This was going to make him famous, it was! Soon, he reckoned, there’d be letters being sent, letters to him and the papers as well as the police, claiming to be from the Ghoul. Hoaxes, pranks, and fakes, but they’d keep the interest running at high tide. Already, Roger’d been flooded with offers from the penny-dreadfuls about his unsold stories, and inquiries about novels!
So, it was with high spirits and a jaunty stride he headed home to the boarding-house late of an evening, whistling to himself. Henry Duchamp was to have a new batch of drawings ready, and Roger could hardly wait to see.
***
He struggled to wakefulness with a head that felt hammered full of railspikes, and his mouth tasting like the bottom of a boot.
When he made to sit up, he found he couldn’t move.
Held down. Held fast. Pinned on some cold, hard surface. His shirt was opened, baring him collar to waist.
His neck creaked as he craned it, trying to see.
A dark shape loomed there, indistinct in the shadows.
Then, light.
A sudden, harsh, flinching glare of light.
***
“Mr. Rillings? Have you no consideration for the hour? My word!”
“Sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Whitte,” he said, mustering his politest smile and hoping she didn’t see fit to be offended at the whiskey on his breath. “You haven’t happened to see Henry Duchamp tonight, have you?”
“That one?” The landlady, wrapped in her housecoat, with a bed-kerchief tied over her hair, sniffed. “Who’s been making those awful pictures to go along with your awful stories?”
Roger nodded. “And which he was to show me the latest, but he doesn’t seem to be at home. Did he leave anything for me, perchance? A parcel? A message?”
“Not with me, he hasn’t.”
“Oh …” Roger shrugged off a twinge of disappointment. He’d been looking forward to those new pieces. “Ah well. Tomorrow’s soon enough.”
“Unless you think that Ghoul of yours has got him.” Eliza Whitte sneered a thin-lipped smile at Roger. “Him being an artist, and all, same as Jack Blint, and Charcoal Pete, and that Harmons fellow who painted the miniature portraits. Isn’t that what your Ghoul goes after?”
“Coincidence and numbers,” Roger said. “Artists are ten for a penny in Garretton; you can hardly swing a cat by the tail without clouting one upside the head.”
“Which some of them could use,” she muttered. “Disreputable scoundrels that they are.”
Hadn’t he had this same discussion with the chaps at the pub earlier? Yet, again, the whiskey compelled him to defend the subject further. “I noticed it, of course, noticed it probably before the police did. There’s nothing to it. More artists here than anywhere else in the city. Odds are if you picked any given man at random off the street in Garretton, that’s what he’d be. Not strange at all.”
“No stranger than suggesting there’s some sort of monster in our midst?” She gave him a dark, narrow-eyed look of reproach. “Some devil that goes about pulling men’s hearts out by the roots and eating them like a boiled turnip?”
“I’ll have you know, they’re taking that possibility very seriously,” Roger said, with a hint of pride. Taking it seriously because of him and his stories, they were! “Brought in a noted paranormalist to track the Ghoul down --”
“Some tart from over Little Paris way, is what I heard.” Eliza huffed, folding her arms beneath her scant bosom. “Educated by the Church, they say, but if she’s any kind of a nun then I’m an airship pilot!”
“But it does sell papers.”
“Hmf. You and your scare-stories, putting everyone into a panic, taking in a tidy profit off their fear!”
“Pays my rent, doesn’t it?” He grinned at her.
“There is that.” She looked him up and down. “Better about it than most of these artist-types, you are, at least. And I daresay you’re not seducing any foolish, impressionable young wives into breaking their husbands’ hearts, like my Abigail.”
“Ah, God in Heaven, not this again!” Roger groaned. “Your daughter ran off with that portraiter weeks ago. That’s old news, Mrs. Whitte. Old news indeed.”
***
Henry Duchamp strained at the buckled straps binding him to the cold metal table, but they held fast. “Let me loose from here, or I’ll wring your neck for you, I will!”
No answer.
The lantern suspended above the table had a conical copper shade, directing its light down onto Henry in a bright spot-shine. Squint though he might, the most he could make out of his surroundings were shelves and what looked like work-benches.
An acrid, chemical-cleaner smell hung bitter in the air. It overpowered, but did not erase, an underlying odor of mingled root cellar, sweat, shit, piss, blood, rust, oil and rot.
The dark shadow-shape moved again. Henry caught a glimpse in the backsplash of light, a glimpse that told him little. He saw a waterproof slicker, not unlike the ones longshoremen favored. He saw heavy black vulcanized gloves. He saw a curved sheet of tint-glass, the kind welders wore, down inside the slicker’s hood.
“You’re the one they call the Ghoul! The one who killed Jack, and Alan, and those others!”
Again, and still, no answer.
The man – it was a man, of that Henry felt certain – moved to the edge of the table. The welder’s mask caught a sheen of light, and what with that and the tint-glass, obscured any view of his features.
Gloved hands reached up. Up past the copper-shaded light, manipulating unseen levers, making unseen gears turn. Henry bucked and thrashed but the straps gave him not so much as an inch. Ankles, wrists, and a broad belt clamped across his waist as well … he was trapped, immobile … as whatever contraption this was descended toward him on hinged armatures.
