blessing that none of our patients were awake when the PC found the thing. I can't imagine the state of them, had they seen it.”

  Miss Bonaventure stifled a chuckle, which the overseer failed to notice but which Blank did not. He cast her a quick glance over his shoulder, warning her silent. She smiled, sheepishly, and gave a helpless shrug. Then, despite his warning, she said, “I expect your patients wouldn't have seen anything of the sort before, would they?”

  The overseer looked back at her, wearing a queer expression. “They'll not have seen anything t'all, miss,” he said simply. “They're blind, you see.”

  Her witticism left to whither in the wind, Miss Bonaventure scowled and twirled her parasol over her shoulder, defiantly.

  “Here it is,” the overseer said, coming to a halt. They stood before a sheltering oak in a courtyard, the ground underfoot hard packed dirt, punctuated here and there with little scattered wisps of dried brown grass. It was a garden sore in need of attention, but Blake could see that the appearance of the place was a low priority for an asylum of sightless patients.

  “Here?” Blank asked, and the overseer pointed to a spot a few yards from the base of the wide-boled trunk. Following his gaze, Blank could see that there was still visual evidence of the discovery, the dirt discolored in a wide circle, bits of dust dried into dark balls. “Here,” Blank said, nodding.

  They were a short distance from the open gate. As they'd passed through, Blank had seen that, while the iron of the gate itself was rusted with age, the lock that hung opened from the hook was shiny and new.

  “You've had to replace the lock, I take it?” Miss Bonaventure asked, evidently having noticed the same.

  “Why, yes,” the overseer said, startled somewhat by the question. “Was the strangest thing, too. The morning the police came and hauled the body away, I found the lock in two pieces just inside the gate. Cut clean through, like butter cut with a hot knife, it was.”

  Blank nodded, thoughtfully. He looked up at the windows of the surrounding walls, which were dark and grimed but unshuttered. “It was early morning that the constable found the body, I believe?”

  The overseer nodded. “Mike does his rounds starting just before dawn, and most mornings comes by to have breakfast with me and the missus.” He smiled, somewhat sheepishly. “And he may linger a bit for a pipe of my best shag, and a cup of tea with a bit of spice to it, if you get my meaning.” The overseer tugged a small flask from his vest pocket, which glinted dully in the afternoon sun. “It's a dreadful habit, is gin, but it can certainly improve the outlook of a day, taken in moderation.”

  “I'm sure,” Blank said with a smile. “Now, on this particular morning, when entering the gate, the constable happened to spy something lying on the ground here beneath the oak. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, just so. He thought I'd been up early, finding the gate already unlocked, and reckoned I might have breakfast laid out sooner rather than later. As it happened, none of us got to eat that morning, more's the pity.”

  “Though I expect you didn't neglect your other appetites.” Miss Bonaventure smiled sweetly and indicated the flask in the overseer's pocket with her parasol.

  The overseer blushed, and looked away.

  “I don't think we need to keep you any longer,” Blank said, clapping his hands together. “I'm sure that you've much more important things to do than play nursemaid to us.” He gave the overseer a broad smile.

  The overseer looked a little lost for a moment, then nodded, absently. “Yes, of course.” He glanced from one side to the other, as though not sure which way to turn.

  “In your office, perhaps?” Blank suggested, an almost silent thrum beneath his words.

  “In my office,” the overseer repeated. “Yes.” He straightened up, blinking several times, and looked from Blank to Miss Bonaventure and back again. “You'll excuse me, but I've some important business to attend in my office. You'll see yourselves out, I trust?”

  Miss Bonaventure nodded, while Blank reached out and patted the overseer on the arm. “I'm sure we can manage,” he said. “Thank you for all your assistance.”

  With that, the overseer turned on his heel and walked away, rounding a corner and disappearing through the front doors of the building.

  “I'll never understand just how you do that, Blank,” Miss Bonaventure said, admiringly.

  “It only works on particularly susceptible minds,” Blank said, turning his attention back to the stained dirt at their feet, “and not always then. But I find it smoothes over so many of the rough edges of social interaction in circumstances such as these.”

