I am a child woman. I look at my reflection in Icabod’s hall mirror. I am tall. My face plain and pale. My hair bright and short like fire. Spiderweb lines on my face, delicate markers of my transition. And I look at Goliath, my protector. Things must change between us now. The love between us new and bright and frightening. I must protect him now. I touch his face with my hands. My pale hands against his dark skin and great beard. And we both know. We both know and we are afraid.
The three of us sit on the train to London. I am wearing a green dress and gloves which Goliath has bought me. It feels soft and alien against my body. It is the green of frogs and fairy tales. It is raining outside, the great black thickening rivers glittering like snake skin. Umbrellas open like black bird wings while the raindrops pound the earth. The world is becoming water.
Icabod reads The Times, gripping it like a holy parchment while Goliath holds my hand in his. The train chugs on like a tug boat, the Kentish countryside lush and rolling like waves. We are off to see an acquaintance of Icabod’s: a hypnotist and psychoanalyst called Mr Edmund Cherrytree. He believes he can help me.
“How long have you known this man?” asks Goliath worriedly
“For about a year. We met at a book launch party. We share the same publisher. He’s an odd sort of a man, but he has an interest in unusual patients and a gift to help them. He has an illustrious reputation and he seemed very interested in Mirror’s situation and eager to see her.” Icabod returns to The Times, eyes dancing over the headlines. “The Ripper still eludes Scotland Yard. It’s a bloody disgrace. I fear it will end very badly.”
“They believe he is a butcher or a surgeon,” says Goliath.
“I don’t think they know what he is,” Icabod sighs.
Goliath says sadly. “He’s clearly insane”
I think about the dead women of Jack the Ripper. I imagine them lying on a table served up for dinner. I imagine Jack the Ripper with a knife and fork in his hands and a napkin resting delicately in his lap.
“What if he isn’t mad?” I say.
“Then we are living in a kind of hell.” And Icabod puts the paper down and stares out of the window, at a world sinking in water.
The train arrives at Victoria Station, the platform bustling with people, churning with soot and steam from the engines like a cooking pot. And we walk out into the great arms of London, into the capital of the world. The faces of the crowds are like a strange painting. An old woman is selling flowers on the street; she has no teeth and she stares at me. And I can feel the emptiness. A man is smacking a small child with the back of his hand and then spits, steam is rising from the streets, cracking open. Ready to burst. There is something red underneath London. It is the red of the flowers of the Egyptian princess, it is the red of Jack the Ripper, it is the red of a painter smearing oils on a canvas. It’s on my hands too. I’m sure.
Mr Cherrytree’s office is a short walk from the station. I can smell Mr Fingers, he’s under the smog and the stench of horse manure, under the shadows and grime. In the dark corners, hiding and waiting. He smells of something burning, like ribbons thrown on a fire. I think I can smell him on me. I’m not sure if I understand fear. I do not really know what it is anymore. And yet I know I should be afraid. I know what it smells like. It’s the wolf in all those fairy stories Goliath read me. It’s Jack the Ripper. It’s the dark hole in that old woman’s mouth. It’s all around me. I am in the painting. I am in the red world.
We arrive at a very smart house on a bustling side street. The air smells smoky, hanging like a veil, concealing something, the sky as white as a shroud lying over the face of the sun.
As we enter the establishment we are greeted by Mr Cherrytree’s assistant, a young, handsome gentleman who escorts us up to a waiting room. The walls of which are covered in framed spiritual photographs depicting the human soul leaving the body at the moment of death. Both eerie and fascinating, my eyes follow their trail around the room: an elderly woman lying face down in the snow, a wisp of ectoplasm rising like steam from her body; a soldier on a battlefield, eyes glazed, and again a wisp of soul emerging. Above Goliath’s head, three sisters who have taken poison whilst taking tea lie slumped in their seats, an ooze of weird light seeping from them and floating to the ceiling. We are sitting in a tomb, on a dead white planet. The dead captured in photographs, like genies swirling in a bottle. And yet there is something wrong with the pictures, something off. Something empty.
Icabod looks a little nervous. “What ghoulish pictures. I do hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake bringing you here.”