Alex Grecian - Devil's Workshop

The wagon had not yet reached HM Prison Bridewell when the cannibal had a seizure. Napper’s eyes rolled back in his head and the handcuffs kept his hands restrained, but his right shoulder rotated forward and his right leg twisted up and across his left leg and he curled down and toppled off the bench onto the floor of the police wagon.

Watching this from the other side of the wagon, Hammersmith immediately drew his truncheon from his belt, but didn’t otherwise move. He had no way of knowing whether Napper was tricking him, trying to get him to come closer, or if something was actually wrong. Hammersmith could hear Napper’s teeth grinding above the sound of wheels on the cobblestones outside. It occurred to the sergeant that Napper might swallow his own tongue, and so he dropped down and knelt beside the cannibal, his truncheon at the ready. Napper made no move on him, but seemed to be breathing, and so Hammersmith eased back on his haunches, his spine resting against the front of the bench behind him, and waited. At last Napper’s limbs relaxed and his eyes closed. A great streamer of thick drool escaped from his mouth and ran across the toe of Hammersmith’s boot. Napper’s breath steadied and slowed and he appeared to sleep.

Hammersmith put his truncheon away and made a halfhearted attempt to lever Napper back up onto the bench, but the prisoner was limp and unhelpful. Finally, Hammersmith gave up and kept a watchful eye as Napper slept.

Several minutes later, Napper’s eyes opened to half-mast and he spoke. The words were slurred, and Hammersmith leaned marginally closer.

“What?”

“Not just us,” Napper said. But Hammersmith thought he said not justice .

“Never mind justice for you,” he said. “What about your victims, huh?”

“No,” Napper said. “More than us now.” This time Hammersmith heard him correctly.

“What does that mean?”

“You might catch us, but you’ll never catch him.”

“Catch who? Either make some sense or shut up, you.”

“Somebody set the Devil free and it’s too late to put him back,” Napper said. Then he closed his eyes and began to snore.

Hammersmith frowned and settled back against the bench. Outside, a cloud drifted in front of the sun and the interior of the wagon went darker and colder. The lantern’s light seemed to dim. A shiver scurried up the sergeant’s spine, and he felt the hair at the base of his neck stand up. He shook off the feeling, but he tightened his grip on his truncheon and fastened his eyes on the slumbering cannibal.

The crude staircase ended at a tunnel that led off in either direction, farther into the city and farther away from it. March argued that the prisoners would have run as far away from London as possible, but Day disagreed.

“These men were all scheduled to die in prison,” Day said.

“Precisely why they would want to get far away from it,” March said. “They would be heading north, toward open country.”

“That’s what you or I might do. We’re rational people. But these escapees are the worst specimens London has to offer. They’re animals, predators. I think they’ll go looking for prey.”

“Surely not right away. Surely they’d hide first. They’d want to be certain they wouldn’t be caught.”

“No,” Day said. “They’ve been forced to deny their true natures for months and years. They’ll be hungry. They’ll want to experience a kill. They’d go where they can find the densest concentration of people. Of victims.”

“There are people to the north of us.”

“We don’t know who’s down here, if anyone is. But if Cinderhouse made it this far, if he’s down in these tunnels, he’ll want a child. I know this man, I captured him once before, and I know that he’ll go looking for a child. He would go south.”

March argued his point for a few more minutes, but finally gave in and followed Day into the tunnel going south.

As they walked, smaller tunnels branched off to either side of them, black mouths in the rough stone walls, only barely visible in the glow of candlelight. At first they would stop and advance a few feet into each of these offshoots, examining the ground for any sign that a person might recently have passed over it. But eventually they stopped bothering with the smaller tunnels and stuck to the big main passage where they could see occasional scuff marks in the dirt. Someone had used this tunnel. The same someone who had opened up the church floor.

Eventually the tunnel widened out and they found themselves in a huge chamber. The ceiling arced high above them, invisible in the darkness, and they could hear water streaming past them, off to their left. A stream traveling south and a bit west, burbling over ancient brick and cobblestone. Day ran his hand over the wall beside him and thrust his candle into an alcove. There was a pile of bones on the ground, heaped four feet tall and at least as deep. Above the bones, yellow skulls were stacked on some kind of shelf, row after row of them, grinning out at him, their black eye sockets glittering with imaginary wit. Day poked at one of the skulls with the barrel of his revolver and it rolled forward to reveal another skull behind it.

March came up behind him. “Catacombs,” he said. “Probably attached to the church graveyard at some distant point in the past.”

“All these people,” Day said. “Forgotten.”

“As we all will be. Every human being who has ever lived or ever will live. We’ll all be forgotten when the people who loved us and remembered us die in their turn.”

“There’s a sad thought.”

“Not at all,” March said.

“By your way of thinking, nothing matters. Not a bit of it. Whether we catch these men today or not, whether they kill more innocent people or not. Hell, it doesn’t matter whether anybody falls in love or has a child, dies young or dies old. We’re all destined for this.” He gestured at the wall of skulls, the blank hollow features dancing in the light of the shivering candle flame. The candle had nearly burned down to his fingers now. Day reached into his pocket and found another candle, lit it from the old stub. He held the stub up and blew out its flame. “I can’t believe in that,” Day said. “That’s not a thought I want to wake to every morning.”

March shook his head. “But that’s not at all what I mean. It all matters. Everyone and everything matters because every moment that we have matters. We must make the most of our lives while we can.”

“That would seem to run contrary to your philosophy.”

“You don’t know my philosophy, Walter.” March’s voice was barely audible. “Don’t presume to know what I’m about.”

Day looked at the skulls, big and small, young and old. He moved past March, out into the tunnel, and walked on. Ten feet down the passageway there was another alcove. Bones were stacked in the tunnel, mounded high and wide. Skulls had rolled down this enormous pile and were scattered randomly in the dirt. Day stuck his candle into the alcove opposite the bone pile and peered in after it. This niche in the tunnel wall was identical to the one next to it, but it was empty. Clearly the bones had been taken from it and thrown outside to make room. Day entered the alcove and looked around it. There was an iron ring hammered into the floor and chains fastened to the back wall. Shackles rested on the shelf under the chain, the shelf that had been built to hold skulls. He set his revolver on the shelf and picked up one of the shackles with his free hand. It was a simple grey iron band, not a speck of rust on it. The chains were also new, strong and shiny. Day frowned and turned to March, still holding the shackle. The older man reached past him and grabbed the revolver off the shelf. He backed up and pointed it at Day.