Ernest, slightly nervously, went into the house. The
principal room occupied the whole of the ground floor, and was well appointed,
although garishly furnished. Gabriel was accepting birthday wishes, and kisses,
from the young ladies in the room.
‘Oh yes’ he said ‘Myself and Ernest are both celebrating. We’re twenty-one – we’ve come of age today.’ He grinned at Ernest.
‘Um. Yes. Indeed.’ Said Ernest, wondering why he was agreeing, but realising that Gabriel must have begun visiting this establishment at a questionably young age. He had done enough reading to understand that this was a brothel, although it was most certainly a better class of establishment than the single rooms that had offered such services in the Rookery of his childhood. However reading about it, and being in one, were two different things, and Ernest was becoming less sure that he wanted to take the celebrations any further. He thought of Effie, and had some high minded thoughts of retaining his purity, like Sir Galahad, for her. Gabriel seemed to read his mind.
‘This is all good experience, Ernest. You don’t want to be fumbling around on your wedding night, do you? You have to be the man of the world, to reassure your sweet and innocent bride.’ He said, with his arm around the waist of a young woman in a pink corset and petticoat.
A dark haired woman put her arms around Ernest and kissed him. ‘You’re friend’s right. You want to do right by your sweetheat. Girls like a man who knows what’s what – and where’s where’ she added, with another kiss.
Ernest allowed her to lead him off into a side room.
Some time later, Ernest was still lying in the bed, staring at the ceiling. His companion had left to ‘tidy herself up’. Ernest had to admit that she had been a skilled and patient teacher, and he felt as though his mind, as well as his body, had made some new connection with the world. The blood beat through his head to a slightly different rhythm, perhaps. He got up and went in search of Gabriel. He found him lying across a large bed, pillowed against a sleeping woman, with a fine-featured youth in his arms. Gabriel passed a pipe to the boy, who half blew and half coughed a cloud of sweet smoke into the air. Ernest was speechless. He had thought his own behaviour decadent enough, but now realised he was a complete amateur besides Gabriel’s mastery of louche and amoral living. Still, he sat down on the end of the bed and drank the champagne that was offered. It did not taste as good as that at Gabriel’s house, and he was astonished that he had the discernment to mark this.
After some hesitation, he also accepted the opium pipe. At first he coughed so much that he thought he was going to be sick, but then the smoke seemed to coat his lungs, and his airways opened up. He took another deep breath, diving into it, his eyes wide open. Then the bed seemed to get much smaller, and his arms absurdly long. He shut his eyes to steady himself. When he opened them, a tall man in a black top hat and long coat was standing by the door.
‘Come along Ernest. I’ve been waiting for you.’
Ernest got up and followed the man into the street. They seemed to move with speed and fluidity, gliding through the sleeping city unobserved. Ernest recognised the landmarks of his childhood; the churchtowers and colonnaded markets of the prosperous East End, giving way to the cluttered, claustrophobic alleys of the underclass.
The man looked this way and that, questing, seeking something; not just looking for it, but sniffing it out. Finally he stopped in the middle of a grey-stoned alley, and leaned against a rotten windowsill. He inspected the dirt on his gloves. Then he lifted his head, and said casually.
‘In there was my first. Well; I must be accurate. The first that I undertook with any deliberate intent. There had been others - others I had wounded, even killed. But that was in the heat of the moment. Before I learned how to control myself. How to use my gift. Before I learned the awesome, the terrifying ecstasy of complete mastery of myself. Everything is so much better when done with purpose, with poise, with discipline. ‘ He smiled at Ernest. ‘Wasn’t that what young Suzie was trying to teach you tonight?’ He leaned forward. ‘Gabriel does not understand that. He thinks more is everything. But the more of any pleasure you have, the less in command you become. Too much drink, or food and you end up spewing the surplus into the gutter. Too much laudanum and you may never return from a night trip such as this. Too many women - or boys, or matelots or whatever you desire - and you become satiated, impossible to please and incapable of finding delight in anything else. Control, though, is power.
