by Cross, Amy
“Is it short for Madeleine?”
“Nobody calls me Madeleine,” I reply. “Not unless they're being mean, Wally.”
“Well hello, Maddie,” he says. “It's nice to meet you. I'm Matt.”
“How old are you, Matt?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you look ridiculous in that uniform, and I can barely believe you're old enough to be in the police.”
“It's a little too big for me,” he admits, looking down and trying to straighten the front of his shirt.
“Either that or you're too small for it,” I point out.
“I prefer not to think of it that way.” He finishes adjusting his shirt, and then he allows himself a faint smile as he turns back to me. “I'm twenty-two, if you must know. I got kind of fast-tracked through training.”
“Because you were so good?”
“Because they were desperate.”
I can't help smiling.
“I'm serious,” he continues. “They need boots on the ground. They were run off their feet even before this Jack the Ripper copycat turned up, and now the whole situation's completely insane. You can't even begin to imagine how busy it is at the station. They're even running low on uniforms. Which reminds me, I've got a plastic bag in the boot with a pair of muddy trousers. I guess I have to get those in the machine before I hit the hay.”
“I knew it was you yesterday morning,” I reply.
“And I was pretty sure it was you.”
I'm about to make some lame joke, but I decide to hold back. I haven't spoken to anyone properly since Alex left, and deep down I know that there's no point getting to know this guy. He seems nice for a cop, but at some point he'd have to contact my parents. The last thing I want is to keep this conversation going, so I mutter something about getting going and then I turn and start walking away.
“What was that?” he calls after me.
“Never mind. Forget it.”
“Maddie! Where are you going?”
“I'll be fine.”
“Maddie, wait!”
I hear him opening the door on his side of the car.
So I run, hurrying out across the street and then onto the grass that leads toward the park gate. I take care to avoid the lights, but I'm breathless by the time I reach the gate and I stop for a moment to look back. I can see the police car still parked at the side of the road, and Matt is just climbing out. He doesn't come after me, however, and I guess he knows he can't chase me, and he probably figures I'll be fine. Which, to be fair, is a reasonable assumption. I mean, what are the odds of some asshole serial killer finding me in the middle of such a huge city?
In fact, if it was the killer on the beach earlier, then that's even better. 'Cause the one thing that's less likely than him stumbling onto me, would be him stumbling onto me twice.
Glancing back again, I see that Matt is still looking for me, and I can hear him calling my name. He's a nice guy, but I'm better off on my own, so I turn and hurry away.
Chapter Seventeen
Doctor Charles Grazier
Sunday September 30th, 1888
“What are you doing?”
Stopping in the doorway, I see to my utmost horror that Jack is sitting on the edge of the bed. He seems to be tending to the silk sheet that covers Catherine's body. The scene would be almost tender, were Jack a caring husband rather than a brute from the streets, and were Catherine a resting wife rather than a corpse.
Jack turns to me.
He has uncovered my wife's face, and although I know that I should be more rational about these things, I cannot help but feel that this is an act of great disrespect. Catherine would be horrified if she knew that a strange man was sitting so close to her.
“What are you doing?” I ask again. “I want you to get off there at once.”
“And why's that?” he asks, before looking at the wrench in my hand. “Ah, you found it. Good. I was wondering where I'd left that thing.”
“Get off the bed!” I snarl, taking a step toward him.
“Or what?”
“I swear, you will get off that bed this instant, or I shall drag you off myself!”
“Really?” He pauses, before looking back down at Catherine's face. “I was just thinking that although Catherine herself is dead, her body in some ways is still a hive of activity. The cancer does not die immediately, does it? Or am I wrong? Does the cancer persist for a short while, lingering and trying to survive in the cooling body that once fed its voracious appetite?”
“What are you talking about?” I snap. “She's dead, damn you!”
“Perhaps I was trying too hard to be poetic.” Sighing, he gets to his feet, but still he looks down at my wife's uncovered face. “Your wife was very pretty,” he continues. “I can tell that, even now. There's something noble about her, even in her current state. Almost statuesque, really. Even in death, she has a kind of dignity.”
“I'll thank you to not look at her,” I mutter, heading over to the bed and once again placing the silk sheet over Catherine's face. “She's not some attraction to be gawped at.”
“Sometimes I just get philosophical. I usually try to hide that part of myself, but I thought – wrongly, as it turns out – that you might appreciate these thoughts. I'm sorry, Doctor Grazier. I shan't mention anything like this again.” He pauses for a moment. “Then again, perhaps I am not the only one in this house whose mind has begun to wander from the straight and narrow. Tell me, were you really trying to join her?”
After smoothing the sheet a little more, I turn to him.
“When I found you bleeding over that bowl,” he continues, “you were passing out thanks to all the blood you'd lost, but you said you wanted to be reunited with Catherine. You were going on and on about it, like you thought she was waiting somewhere for you. You were rather insistent about the enterprise.”
“I don't remember that,” I reply, although I suppose he's telling the truth.
“I was so surprised,” he adds, “that a rational-minded man such as yourself was starting to believe in such fairytales. Then again, I suppose in your grief you were willing to believe almost anything. You must miss her a great deal.”
