The Whitechapel Demon

by Josh Reynolds

  “Aife—it’s gone. It—he—whatever it was, it won’t come back,” he said. “It’s gone and it won’t come back and I won’t die, you’ll see.”

  I have seen and you do, she thought, but she didn’t say it. Instead, she grabbed his hand and squeezed and wished him a silent goodbye. “I’ll wait,” she said. She wouldn’t. It would track him down and then her.

  In her head, she saw its smile, like a promise, and she shuddered.

  3.

  The garret in Whitechapel was a shambles. St. Cyprian stood in the doorway, a handkerchief pressed against his nose and mouth. The stink of blood was heavy on the air, and it stirred up bad, black thoughts of the War, never far from the surface of his mind. Then, for those of a sensitive psychical disposition, the East End was a sump of bad, black thoughts and evil emanations, massacres aside. It had been such since the day the Saxons had begun to drain the marshy ground just outside the walls of the City of London to lay its foundations. The East End had always been a place of chaos, unearthly influence, madness and death. Even now, with most of the slums a thing of the past thanks to a recent flurry of rebuilding, a strange pall hung over the area, fogging the senses and loosening the morals.

  He shuddered under his greatcoat and stepped into the abattoir. Red stains, darkening to crusty black, covered wide swathes of the available surface area, including the walls, the ceiling and the floor alike. Shafts of grey light speared through the windows, which had been opened to exorcise the slaughterhouse-odour, and framed the remains of several bodies.

  Despite the horror of the scene, his stomach rumbled. There hadn’t been time for breakfast. Privately, he thought Morris enjoyed such petty displays of authority. Pushing aside thoughts of happy sausages, soldiers of toast wearing marmalade uniforms and his third coffee of the morning, he tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. It wasn’t quite up to the level of the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor, but what it lacked in eeriness in more than made for in simple brutal unpleasantness.

  The bits and bobs on the floor and all around had been men, once. Now they weren’t much of anything in particular. St. Cyprian had seen men torn apart by artillery fire and shotguns and worse things since, but never quite to this scale of abhorrent artistry. Skin had been peeled and bones splintered, guts spilled and limbs twisted free of their natural housing. It reminded him of the aftermath of a fox among chickens. Whatever had happened had been sudden, swift and monstrous. “On the whole, I think I’d prefer Dartmoor,” he said, to no one in particular.

  “Looks like a bloody bomb went off,” Gallowglass muttered. She stood nearby, her hands thrust into her pockets, her head bowed. She wasn’t squeamish, St. Cyprian knew, but the sort of carnage that he now carefully picked his way through would be enough to make anyone feel subdued. He didn’t blame the poor detective-constables who’d discovered the scene for passing it along to the Ministry, once it became evident that something untoward and altogether more sinister than a garden variety murder had occurred.

  Morris hadn’t seen the inside of the garret, and hadn’t seemed that eager to do so. The man from the Ministry had stayed outside, ostensibly to confer with his associates. The Ministry plods had sealed off the street with a depressing efficiency, rousting people from their homes and likely clouting the stragglers about the head and shoulders with truncheons.

  St. Cyprian approached a broken table that rested on its side. The table had been cracked raggedly in two, as if some great weight had struck it dead in its centre. He traced a long gouge on its edge and said, “Not a bomb. At least, not the kind you’re thinking of.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gallowglass said.

  “I have no idea. Merely thinking out loud,” he said, sinking to his haunches to better examine the carving that had once dominated the centre of the table. He recognized it readily enough despite its current condition—‘The Ghost of a Flea’, by William Blake. “It was first intended to make me as big as a bullock but then when it was considered from my construction, so armed and so powerful withal, that in proportion to my bulk, that I should have been too mighty a destroyer,” he murmured.

  “What are you muttering about?” Gallowglass said, joining him.

  “Just quoting Blake,” he said. He gestured to the carving. “Recognize it?”

  “Should I?”

  St. Cyprian shook his head. “Sometimes Ms. Gallowglass, I despair of you.”

  “Cheers,” she said. She pushed the brim of her cap back and whistled. “Ugly looking thing,” she said.

