Megan Shepherd - Her Dark Curiosity

They neared the corner and I started to let out my held breath, until I heard a third voice behind them, clearly belonging to an older man.

‘Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.’

My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr Hastings – the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.

‘Yes, Doctor?’ one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.

Dr Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.

Focus on the tiles. Focus on the tiles. Focus on the—

‘Don’t think I don’t know about those pranks you’ve been pulling. It’s one thing for boys to have a bit of fun, but quite another to chase me down Wiltshire at night. I nearly broke a shoelace.’

‘It wasn’t us, Doctor, I swear!’ one of them sniveled.

I didn’t worry about being recognized by most professors here – they never bothered to glance at the cleaning crew. But Dr Hastings had always been different. I think he liked to think of us on our hands and knees, cleaning up the messes he made. If he found me here now, he could do anything to me and not a soul would ever know.

I swallowed, wondering if I could crawl backward and scoot away. But to my relief, the two students had his entire attention. He stepped around me and started after them down the hall, chastising them about schoolboy pranks. The moment they were around the corner I leaped up, shoved the brush into my apron pocket, and snuck into the autopsy room.

I waited ten seconds, twenty, a minute, and heard no more voices. A shiver ran down my back as I found a switch on the wall. The artificial electric light snapped to life, bathing the room in a garish glow so much starker than the hurricane lamps my father used in his laboratory.

Eight tables lined the walls, four of which were occupied with cadavers. Each body was covered with a heavy cloth. One was large, over six and a half feet tall – that had to be Daniel Penderwick, the solicitor. In my memory he’d been tall as the devil himself, with just as black a heart. I lifted the cloth and looked at his pale, dead body. His naked chest was gutted open with slash marks now drained of blood. The wounds pulled me to them. They whispered truths – memories – I wasn’t certain I wanted to ever recall.

I approached the next body cautiously, uncertain who I’d find beneath the heavy cloth. Annie’s body would be here, as well as the thief girl’s. But what of the unidentified one? Would it be familiar to me, like the others? Could I still call it all a coincidence if it was?

I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart now torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.

I went to the next table, shakily leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie – or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this ?

Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I pulled back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we’d scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boarding-house’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.

It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping wounds in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for violence. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.

Eventually I moved on to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look in case it was someone dear to me, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked in surprise. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided with the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.

I recognized the fourth body.

It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now … dead . I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surely his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.

Four. I knew all four victims.

And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.

The idea made me step away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it – nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, four people who had wronged me.

Almost as though …

I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.

… almost as though someone was watching out for me.

I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.

A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.

By Edward.

Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.

And yet the fear kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already aching. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. On the island, I had read and memorized meticulous autopsy reports from Father’s files for all of Edward’s victims. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.

They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.

The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.

Edward had done this.

I felt like the room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London – why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.