“You don't know what you're talking about,” I sneer. “Now get out of this room at once! I want you to come downstairs with me!”
“Why?” He looks down at the wrench again. “Is there something you want to do? Something you don't want your dead wife to see?”
“I swear...”
“And are you then going to cut your wrists open again?” he continues. “Is that your plan? Do you intend to tidy everything up here, deal with the loose ends – of which I'm sure I'm one – and then try again to go and join her? Such a nonsensical idea, Doctor Grazier, and really not worthy of a great man.” Reaching into his pocket, he takes out a piece of paper, and I am shocked to see that he is holding the letter that I wrote earlier. “I find it hard to read the handwriting of educated folk,” he adds. “I did manage to pick out one or two words, mind. Treatment. Necessary. Worthless. Intruder. Those were some, as I remember.”
“You are not worthy to be in this room,” I tell him. “It is an offense to my wife's memory that a man such as yourself has even seen her face.”
“Fair point,” he replies, “but I'm just surprised that you're giving up so easily. What happened to the ambition I saw in those notebooks?”
“I failed.”
“Since when?”
“I worked to save her life,” I explain, through gritted teeth, “and I failed. The proof of that is laid out on the bed before you. Perhaps the final procedure worked, perhaps it did not, but either way, I did not save her in time. I worked tirelessly, I did things that I never would have believed possible. I let nothing stand in my way, and yet it was all in vain. All of it, for nothing.”
“You only failed,” he replies, “so far.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?” I ask.
“You failed s
o far,” he continues, “but I do not understand, Doctor Grazier, why you seem so ready to give up.”
“My wife is dead,” I point out.
“But I thought you were a pioneer.”
“She is dead!” I say firmly, struggling to keep from raising my voice. I try to snatch the letter from him, and he lets me. “What exactly do you expect me to do? Get down on my knees and pray for some Lazarus-like miracle?”
“Don't be foolish,” he replies stepping around the bed and stopping at the foot, as if he wants to get a better view of Catherine's silk-covered body. “Nobody's suggesting prayers, Doctor Grazier, but perhaps you need to be reminded that you have already made great strides and discoveries. That's evident from your notes, and from the letter you were going to leave behind. Who is to say that you cannot make a few more discoveries before your time comes to its natural conclusion?”
“To what end?” I ask, tiring immensely of his constant prattling nonsense.
“To the end of reviving her.”
“She is dead, you fool!”
“And how old was she when she died?”
“I fail to see why -”
“Humor me.”
“She was far too young.”
“Her heart beat for all those years,” he continues, “and then it stopped. Such a simple change, like a switch being pressed. Surely, if her heart can be encouraged to beat again, then life shall return to her.”
“Such a thing is not possible.”
“Everything is deemed not possible,” he replies, “until a great man does it for the first time.”
“You're talking about raising the dead!”
“I'm talking about reviving your wife, Doctor Grazier. There are plenty more whores in London still, and plenty more kidneys and livers and blood in all of them. What good do they do? None whatsoever. But what if they could provide a ready stream of body parts that you could use in your work? Catherine's heart was her own, and her brain too, but the rest of her body could be replaced, and then she might rise once more from this bed and breathe anew.”
“Impossible,” I mutter.
“Imagine how she would feel,” he adds, “knowing that you had kept going. That you had not given up at the first hurdle. Why, a surer sign of true love I cannot imagine.”
“The human body cannot be revived after death,” I explain. “It's just not possible.”
“Why not?”
“It has never been done!”
“And did that stop you when you took kidneys and stitched them into your wife's body?”
“No, but that was different.”
“How so?”
“The tasks are not comparable!” I splutter, frustrated by his refusal to see reason. “I had a theory that certain organs could be transplanted, but once the heart stops beating -”
“It has to be restarted.”
Sighing, I look own at Catherine's body. I do not know how I can make this foolish man understand reality, but I am quite certain that reviving my dead wife would be utterly impossible. For one thing, I would need to reliably restart her heart, and then I would have to ensure that the blood reached her brain. She has been dead for less than twenty-four hours, but there will already have been some deterioration of her body. There are so many difficulties, and I would have to swap out such a great mass of her organs that the task seems utterly daunting.
And yet...
And yet, as I continue to stare at Catherine's silk-covered corpse, I find myself already starting to imagine the procedures. I would start, of course, by removing every organ except her heart and brain. I would, indeed, take out everything that I do not consider to be part of her unique identity. Then I would take the parts of other women and stitch them into place. It would be like the kidney and uterus transplants, but on a much grander scale. There would need to be blood, too, but...
For a moment, I try to imagine how I would restart the heart and ensure that it remained beating. Perhaps there might be things I could try.
“The only failure,” Jack says finally, “would be to give up. Catherine does not wait for you after death, Doctor Grazier. She's not lingering in some other place, in some paradise, so that you can find her and spend the rest of eternity frolicking. It's a nice idea, to be sure, but it's little more than a fairytale. Deep down, you know that I am right.” He looks down at the silk-covered body again. “She waits for you here,” he continues, “in her bed. She waits for you to use science to bring her back. You have wasted a day already. Do you intend to waste another?”
