The Woman in the Coffin

by Nathan Long

  The Woman in the Coffin

  Nathan Long

  Oolong Books

  Copyright © 2021 Nathan Long

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover art by: Rebecca Yanovskaya

  Cover design by: Nathan Long

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Elizabeth

  Thank you for letting me play in your world

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Books By This Author

  Introduction

  The Woman in the Coffin is set in a slightly skewed version of my friend Elizabeth Watasin’s delicious Dark Victorian universe. I first wrote it to entertain her and myself, but when I finished it I thought, ‘Say, this isn’t half bad. Maybe I should self-publish it.’ So, I got Elizabeth’s permission, and… well, here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

  Please check out Elizabeth’s Amazon Page for the original Dark Victorian novels, as well as all her other genre-bending lesbian adventure stories.

  The cover art is by the incredibly talented Rebecca Yanovskaya. Find more of her work at www.rebeccayanovskaya.com.

  1

  The Sleeping Beauty

  “Ain’t she a wonder?” Nellie O’Day whispered as she gazed toward the stage. “My heart’s doin’ pirouettes, Davey. I swear it.”

  “Is it indeed?” Davey smirked. “May I feel for myself?”

  “Ha!” Nellie swatted his hand. “Away, y’masher.”

  They were leaning on the rail behind the cheap seats of the Alhambra Palace Music Hall watching London’s latest stage sensation, Dr. Malignita and the Beautiful Dreamer, Aurora, a tumbler who read minds and performed feats of acrobatics, all while—or so the ballyhoo claimed—remaining fast asleep.

  Davey, who juggled glass globes and knives and burning torches under the name “L’Arabe,” though he was neither French nor Arab, but only David Abramson from Golders Green, and Nellie, who had been born Elinor Scanlan in the Irish slum of Kilburn, but who had dubbed herself Little Nellie O’Day when she had decided to dress as a boy and sing Irish songs for a living, had already done their turns on the bill and sneaked out to the back of the house to watch the new act, which had debuted only last week and was already filling the theatre every night.

  Dr. Malignita, a tall, heavyset older man with wild gray hair and an even wilder beard, walked the aisles of the orchestra seats in a black cape and full evening dress, demanding with imperious gestures personal articles from seemingly random audience members, then turning his back on the stage and asking, in something approaching an Italian accent, “Aurora! What have I in my hand?”

  Aurora, whose eyes remained closed for the duration of the act, would then correctly answer him in a haunting monotone, while at the same time walking with somnambulant grace upon a tightrope, or turning slow handstands on a rolling ball, or swinging above the stage on a trapeze.

  All of this business, though artfully done, was well within the traditional parameters of a mentalist act, and would not have raised more than polite applause even in the provinces, and would hardly have drawn a jaded Haymarket crowd. What was pulling in the punters in droves was what followed. When the personal article taken from the audience was a book, or a letter, or a pamphlet, Dr. Malignita did not just ask Aurora to identify it but to read from it. And this she did, in the same uninflected tone, absolutely verbatim.

  Even the oldest hands couldn’t figure out how it was done, and there was much argument in the dressing rooms and after-show saloons about complex signals or shills or memorization. Such mysteries were not, however, why Nellie had watched the act the last five nights running. She watched for one reason and one reason only.

  Aurora.

  Never had Nellie seen a woman more beautiful or more mysterious than the “Sleeping Beauty of the East,” as she was also billed. Aurora always performed in the clothing of an acrobat, a tight maillot top, knee-length bloomers, stockings and slippers, all of a luminous white, which showed to great advantage her trim waist and athletic build. But what really drew Nellie’s eye and heart was Aurora’s face, which was that of a goddess carved in alabaster. Surrounded by coiled black braids in the Grecian style and poised above a graceful, columnar neck, it was pale, solemn, and serene, with a high-bridged nose, a mouth shaped like Cupid’s bow, and a brow both noble and melancholy.

  Of course, as Aurora’s eyes were closed, Nellie could only guess at their color and shape, but that just made her more intriguing. The eyes were the windows to the soul, or so she’d heard. What would Nellie see there when they opened? Somehow, she suspected sadness, for Aurora’s was a face that seemed to speak of hidden sorrows and dark emotions, and a tragic past from which only a fair knight could free her. Nellie, more than anything, longed to be that fair knight.

  There were other male impersonators treading the boards of the Palaces and the Lyceums who wore dresses and long hair in their private life. Some even had beaux or husbands. Nellie was not one of these. She had been born eager for trousers and boyish pursuits, and had taken to the stage not to play a role but to finally have a place where society would allow her to play herself. She wore her trousers, coat, and cap both on stage and off, and likewise loved women just as much in private as she said she did in the comic songs and ribald jokes she told before the footlights. And, since she had first seen her rising from the coffin in which Dr. Malignita had wheeled her to the stage at the matinee last Saturday, it seemed to Nellie that she had never loved a woman more than she now loved Aurora.

