George Mann - The Executioner's heart

She came to this realization as she lay in wait for the man, two curved blades clutched in her fists. The room was silent other than the incessant ticking of the clock on the mantel, measuring the seconds until he would arrive home and the deed could be done.

Everything had unfolded as she’d anticipated. The man stumbled in drunk at close to eleven o’clock. He fumbled to light a candle to guide his way. As the flame took hold of the wick and cast his face in sharp relief, she stepped out from behind the open door and slid the first blade through his belly.

Even now, she could see the look of absolute confusion on his face, how it slowly transformed to an expression of horror and desperation as he realised what was happening, and how the sorrowful realisation finally dawned in his eyes as the second blade bit home, piercing his heart and causing his body to convulse and fall limp to the floor.

She knelt over him as he faded, her breath coming in short, quick gasps. She waited for the welling feeling of loss, for the panic, for the burning shame. Perhaps even for the relief or the exhilaration that she had finally taken her revenge. But none of this came.

At first she rationalised this absence as shock; that the immediacy of what had occurred had rendered her numb, that everything else would follow later. Yet the only thing she felt as she crouched over the corpse of the man who had created her, watching his blood seep from the horrific gashes in his torso, was an acute sense of curiosity.

She had lived a lifetime since that day in Montmartre in 1826. Almost eighty years. Yet it was still vivid in her memory, like an old, stubborn stain that refused to be scrubbed away.

The next death followed a week later, driven by that same intense sense of curiosity: a need to discover whether there was any part of her that could still feel. This time it was a stranger, and she discovered that the fact that she did not know the person, did not understand their hopes, fears, and desires, made no difference to her whatsoever.

A string of murders throughout the streets of Paris had followed, but nothing she did-no matter the means of death, the condition in which she left the bodies, the manner in which she allowed them to beg or scream-could touch her.

She understood that this was not normal, that the people who found the corpses she’d left strewn across the cobbled streets in her wake were disgusted by what they saw. She read the newspaper reports about the hunt to find the killer, who the reporters had dubbed “the Scourge of Paris” or “the Executioner,” how the city’s populace cowered in fear that this shadowy killer might come for them in the night. She recognised the impact of her actions, but found herself entirely unable to care.

For a while after her murderous spree, she joined a travelling troupe of acrobats (for she had always been athletic), quitting Paris and touring from city to city across the continent. This had proved to be a distraction, for a time, but it did not last. She grew tired of being dragged from one unfamiliar town to another, and the initial lustre of a life on the road was soon eroded by the weariness in her bones and the emptiness where her heart had once been. She longed to have her pulse quicken with excitement, to feel alive.

One night after a show, she happened across one of the acrobats cursing and thrashing about her caravan in a blind rage. Earlier that day, the acrobat had discovered her lover rutting with another of the girls from the troupe. When confronted, he had simply laughed and carried on.

The girl begged her to help, and together they plotted vengeance through the night. The next day, the acrobat woke to find her lover’s heart on the pillow beside her. The girl never spoke a word about it to anyone.

The Executioner-a name she had embraced by this time-fled to evade discovery. But still she felt no sense of triumph, of fulfilment. There was nothing but a void in her soul, a deep sense of emptiness at the core of her being.

She had not sought this strange, nomadic existence, but it found her regardless, drawing her in-out of necessity, perhaps, and as a result of her dispassion. She had fallen into this life because she didn’t care enough not to, and because, in some ways, she was still searching, still hoping to find that glimmer of a reaction in the empty space where her own heart had been.

She held her breath as the door opened. Her next victim had arrived.

Sometimes, Veronica caught herself wondering why it was that the majority of her encounters with Sir Charles Bainbridge involved a visit to the morgue.

Was it that she was simply a glutton for punishment? After all, she might simply choose to abstain from such distasteful pursuits and receive a report detailing all of the necessary findings later. Did she really need to force herself to attend these trips to that detestable place, with its thick stench of blood and carbolic and its grisly occupants, most of whom had died violent or miserable deaths, their remains mangled by weapons or disease?

Of course, both Newbury and Charles would have accepted her choice to stay away without comment. She was, after all, a woman , and the morgue was certainly no place for one of those . Indeed, she knew that both of them, while perhaps more accepting of her independence than many other men might have been, felt a need to protect her from the more gruesome elements of their shared profession. And that, she concluded, was precisely the reason that she did force herself to go through with it, despite the fact that it turned her stomach and left her feeling quite unwell.

The current situation was a case in point. There were three corpses in the chamber, each of them laid out on wooden trestles. The attendants hadn’t bothered to cover them with the thin cotton sheets they often used to preserve the dignity of the dead. The bodies had simply been wheeled out and dumped on the trestles like unwanted animal carcasses in a butcher’s shop, spoiled and riddled with decay.

Veronica couldn’t stop staring at them. She wanted to look away-to focus on anything except the grotesque cadavers-but she felt strangely compelled to look on regardless, unable to tear her eyes away. She supposed it was a form of macabre fascination, a reminder of one’s own tenuous grip on life. She’d come close to ending up like that herself on more than one occasion. She wondered who might have gathered around her butchered corpse to poke and prod at it in an attempt to tease information from its lifeless lips. Who might yet…?

The nearest of the corpses, a man who had been in his mid-twenties from the look of him, had a terrible fixed grin on his face. Veronica couldn’t help feeling he was laughing at her. It was as if-even dead-he knew some secret that she did not, and was lording it over her from beyond the grave, amused that she was so appalled to find herself in the presence of his battered, bloody corpse. She wondered what he’d been thinking when he died, and whether the bodies of the dead ever did retain the memories of the people who had once inhabited them. The thought gave her a chill.

Memories or not, a corpse could nevertheless tell a story. She’d seen Newbury examine them before, and was always amazed how much he could extrapolate from any given injury or mark, from an eviscerated belly to the pinprick of a needle in an upper arm. He could unravel what had happened to a victim simply by reading the direction of their wounds or the objects in their pockets.

Not that it was difficult to see what had happened here. Just like the others-the elderly man and the middle-aged woman with whom he now made uneasy bedfellows-the younger man’s chest had been cracked open and his heart ripped viciously from within. Even now his rib cage yawned open, split into a ragged-edged wound. Around the gaping hole the flesh was puckered, waxy, and spattered with gore. His hands were fixed like rigid claws by his sides, as if he’d been raking at something in the moments before he died, either in self-defence, or more likely in abject pain. Perhaps both. His shirt and jacket-now little more than ragged, bloodied strips-still hung loosely from his shoulders. They had clearly been torn open in a hurry to provide access to the flesh and bone beneath. It seemed to Veronica that the makeshift surgery had been performed while the man was still alive.