The Pierced Heart: A Novel

by Shepherd, Lynn

  It has been three days now, since I have eaten what he has brought me. I have thrown the food into the water-closet, and when he comes I disguise my weakness by cowering in the corner and refusing to go near him. He chides me, then, for childishness and pique and I turn my face to the wall and say nothing. Better far he should think so, than have him guess the truth.

  NO DATE—

  I have made a discovery. The last time he left the lamp I took it into the sitting-room, wondering if despite its dirt and emptiness there might after all be something there that could tell me where I am—some discarded letter perhaps, or tradesman’s receipt. And it was then, when I went searching from shelf to bare shelf, that I discovered a door in the corner by the window, concealed in the wooden panelling. My heart rose an instant in a wild hope of escape, only for it to perish cruelly as I realised that there could be no egress this way—that it could be nothing more than a cupboard set into the dividing wall. And yet I persevered, thinking such a hiding-place might still contain something of use. I felt down the jamb with my fingers and found a small metal catch, and the next moment the door swung open towards me. And it was indeed, only a cupboard, barely three feet in depth. Or at least so I thought, until I noticed a tiny circle of light on the far side and saw that it was not a wall at all, but another door, leading to the apartment beyond. I pushed gently but it would not give, so I knelt down as quietly as I could and placed my eye to the keyhole. Because I knew by then what I would see.

  I would see him.

  And perhaps because I am so helpless, so entirely subservient to the power he wields, I have taken to sitting at this door and observing him. It is my tiny vengeance to watch him so, when he has no notion I am there, for it is clear to me he has not perceived that this hidden door separates us. But I have learned nothing from my spying that I did not know, or that might assist me. It is part of his bedroom I can see, a bedroom most luxuriously appointed. There is a large bed, and what I think must be a table, covered with a heavy crimson satin cloth. Sometimes he lies many hours on that bed by day, full-dressed in the clothes he always wears, not sleeping, but not awake, as if sunk in a trance. Sometimes I see him reading from a great quantity of heavy volumes which appear to contain diagrams, or sheets of figures, or obscure mathematical signs, and once I saw a great piece of glass, cut in a diamond shape like the prisms I once studied in my father’s books. And when night has fallen and he has brought me my dinner, I hear him, for many hours, writing, the pen scratching scratching scratching across the page.

  NO DATE—

  It must be more than a month since we left my home, for my bleeds have come. Having endured so much, and so long, this last might seem such a little thing, and yet I am weeping now for the first time in many days, not just for myself and for my father all those long weeks alone and unknowing, but because I am ashamed. I have not brought those requisites with me that a lady needs, and there is no way, here, of obtaining them. Nor will I raise the subject with him, not only because it is unfitting, but because I will never again put myself in his debt. He has taken from me all I had—my home, my father, even the light and air—and now he seeks to take what is left of my dignity.

  Perhaps it is because I have been so sick, but I cannot remember so much blood before, not even that first time when I was a girl, or in Vienna before we left, when I was so ill and those doctors diagnosed chlorosis. I have conquered my punctilio and my humiliation and torn the bed-linen, winding it into heavy bandages, but still the blood pulses from me as if my last strength were ebbing away, and when I woke last night gasping from the nightmare the bed was drenched with it, and I heard a child’s voice crying in the silence. I sat a moment, the wetness thick on my skin, praying I was mistaken or had dreamed it, but then I heard the cry again and knew it was not so.