  “Aurora!” called the doctor, from the left-hand aisle. “What have I in my hand?”

  “A copy of today’s Times,” intoned Aurora as she turned and held her pure white parasol high.

  “And will you read the article upon which I have my finger?” Malignita asked.

  “‘Mysterious Slayer Strikes Again,’” said Aurora, walking steadily along the wire. “Scotland Yard is convinced that the murder of prominent industrialist Mr. H. Rusholme Wedlock is the work of the same killer who slew the well-known painter and academy member Robert Brightline two nights ago. Though no motive has been suggested in either case, nor is any connection apparent between the two men, the unusual method of entry into each man’s domicile and the nature of the wounds that killed them leave little doubt that—”

  “Thank you, Aurora. That is enough.” Malignita handed the paper back to the man he had borrowed it from. “Is that what is written there, sir?”

  The man looked over the paper, then choked. “By God, it is.”

  “Will you pass it to anyone in any seat around you and ask them to confirm it?”

  Nellie nudged Davey. “Come on. Let’s get back. I want to catch ’em going back to their dressing room. I’m going to talk to her tonight or die tryi
ng.”

  “Ah, Nellie. You don’t even know if she’s a sapphist.”

  Nellie smiled and started for the side exit. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  2

  The Lady Vanishes

  Moments later, as applause echoed from the house and the orchestra struck up a jaunty interlude, Nellie made a little bow as Dr. Malignita wheeled Aurora’s elaborate black-and-gold coffin off the stage and toward the narrow hall to the dressing rooms. The lid of the coffin had a large oval opening in it, framing Aurora’s head and shoulders as if she were a living cameo. Her eyes were still closed.

  “Wonderful act, sir,” said Nellie, following him. “Wonderful. Er, my friends and I thought we might have drop or two at the Rose and Crown after the curtain, and wanted to know if you and Miss Aurora would like to join—”

  “It is not an act, young man,” said Malignita, barging on. “My niece has a medical condition. Somnambulism. Though she can walk and eat, she has not been truly awake since a tropical illness confined her to her bed when she was six years old. To my shame, I exploit her illness in order to raise money to find its cure, but that does not mean we are show people, nor do we wish to congregate with such.”

  “Oh, come now, Doc,” said Nellie. “We’re all in the game here. No need to lay on the hokum. Take off that beard and—”

  “I assure you, boy,” snapped Malignita. “There is no—as you say—hokum. Everything I have told you is the truth. Now, good evening to you.”

  Nellie snorted as the doctor struggled to guide Aurora’s coffin through the narrow door of his dressing room. Every word he said might be true, but there was a lie in there somewhere. Out on the stage, Malignita spoke with an Italian accent. Here in the back, he was pure Nottinghamshire.

  “Time to find out what,” she said to herself as she started for the spiraled iron stairs that led to the flies, “is what.”

  ***

  Nellie knew from previous explorations back when the unicycling sister act the Darlington Twins had played the Alhambra, that there was a hole in the floorboards of the storage closet above that looked directly down into the dressing room that Dr. Malignita and Aurora now occupied—a fact she had discovered because of a bet between Davey and herself. Davey had refused to believe that the Darlington Twins’ stupendous bosoms were not some sort of stage trickery, while Nellie had been certain that everything about the sisters was shipshape and Bristol fashion. Nellie had found the hole—and won the bet.

  Now she was just as certain that she would find that this time, she had been tricked. She expected—indeed, fervently hoped—to look down upon the beautiful Aurora in her chemise, brushing out her long black hair and comparing notes on the evening’s performance with Dr. Malignita, who would have by now pulled off his fake whiskers and lit up a fragrant cigar.

  She grinned at the thought of this mundane scene and how it would smash all her fairy-tale fantasies of Aurora, as she carefully knelt on the floor of the closet and bent to put her eye to the hole.

  Her view of the room focused, and her grin faltered. There was nothing mundane about what was happening below.

  Aurora had indeed taken off her stage costume, but she was not in her unmentionables. Instead, she was donning an outfit identical in every way to her stage costume, except that it was as black as night. She then added to it a black cloak and a mask of shaped black velvet, which, Nellie realized to her great consternation, had no eye holes. This however, made a curious if frightening sort of sense when she realized that despite Aurora’s movements, her eyes still remained shut, just as they had during the entirety of her act. She was dressing herself while keeping her closed eyes aimed straight ahead.

  Dr. Malignita, meanwhile, had pushed open the room’s tiny window and was now throwing through it a coiled rope, one end of which was tied to the leg of the built-in dressing table. He then edged back and watched as Aurora stepped to the window and, with a fluidity Nellie found nearly impossible to follow, did a handstand that allowed her to slip through it feet-first, then grab the rope and lower herself from view.

  “Where’s she gone?” Nellie breathed, and was about to pull away when Dr. Malignita’s actions arrested her.

