Pariah

by Thomas Emson

  “I would’ve been alive, Jay. He said he would’ve cut off my right hand.”

  “Hand?”

  “Yeah. Right hand. As I am a thief, he said.”

  “Fuck.”

  “And a sinner.”

  “Sinner?”

  They strode away from Roy Hanbury’s front gate. As they walked, Spencer clocked the other houses in the terrace. He couldn’t help it. It was so tempting. The properties were red brick and white paneling. They were two-story with high front walls, which were difficult to scale if you were going to rob the place. But once you were in the garden, they provided cover. Swings and roundabouts, he thought.

  “Yeah,” he said, “sinner.”

  I’m a sinner.

  He looked back over his shoulder towards Hanbury’s house. He thought about the TV. If he could sell that—

  Sinner!

  He turned away, looked at his feet as he walked.

  You wouldn’t want to rob Hanbury’s house. That would be stupid. That would be suicide. He’d probably feed you to that snake. He would’ve eaten you himself in the 1970s.

  He shivered again, glad to be out of the house, away from the old man’s presence.

  Hanbury was a big bloke. He used to be a gangster who tortured and killed, who organized heists and ran drugs and pimped whores. He owned Barrowmore and nearly owned Whitechapel. He tussled with other gangs. Threats were made. Men were killed. Tit-for-tat. Back and forth. Blood for blood. It went on and on, and it still went on. There was always payback.

  There is always a judgment.

  And Hanbury finally got caught.

  Conspiracy to commit armed robbery got him twelve years.

  He went in marked by the beast. He came out washed by Christ.

  Spencer and Jay-T walked in silence. Jay-T did footballer dribbles with a Coke can. Spencer ran get-out clauses through his head—how to keep the PS3 without (a) the Sharpleys catching him and/or (b) Hanbury finding out?

  He couldn’t work it out.

  He looked up. The sky was gray. Was there a God up there? He’d never thought about it. He supposed there had to be something.

  This can’t be it.

  So maybe he should repent. He didn’t know how. Was he supposed to say sorry to God? He tutted, confused. Maybe he should ask his sister. He hadn’t spoken to her for a year. But she was into astrology. Was that the same as God?

  Hanbury’s words haunted him.

  There is always a judgment.

  No one had said that to him before. His mum had said, “You should always try to be a good boy, Spencer.” But that wasn’t the same. Not the same as, There is always a judgment.

  He’d always been taught to get away with as much as you can.

  His dad got away with it, and he’d burgled all his life—from when his own mum used him in his pushchair to scam old ladies to the day he dropped dead of a heart attack three years ago.

  Spencer furrowed his brow.

  Maybe that was judgment?

  “You think there’s judgment, Jay-T?”

  “You what?”

  “Judgment. Like a judge.”

  “Only if you get caught. Mostly magistrates, ain’t it.”

  “Hanbury says everyone’s got to pay in the end. There’s always a judgment.”

  “Not if you get away with it.”

  “My dad said he got away with it. He never got caught.”

  “See?”

  “But he died. He was only thirty or forty or something.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe that was judgment.”

  “No, I think it was fags. I mean, like, he went through three packs a day, Spence. And he’d go mental if we ever nicked a fag. Even though he had loads.”

  Spencer felt the itch in his chest.

  “You got any now?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Let’s go to the Paki shop. I need a fag.”

  They had to turn round now. The Costcutter was on the road leading out of Barrowmore, and Spencer and Jay-T were traipsing aimlessly along the estates back streets, inhabited by lock-up garages.

  He glanced at one of the lock-ups as he turned to head back.

  The metal door was rusted. A huge padlock hung off the handle. The words “Trespassers will be hunted down and shot” had been painted in red across the brickwork.

  Spencer gulped.

  People told scare stories of gangsters like Hanbury torturing people in the lock-ups. Some said he still owned them. Spencer wondered if there were any bones in there. Skeletons of victims hanging from hooks.

