The Dickens Mirror (13 page)

was ancient history. He never thought of the man. Never.

Why, of course not
. The black dog slavered.
I suppose that’s why you carry his
sgian-dubh
everywhere, isn’t it? That’s why that black blade’s at your hip this very moment—because you never
,
ever
think of him
.

No, he didn’t. Ever. Regardless of the knife, which he really oughtn’t have whilst in uniform, but he didn’t trust the weapon not to find legs and walk out of his rooms in the policemen’s dormitory. Anyway, the pipes, the needles, the drink all did their jobs, thank you very much. Of course, exhaust his supply as he’d done and the old nightly jimjams would return: when he jolted from sleep convinced that some great green and moist moldering monster—dripping with rotted flesh and absolutely
crawling
with maggots—hunched over his bed. Then he might be in for a touch of trouble.

A
touch
of trouble?
The black dog seemed to croon.
Battle’d be keen to know, don’t you think? Say … about your little problem? That left arm? I’m sure he’d find your black blade’s provenance of great interest. Black blade, black dog … poetical, don’t you think?

No. He didn’t. Absurd.
The Peculiar’s going to eat us alive until
London’s nuthin’ but skin ’n’ bones, and ya think anyone’s going to care about a Billy born drunk?
History was winding down. Besides, who would Battle ask, anyway? Edinburgh had gone silent … oh, ever so long ago. Not exactly sure when. Didn’t matter, didn’t.

He exhaled, slowly, through his teeth. He needed to get out of here, this
asylum
. Place worked on his nerves. The close, chill air stank with a lunatic fug of sour flesh, rancid piss, and sweaty desperation. Worst of all was that
gabble
, so like that miserable top flat on Sciennes Hill Place, where they’d crammed into squalid rooms in an even filthier tenement: mother, father, a brother, and, good Christ on a cross, more sisters than he could count yammering day

NOT EATING THIS SLOP, NOT FIT FOR A MAN

and night.

In a way,
this
place was like that. It was the many voices rising like steam through floor-set iron grates; all those fists and feet and heads thumping walls and doors; and the mad wailing,
Letmeoutletmeoutpleaseletmeoutletmeout
.

That sound was, he thought, how it would be at the end, when the sky blacked completely, cold settled on a buried city, and the fog, that Peculiar, finally lowered itself like a specimen jar to trap them all like so many doomed flies.

“ARE YOU ALL
right, Doyle?” A voice, gruff and peremptory, by his right elbow.

“Fine, sir,” he said, turning Battle a tight smile whilst strangling a groan. His guts clenched, the long innards twisting and knotting as if a giant had plunged in his fist to rummage around
Doyle’s belly after a dropped penny. “Right as rain.”

“You don’t look fine.” Something the inspector saw or heard didn’t tally, because his eyes narrowed to an analytical look that was cold silver. “Are you quite … Good God, your arm.” Battle used his chin to point. “Do you know you’re bloodied, Constable? Did she bite you?”

“What?” Startled, he spied a wet purple pucker halfway up the right forearm of his grimy uniform coat. For a bizarre second, he actually thought the black dog might be chewing its way free. How could he not know he’d been hurt? Thank God, the
left
arm wasn’t cut. Roll up that cuff and sleeve and, besides the souvenirs from his dear pap, there was a scattershot of some truly fascinating scabs and nicks and pricks. Even an exhausted sclerotic and inflamed vein or two. (A wonder he’d not yet died of blood poisoning, actually.) He wasn’t eager to be examined, in any event.

“Must’ve cut myself on the mirror glass, that’s all.” Doyle clamped his hand over the squelchy rent.
Blast
. While rumpled and a touch threadbare, this was the only uniform coat he owned. He thought about digging out his kerchief to staunch the flow, then discarded the idea, not from pride or the concern that he wouldn’t look very manly—
and sod Battle, the old gob
—but the kerchief hadn’t seen a wash in nearly a month, same as his uniform. The pathetic brown shard of soap he’d been issued had to last ten more days, and here he was, down to practically nothing more than a bare fingernail. That his smirking sergeant had the balls to call it
soap
and
go on, boys, let’s see you scrub yourself pink and pretty
 … oh, that was
hilaaarious
. Soap felt like pulverized gravel held together with crumbly candle wax. Scrape your arse to bloody ribbons.