  Before Aurora had entirely vanished, he turned to her coffin and, releasing two hidden levers at either end of its velvet-draped undercarriage, spun it like a hog on a spit so that the bottom was now the top.

  Nellie gasped, for the bottom was identical to the lid in every way, including the oval cameo opening—and it appeared that Aurora still lay inside! Her face, shoulders, and bust were visible through the opening, as serene and sad and still as before. How could it be? Did she, like the sisters Darlington, have a twin? Or was this some sort of waxwork?

  Before Nellie could watch this new Aurora for signs of breathing, Dr. Malignita was in motion again, pulling in the climbing rope, coiling it and untying it from the table, and stowing it in the coffin. Then he donned a greatcoat and top hat and began guiding the coffin once again toward the dressing-room door.

  Nellie stood, ready to plunge down the stairs and confront him about his “sick niece” and his concern for her care, but then the thought of Aurora blind and lost in the nighttime alleys of London stirred her knightly urges, and she decided she must leave the ogre behind and instead find the damsel.

  She threw open the door of the closet and ran.

  ***

  After a mad dash through the bowels of the Alhambra, Nellie shouldered through the stage door into the dark alley that ran along its side. She looked up and down the narrow space but did not see Aurora, so she ran to the back of the building and looked left and right along the connecting alley. Aurora was not there, either.

  Nellie grunted, annoyed, then started for the light and noise of the Alhambra’s front, where it faced Leicester Square. The sound of people cheering and applauding got louder as she neared it, and when she stepped out onto the street, she saw a crowd watching avidly as Dr. Malignita and four men in undertaker’s black lifted Aurora’s wheeled casket into the back of a glass-sided hearse. This was part of the ballyhoo for the act. Every evening before the show, Aurora and Malignita were met at their hotel by the undertakers, who then conveyed them to the theatre in their hearse with its team of four midnight-black horses, and every night after the performance, the procession was reversed.

  Nellie did not expect to see Aurora anywhere near the spectacle, as being in two places at once would be difficult to explain, but she looked around anyway, and a motion above her caught her eye. High up on a wall in a shadowed alley, a dark figure was climbing a drainpipe with catlike ease. It was Aurora, and as Nellie watched, she swung onto the roof and started up the slanting slates toward the peak without a backward glance.

  “Well, ain’t you the nimble minx,” muttered Nellie.

  She raced for the building, the ground floor of which was a fancy cafe where theatregoers partook of before-and-after-show food and drinks. She plunged through the front door and squeezed through the press of men in top hats and ladies in furs, looking for a door that would lead to the rest of the building. She found one in a back corridor, opposite the kitchen, and pushed through. A grimy hallway showed dark doors and a narrow stairwell at the back.

  Nellie sprinted up the stairs and, five flights later, came huffing and puffing to a small service door. It was locked with nothing but a hook, so she unlatched it and stepped out on the roof, which was flat and tarred behind the pitched facade that faced the street.

  “Aurora!” she called. “Aurora, where are you?”

  There was no answer.

  She scrabbled up the slanted roof for a better vantage, her hard-soled shoes slipping on the slates, and clung to the roofline, looking in every direction.

  Aurora was nowhere to be seen.

  3

  The Somnambulist's Tears

  The next evening, Nellie paced the lady’s dressing room while the other women on the bill got ready for their turns. She’d had a sleepless night
and anxious day, endlessly thinking back over what she had seen the evening before, and wondering if she had any real reason to be concerned for Aurora or suspicious of Doctor Malignita.

  It had all certainly looked suspicious, but what had she really seen? A female performer getting dressed and leaving a dressing room—admittedly by a window, which, though unusual, was not, as far as Nellie knew, illegal. And a male performer packing his props and going home. Again, admittedly, one of those props was a dummy of his female partner, but there might be any number of reasons for that. Perhaps they employed the dummy to allow Aurora to have some sort of off-stage life while still maintaining the illusion of her peculiar condition. Malignita took the dummy back to the hotel in full public view, while Aurora slipped secretly out the window, free to do as she pleased. But why then the eyeless mask? Why the strange, somnambulistic movements? Why the climb to the rooftops? What was the truth of Aurora’s illness?

  Nellie looked up from her pacing. “Any of you ladies know this Dr. Malignita or Aurora? Have you worked with ’em before?”

  “They’re new to me,” said Abomah the “African Giantess,” who was really from South Carolina and whose name was Ella.

  Madame Charlemagne, the coloratura, paused from lining her eyes. “I have been on the circuit for twenty years now. I’ve never heard of either of them.”

  “Supposed to be from the continent, ain’t they?” asked Mary. She was the only female member of the Flying Foyles, an acrobatic family act from Shoreditch. Her brothers were the throwers. She was the throwee.

  “Supposed to be,” said Nellie. “I just wonder if anything about those two is on the level.”