Selected Short Stories Featuring Cockfight Read online

“Single?”

  “Married, much to my wife’s chagrin.” He didn’t smile, but he hadn’t smiled yet over the course of our conversation.

  “My first wife died of tuberculosis.”

  “The first? Then there’s a second,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he replied, and betrayed the tiniest bit of emotion, not a smile so much as a twitch in his lips.

  “I shouldn’t take up more of your time.” I said, and took up my beer in one hand; he gave a gruff sigh. I didn’t have to look behind me to know that a moment later he would turn to watch- all he would find was my empty glass on a table beside the door.

  After only a few days, I found myself wanting for pocket money. The majority of my funds and credit are tied down in construction of my hotel in Chicago. My encounter with Abberline had left me suspicious, but it was far too early to retreat back across the sea, so I devised another option.

  I carved out pieces of a woman for sale to medical students- a practice that had paid my way through medical school. Specifically, a young man was looking for a uterus, which I cut out of Annie Chapman that very night.

  It was the day after, and I had delivered the organ already, and I was walking in Flower and Dean street, when I saw a ghost. To my surprise, she spoke to me, and told me her name was Miss Lyons, and agreed to meet me at Queen’s Head that evening.

  Possessed nearly, I could not stop myself from stating, "You are about the same style of woman as the one that's murdered."

  She nearly dropped her pint. "What do you know about her?" she asked.

  I’d spoken too candidly. "You are beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don't always find them." I excused myself politely and left. She followed me all the way to Spitalfield Church- though the wisdom of such vigilance I’d question- when she lost me in a crowd.

  A second brush with apprehension chastened me, and I spent the next several weeks indulging in sight-seeing and whore-mongering. I believe it was out of boredom, or at least because it had been so long since I’d scratched the itch, but I murdered two women in one evening.

  Even that could not salvage things. My vacation in London was proving less agreeable than I’d hoped. The city was cold and damp. Even dispatching Mrs. Stride and Eddowe had left me despondent. Several letters, to the police and the papers, had claimed responsibility for my actions, discussing them in lurid and often silly and demeaning detail.

  I was depressive and trying to calm my own spirits when I penned my address as “From Hell” in a letter to George Lusk. I’d considered a conversation with the man, but after my brush with Abberline thought it best to keep Lusk at a distance. I included with the letter half a kidney, preserved in wine, from Eddowes. I’d intended to take both kidneys, but hadn’t the time, so I cut the kidney in half; the medical student not being very bright, I doubted he’d miss a half a kidney. I realize now I should not have drunk half the bottle of wine before composing the letter; the results were atrocious.

  Embarrassed, and perhaps worried I had included some traceable detail in my ill-advised note, I left the city for a time. The English countryside was filled with wonders, and I visited several manors with an eye to adapting architectural features for my hotel.

  I had not intended to travel to South Sea on my vacation, but events had so disgusted me that I became careless in my wandering. I found myself on the porch of the one man in all of England, more so even than Abberline or Lusk, who could have found me out.

  Readers of the penny dreadfuls will likely know the man only as the author of A Study in Scarlet, but Conan Doyle is also an informed criminologist of some repute; he may appear at first blush to be the model of Dr. John Watson, but his is also the mind behind Sherlock Holmes. I knocked lightly, half wanting not to be heard; he arrived at the door shortly, and from his dress, had not yet retired for the evening.

  “I know it’s late, and the appropriateness of my visit is questionable at best. But I couldn’t spend time here all the way from America without at a minimum telling you how impressed I am by your writings.”

  He eyed me for a moment before he asked, “Would you care to join me for tea?” He left the door open and I followed him inside. “We’ll have to be quiet, you understand. My wife Jean is sleeping. I take it from your late night visit you’re not a married man.” He motioned for me to take a chair across from a high wingback he dropped into.

  “I am, in fact, though my wife is back in America. She was scheduled to travel with me, but came down with a chest cold she swears against the doctors’ diagnosis is tuberculosis. It isn’t, but she couldn’t be motivated from her fainting couch.”

  “My first wife died of tuberculosis.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, “the same occurred to Inspector Abberline’s first wife.”