Inside a stainless steel cylindrical barrel were rings of razor-edged metal teeth, three concentric circles of them. When the madman thumbed a switch, an engine whirred. Slowly at first, the bladed rings began to revolve, two clockwise and one widdershins. At the turn of a dial, they sped up, spinning faster and faster, making a glinting, flashing, silvery blur. They gave off a hideous, eager whine that rose in pitch as their speed increased.
“What … what’s that?” Henry asked, stammering, sickly sure he already knew the answer. He’d not seen the bodies in person, but he’d heard the talk, and when a man spent his life doing art for the penny-dreadfuls and fright-show posters, he honed his imagination well.
The hooded head gave a satisfactory that’ll-do nod. The Ghoul thumbed the switch again, turning off the engine. The revolving blades slowed from a blur to a gradual stop, poised there, toothy, waiting.
“No,” Henry said. “Don’t do this. You don’t as got to do this. We can talk it over, can’t we? I’ve done nothing to you.”
The Ghoul lowered the barrel until its end rested against Henry’s bared chest. He felt it, a cold circle with countless sharp pinpricks dimpling into his skin. Lifting his head, he could see it as well, indenting the flesh. The shining metal reflected a warped image of himself, distorted as any unflattering caricature the Portnoys had ever drawn.
“No!” Henry blubbered.
He nearly pissed himself with relief when the Ghoul lifted the device away.
But that was only to reposition it.
Over his heart. Directly over his heart, pressing down against that rapid beating.
Henry did piss himself, a warm yellow flood soaking his trousers.
The tint-glass mask leaned down. Henry saw just another warped reflection of his own terror-struck, wild-eyed face.
“Now it’s your turn,” the Ghoul whispered. “Now you’ll know. One by one, you’ll all know.”
His black-gloved hand thumbed the switch.
The shrill, eager whine swallowed up Henry’s desperate scream. The cold circle on his chest became a searing, slicing agony. Blood sprayed up in a dense red mist. The whine’s tone changed, deepened, chugged, as the whirring steel te
eth met bone. The red blood-mist thickened with flecks and chips that stung Henry’s eyes, that spatted hot wet grit into his open, screaming mouth.
The spinning blades bored in deeper. The spraying mist became a dark upwelling.
Inside his chest – inside his chest! – the device made a cleaving, meaty sound. Henry felt it as much as heard it, and in what dim detached part of his head as hadn’t already gone mad, didn’t know which was worse, the hearing or the feeling. What next he heard and felt was the popping of gristle, like pulling apart a Christmas goose.
The device drew smoothly up. Henry had a hideous sensation of suction and burble. More blood rained onto him, spouting from the precise round hole, dripping from the plug of meat and bone stuck in the end of the machine’s cylindrical barrel.
His exposed heart pulsed to the open air. Henry quivered from shock.
“She liked chilled mint fizzes,” the Ghoul said, turning to the worktable. His voice was conversational. Nostalgic. Almost fond.
A whimper gurgled up from Henry’s throat.
“I’d make them for her in the evenings. Frozen mint syrup, and gin, carbonated with a gazogene. I grew mint in a kitchen window greenhouse just so she could have a sprig of it, fresh, with each glass. Oh, she was beautiful.”
The Ghoul turned back, holding a small but heavy-looking canister. He’d pushed up the tint-glass, revealing pleasant-enough features. Older. Lined. Respectable. Badger-grey tufted eyerows and muttonchops. A dead blankness in the eyes.
“I kept the syrup in one of these,” he said. He unscrewed the canister’s top. A chill wispy exhalation issued out. “Marvelous, what they can do these days, isn’t it? Have you ever had your heart broken, you wretched whoreson of an artist?”
Henry, whimpering and gurgling, stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“You might not think it can break,” said the Ghoul. “I thought so too, at first. After all, it’s muscle, not porcelain. Muscle can be crushed, sliced, minced, any number of things … but not so readily broken, if you take my meaning.” He tipped the canister.
A frost-smoking stream of liquid poured into Henry’s gaping chest. Cold white clouds boiled up and over. A white numbing flash doused him from within. His breath locked.
“And yet, that is how I felt. As if my heart had been torn from my breast and shattered before my very eyes.”
So saying, the Ghoul stuck his black-gloved hand into the hole. He yanked. With a brittle crackle, a fist-sized lump tore free. Rime-streaked red, like a handful of bloody ice, like a chunk of raw and frozen meat.
He showed it to Henry, then struck it against the edge of the table, smashing it to pieces.
“There, Abigail,” Henry heard him say as the world faded to nothingness. “There’s another one for you …”
###
The End of our Steampunk Horror Adventure.
Thank you for taking the time to read this book, which we here at KnightWatch Press an imprint of Fringeworks Ltd hope you enjoyed.
Feel free to find out more about our works at www.fringeworks.co.uk and KnightWatch Press at http://www.knightwatchpress.info
You can follow the Formatter Theresa Derwin on Twitter @BarbarellaFem
She writes book reviews at www.terror-tree.co.uk and her personal blog is www.theresa-derwin.co.uk
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