Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

“What’s yer fancy, sir? Me, or something younger?”

As the drab concluded her proposition, she pushed the child forward. In the half-light cast from the doorway of a Mollie House I saw she was no older than six; all in rags, dirty, barefoot and hollow-cheeked. The child had suffered a severe beating, and her body, which showed through the torn cloth, was covered with bruises. The child’s filthy countenance could not mask the true look of such distress, hide such hopeless despair on her face. My heart thudded with anger in my chest at such a sight, and filled my soul, too, with such despondency I could neither speak nor move away from this terrible vision of innocence so defiled. The child shook, and kept shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands, and then suddenly clasped them together and pressed them to her little bare breast.

I turned away, my heart and mind in such moral turmoil, for I desired nothing more than to raise my walking cane and smite the leering face of this mackerel who call herself a mother. On, then, I strode as fast as my sleep-guided legs would carry me, away from this perverted Madonna and her damaged child. Somehow, with that peculiar reason only felt in the dreaming state, I next found myself on the south side of Soho Square, approaching Oxford Street to the north. It was there, as I bisected the finely manicured lawn of the tiny park, that temptation accosted me.

“Would you help me, kind sir?”

The voice was young, surely no older than thirteen years. Female and underwritten with an Eastern European accent far thicker than my Dutch-English. It came from beside a bush heavily curtained with shadow, for here, in the middle of the park, the sulphurous tallow of the sparsely placed gas lanterns could hardly reach. As I approached the voice, I could faintly make out a shapely figure, high and rich of bosom. Surely I was mistaken? The voice belonged not to a child but a young woman of at least her twenty-first year.

I asked what aid she was in need of, and as I did so, a hand reached out for mine. Not the hand of a woman, but that of a young man. Yet before I could rectify that which my dream eyes and ears had mistakenly led me to believe was a damsel in distress, the cold, male fingers touched me, attached themselves to my skin like some terrible human leech. The sensation disturbingly stirred my blood, and as the gamine stepped forward into the orange glow shed by the nearest lamp, I felt a stiffening in my loins. As the toothless mouth opened, the lips rounding in a perfect circle, a mocking travesty of the kiss, my body betrayed my spiritual repugnance at the vision and what it promised.

Two hours have passed since I awoke, like Lazarus, from that terrible state. Yet unlike Lazarus, I do not have the solace of the Lord to comfort me in my resurrection. The state of my awakening so shameful, I removed the sheets from my bed and soiled nightgown and burned them in the fireplace. Heaven forbid poor Marta, my devoted maid of this past year while I have been living in London, should have to deal with the betrayal of my body. I partook of a cold bath to flagellate my corrupt flesh until I shivered like a Russian bathing in an ice-brook. Yet, still the dream pursued my waking state, and my nerves were such that my hands shook so I could not put pen to this paper. Much as I despise the habit, I drank a small draught of laudanum to ease my vexation.

Dawn has now arisen with all the rich hues of a bonfire night blaze as a vibrant sun fights the smuts of the infernal smokestacks and coal fires which choke this teeming city. Deep in my soul I yearn to return to Haarlem, to breathe fresh air and bicycle through tulip fields of passionate red and soothing yellow. Duty, however, calls; I have another six months of teaching at the Royal College of Medicine. My heart, though, is heavy, for there are other reasons I must stay in this manmade Hell. And I must go to them now.

A brougham waits, and I must away to Bedlam.

Van Helsing hissed in disgust at the stench rising from the cobble-stones outside his chambers in Holland Park, for even here in this more salubrious area of west London, feces both human and animal ran thick in the gutters. Treading wearily, he entered his carriage, the door held open by Mr. Tobias Flemyng, his driver. A man afflicted at birth by a port wine stain which smeared the right side of his face like some terrible jest performed by children playing with a pail of paint, and cursed with weak, degenerate teeth, of which few remained in his head at the young age of twenty-nine years, Mr. Flemyng, despite his disturbing appearance, was a man of good heart and solid moral character. Besides which, in all his years either living in or visiting the cesspool of London, Van Helsing had yet to find a more knowledgeable or safe brougham driver who could navigate the dangerous streets of the teeming metropolis.

Once his dear patron was comfortably seated, Mr. Flemyng took the reins in hand and they set off towards the rising sun — east, and to that most troubling of places, the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem, known to all in Britannia as “Bedlam.”

Founded at some unknown date in the fourteenth century, St. Mary of Bethlem was, from the very beginning, devoted to care for those sick in mind. Over the centuries, this once noble, but now shameful, establishment had come to epitomize the city as a great madhouse, populated as it was with so many afflicted and distracted souls. Such was the moral, psychic, and physical decay of its hapless inhabitants, and the attendant effects upon their keepers, that Bedlam had fallen into such a state of physical desolation, the hospital had been moved and rebuilt twice since its founding, and now resided in the borough of Southwark, the traditional nursery of prisons and other such forbidding institutions.

Tobias Flemyng made careful haste, guiding his dear patron and passenger through the chaos of swarming Oxford Street to Holborn, to the Blackfriars Road, then south, over the bridge and into the borough of the melancholy mad, the dismally deranged, and the condemned.

The current institution was as grand as its predecessor in Moorfields — the façade an impressive portico decorated with Ionic columns, topped by a formidable dome. Like a prestigiator who charms the eyes with his finely manicured hands while palming a tarnished coin, Bedlam’s exterior hid the unvarnished, sullied truth — the hospital had become a circus, a morally degenerate entertainment for a paying public who came to see tales acted by those who were now mad, fragmented versions of those life experiences which had driven them into the abyss of insanity in the first place.

Van Helsing dismounted from the brougham, tipped Mr. Flemyng and informed him he would be no longer than ten minutes, then strode with the purpose of a Higher Power into this purgatorial place.

Entering the vestibule, he glanced at the two sculpted giants, known popularly as “the brainless brothers,” a pair of bald-headed and semi-naked figures named “Raving Madness” and “Melancholy Madness” by the sculptor, Cibber, who had been commissioned to create them for the previous incarnation of St. Mary’s. Calling to a steward, Van Helsing requested an immediate audience with Dr. Christopher Hughes. A shilling slipped into the man’s hand quieted his protestations that Dr. Hughes was “busy, and cannot be disturbed, sir.”

Van Helsing waited for no less than a minute before Dr. Hughes, a rotund, ruddy-faced fellow crowned by a mop of baby-fine blond hair, appeared.

“I must see Susannah,” Van Helsing said.

“Her condition is, I am afraid, very fragile, and I do not think—”

“I do not pay you to think! I pay you to take care of her! Take me to her now,” Van Helsing hissed, his customary sign of emotional distress.