  “Yes. Blake believed that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men. I don’t suppose you knew that?” he asked, looking at her. She shrugged and he sighed. “Silly question, I suppose. What do you see?” He indicated the room. “Besides the mess, I mean.”

  Gallowglass looked around. A moment later she said, “Looks sort of like our place, done on the cheap.” She looked at him. “There’re a lot of spiritualists about these days, aren’t there?” She crouched and lifted up a blood-smeared silver incense burner, cunningly wrought to look like an idol. She gave it a sniff and tossed it over her shoulder. “Maybe someone was unhappy with the message the spirits had for them.”

  St. Cyprian looked around. “Someone was certainly unhappy about something, yes,” he said. “Keep looking. There’s bound to be something useful here, if only to point us in the right direction.” He rubbed his hands together, feeling somewhat gleeful, despite their surroundings. It was rare that he got to play detective. Many of the cases which attracted the interest of the Royal Occultist often required little in the way of investigation. The nature of the threats in question was, if not obvious at first glance, readily apparent after careful observation. After that, it was simply a matter of finding the right book, root or amulet to bring the shenanigans to an end, or, failing that, shooting it repeatedly until whatever it was decided to pick up stakes and go bother the French.

  But this was shaping up to be a proper little mystery. He would’ve laughed out loud, if it weren’t for the fact that he was standing in the remains of several previously breathing human beings. That was always the sobering bit—inevitably, mysteries were rarely tidy. London was full of ghosts who could attest to that, if one but had the wit and wile to ask them. Not that he would encourage anyone to do so. Necromancy, like werewolfery, witchery and sodomy, was still a crime in the British Empire. Though, frankly, he thought that last one ought to be reconsidered. He’d known quite a few chaps of that persuasion, and, on the whole, he’d take their company over that of the average, red-blooded warlock.

  As he knelt by the closest body, he noted that, beneath the blood, it had a curiously shrunken aspect to it. As if something had vivisected the poor man and drained him of his vital fluids all in one go. There was an odour on the air around the bodies as well, a gamey liquid stink that he smelled before, in similarly unpleasant surroundings.

  He rifled gingerly through something that had been a coat, before it had become a crimson-stained soggy mess. He pried loose a money clip and some loose sovereigns, and, more interestingly, a lapel pin in the shape of a gallows noose. He held the pin up and examined it closely in the weak light coming in through the window. The pin pricked at his memory; he had seen one like it before, though in regards to what, he couldn’t say. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured.

  “Bedrooms seem up to standards,” Gallowglass said, poking her head back into the room. St. Cyprian counted the chairs, and then turned to look at her.

  “Rooms, as in plural,” he said.

  She held up two fingers. “One clearly belongs to a bloke. He’s got the usual theosophist nonsense, some of Murray’s stuff on European witchcraft, and few bits and bobs by Crowley, Rollo Ahmed and Levi. There’re a few old copies of the International Psychic Gazette. All of it well-thumbed, none of it ‘special’,” she said, crooking her fingers for emphasis.

  “No eldritch tomes?” St. Cyprian asked hopefully. “No hairy grimoires or antediluvian treatise
s?” He pried a blood-stained poster from the wall and peered at the space behind it, before looking at her. “A copy of The Revelations of Glaaki, perhaps, or Harzan’s monograph on lupine waveform entities,” he asked.

  “He’s got some smutty postcards,” Gallowglass said.

  St. Cyprian blinked. “Are they eldritch smut?”

  “Only if you consider fellows with their todgers out eldritch,” she said. “Do you want to see them? I nicked some for posterity.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. What about the other room?” he asked. Gallowglass’ reply was to hold up a pair of women’s stockings. St. Cyprian blinked, and then said, “That’s no sure sign of anything. I knew a fellow at the Somme who wore a brassiere into battle.”

  “Definitely a lady, innit,” Gallowglass said, stuffing the stockings into her pocket. “Got some perfume and some slap and such,” she added, sniffing. “I know what a lady’s room looks like don’t I?”