I pause, before setting the wrench down and making my way around to the other side of the bed. Reaching down, I pull the silk aside, once again uncovering Catherine's face.
She cannot be revived.
It is impossible.
And yet, in the back of my mind, ideas are forming.
“You are a great doctor,” Jack continues. “I have seen you work in dark alleys. But if I were to help you acquire the body parts that you need, you could work here, in your own home. With proper facilities and enough time to make sure that you get things right. And I believe in you, Doctor Grazier. I truly believe that if anyone can do this, it is you.”
Placing a hand on the side of Catherine's face, I feel her cold skin and imagine what it would be like to return the warmth to her body. Her heart sits dormant in her chest, but what if it could be encouraged to beat again?
“What do you need?” Jack asks. “Tell me, and I'll get it for you. Anything at all.”
I pause for a moment, before turning to him and seeing that a faint smile is creeping across his face. He is utterly, freakishly insane, yet his words have wriggled their way into my thoughts and he has – in his own way – returned hope to my mind. He has given me an idea.
“I need the whole of a woman,” I explain finally. “And I need her to be fresh.”
Chapter Eighteen
Maddie
Today
I watch as the police car drives away, and then I make my way back over to the side of the road. I'm soaking wet now, and my cold clothes are clinging to my body. The sky is brightening a little more with each passing minute, and soon morning will be well and truly here. And despite what I told Matt, I have absolutely no intention of getting out of London. I'm sure the police will catch the killer today and, if they don't, I'll keep out of sight tonight and this time no silhouetted freak is going to come and find me.
“I can't believe you sat in a cop car all night like a little pussy,” I imagine Alex saying. “What's wrong with you?”
“It worked out fine, didn't it?” I'd tell her. “I'm not dead.”
Wherever Alex is right now, I hope she's safe. I hope she's got a roof over her head, and I hope she's staying off the streets at night. Later I'm going to try to get a glimpse of a TV screen, just to make sure that she wasn't the killer's latest victim. Then again, that'd be way too much of a coincidence. As I make my way down some steps and along a narrow street that leads toward some shops, I tell myself that Alex is going to be fine. I just wish I was still with her, because in this kind of situation she'd know exactly what to do.
Wincing suddenly, I feel a sharp pain in my gut. I stop and lean against the wall, but the pain is already gone. I wait for a moment, in case it comes back, but then I tell myself that nothing's wrong. I set off again and -
Suddenly I hear footsteps nearby.
I spin around, terrified that somebody is coming up behind me, but instead I realize that the footsteps are high above. Looking up, I see a dark figure hurrying across a nearby bridge, heading away from the street. The figure's gone soon enough, but I watch for a few more seconds, just in case he doubles back. He's far from the first person I've seen running through the early morning streets of London, but right now I'd really like to not bump into anyone at all. The effects of the curfew will take a while to wear off in the morning gloom, and I'm surprised that anybody else was out here.
Once I'm sure that the guy has gone, I turn and start walking
again, heading along the side of some old factory buildings. I'm still pretty wet from the night's bad weather, and I'm trying to think of ways I might be able to dry off. As I pass the end of an alley, however, I spot something out of the corner of my eye. I keep walking for a few paces before stopping, and then I step back and look along the alley.
There's a body on the ground, slumped against puddles that dot the uneven concrete.
I stare, convinced that I must be wrong, that the body is just a shadow or a bin bag, but deep down I'm already feeling a sense of dread in the pit of my belly. The shape is definitely a body, and I can even see a pale hand stretched out. I keep telling myself that there's no reason to be scared, that it's just somebody who got a little drunk last night and passed out.
I should keep going.
I should just keep walking and forget about whatever's going on here.
Then again, I did just see a figure hurrying away from this set of streets.
It's not possible.
This can't be what it looks like.
“Just keep moving,” Alex would say right now. “This is none of your business. If some drunk tart wants to pass out after a few too many shots, then let her. If she dies, she dies. It's natural selection.”
But I'm not Alex.
I look around for a moment, just to check that there's nobody else here, and then I start making my way along the alley. I'm tense, poised to turn and run if I hear even the slightest hint that anyone else is lurking nearby, but finally I get closer to the prone figure on the ground. There's not much light here in the alley, but I can just about make out some kind of torn and muddied dress that seems a little old-fashioned. I'm pretty sure this is a woman, and as I start making my way around her I realize I can see what looks like a dark puddle spreading out from the upper half of her body.
Blood.
That's what it looks like, but it can't be blood.
Please don't be blood.
“Are you okay?” I ask, my voice trembling wildly. “Hey, are you okay down there?”
I take another step around her, but then I stop as soon as I see her open, glassy eyes staring at the opposite wall. I wait for her to move, or at least to blink, but there's nothing. No matter how much I try to persuade myself that she's just some drunk who wandered out from an old-time fancy-dress party, I'm starting to see that the front of her dress has been torn away, exposing a slashed belly with guts spilling out onto the concrete. Finally I kneel down to get a closer look, to prove to myself that I'm wrong.