  Blank tested the soil, tapping it with the foot of his cane. It was a thick layer of dried earth beneath a thin blanket of dust and covering the moister soil underneath. Footprints were difficult to discern in the dust, which was blown hither and fro with the winds that circulated around the courtyard like a turbine. In another hour at most, all signs of his and Miss Bonaventure
's passage through the yard would be obscured. Tightening his grip on the cane, he brought its foot down hard on the ground, puncturing the mantle of dried earth and sending cracks creeping a few inches in every direction. Digging in and levering up with the cane, he knocked loose a clump of earth about the size of his palm.

  “Correct me if I'm mistaken,” he said aloud, “but it's not rained in at least a fortnight, has it?”

  Miss Bonaventure nodded. With a crooked finger she tugged at the collar of her jacket, a glow of perspiration on her cheek. “If not more, sadly.”

  “Given that the overseer hardly seems the sort to concern himself with watering the garden, then, we can safely assume that the only moisture the ground here has seen in the last week was the spilled blood of the victim.”

  Miss Bonaventure pointed to the blood-stained earth with the tip of her parasol. “Still very much in evidence.”

  “Yes,” Blank said with a nod. “And the state of the ground is such that, even if someone were by some means to wrestle a guillotine or similar into the yard, the soil would still be broken and cracked beneath its weight.”

  “Thereby dismissing Hibbert's already dubious suggestion.”

  “Fairly conclusively, I would say. So whatever cutting implement was employed, it was not heavy enough to leave an impression on the ground.”

  “Though clearly it was sufficient to leave an impression on this poor girl.” Miss Bonaventure knelt down and ran her finger along the rust-colored ground. “And sharp enough to cut an iron padlock in two, at that.”

  “So it would seem.” Blank swung his cane up, resting it on his shoulder, and spun on his heel in a slow circle, regarding the windows which overlooked the courtyard. “If the postmortem is any indicator, the murder took place between three and twelve hours before the body was discovered. By the overseer's testimony, the discovery came sometime just around dawn. Sunrise would have been sometime just short of a quarter hour before five o'clock, putting the murder somewhere between five o'clock the previous afternoon and two o'clock in the morning. My guess is that the deed was done in the latter part of that window, sometime past midnight. The overseer and his wife, who presumably live here on the grounds, would doubtless have been abed by that hour.”

  “And any witnesses who happened to be awake,” Miss Bonaventure said, indicating the windows overhead, “were not in a position to witness much of anything. So long as the killer prevented the victim from making much in the way of noise, the whole thing would have passed completely unnoticed beneath the sightless eyes of the asylum.”

  “Just so.” Blank nodded. “Which tells us…?” He trailed off and looked to Miss Bonaventure.

  “Very little, I would think. Except that the killer had the presence of mind to choose a secluded locale for his business and was in possession of some unknown implement capable of cutting iron as easily as muscle and bone.”

  “That's not quite all, my dear.”

  Miss Bonaventure cocked an eyebrow.

  “It tells us that the killer shows very little concern for whether the remains are found, since the overseer could not have failed to notice them on waking. As borne out by the discovery of the third body in the Tower Bridge walkway. The killer desires uninterrupted solitude during the commission of the crime, but has no compunction against leaving the body in plain view when the task is done.”

  “Except for the missing limbs and heads,” Miss Bonaventure said, her voice low. Then, after a pause, she looked at Blank, an expression of disquieted horror creeping across her features. “What do you suppose he does with them?”

  “Or ‘she,’ Miss Bonaventure,” Blank corrected. “Let's not unfairly dismiss your own sex as possibly including our killer in its number. There has been no evidence as yet to suggest that the murderer could not have been a woman.” His slight smile faded, and more seriously he added, “But I'm afraid that I don't even have an informed guess for you on that count, my dear. And I confess that I shrink from contemplating the possibilities.”

  “Blank, if you shrink, then I positively vanish.” She laid a hand over her stomach, the blue silk of her jacket crinkling under her touch. “I feel…ugh.” She shook her head in distaste.

  “Are you sure, Miss Bonaventure, that the sensation you detect in your innards is not the early twinges of hunger pangs?” Blank came and stood beside her, brightening. “I believe we've learned all we can here, at least for the moment, and as for myself I am ravenously hungry. If memory serves, there is a serviceable chop house not three blocks from here, and if we hurry, we just might beat the dinner rush.”

  Miss Bonaventure smiled, somewhat soothed, and threaded her arm through his. “I shouldn't wonder, Blank, if you don't at times use a bit of your mesmerism on me, as well.”