“Thank you for your concern, sir. But it’s just a scratch.” He
pulled himself a little straighter, aware of the rancid tang of hair oil rising in a cloud from his scalp to mingle with the ward’s general reek.
Come on, Doyle. Hold yourself together a few more minutes
. “I’ll manage, sir.”

“Don’t look it. Is there something troubling you, Constable? You’re fidgeting. Or”—Battle’s eyes, so light blue they seemed like chips of mica, sharpened—“have you something to tell me? How that girl came by your Christian name?”

“My name.” Doyle’s mind was a complete blank. And besides, it was an excellent question, wasn’t it? Because that girl, Elizabeth—after she’d battled her way out of her room and right before she turned to run pell-mell into that mirror—had known him … as
Arthur
. But how? Fresh, clammy sweat oozed into his constable coat’s high collar. He’d never told her his Christian name. So how could she
know
a thing like that?

He turned a look down the hall at that ghoulish doctor and the girl. Elizabeth’s pale features were smeary from that nasty gash on her forehead, over which Kramer had slapped a crude bandage that was going the color of claret from the ooze. Still, she was a beauty. A girl like that, he was positive he’d recall meeting before the night she appeared, covered in blood and on a scream.

Bad luck that, too
. He was no place he’d any business being at the time, him off his beat like that, hustling to purchase a bottle of morphia; then—
poof!
—there she was, as if a curtain had suddenly drawn aside to let her through from someplace off stage. Then, of course, he’d had to lead Battle back to the scene. But the most ridiculous part of it all? He couldn’t bloody remember precisely where he’d been. At all. Not the street, the lane, the alley, the buildings, or if there were carts (there were always carts) or Judys (there were always Judys and dollymops happy
to oblige) or a pub on the corner (plenty of them, too, though whether you trusted what was in that pint glass, considering the trains had stopped running long ago and no grain to be had or even potatoes … well, your funeral). He’d wandered for hours, hoping to recognize
something
that would lead them to an entrance and then to catacombs or tunnels or caves or
whatever
in which the girl claimed she’d been held, where she’d come on her father doing something over bodies that she couldn’t quite remember.

Came up empty. He’d have more luck finding his own bunghole with two hands and a candle. Worried him. How could you forget a thing like that? Maybe his brain was going spongy from all that morphia.

Whatever the case … nothing. No trapdoors, no hidden passages, no catacombs, no caves, though there were bodies, apparently. Only later had Battle taken himself back and found … well, whatever he’d found; the gob was playing it close to the vest. Other than Battle, no one else had seen the bodies, not even the police surgeon.

And why was that?

“SHE MIGHT HAVE
overheard my name from one of the other constables,” he now said to Battle, the lie rolling smoothly from his tongue.

“Indeed.” Battle’s tone suggested he thought that a bit of a stretch. “You’re all in the habit of calling each other by your Christian names.”

“At times.” In truth, he was “Doyle” or “Constable” or
crusher
,
nose, slop, blue devil, pig
, depending upon which slammer or fadger or breaker he happened to snag on any given day. These days, and with his needs? One thing positively rum about signing on as a constable: you got to know who all the crooks were. Grease Doyle’s palm with some chink, a little of the old smoke, or, better yet, a phial of seven-percent, and most sneaks never saw the inside of a jail. “At any rate, I suppose you’ll want to leave the doctor to it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Constable.” The quicksilver dart of another careful look. “Are you sure you’re not in pain from that arm? You look a little peaky.”

PEAKY?
For a split second, the words were poised to leap from his tongue:
You old gob, I need a bloody
needle,
and don’t nobody CARE about murder when we’re all done for!

“What? Sorry? Pain? No, just …,” he fumbled. Just what,
what
? “I might need a moment, Inspector.”

“Out of the question. Control yourself,” Battle said, and Doyle thought,
Oh yeah? Dump a nice steaming load on that toff pair of leather clamshells you got on your feet, I bet you change your tune
. “Mrs. Graves has gone to fetch the surgeon or an assistant …” Battle made a dismissive gesture. “He’ll see to your arm.”