  It took the boys twenty minutes to reach Costcutter. An old man stood outside, smoking a cigar. He wore a leather waistcoat. He was well tattooed. Weird stuff—language and lettering Spencer had never seen before.

  Maybe we can nick a fag off him, he thought.

  “Fuck,” said Jay-T.

  Spencer said, “What?”

  Jay-T pointed.

  Pissing against the side of the Costcutter was Lethal Ellis. Tall and gangly, Lethal was psycho. He had a very low attack threshold—it wouldn’t take any provocation to make him snap, because he was snapped already.

  And he was the Sharpleys cousin. Where he was, they weren’t too far away.

  Not far at all.

  Both of them swaggered out of Costcutter, Paul carrying a bottle of vodka—nicked, Michael carrying a bottle of gin—nicked.

  The Sharpleys stopped dead. Spencer froze. Jay-T wheezed. Lethal Ellis said, “I needed that.”

  “You cunt,” Paul said and bolted towards Spencer.

  Jay-T legged it. Spencer followed. He bumped into a bloke eating a Twix.

  The brothers pursued. Lethal tailed while shouting, “You’re going to bleed, Drake. You’re going to fucking bleed.”

  Chapter 19

  PASSING ON THE GIFT

  HACKNEY, LONDON–9:22 PM, JANUARY 12, 1903

  The crowd booed. Jonas Troy concentrated. Nothing happened. The crowd booed louder.

  But the dead were silent. And that was the problem. No dead, no show.

  “You’re a fraud,” someone shouted from the audience.

  It had been a rotten evening. It had been a terrible fifteen years.

  And Troy knew why—The Ripper.

  The one they called Jack.

  The audience bayed. They had come to talk to their dearly departed. But their dearly departed weren’t in the mood.

  This was his first performance at the Hackney Empire.

  “We’re getting big crowds,” Mr Tolland, the manager, had told him. “I’ve never had a medium here before. You’d better bring a show.”

  He promised he would.

  But waiting in the wings while a fourteen-year-old singer and dancer named Charlie Chaplin dazzled the crowd, Troy started to feel queasy. Voices echoed in his head—the screams of the Rippers victims, the hollering of the crowds that followed the trail of bodies, the trilling of police whistles, always too late, and the cold, cruel laugh of the one who made this madness.

  Jack.

  In the theatre, the crowd had cheered Chaplin. The kid skipped off the stage. As he entered the wings, he winked at Troy and said, “If you’re half as good as me, mate, you’ll be all right.”

  That was asking too much.

  He quaked now as the audience crowed. He’d done performances in smaller venues, front rooms. They had been successful. But the money on offer at the Empire was much better. It would put food on Hannah’s plate for months and pay for their lodgings for weeks.

  After the Ripper plunged into the well, bringing the murders to an end, Troy had stayed in London. It was a grim, dirty city crammed with grim, dirty people. The East End, in particular, was a cesspit of immortality and disease. But he remained. He found lo
dging and soon he began to advertise his gifts so he could pay the rent.

  Your future foretold. Your dearly departed contacted. Medium and fortune teller Jonas Troy will bring the spirits alive for you. Let him guide you to your fate.

  The ad appeared in the newspaper. Soon he had customers knocking at his door.

  He would only charge what people could pay. Sometimes that was nothing. Sometimes it was: “I’ll sew on those buttons for you, sir,” “I’ve got some apples here, guvnor,” “I could keep you company this afternoon, love.”

  The third offer, he’d refuse. He was courting by then. Magda, the daughter of a Polish butcher. She was golden-haired and green-eyed. At eighteen, she was thirteen years younger than Troy. He’d met her when he read for her mother. The woman had been grief-stricken after losing her brother the year before.

  Troy made contact. The woman cried. She thanked him in Polish. Magda translated. Troy said, “And can you ask your mother if I might be able to take her daughter out to tea?”

  Magda said, “You should ask the daughter yourself.”

  He did. They went.

