Alex Grecian - Devil's Workshop

The explosion was deafening in the confines of the small room, and the key flipped up and back and hit her in the chin. She dropped it to the floor and screamed.

Hammersmith heard an explosion somewhere in the house and he struggled to open his eyes. Light streamed over him from somewhere nearby and the backs of his eyelids were red. His chest hurt more than anything had ever hurt before.

“Shh.” The voice was unfamiliar, deep and gentle. “Lie still. It’s not your time to change yet. That stupid buzzing fly. He’s missed your heart completely. But he has nicked one of your lungs.”

“Can’t. .”

“I know. You can barely breathe, much less talk. So be quiet and let me finish this. A mutual friend would not like you to leave him just yet.”

Hammersmith felt something piercing him, pulling on him. Whoever was talking to him was also sewing his wound. No, sewing something beyond his wound, something inside him.

“Don’t. .”

Hammersmith’s mouth was forced open and salty fingers clamped onto his tongue. “I said to be quiet.” This time the voice was stern and there was something dry beneath it, like metal. “Hush now, or I’ll take this from you. It’s been a very long day and I’m in no mood.”

Hammersmith tried to breathe in, tried to maneuver himself upright, but the effort was too much for him to bear, and he felt the world recede.

“That’s better,” the voice said.

Hammersmith passed out again.

The pantry was full of smoke. Fiona coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. Then she noticed the door. The entire doorknob plate hung loose, the knob was on the floor, and a crack of light showed between the jamb and the door. She grabbed up the tiny gun and pushed against the door and ran out into the kitchen.

The floor was a swamp of blood and gore, and Constable Rupert Winthrop was directly in front of the pantry, part of the way under the table. Fiona gasped and put her hand up to her mouth. She felt her gorge rise and swallowed hard against it, forcing it back down. She had seen many corpses while assisting her father, but never the body of someone she knew. Always before she had approached bodies as artistic things, tragic forms to capture in charcoal. This one had a name. This one had been sweet and stupid and caring.

When she had recovered, she pulled up the end of her apron and wiped her mouth. She did not look at the mutilated body of poor Rupert Winthrop again. She went to the kitchen door and out, the key gun held straight out from her body, her finger on the mini-trigger.

Far down the hall, just inside the entryway, someone knelt over the body of a man. She raised her strange pistol.

“Get away from him!”

The man kneeling over the body on the floor stood and picked up a black bag and walked to the door. He didn’t turn toward her when he spoke.

“There is still time,” he said. “You may save him yet, if you want to.”

“Stop!” Fiona pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. She pulled it again. Click. She realized too late that the gun was too small to hold more than a single bullet, and she had used that bullet to escape the pantry.

The man with the black bag was already out the door. When he reached Regent’s Park Road, he turned and passed out of sight. Fiona dropped the jailer’s gun at her feet and ran down the hall. She slowed and looked in through the parlor door as she passed that room. What she saw would come back to her in her dreams for the rest of her life, but she looked away and kept moving. Her father was stretched out at the bottom of the stairs. A few feet away from him, blocking the open front door, Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith lay in a pool of blood. He looked dead.

She checked on her father first. His pulse was strong and he was breathing evenly, but she couldn’t wake him. She left him there and went to Hammersmith, knelt down beside him. His pulse was faint, but regular. His shirt was torn open and a wound in his chest leaked a steady trickle of blood, down under his left armpit and into the spreading pool beneath him. A spool of red thread and a card of needles that she recognized from Claire’s sewing basket rested on the floor next to Hammersmith’s body, and she knew what the stranger had meant when he told her that she could save him.

One of the needles was already threaded, as if she had interrupted the stranger in his work. She picked it up and burst into tears. She recovered quickly and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and began to sew the man she loved back together.

Inspector Michael Blacker was the first through the door, and Inspector James Tiffany was right behind him. Both of them had their revolvers out, at the ready. The front door stood open and there was a girl passed out across the threshold, cradling Sergeant Hammersmith’s head in her lap. Hammersmith was covered in blood. Blacker recognized the girl as Dr Kingsley’s daughter. She helped sometimes, sketching out crime scenes. He couldn’t remember her name. Beyond Hammersmith’s outstretched feet, they could see Dr Kingsley himself, lying with one foot on the bottom step of the staircase. His chest was moving gently up and down.

“Good Lord,” Tiffany said.

“What do you suppose happened here?”

“As long as nothing else happens. .”

They stepped carefully past the girl and Hammersmith, both of the inspectors alert for any sound in the house. Blacker checked on Kingsley and his daughter, then moved them into more comfortable positions. Tiffany bent over Hammersmith and felt for a pulse.

“He’s alive,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

Blacker shook his head. “I really don’t,” he said. Hammersmith’s shirt was torn open and his chest was a railroad switchyard of red and black stitches.

Constable Jones followed them through the door. Inspector Day was behind them, but he was barely upright. Sir Edward had sent him to hospital, but Day had ignored his orders. Neither Blacker nor Tiffany could blame him. They had only asked that he stay well back until they could look through his house to make sure it was safe.

Day stopped and bent unsteadily over Fiona, filled with guilt and shame and fear for the girl. What had she seen?

Tiffany waved Jones past them down the hall to the kitchen. Blacker started up the stairs, but turned and hurried back down when he heard Jones gagging. He and Tiffany came up behind Jones and looked into the parlor.

The man on the floor was spread-eagle, a horizontal Vitruvian Man. He was bald and naked, and his torso had been cut straight up the middle, the flaps of skin and slabs of muscle folded to either side. His rib cage was broken, the bones pointed up at the ceiling. His major internal organs had been removed, but were still attached, their veins and arteries spun like fishing line to various points around the body. The intestines had also been removed and had been spooled out to the farthest corner of the room, then arranged along the baseboards like an elaborate red and grey glistening picture frame, made to show off the artistry of the killer. The bald man’s hands had been cut off and lay several inches away from the stumps of his wrists, as if they had flown off his arms in surprise. The same had been done to his feet. His eyes had been removed and laid on his cheeks, each of them looking away in a different direction. His genitals were entirely missing. Neither Blacker nor Tiffany nor any of the policemen or coroners who followed them would find those particular anatomical items.

His clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair.

Three or four fat houseflies lazily circled the body, darting away and then back after bumping into the big window at the front of the house.

Tiffany left the house and went to the street, where he vomited. He spat and wiped his mouth, then instructed the watching carriage driver to send for more wagons and for as many doctors as could be found. Meanwhile, Constable Jones walked away from Cinderhouse to the kitchen, and so had the dubious honor of having discovered both of the corpses in Day’s house. Jones had come up at the Yard with Rupert Winthrop, and the sight of the body caused him to lose himself. Tiffany found him sitting at the kitchen table, softly crying and squeezing a damp coverlet.