  “Are you planning on keeping those stockings?” he said, gesturing.

  “By the looks of this place, she won’t miss ‘em,” Gallowglass said.

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” St. Cyprian said. “From what I can tell, our late friends here were all of the masculine variety, what?” He stood. Something caught his eye from across the room. “Three men and each of them in various states of…disassembly,” he continued, picking his way gingerly towards the far wall, where the ceiling sloped to meet it. “Knife,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Gallowglass reached into her pocket and produced a balisong. She flicked her wrist in a practiced gesture, opening the butterfly knife to reveal the thin, deadly looking blade with stark Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into its steel length. She proffered it to St. Cyprian without comment. He took it gingerly and used it to dig out around a hole in the plaster. Retrieving what he sought, he handed the blade back and held out his discovery to her, rolling it around on his palm. “Cast your keen eye on this, if you would,” he said.

  “That’s a bullet,” she said.

  “Indeed it is.” He bounced the spent slug on his palm and turned to examine the wall. “From the look of it, there’re likely a few more nestled in the plaster. Someone added a bit of argy-bargy to the butchery.”

  “Didn’t seem to do them any good,” she said.

  “Maybe it did. Did you see a pistol laying anywhere about, by chance?”

  “No,” Gallowglass said. She frowned. “Someone got away?”

  “Possibly, or else they were swallowed whole, like the fellow who was eaten by that cursed armoire in Shropshire last month,” St. Cyprian said. He looked around. “Something happened here.”

  “Really,” Gallowglass said, “However did you guess?”

  “Ta. I don’t mean in general, I mean a specific something. I can feel it on the air. I can smell it…” And he could. There was something there, something greasy and foul, hiding beneath the physical stench of death. He could feel it pricking at him, taunting him. It wasn’t just the usual East End miasma, either. Something new had been added to the mix.

  Gallowglass sniffed. “Smell what?”

  “The odour of the outside, Ms. Gallowglass,” he said.

  “Want me to close the window?”

  “That’s not the outside I’m referring to and you know it,” he said. He stripped off his coat and loosened his tie. “We’ve seen this sort of thing before.”

  “You’re not going to do what I think you’re going to do, are you?” she said.

  “I need to examine the room more closely,” he said.

  “We’ll buy you a magnifying glass,” she said.

  “Some things cannot be seen with the physical eye, I’m afraid.” He gestured, tracing the sacred shape of the Voorish Sign in the air with two fingers. Carefully, he emptied his mind, shooing out stray thoughts and idle whimsies. It required complete concentration to open his third eye. The ‘spirit-eye’, Carnacki had called it. To peer through it was to peer into the unfettered spaces between one world and the next, and a slip in his concentration could have painful, if not disastrous consequences. He pressed his fingertips together in front of his face and relaxed the rest of his body, focusing all of his tension into his stiffened fingers. He closed his eyes, and sucked in several deep, cleansing breaths. He felt the telltale pulse in his head, like the contraction of some dormant organ, and felt a vibration shudder through him as his third eye blinked blearily, and then focused on the world before it.

  Everything became soft at the edges and more vibrant as his senses expanded to fill the void left by his thoughts and physical sight. Humans were, by and large, as sensitive to the paranormal as animals were to earthquakes. But they put on blinders instinctively, blocking out everything but what was ahead of them. The inability of the human mind to correlate all of its perceptions was one of humanity’s built-in defences against the many, many predatory malignancies that swam through the outer void. In the trade, you had to shuck those evolutionary blinders first thing, lest the sharks snap you up all unawares. Better to see and take your chances than not see and become food for something nasty lurking in the wrong angles, as Carnacki had always said.

  Little by little, the hues of the garret blended and flowed into one another like water-colours. Everything became porous and gossamer and through his third eye he could see the dim shapes of past moments flickering about like moths circling a flame—the afterimages of the ka of those who’d passed through this garret burned dully, like spots on his retinas. Gallowglass’ ka shone almost painfully bright, in contrast. Every living human possessed one, though the concept had as many different names as there were explanations for what it was. It was what separated the dead from the living, the ectoplasmic energy that anchored mankind firmly in place in the web of life. If it was strong enough, you could even use it. Or it could use you, depending on how careful you were.