  I crawled to the hidden door and I knelt, trembling, by the keyhole. The curtains were undrawn now, and the white moonlight flooded so into the room that I had to close my eyes for a moment in sudden pain—I had never seen it so bright as this, so powerful as this, and I thought afterwards that he must have employed that prism I had seen in his hands. The light fell full on the table I had seen before, but as my eyes became accustomed to the brightness I saw that its red satin covering was gone and my heart froze as I saw that it was indeed a table, but one such as I had never seen before—a table covered in leather with holes drilled along its edges, and straps threaded through them, and there, there—I shudder even now as I write it—a young woman was lying, half-naked, her ankles pinned by those leather straps. I could not see her face, but I could tell her youth from her slenderness and the little rosebud tattooed near her foot. And then another figure passed close before the door and I saw only black. But I knew who it was. I scarcely dared breathe then, as I watched him move forwards towards the bed, his back toward me, and then he bent low over the girl as he had once bent over me—as he had once bent over my Dora. I knew—I thought I knew—what he would do then, and bit my lip until my teeth pierced flesh. She moaned, just as I had once moaned, but my body had never convulsed as hers did now, thrashing, twisting, thrown again and again hard against the wooden frame. I turned my face away and clasped my hands tight over my ears but I could not shut it out—the drumming of the table against the floor, and above it the sound of a little child crying, “Mama! Mama!”

  I lay there in the silence that followed, too terrified to move, feeling the blood seep through my thin nightgown, until at last I heard sounds from the room beyond. The sound of something heavy dragging across the floor, then the door opening and steps on the stairs outside. I crept to the keyhole again and saw that the room was as it had always been. The red satin was again in place, and of mother and child there was no sign.

  THE NEXT DAY—

  I can barely read my writing, so weak are my eyes, so unsteady my hand. Still the blood comes, and now there is pain such as I have never endured. For hours I have sat here, crouched in the water-closet, shivering despite the heat, weeping tears of self-pity. Because now, after all these weeks of listening and hoping—now, when I no longer have the strength to crawl to the door and beat my fists upon it, someone has come. I do not know who it is, but I can hear, even from where I am, the low murmur of voices from beyond the wall. His, and another man’s. I cannot make out his words, cannot even gauge the man’s age, and though I cry out, I know he does not hear. I am too weak, and he is too far, but still I cry out, the tears running down my face.

  Do not leave me—

  Do not leave me—

  CHAPTER NINE

  HER BODY LIES EXPOSED to the air, naked and defiled. There is no sheet to cover her white skin now. Her breast has been pierced, and twists of sinew and muscle and flaccid veins spill from the empty hollow of the ribs to the heart that once beat there. A heart that lies now seeping on her belly. And there on the floor, where her head has rolled, a huge black crow is perched on her forehead, pecking at her eyes.

  Sam lurches at the bird which lifts slowly off and makes for the window, its ragged wings beating the stale air.

  “Is someone goin’ to tell me ’ow the bloody ’ell this man got in?” he barks at the attendant. “You there—Madsen, weren’t you supposed to be on duty last night?”

  The man blenches. “Yes, sir. I just don’t know how it could have happened, sir—I was only gone for five minutes. I got called upstairs when they were bringing in another corpse, and by the time I got back, well, you can see—”

  “Yes, Madsen, I can bloody well see! And was the window open then?”

  “Yes, sir, it being so hot, sir.”

  Sam looks again at the casement, but for the life of him he can’t see how a full-grown man could have got through that aperture. And as for the idea that a child could have done this—

  “I suppose it’s possible—” begins Madsen tentatively, rather red in the face.

  “Go on—I’m all ears.”

  “There’ve been a lot of people in and out of the station, sir. Tou
rists and such, what with the Exhibition being on. Lost children, people wanting directions and so forth. It’s possible, I suppose, that someone could have slipped past the sergeant on duty—if there’d been a sudden crowd at the desk. And then if he hid somewhere down here until it was dark, and I was out of the room—”

  “That’s an ’ell of a lot of ‘ifs,’ Madsen.”

  “I know, sir. But I just can’t think of any other way he could’ve done it.”

  “And ’ow did ’e get out afterwards?”

  Madsen flushes. “Well, things did get a bit confused after that—when I saw what had happened I called out to the sergeant and he came down to see—”

  “So the desk was unmanned.”

  “Yes, sir. But only for a few minutes. Sir.”

  But long enough, as Sam well knows, for someone to make their escape—and especially someone capable of planning such an operation in the first place. He glances at his pocket-watch—he sent young Jenkins for Charles over an hour ago—where the hell is he?