The man stepped away from the windowsill and into a patch of light that slashed across the bricks from an upper storey window. Still, Ernest could not see his face. It seemed to be always in darkness, however he turned his head. When Ernest attempted to look at him straight on, it seemed that the features moved and swam like oil on the surface of a dark pool, never settling into one likeness.
‘Some fools think that I am a madman. Something crazed, wild, animalistic. It is true, I have those qualities. We all do, Ernest, even you. But when I took the woman into that room, strangled her, and eviscerated her neatly, I was in full and complete control of myself and my senses. And that - oh that was the joy of it.’
Ernest closed his eyes to shut out the man’s swirling face, and when he opened them again he and the man were both stood in a small room. There was hardly anything in the room but a small table and a bed, on which a girl of about five slept soundly.
‘Pretty thing.’ Mused the man. ‘I am astonished she does not have nightmares, put to bed in this room – this box of delights. Goodness me, the chamber pot is the same.’
He kicked it a little further under the bed.
‘In this room, Ernest, the object of my desires did not fall in with my wishes, despite my best attempts to persuade her. I had no chloroform, and she was a strong girl. The operation did not go quite as I wished. There was blood all the way up the walls’. He ran his hand down the nearest wall, and it seemed to Ernest that each finger left a red trail behind it. ‘So much blood. I admit, I was unprepared for that. I was moved by its intensity. It seemed to possess a life force of its own, in the way that it burst from her. Still, at the last, she was the same as the others.’
He stepped across the room and grasped Ernest by his jacket colour. Ernest could smell him now, an earthy, rotten smell, like an old fox holt or the lair of a dangerous stray dog. ‘Do you understand what I am telling you? Do you understand what I was looking for? I wasted time here, I wasted a lot of time on these – these abstractions. I hoped to catch their essence, see their soul rising, hear the secrets passed on at the moment of departure. And there is nothing, Ernest. There is nothing, but darkness, and blood becoming colder. Even if they died in the moment of physical connection to my own body, my own seed, they went their way without me. ‘
‘The last journey…’began Ernest, faintly
‘Don’t! Don’t say a word to show your stupidity. Don’t begin to preach to me. You may think I am Godless; that I am beyond even your shallow and literal ideas of redemption, salvation. In one sense, in a very small sense, you are in the right. I do not need salvation. I am doing God’s work. I am taking apart His creation organ by organ, vein by vein. I look inside His finest work, His work of woman torn from Adam’s rib. I look to find where God is hidden. I have looked so long, so hard inside each beating heart that I ask you, as I ask Him, every night – where is He? Where is He? Ernest? Because I have not found Him yet.’
The man released his grip on Ernest and sat down heavily on the end of the bed. Ernest glanced at the child, but she merely turned over and did not wake up.
‘This fills me with sorrow’ the man continued. ‘It is as if every apple has no core. It is as if I possessed a painting, a masterpiece, and everyone assured me that it truly was by Giotto or Titian – and yet it was not signed.’
‘But scraping a painting down to the bare canvas will not reveal the signature’ said Ernest. ‘You have destroyed any maker’s mark in the process of – of dissection. The soul of a man – of a woman – is not a butterfly. It cannot be put in a jar and pinned to a card.’
The man stood up, then, and he seemed to grow until he filled the room, and Ernest became the same size as the child who slept on.
‘Once, years ago, you admired a man who stood up for what he was, for his unchangeable nature. You thought it was the bravest remark you had ever heard.’
Ernest heard his boy’s voice parroted back to him, and remembered from Julian from ten years ago. ‘You have been brave tonight. Wrongheaded, romantic and delusional, but brave to stand up to me, one of the terrors of your young life. I will have to teach you, but I shall be lenient, because you are brave. I will not make you find out through your own hands, but only through my eyes – for now.’
He grasped Ernest by the wrist, and Ernest felt the room dissolve away from him, dripping down into the sewers, as he was dragged through streets so thick with fog that the buildings themselves were drifting and remaking themselves as they glided along. When they stopped, the buildings settled around them, and a woman, a streetwalker, sauntered up to them. She made no sign that she even noticed Ernest was there, but leaned against the man, and asked ‘Are you good natured, dearie?’