“Really, Inspector,” Doyle said, trying to squash the plea in his voice, “it’s only a scratch. Nothing to bother about.”

“Nonsense. The surgeon will attend you and that’s final.” Planting his fists on his hips, Battle worked his lower jaw in a hard jut. Everything about the man, from his steel-colored bowler to his checked flannel trousers and houndstooth coat, was a study in gray and as obdurate as granite. “In the meantime, I want to know exactly what went wrong, because I will have what’s locked in her mind, Constable.” Battle strode off
without a backward glance. “Now, come along and be smart about it.”

AT THEIR APPROACH
,
Kramer half-turned, the flesh-and-blood side of his face showing in profile. Doyle read the man’s annoyance in the splash of high color staining that right cheek and the tiny downward curl of his mouth. No love lost between these two: you could light a fire from the sparks.

“
Yesss
, Battle?” Distorted by the mask and what it hid—no jaw and probably not much of a tongue—Kramer’s words came in that slithery and strangely guttural lisp and hiss. At the same time, he slipped something into the breast pocket of his long physician’s coat, once grayish-white but now splotchy with the girl’s blood. Spectacles, Doyle thought, with lenses that were … purple? Odd. Kramer had something else he was just now sliding into another pocket: a glass bauble and bits of tin on a chain.

“What is it you want now?” Kramer said. “I should think you’d leave me to more important matters, and my patient.”

“She’s unconscious, Doctor.” Arms akimbo, Battle loomed like a gray vulture. “It don’t look to me that she’ll be the worst for your answering to what’s happened here.”

“I think that depends on how you look at it,” Kramer replied, coolly. “She needs to wake, so she and I can talk about it.”

That necklace
, Doyle thought,
it don’t tally
. Patients weren’t allowed anything with a sharp edge or point. The chain would have been confiscated. Too easy to choke herself with, or swallow.

But he lets her keep it … and only
now
takes it away? Why?

“She needs to wake,” Battle echoed. “After all the tonic you’ve poured down her gullet. And when shall that be? The next century?”

“Don’t lecture me.” No ordinary man would hiss those words, but Kramer was anything but ordinary and perhaps not much of a man, Doyle thought, depending on what else might be gnawing at his innards. Just because Kramer had managed to have the rot hacked from his face didn’t mean it wasn’t also crawling around the juicier bits inside. Kramer’s hand fell to a small bottle by his knee. “This is my asylum. Badgering the girl will not force memories she doesn’t want found.”

Battle said something else, but Doyle didn’t hear. His gaze nailed itself to that bottle.
Oh
. A knife of want sliced his chest. A groan slid up his throat.
Oh shite, oh good Christ
. The sudden buzz in his head was very loud, and so was Black Dog:
Oooh
,
you want that, don’t you? Well, go on, poppet, nick it. Make a scene. Show them what you
really
are
.

No, he couldn’t; he
wouldn’t
. He pressed an arm to his grumbling belly.
Control yourself, Doyle
. But,
God
, he had to get off this ward, and soon.

“So what, then?” Battle asked as Kramer expertly uncorked the phial with a flick of a thumbnail. “Do you at least understand precisely what happened back there?”

“Of course.” Kramer’s grip tightened around the girl curled like a baby against his chest:
She’s mine, you; now bugger off
. He pressed the bottle to the girl’s mouth. At the touch of ruby-colored liquid (oh, Doyle could
smell
it, the too-sweet aroma of laudanum cut with passionflower and fortified wine), she tried turning her face aside, but her movements were lethargic and slow. Doyle thought she’d more than enough drug.

Quit wasting that on her. Give it to
me,
you old fool, give it to
—

But look
, Black Dog interrupted.
Isn’t that odd, poppet? Why would this doctor keep feeding that girl more when she don’t need it?
Black Dog paused, and Doyle could imagine it tapping a paw to its chin in thought.
If I didn’t know better, I’d wager the prissy cove’s trying to keep her under
.

Why, yes, excellent point. Black Dog was always so observant. Why
would
the doctor want the girl so
completely
petrified?