  On April 7, 1891, six months after they met, Troy and Magda were married.

  Ten months later, Hannah was born. Two months later while she was walking home late, after visiting her ailing father, Magda was murdered.

  Throat cut. Face mutilated. Gut opened.

  Her intestines were spooled on the ground beside her. Her liver and kidney had been removed. The words “A gift from him” had been written in blood on the wall.

  Troy wailed. He raged. He cut himself. He tore out his hair. He smashed up the room where he now lived with his motherless daughter.

  And then a voice in his head stilled him.

  “I will never die.”

  Troy had frozen in the act of throwing a chair out of the window.

  And the voice came again.

  “You’ll never be rid of me.”

  Troy had put the chair down and gawped around the room.

  Hannah screamed in her cot.

  He ignored his child and listened to the voice, which said, “’Your lovely, lustful whore of a wife wasn’t one of you, Jonas, but I chose to have her ripped, anyway, because I can—even when I’m trapped. Even when I’m buried. My poison seeps through this city’s veins, Jonas. It can still stain a heart. It can still twist a mind. Every day I call out to someone for blood, and one day I shall have blood. And when I do, I will live again. Long after you are dead. But I’ll hunt your kind, Jonas. I’ll rip and I’ll rip. I’ll eat and I’ll eat. Till there’s five. Till I’m free’.”

  “No!” Troy screamed and hurled the chair through the window.

  It snapped him back to the present—Hackney Empire, nearly eleven years later.

  The audience howling.

  “You’re a fraud,” shouted a man with golden whiskers.

  “You promised my husband would tell me where he left the silver,” wailed a fat woman.

  Another woman cried out, “My little boy is lost on the other side, and he wants his ma.”

  Troy raised his hands to quieten them. It made them angrier.

  Mr Tolland shuffled on stage in his red velvet jacket and top hat.

  Smiling at the audience, he hissed at Troy. “Fuck off, mate, before they kill you.” Then he addressed the mob. “Ladies and gents, ladies and gents, please . . . sometimes, the spirits don’t feel like visiting us . . . ”

  “Sometimes we don’t feel like paying,” a man shouted.

  Troy plodded off stage and made his way down into the belly of the building, running the gauntlet of smirking entertainers.

  In the dressing room, Hannah faced the mirror. She ate an apple and stared at her reflection. Her eyes were brown like chestnuts, her hair gold like her mothers. Troy’s red suitcase sat on the floor next to her.

  Hannah’s gaze skipped across to him as he stood in the doorway. Without turning she said, “I heard them shout at you, Daddy.”

  “I . . . I couldn’t get through tonight.”

  “Perhaps there was no one there.”

  “There wasn’t. Not tonight.”

  “Perhaps there’s no one there, ever.”

  He came to stand beside her and began removing his stage clothes—the Fez, the brightly-colored smoking jacket, and the scarlet necktie.

  “You shouldn’t speak like that, Hannah,” he said.

  “Why not, Daddy?”

  “Because I say so.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m . . . I’m not mean.” He lifted the suitcase and laid it flat on the counter where Hannah sat. “But . . . but the spirits, they can hear you. If we doubt them, they will never come. You have to keep believing, Hannah. If . . . if you stop, there isn’t anyone else to—”

  He stopped talking. He was about to say, “There isn’t anyone else to watch for him.”

  For the Ripper. For Jack.

  No one to see his coming. No one to find him. No one to hunt him. No one to cage him.

  But he didn’t say those things. He never had. Hannah didn’t know she had a gift. Maybe it was time she did.

  Jonas opened the suitcase. His newspaper cuttings were laid inside, clipped together neatly. His scribbled notes covered sheets of paper, and a leather journal was tucked into a pocket on the inside cover of the suitcase. He started to pack his stage clothes in the case. When he was done, he said, “You are a special girl, Hannah.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “You have gifts.”

  She turned to face the mirror.