Ernest wanted to warn her, to push her away, but his voice had left him and his arms, when he moved them forward, dissolved into smoke and fog. He followed the man down the alley as if tied to him by a lead, so closely that by the time they turned a corner Ernest was looking out through the eyes of the man, on a world of distorted shapes and garish colours, at the centre of which the confident streetwalker was a swirling mass of lines and shapes.
Ernest was powerless to stop what happened next, although he fought with all his consciousness to pull his hands, the man’s hands, away from the woman’s throat. When he saw the long knife blade glinting in the gaslight, the one constant shape in the miasma, Ernest wrenched control back to his own body, and ran down the cobbled alley. But the alley grew longer, the point of light at the end of it never growing larger, and a deathly cold seeped into his limbs. Ernest looked down, and saw that his shoes were covered in blood up to the laces. He took more determined strides, fixing his gaze on the distant streetlight, and willing the outline of St Botolphs’ to remain a fixed point on the horizon. He could sense the man close behind him now, and ran faster, his strength returning as the man’s clutch on his senses was diminishing. But now as he ran the cobbles became thick mud under their feet, and he was sliding down, the buildings closing above him, so that all he could see against the night sky were the leafless corpses of burning trees. The air was torn by balls of fire screaming away, and towards his position, and sometimes the sky turned cinder brown as if from lightning. Ernest put his hands out and felt bodies, some living, some as cold as the mud. Behind him he heard the man cry out.
‘Ernest! What is this place! Why are you here?’
‘I thought this was your Hell’ said Ernest, struggling against the mud. ‘I thought you had made this for me.’
‘This is not mine. This cannot be any man’s. Some dread machine must rule this world.’
Ernest looked up again, and saw Effie looking down at him. She knelt in the mud, unheeding of her white dress, and held out her hand, but Ernest was too far below to reach it. Effie unwound her blue sash, and wordlessly lowered it down. Ernest grabbed it, and Effie pulled him up as if he weighed no more than a ribbon. The mud receded, and cobbles returned. Somewhere behind him, Ernest could hear the man struggling in the earth and calling for help, but when he turned round he could see nothing except the bare street. He held on to Effie, tightly, and rested his head against her warm shoulder.
‘Oh yes’ he said ‘Myself and Ernest are both celebrating. We’re twenty-one – we’ve come of age today.’ He grinned at Ernest.
‘Um. Yes. Indeed.’ Said Ernest, wondering why he was agreeing, but realising that Gabriel must have begun visiting this establishment at a questionably young age. He had done enough reading to understand that this was a brothel, although it was most certainly a better class of establishment than the single rooms that had offered such services in the Rookery of his childhood. However reading about it, and being in one, were two different things, and Ernest was becoming less sure that he wanted to take the celebrations any further. He thought of Effie, and had some high minded thoughts of retaining his purity, like Sir Galahad, for her. Gabriel seemed to read his mind.
‘This is all good experience, Ernest. You don’t want to be fumbling around on your wedding night, do you? You have to be the man of the world, to reassure your sweet and innocent bride.’ He said, with his arm around the waist of a young woman in a pink corset and petticoat.
A dark haired woman put her arms around Ernest and kissed him. ‘You’re friend’s right. You want to do right by your sweetheat. Girls like a man who knows what’s what – and where’s where’ she added, with another kiss.
Ernest allowed her to lead him off into a side room.
Some time later, Ernest was still lying in the bed, staring at the ceiling. His companion had left to ‘tidy herself up’. Ernest had to admit that she had been a skilled and patient teacher, and he felt as though his mind, as well as his body, had made some new connection with the world. The blood beat through his head to a slightly different rhythm, perhaps. He got up and went in search of Gabriel. He found him lying across a large bed, pillowed against a sleeping woman, with a fine-featured youth in his arms. Gabriel passed a pipe to the boy, who half blew and half coughed a cloud of sweet smoke into the air. Ernest was speechless. He had thought his own behaviour decadent enough, but now realised he was a complete amateur besides Gabriel’s mastery of louche and amoral living. Still, he sat down on the end of the bed and drank the champagne that was offered. It did not taste as good as that at Gabriel’s house, and he was astonished that he had the discernment to mark this.