  “Miss Bonaventure!” Blank opened his mouth in a wide “o” of outrage. “I'm shocked that you'd suggest such a thing.” Leading her back through the courtyard towards the gate, he patted her hand and smiled. “Which is not to say that I haven't tried, on innumerable occasions, but you seem to be too obstinately strong-willed to succumb, I'm sorry to say.”

  Miss Bonaventure's smile widened, and her eyes twinkled. “Why, Mr. Blank, but you do say the most flattering things.”

  WHEN ALICE STEPPED ONTO WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, she got her first look at the London Eye. It was just like she'd seen on television the week before. But she'd been seeing it for a lot longer than that.

  It was an enormous Ferris wheel and looked for all the world like a gigantic bicycle wheel, spokes radiating out from the hub to the rim, but in the place of a tire were little pillbug-shaped pods of glass and steel spaced at regular intervals. It stood right on the banks of the Thames River, across from the Houses of Parliament and up a bit. According to Frommer's, it was an “observation wheel,” whatever that was, but was the tallest one in the world, so Alice supposed that made it the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, too. She'd been up in the Texas Star at the State Fair, which was supposed to be the biggest one in North America or the Western Hemisphere or something-or-other, but if it was half as tall as the London Eye, Alice would have been surprised.

  Luckily, Alice wasn't scared of heights. Not really. She was scared of falling, but not from heights. She was scared of falling off of anything, tall or short.

  So the idea of falling from the top of a four-hundred-foot-tall Ferris wheel wasn't any more scary than that of falling from the top of a flight of stairs. And she'd done that once and survived, hadn't she? More or less, that is.

  But when Alice saw the London Eye, she didn't just see a giant Ferris wheel. Or an enormous bicycle wheel surrounded by metal pillbugs. She saw an eye, looking out over a city. You had to squint a little to see it as an eye, but it was there, all the same. And it was this image, the eye looking out over the city, that had brought her here.

  She'd been seeing that eye and that city since she was seven and a half years old, since a few months after the accident, the first one, not the one that no one at school liked to talk about. The eye above the city had been the central image of her very first “episode,” as her grandmother called them, or “temporal lobe seizure,” as the doctors later called it. Of course, her grandmother Naomi had been going through a Catholic phase at the time and had been convinced that the episodes were evidence of demonic possession and had taken her down to the church and insisted that the priest give her an exorcism. The priest had refused, and Alice's grandmother had to continue to look further and further afield until she was able to find a clergyman willing to administer the rites. Of course, she also took Alice to a curandera, who shaved her head just in case she had lice; a palm reader, who smelled of mentholated cough drops and stale tobacco; and a hairdresser who dabbled in the occult, who couldn't bring herself to sacrifice a live chicken and so instead performed a few cleansing rituals with a frozen turkey her grandmother brought from the supermarket. Alice's mother had been busy with the postal contract unit, pulling double shifts after the death of Alice's father a
few months before, and didn't know how much school Alice was missing until the school sent around a truant officer. Then the trips to the crazy-eyed hairdressers and disreputable priests stopped, and when Alice's mother found out about the episodes, all of those weeks later, she rushed her to the doctor, who hooked her up to an EEG and diagnosed her with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

  As soon as Alice started taking the anticonvulsants the doctor prescribed, she stopped having her episodes. For a while, at least.

  Here is what Alice saw during her episodes:

  An eye over a city. (What city, she didn't know.)

  A jewel or diamond or crystal that seemed to shine with an inner light.

  Large black birds. Lots of them. (Originally Alice thought they were crows, or maybe even oversized grackles, but when she saw a nature documentary a while later, she knew she'd been wrong. They were ravens.)

  A small body of water, a pond or lake, the surface motionless as glass, smooth and featureless as a mirror's face.

  A man she didn't know whose eyes were ice-chip blue.

  Alice had missed so much school that she was held back a year, and when all of the other kids moved on to the third grade, she stayed back in the second. She didn't have any more episodes, not until she was almost sixteen and a freshman in high school. But the images she'd seen in those weeks stuck with her, and she was forever doodling them in the margins of her schoolwork or drawing them in art classes. In particular the eye above the city. The eye was giant, Alice had remembered that, but there hadn't been a face, or another eye, or even an eyebrow and lashes. More a giant eyeball floating in midair. And the city was indistinct, more the abstract suggestion of a city than an actual place.