  “Abberline?” he asked. “Of White Chapel?”

  “Happened upon him in a pub when I’d first arrived on holiday. Very quiet, thoughtful man.”

  “What does he think of the murders?” Doyle asked, a hint of an amused child dancing in the candlelight reflected in his eyes.

  “We didn’t speak of it. In fact, we only spoke for a moment.”

  “Yet discussion of his deceased wife became pertinent?” I chuckled nervously. It was like being batted about by a tiger; the bottle of chloroform in my jacket pocket comforted me.

  “He relayed it as you just did; the logical counter to news of my own nuptials. If I had to fathom a supposition, I would say it is the guilt of one who survives what others did not- typical of a soldier’s reaction after a war.”

  “Are you a veteran?” he asked.

  “Regrettably, and just as fortunately, no.”

  “Hmm. I’ve mulled a story involving the Indian Rebellion, but no matter; I’ve also contemplated murdering Holmes,” he said plainly.

  “Why on Earth would you do that?”

  “He interferes. The public demands that he dominate my pen, but I have more important uses for it.”

  “An absolutely lunatic idea, but I won’t presume to lecture you on it; in good time, you’ll see the error of shuffling him off his mortal spine. But what do you think would Holmes, or you for the matter, make of this White Chapel mess?”

  He eyed me, then shrugged. “I’ve thought on the subject, but who hasn’t? The declaration of Jack as left-handed is unfounded; if the murders were committed while the victims lay strangled, then a left to right direction of the cut is decipherable only if one knows the orientation of the killer. If he stands above her head, then left to right is naturally right-handed, and only if the killer kneels below the neck that the throat-slitting should be seen as left-handed.”

  “And nothing I’ve known implies a career with a knife. Butchers, surgeons, professional soldiers and common enough criminals have enough familiarity with a blade to do the dirty deed.”

  “Further, our backward age is biased, looking for anyone to blame who isn’t us. That’s why most allegations are made against Jews, and foreigners; even the ‘sinister’ hand is accused. No, I’m afraid at my distance I’m more useful to express who is not the killer than who is.”

  “Ah, but I promised you tea,” he said, and scrambled out of his chair. I smiled, nodded, and took my leave. I believe he’d do something to my tea, or would have. I did not stay til he emerged from his kitchen to test my theory for fact.

  I was still tense after meeting Doyle, and had begun to believe I would leave the country worse than when I’d found it, when I happened upon Mary Kelly. Through irreconcilable kindness she had chased off Joseph Barnett- having been a prostitute she could not refuse shelter to other prostitutes, and he could not stand to house them.

  She had a weakness for drink, worse even than most of her countrymen, and without Barnett she fell back to her old profession. It was a simple enough thing to hire her services, but Kelly still maintained the room she’d had with Barnett. I’m afraid I took advantage of her hospitality, and the solace and solitude. <
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  I removed her heart; my unscrupulous medical student customer saw to it my trip was, on balance, profitable, if modestly so, and I spent the better part of a morning, well, playing, we’ll say. I’ll admit, I took a portion of my frustrations and curiosities out on the poor girl’s corpse, but she was dead long before the mutilation. After all, I’m not a monster.

  Table of Contents

  A Life in Porn

  He was too young for the Great War, and his flat feet might have saved him from the trenches, anyways. Just before the war ended, he fell in love for the first time, with a girl promised to a dead soldier. She was older, although her age did not mean a more varied experience. She had soft, dark hair, and sad blue eyes; before they were sad, she had been the kind of girl men painted on war planes.

  He couldn’t quite remember how he came to use the camera, except that it involved an ephemeral friend who worked in a studio. He remembered the film cost him a month’s pay, and that it was a nitrate film and required special handling to avoid suffering horrible burns; he also remembered that once he’d coaxed her out of her dress it was worth it all. When she blushed her rosy cheeks became a darker shade of gray, and she whispered silent, dirty words to him he strove in vain to remember. Her voice buzzed in his ear like a bee deep in a flower, resonating, but not quite clearly, and as the film ended, she waved goodbye. They made love after that, and even now he