  Then the morgue door bangs open and the hefty desk sergeant appears in the doorway.

  “Mr Maddox is upstairs.”

  “About bloody time! Bring ’im down then, what yer waitin’ for?”

  “He’s with Rowlandson. The Inspector asked me to fetch you.”

  “Tell ’im I’ll be there in a minute,” says Sam, desperate to buy some time, and well aware that Rowlandson will be asking all the same questions he just did, and Sam doesn’t have anything like a satisfactory answer.

  “He said at once, Wheeler. And judging by the look on his face, he meant it.”

  Charles is already waiting outside the upstairs office but there is no time to speak before the door is opened and they are ushered into Rowlandson’s presence. The Inspector is standing at the window with his back to them. He is a tall man, and his height is further accentuated by his thinness; he has greying hair cut short, and a little beard trimmed in a goatee. It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning but the day is already hot, and the Inspector has his handkerchief in his hand and is wiping the moisture from his neck. When he hears the door he turns to face them, and then comes forwards a few paces and places a newspaper on the table. It’s that morning’s Daily News. Carefully folded so that the story on the front page is facing upwards:

  Wednesday, 18 June 1851

  DOES A VAMPIRE STALK LONDON?

  HORRIBLE MURDERS IN PICCADILLY

  FOUR CASES SINCE THE EXHIBITION OPENED

  VICTIMS BEHEADED AND DESECRATED

  The news we have to report today will, we have no doubt, send a thrill of horror throughout the whole metropolis. We doubt whether any occurrence of the kind has ever created a greater sensation, and it is with the most painful reluctance that we divulge it, but we believe it is our duty to bring to the attention of the public a series of brutal murders that the authorities have sought for some weeks to bury in silence. The police have said nothing of these outrages, fearing an outbreak of general panic such as London has never witnessed, and at a time when the capital is thronged with visitors, but we can now reveal that in the last two months, three women, all of the class known as “unfortunates,” have been found slaughtered in the most savage manner in the vicinity of St James’s Park, their heads hacked from their bodies and disposed of who knows where. Were that not dreadful enough, we are informed by a most unimpeachable source that the necks showed the unmistakable signs of teeth marks, and the hearts had either been pierced with some unknown weapon, or removed from the corpses entirely.

  None of the three women has yet been identified, and yet before an inquest has even been convened, when their desecrated bodies have scarcely even been committed to the ground, another female of the same class has now met with the same gruesome fate.

  A NEW OUTRAGE

  The latest barbarity occurred only yesterday, when the police station in Vine Street was entered in the early hours of the morning by an unknown intruder, and a fourth corpse butchered in the like horrific manner, within yards of where a sergeant was supposedly on watch. This young woman is believed to have been a resident of Granby Street, and her body was discovered only two days ago. We are assured that it was at that time intact, though showing the same marks of puncture wounds about the throat. There being no other visible injury, and the young woman’s skin being unnaturally pale, rumour is rife that both she and the other victims met their deaths by exsanguination.

  The obvious similarities in the atrocious mutilations which all four bodies suffered serve only to add the most profound mystery to the horror of these crimes, and forces us to the irresistible conclusion that all were perpetrated by one and the same hand.

  As a general rule, the mutilation of bodies is entirely foreign to the English style in crime, and it was with no surprise, therefore, that we learned that the one attested sighting of the perpetrator suggests that he speaks with a foreign accent. Foreigner he may be; fiend he most certainly is. To commit such atrocities in the very heart of London, no more than yards from the lights and crowds of one of its most populous and fashionable thoroughfares, argues for a terrifying and indeed supernatural ability to move among us undetected. For it is impossible, after committing such sanguinary crimes, that he was not literally drenched with the blood of his hapless victims, and yet he was observed in this state by no-one, and certainly not by any member of the police force which is supposedly charged with the protection of the law-abiding citizenry.

