The Devil's Workshop

The images of Jack the Ripper’s victims flooded Day’s head. All the postmortem photographs and artists’ reconstructions. It was overwhelming. Day felt dizzy and nauseated. He fought against blacking out again.

“It was wrong, what you did,” Day said. “It was selfish.”

“I know.”

“The public still fears Jack. You left your fellow policemen to deal with the aftermath of your actions, all of the public’s fears and insecurities. Everybody thinks he got away.”

“Well,” March said, “he did, didn’t he? And now he’s going to kill us if we can’t get ourselves free and stop him.”

“We’ll get out of here. We’ll catch him again and we’ll turn him over to the proper authorities. And then I’m still going to place you under arrest.”

March fell silent. Day concentrated on breathing. In and out, through his mouth, no deep breaths. He had threatened to arrest two people despite being shackled to a wall in a cave.

He was counting on March to get him free, but Day’s mentor had no good reason to help him now. He was afraid he would die there, deep underground, his body lost forever.

But Day was a detective inspector for Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. And if he was going to die, at least he would do so with some integrity.

43

Cinderhouse dreamed that he was falling and he woke with a start. He was sitting in the upstairs hallway of the house with the red door. The first thing he noticed was the excruciating pain in his mouth, shooting through his jaw and up into his head. He put a hand to his mouth and immediately regretted it. He fished in the pockets of his trousers, no easy feat from a sitting position, and found his handkerchief, dabbed at the corners of his mouth. There was a little blood on the cloth when he pulled it back. He held it against his lips again and applied pressure, but it didn’t help. The pain was deep inside.

He realized that the bedroom door was open behind him at the same time he noticed that the knife was missing from his hand. He had been waiting for the spider to wake up and unlock the bedroom door, and now the door was open and the knife was missing. He eased himself up and peered in through the open door, but the room was empty. There was the stale remnant of body odor, and dust motes swirled in the sunlight through the window opposite the big bed.

Cinderhouse blinked and sniffed and picked gunk from the corners of his eyes. He stood and staggered into the room, just to be sure no one was there, then went back to the hallway and sat at the top of the stairs, moved slowly forward and out, and bounced down each step. At the bottom of the stairs, he grabbed the post at the end of the banister and pulled himself up. He glanced in at the parlor on his way past and noted the absence of Elizabeth. The kitchen was as deserted as every other room he’d seen, but the back door was open and honeybees flitted in and out, visiting the purple blossoms in the garden and taking a wrong turn into the house before finding their way back out.

“Aaaauuoogh!”

He thought he was going to shout hello, but the sound that came from his tongueless mouth was some hideous howl of loneliness and pain. He winced at the sound of it.

He held perfectly still, his back to the butcher block, and listened. There was nothing. The house was empty. The echoes of silence came back to him and proved that there wasn’t a sound being made anywhere except here, except by him and the honeybees.

Jack had left and he had taken Elizabeth with him.

Jack had chosen Elizabeth over Cinderhouse. Never mind that Cinderhouse had planned to kill Jack, had been waiting for him with the biggest knife he could find in the kitchen, had fantasized about plunging that blade deep in Jack’s chest and then taking it out and cutting out Jack’s tongue before the spider died. Never mind any of that. Cinderhouse had helped him, and still Jack had chosen Elizabeth to be his new rock, his Peter, his fly. He had taken Elizabeth away, and Cinderhouse felt certain they would never come back for him.

He pushed away from the butcher block and turned. He opened the drawer behind him and saw a rack of silverware inside. He couldn’t remember where he had found the twine he’d used to bind Elizabeth. He concentrated and crossed the kitchen and opened another drawer beside the water basin. Inside was another ball of rough string, not as thick as the stuff he’d used on Elizabeth, and a corkscrew, three pencil stubs, several thumbtacks, a pair of gloves, a shaker of salt, and a map of London, folded the wrong way round as if someone had consulted it and then been too impatient to fold it back properly.