  “Daddy, I’m too old for fairytales—”

  “No you are not. And you are not too young for the truth. Listen to me, Hannah.”

  “Daddy—”

  “We are seers. We see the dead. We see the future. We see . . . we see evil.”

  “Evil?”

  He took a breath and sat next to her. He stared at their reflections in the mirror.

  He said, “Before you were born, I fought a monster. An evil thing. They called him Jack back then. But he’s had many names.”

  “Why did you fight him?”

  “Because we are the only ones who can.”

  She said nothing.

  “There are a few of us,” he told his daughter. “We are watchmen. We must be vigilant. If . . . if the evil is freed, it is our duty to hunt him down.”

  “Why?”

  “Or he will kill us. He will kill us and . . . ” He paused, wondering if he should tell her everything and then deciding he should. “And he will rip us open and . . . ”

  “Daddy, no!” She leapt to her feet, the chair flying across the room. She reeled away, hands clasped over her ears. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!”

  He went to follow her, calling her name.

  The muffled sound of music came from the stage above.

  “Don’t tell me, Daddy,” said Hannah, cowering.

  “I must,” he said. “You must know.”

  She shook her head violently.

  He said, “You must know, because he is not truly dead, Hannah. You must know, and your children must know. Promise me. Promise me. Or if he is resurrected and there is no one to know, no one to see, the people of the world will suffer terrible things. Promise me, Hannah. Do you promise?”

  Chapter 20

  THE VOICE IN THE DARKNESS

  WHITECHAPEL—8:47 AM, FEBRUARY 26, 2011

  How had they ended up here?

  Spencer had no idea.

  They’d been running hard, the brothers tailing them.

  Lethal brought up the rear and was shouting, “I got my shank out, Drake. You’re gonna bleed, cunt.”

  Spencer ran. Blinded by fear. Blinded by rain. The sky like lead. The terror heavy in his limbs. His heart nearly bursti
ng. Jay-T behind him, wheezing.

  They ran along the roads. Down the alleys. Over parked vehicles. In front of moving vehicles—brakes shrieking and drivers cursing. Plowing through pedestrians. Weaving past cyclists. Flipping over a pram—the mum screeching and threatening death.

  Running till Spencer saw hope.

  One of the garages—the padlock unlatched, the door slightly ajar.

  As they entered the building, they looked back. No sign of Lethal and the Sharpleys.

  Spencer could hear them, though—pounding the pavements a few dozen yards around the corner.

  “What is this place?” Jay-T asked.

  “Just get inside,” Spencer told him.

  Into darkness. Into cold. Into stink.

  “Jeeee-sus,” said Jay-T. “It goes way back down there, way back. Can you see?”

  Just, but it was pretty dark. Light seeped in through gaps in the ceiling. But very little. Barely enough to show them the way.

  But the way where?

  “Where are we going?” Jay-T said.

  “I don’t fucking know.”

  At the back of the warehouse, they found an office. The door hung off its hinges. Cobwebs curtained the entrance, but the boys waded through.

  Rats scuttled. The place smelled old. Yellowing papers curled on a table. Spiders crawled over a typewriter. A coffee mug was half full of something green and thick.

  A wooden door at the rear of the office, marked Do Not Enter, looked tempting.

  “Let’s go,” said Spencer. “They’ll never find us.”

  They nearly tumbled down stone stairs that led into pitch black.

  “Not sure about this, Spencer,” Jay-T said.

  “Lethal’s going to cut you,” Spencer replied.

  They went down into the dark.

  Their eyes adjusted to the gloom, and a little light also filtered from a crack where the wall and the ceiling met. It helped them see enough of their surroundings.

  Wooden crates, rotting and stinking, were piled around the walls. The floor was littered with debris—pieces of wood, bricks, chunks of cement.

  Damp soaked into everything. It smelled fusty and old. It smelled dead.

  How did we end up here? Spencer thought.

  How? By having itchy fingers and failing to walk past an opportunity, that’s how.