After some hesitation, he also accepted the opium pipe. At first he coughed so much that he thought he was going to be sick, but then the smoke seemed to coat his lungs, and his airways opened up. He took another deep breath, diving into it, his eyes wide open. Then the bed seemed to get much smaller, and his arms absurdly long. He shut his eyes to steady himself. When he opened them, a tall man in a black top hat and long coat was standing by the door.
‘Come along Ernest. I’ve been waiting for you.’
Ernest got up and followed the man into the street. They seemed to move with speed and fluidity, gliding through the sleeping city unobserved. Ernest recognised the landmarks of his childhood; the churchtowers and colonnaded markets of the prosperous East End, giving way to the cluttered, claustrophobic alleys of the underclass.
The man looked this way and that, questing, seeking something; not just looking for it, but sniffing it out. Finally he stopped in the middle of a grey-stoned alley, and leaned against a rotten windowsill. He inspected the dirt on his gloves. Then he lifted his head, and said casually.
‘In there was my first. Well; I must be accurate. The first that I undertook with any deliberate intent. There had been others - others I had wounded, even killed. But that was in the heat of the moment. Before I learned how to control myself. How to use my gift. Before I learned the awesome, the terrifying ecstasy of complete mastery of myself. Everything is so much better when done with purpose, with poise, with discipline. ‘ He smiled at Ernest. ‘Wasn’t that what young Suzie was trying to teach you tonight?’ He leaned forward. ‘Gabriel does not understand that. He thinks more is everything. But the more of any pleasure you have, the less in command you become. Too much drink, or food and you end up spewing the surplus into the gutter. Too much laudanum and you may never return from a night trip such as this. Too many women - or boys, or matelots or whatever you desire - and you become satiated, impossible to please and incapable of finding delight in anything else. Control, though, is power.
The man stepped away from the windowsill and into a patch of light that slashed across the bricks from an upper storey window. Still, Ernest could not see his face. It seemed to be always in darkness, however he turned his head. When Ernest attempted to look at him straight on, it seemed that the features moved and swam like oil on the surface of a dark pool, never settling into one likeness.
‘Some fools think that I am a madman. Something crazed, wild, animalistic. It is true, I have those qualities. We all do, Ernest, even you. But when I took the woman into that room, strangled her, and eviscerated her neatly, I was in full and complete control of myself and my senses. And that - oh that was the joy of it.’
Ernest closed his eyes to shut out the man’s swirling face, and when he opened them again he and the man were both stood in a small room. There was hardly anything in the room but a small table and a bed, on which a girl of about five slept soundly.
‘Pretty thing.’ Mused the man. ‘I am astonished she does not have nightmares, put to bed in this room – this box of delights. Goodness me, the chamber pot is the same.’
He kicked it a little further under the bed.
‘In this room, Ernest, the object of my desires did not fall in with my wishes, despite my best attempts to persuade her. I had no chloroform, and she was a strong girl. The operation did not go quite as I wished. There was blood all the way up the walls’. He ran his hand down the nearest wall, and it seemed to Ernest that each finger left a red trail behind it. ‘So much blood. I admit, I was unprepared for that. I was moved by its intensity. It seemed to possess a life force of its own, in the way that it burst from her. Still, at the last, she was the same as the others.’
He stepped across the room and grasped Ernest by his jacket colour. Ernest could smell him now, an earthy, rotten smell, like an old fox holt or the lair of a dangerous stray dog. ‘Do you understand what I am telling you? Do you understand what I was looking for? I wasted time here, I wasted a lot of time on these – these abstractions. I hoped to catch their essence, see their soul rising, hear the secrets passed on at the moment of departure. And there is nothing, Ernest. There is nothing, but darkness, and blood becoming colder. Even if they died in the moment of physical connection to my own body, my own seed, they went their way without me. ‘
‘The last journey…’began Ernest, faintly
‘Don’t! Don’t say a word to show your stupidity. Don’t begin to preach to me. You may think I am Godless; that I am beyond even your shallow and literal ideas of redemption, salvation. In one sense, in a very small sense, you are in the right. I do not need salvation. I am doing God’s work. I am taking apart His creation organ by organ, vein by vein. I look inside His finest work, His work of woman torn from Adam’s rib. I look to find where God is hidden. I have looked so long, so hard inside each beating heart that I ask you, as I ask Him, every night – where is He? Where is He? Ernest? Because I have not found Him yet.’
