Alex Grecian - Devil's Workshop

“Rupert! Rupert!”

I should be very surprised if he answered you, Cinderhouse thought. He chuckled, a rasping sound in the back of his throat, and wished he could share this joke with his new girl.

“You’ve made a mistake, sir! This is the house of Detective Inspector Walter Day. Whatever you’re doing here, this is the wrong house. He will find you and arrest you.”

Cinderhouse nodded at the closed door and smiled again. It wasn’t the wrong house at all. He turned the key and heard a confident snick as the lock slid into place.

“No! You can’t do this!” And then louder: “Father! Father!”

He pulled the chair out from under the knob. Father? Who might that be? Walter Day?

He picked up the spool of thread and grabbed the card of needles from the table and carried the chair over to the body on the floor. He sat down again, poked at the body with the toe of his boot. It was as dead as a person could get. He used his foot to roll the constable over. Rupert’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling.

Mustn’t have that.

Cinderhouse slipped off the chair onto his knees. There was no point in worrying about the blood. He was covered with it, head to feet; it was dripping from his chin whiskers. He broke off a length of bloody red thread with his teeth, wet the end of it with his lips, and poked it through the eye of a needle. He tied a knot in the thread’s hanging end, then bent over the body and stuck the needle through Rupert’s left eyelid. He pulled it through and around and hummed to himself as he began the work of quieting Rupert’s accusing eyes for good and all.

It’s not time to rest,” Kingsley said. “Push again.”

“I can’t,” Claire said. “I won’t. I’m tired.”

“Well, you may be tired, but nature hasn’t given you a choice. You’ll push or you’ll die.”

“Just take it out.”

“If I do, you’ll surely die.”

“Please stop saying that I’ll die.”

“I’m sorry. It’s my hope that I might motivate you to avoid death.”

“Well, you’re scaring me.”

“Yes.”

“No more.”

“Once more.”

“Only once?”

“I think once might be enough. I know you can do it. Just one more time.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned forward, her hands tight around the bedposts behind her, and she screamed and she bore down.

Kingsley held his breath as he saw the furry crown come into view. He did not consider childbirth to be a miracle. It was a natural animal occurrence, and he would prefer that a midwife be in attendance.

Where was Fiona? He had heard a racket downstairs and assumed that the clumsy constable-what was his name? — was tripping over himself in an effort to collect basins and heat water at the fireplace. He hoped the boy hadn’t burned himself.

The baby emerged amid a slurry of fluid and Kingsley caught it, felt her body pushing it toward him. He snipped the cord and expertly tied off the end. He turned with the infant girl in his hands, but there was no towel ready, no basin of fresh water, nobody to help.

Fiona should have stopped in by now to check on Claire.

Claire slumped, exhausted, back against the bed, and Kingsley used a face flannel from the washbasin on the table to wipe the baby down as well as he could and warm her, and she made the same tentative movements that he had seen from dozens of healthy newborns. She gurgled and tested her new voice, and he came around the side of the bed and rested her in her mother’s arms. Claire managed a weak smile and touched the baby’s face with her fingertip.

Kingsley went to the bedroom door and opened it, poked his head out hoping to see Fiona, but the hall was dark and empty. He went to the top of the stairs and heard the doorbell ring below him just as Claire called out to him from the bedroom.

“Doctor! I think something’s wrong.”

J ack asked the driver to stop as soon as they reached Primrose Hill. He got out and strolled away from the two-wheeler with no destination in mind and a clear sense of anticipation. Fate would provide. Fate and the city.

And so, when he turned the corner, he was not surprised to see a man standing at a door at the end of the street ahead. The man was very tall and very thin and, Jack thought, quite beautiful. But he was dressed in a shabby blue uniform that appeared to have dirt pressed into its many creases. The jacket might have been taken from a corpse. Lying on the footpath behind the man was a boy’s bicycle, cast hastily aside. This could be no one but Sergeant Hammersmith.

Hammersmith was pounding on the door of the last house and took no notice as Jack passed behind him in the lane.

“Claire!” Hammersmith said to the door. “Fiona! Someone answer!” No one did, and Hammersmith began to frantically pull the bell cord.

Jack turned the corner and passed out of sight of the agitated policeman. There was a low fence behind the house, just above waist level, and Jack hopped it, landing neatly on the other side of a nettle bush. The instruments in his medical bag clattered against one another, but the clasp held tight.

Jack strolled across the garden, staying as close as possible to the house’s rear wall without snagging his trousers on the nettles, and peered around the edge of an open door. He was looking into a kitchen, which seemed to have been decorated in the fashion of an abattoir. The floor was pooled with congealing blood, and a fine red spray had coated most of the vertical surfaces that Jack could see. A pair of legs belonging to a prostrate man extended out of sight behind a long wooden table that was too large for the room. There was another door at the far side of the room, and another man was passing through that door now, walking away from Jack down a hallway. Even from behind, Jack had no trouble recognizing his foolish little fly. He shook his head and clucked his tongue and carefully sidled into the room.

Cinderhouse did not hear him or turn around. The fly was hurrying toward the front door, directly in front of him along the hallway. The doorbell was pealing in the most annoying way, and Jack could faintly hear Hammersmith’s voice on the other side of the house, still calling out women’s names.

It occurred to him that he might very well have saved Walter Day from a bit of trouble by detaining him belowground on this fine spring afternoon.

Jack stepped over the largest plash of blood and around to the other side of the table. He looked down at the dead man who had decorated the room with his blood. The man didn’t look familiar. He was young, but it was difficult to tell more than that because his throat had been torn open and his mouth and eyes stitched shut. Jack frowned at the dead man. He had been transformed, that was certain. But there was no artistry in this. It was savagery for the sake of savagery. A waste of sticky blood.

A thumping noise distracted Jack and he turned toward yet another door, next to the one leading out into the hall. This second door, which Jack presumed separated the pantry from the rest of the kitchen, was closed, and someone was pounding on it as if in response to Sergeant Hammersmith’s attack on the front door. Jack stepped closer to the closed door.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” said a girl on the other side of the door. “Is someone there?”

Oh, little fly, Jack thought, I told you to leave the children alone.

“Your back door was open,” he said. “There’s a terrible mess out here. What’s happened?”

“Be careful. There’s a very dangerous man out there.”