  He pressed his palms together, forcing the tension from his fingers down into the centre of his hands and let his mouth hang open ever so slightly to expel a tendril of his own ka. It slid between his lips like cigarette smoke, curling and coiling out from him in a straight line. He didn’t let it go too far. Ectoplasm was a tricky substance at the best of times. It was a useful trick, though. Especially when it came to recreating past events. There were historians he knew who’d give their right foot to do what he was now attempting.

  Slowly but surely, he teased out the events of the past evening. It was like watching a film, complete with herky-jerky viewing quality. He watched five men arrive, and a sixth greet them. He saw the woman seated at the table. Unlike the men, whose faces blurred and shifted like distorted reflections, her features were crisp and startlingly real. She was not beautiful, per se, but striking nonetheless, and when he realized what she was doing and saw the vivid ferocity of Blake’s Flea made reality, he felt no small amount of awe. His ectenic manipulations were party tricks compared to hers. He wondered idly who she was. Then he saw the revolver come out and the confrontation. One of the men stood, and reached out, and—what?

  A whiff of sensation caught his attention and he turned. There was something else in the garret, something dark. It was reminiscent of oil spreading across water in a hundred different directions and it shot through the hollow shape of Blake’s Flea, rising from nowhere all at once. His heart sped up, rattling his ribs like a bird in a cage. The air around the spreading darkness looked almost infected, and he felt sick, staring at the pulsing un-colours that shone beneath the skin of the ectoplasmic automaton. The man who’d reached out twitched, stiffened and then screamed, all in silence, as the dark filaments met his questing fingers and then pushed through them like a hook into a fish’s mouth.

  Everything sped up, moving like a kaleidoscope, images shifting, and all of the soft colours bled into a harsh crimson as the man was excavated and enveloped all at once, and something awful snuggled into the meat of him with a satisfied purr that sizzled across the surface of St. Cyprian’s mind like acid. The butchery th
at followed was swift and merciless. It was a glutting of inhuman passion which passed swiftly and left its author a-swirl in confusion. It killed three men in as many moments, leaving only the medium, the sixth man and one other, the man with the revolver. The latter rose and discharged his weapon again and again, and the impact startled the newcomer whose shadow-shape settled over its human mount like a vast cloak. It leapt, clearing the room in a single bound and made for the door.

  St. Cyprian watched the scene play out with not a little bit of relief. He felt sick to his stomach, but he forced himself to keep watching. If he could see where it went, they might be able to find it before it did any more damage.

  It paused then, in the doorway. It turned. Eyes like raw, red wounds met his from across the garret, only they were bigger than the garret, bigger even than stars and staring right at him. There was no face that went with those terrible eyes, not anymore, merely an odour of urgency and alien eagerness. A panting, hungry musk that pawed at his ka idly and sent shivers of revulsion through him. He heard, or perhaps felt, a querulous grunt that seemed to echo through the hollow spaces of him. Ethereal talons stretched out from somewhere below those flickering eyes and snagged almost playfully at his ka—a gush of shattered memories, failed dreams and strident agonies—dying thoughts, built into a shell—like some deep sea crustacean, thrusting and squirming into the shape it now wore, stretching it out to accommodate itself. The shape allowed it to survive in this place, to stay and gorge on the banquet that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  I SEE YOU, it purred.

  His eyes snapped open, even as his third snapped shut and he staggered on noodle-soft legs. Gallowglass caught him. “What is it? What did you see?” she said.

  “Something very unpleasant,” he said. “I need some air.” He pushed away from her and stumbled to the door, his stomach heaving. His head felt heavy and a ragged twist of pain crept between the hemispheres of his mind. He’d broken contact too quickly, and he’d be paying for it for an hour or so, until his spirit regained its balance. There was no time to sit and wait for it to dull however. Time was of the essence, if what he’d seen was anything to go by. He glanced at Gallowglass. “Don’t say anything to Morris about the woman.”