The man released his grip on Ernest and sat down heavily on the end of the bed. Ernest glanced at the child, but she merely turned over and did not wake up.
‘This fills me with sorrow’ the man continued. ‘It is as if every apple has no core. It is as if I possessed a painting, a masterpiece, and everyone assured me that it truly was by Giotto or Titian – and yet it was not signed.’
‘But scraping a painting down to the bare canvas will not reveal the signature’ said Ernest. ‘You have destroyed any maker’s mark in the process of – of dissection. The soul of a man – of a woman – is not a butterfly. It cannot be put in a jar and pinned to a card.’
The man stood up, then, and he seemed to grow until he filled the room, and Ernest became the same size as the child who slept on.
‘Once, years ago, you admired a man who stood up for what he was, for his unchangeable nature. You thought it was the bravest remark you had ever heard.’
Ernest heard his boy’s voice parroted back to him, and remembered from Julian from ten years ago. ‘You have been brave tonight. Wrongheaded, romantic and delusional, but brave to stand up to me, one of the terrors of your young life. I will have to teach you, but I shall be lenient, because you are brave. I will not make you find out through your own hands, but only through my eyes – for now.’
He grasped Ernest by the wrist, and Ernest felt the room dissolve away from him, dripping down into the sewers, as he was dragged through streets so thick with fog that the buildings themselves were drifting and remaking themselves as they glided along. When they stopped, the buildings settled around them, and a woman, a streetwalker, sauntered up to them. She made no sign that she even noticed Ernest was there, but leaned against the man, and asked ‘Are you good natured, dearie?’
Ernest wanted to warn her, to push her away, but his voice had left him and his arms, when he moved them forward, dissolved into smoke and fog. He followed the man down the alley as if tied to him by a lead, so closely that by the time they turned a corner Ernest was looking out through the eyes of the man, on a world of distorted shapes and garish colours, at the centre of which the confident streetwalker was a swirling mass of lines and shapes.
Ernest was powerless to stop what happened next, although he fought with all his consciousness to pull his hands, the man’s hands, away from the woman’s throat. When he saw the long knife blade glinting in the gaslight, the one constant shape in the miasma, Ernest wrenched control back to his own body, and ran down the cobbled alley. But the alley grew longer, the point of light at the end of it never growing larger, and a deathly cold seeped into his limbs. Ernest looked down, and saw that his shoes were covered in blood up to the laces. He took more determined strides, fixing his gaze on the distant streetlight, and willing the outline of St Botolphs’ to remain a fixed point on the horizon. He could sense the man close behind him now, and ran faster, his strength returning as the man’s clutch on his senses was diminishing. But now as he ran the cobbles became thick mud under their feet, and he was sliding down, the buildings closing above him, so that all he could see against the night sky were the leafless corpses of burning trees. The air was torn by balls of fire screaming away, and towards his position, and sometimes the sky turned cinder brown as if from lightning. Ernest put his hands out and felt bodies, some living, some as cold as the mud. Behind him he heard the man cry out.
‘Ernest! What is this place! Why are you here?’
‘I thought this was your Hell’ said Ernest, struggling against the mud. ‘I thought you had made this for me.’
‘This is not mine. This cannot be any man’s. Some dread machine must rule this world.’
Ernest looked up again, and saw Effie looking down at him. She knelt in the mud, unheeding of her white dress, and held out her hand, but Ernest was too far below to reach it. Effie unwound her blue sash, and wordlessly lowered it down. Ernest grabbed it, and Effie pulled him up as if he weighed no more than a ribbon. The mud receded, and cobbles returned. Somewhere behind him, Ernest could hear the man struggling in the earth and calling for help, but when he turned round he could see nothing except the bare street. He held on to Effie, tightly, and rested his head against her warm shoulder.
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