  POLICE CONFOUNDED

  The police have much to answer for in this sorry case. All attempts to discover and apprehend the assailant have met with failure, and we are of the opinion that this unforgiveable dereliction of duty stems in no small measure from a refusal on the part of those charged with the inquiry (to wit, Inspector Rowlandson, of Bow Street) to accept a simple fact that will be obvious at once to anyone cognisant with even the barest facts of the case: There is a Vampire at large in London, stalking its most hallowed quarters, preying upon those foolish or unfortunate enough to walk the streets by night.

  There are those of our readers, no doubt, who will ridicule such a suggestion, countering that Vampires are nothing but the stuff of children’s stories and folk legend, but we believe there is no other rational explanation that can account for the evidence that has been presented to us. Not only do these murders exhibit an unprecedented savagery, they defy all rules of human motive. There are no known connexions among the victims, and no conceivable benefit that could result from the butchery inflicted upon them, beyond a malignant and bloodthirsty delight in the deed itself. We are bound to conclude, therefore, that these crimes can only be the work of some inhuman monster, raging with a ghoulish lust for blood. For in addition to those facts we have already set out, viz, the unnaturally pale condition of the bodies, the removal of the hearts, and the teeth marks upon the necks, there is a further circumstance the police have thus far refused even to consider, and it is this: Each of these foul murders took place at or approximate to full moon; a time, as is well attested, when the grim spectre of the Vampire is at his most powerful, and most menacing.

  We have attempted to speak with Inspector Rowlandson on several occasions, most lately last evening, but he has thus far declined to answer any of our questions. It is in the light of this refusal, and in the interests of public safety, that we now feel compelled to break the silence surrounding these heinous crimes. We have no wish to provoke unnecessary alarm, but given the inability of the police to either prevent or resolve these foul murders, we feel our readers must be told the truth, that they might take whatever measures they deem fit to ensure the safety of their own households. For until this fiend has been apprehended, the denizens of Piccadilly and St James’s will rightly feel the highest degree of apprehension that some new horror might nightly be committed in their very midst, perhaps upon the bodies of their own innocent and respectable womenfolk.

  We acknowledge that the current Exhibition has placed an additional strain on a constabula
ry already struggling to police the vast extent of the greatest capital in the world, but it does not excuse their repeated failure in this extraordinary case. We say only this: If the Detective Branch has neither the intelligence nor the resources it requires to effect an arrest, it might do worse than to call upon the proven capabilities of the private agencies, there being at least one member thereof who has exhibited the true instinct of the detective calling, in both identifying and then apprehending the vicious criminals at the heart of that infamous conspiracy lately set on foot by Sir Julius Cremorne. We have in mind, of course, Mr Charles Maddox, the younger of that illustrious name.

  “So would one of you like to tell me what in the devil’s name is going on?”

  Sam shoots an agonised look in Charles’s direction, and Charles takes a deep breath. “It has nothing to do with me, sir. I know it looks like—”

  “Too damn right, Maddox, as to what it looks like. The eyes of the Empire are upon this city at present, and in consequence there is an unprecedented attention upon the manner in which London conducts its affairs. The very last thing we need is ill-informed panic-mongering on the part of the press, or the slightest suggestion that the Metropolitan Police is not even capable of catching the killer of a few street whores. When I asked Wheeler to consult with you about this case, I believed I could trust in your judgement and discretion; I did not expect you to exploit the fact as a means to advance your own reputation, at the expense of that of your former colleagues.”

  “And I did not do so.” Charles looks at him, full in the face, his blue eyes blazing and his chin high. “I know how it appears, sir, but I swear to you that I have discussed this case with no-one but Sam and my uncle—”

  “Are you telling me that you have had no contact—no contact whatsoever—with Patrick O’Riordan?”

  Charles flushes and his eyes drop.

  “I thought as much.”

  “He came to me—started spouting this ludicrous story about vampires. I knew it was absurd, but I needed more evidence—I needed to be able to prove it—”