The voices. Always the voices. They stopped whenever he smoked the resin but no sooner was he rising up out of its stupor, his skull throbbing, than they were back in his head, whispering, always whispering.
He couldn’t tell the hour but it wasn’t night anymore. Fog drifted in the lane outside. Jacob had given him a task, yes. Now he was remembering. There was a woman who could hurt him, yes. And he’d trusted Walter to find her. He stumbled in a puddle and caught himself on a bollard in the fog and then melted into the roar of Market Street. Then he was hurrying down a narrow lane between tenements and turning left and crossing a second street and ducking under the dripping awning of a tobacconist’s. Down a flight of cobblestone stairs, along a steep passage. There were children huddled in doorways staring at him; there were women picking through garbage. At St Anne’s Court he turned sideways and slipped past the twisted iron grille and walked gingerly over the muck, avoiding the deep puddles, the greasy sludge afloat there. There was a line of laundry strung up from a window, all of it yellowed and patched and limp in the watery fog, and under the axle of a broken cart in one corner he saw the rat man, drunk, sleeping.
Walter Walter Walter Walter Walter—
His door. It had been left open. He stumbled inside, down the three damp steps. The light from the broken window was the only light there was.
—come to us Walter come to us bring us the keywrasse and—
He was trying to remember. And then, there—on a shelf against the far wall—he saw them, his sweet ones, shining in the darkness. A row of three enormous glass canisters. The liquid within was a smoky green, and afloat in each like jarred fruit was the pale cranial figure of a human fetus, curled, aborted, malformed. Their eyes were open and their slow hands were pressing against the jars, they were watching him, calling to him softly.
Walter Walter what have you left in the—
That was when he turned and saw his broken cot and in the bedclothes the yellow-haired basket seller. Her throat had been cut ear to ear, her abdomen carved open and pinned wide as if under the knife of a surgeon, as if someone had rummaged inside her, looking for something. Her eyes had been removed and laid out beside her.
—because she was hiding it she was but where is it Walter where is the hurting thing—
He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes. The light in the cellar was different. His sweet ones glowed in their glass jars, greenish and lovely. He got woozily to his feet and stood swaying over the dead girl and then he sat back down on the freezing floor and slept again and when he woke next his head was clearer and there was a visitor standing over the cot, a middle-aged woman. She was staring down at the body of the basket seller.
“It seems you’ve made rather a mess of things, Walter,” she said matter-of-factly. “I blame myself. I ought to have come to you sooner, of course.”
—she knows us Walter how does she know us—
“You know us,” he said thickly. “How—?”
“Us?” She stepped into the weak gray light coming from the window, a visitor from a society and world he’d once known and knew no longer. She clutched a handbag demurely in front of her, in both her gloved fists. She wore a black collared dress, black gloves, a black hat with a blue feather, and there was a birthmark obscuring half her face. Her eyes were very dark and her voice, when she spoke, was dangerous. “We’re quite alone here, Walter. I’ve been watching you for some time.”
“Walter, Walter, little Walter,” he whispered.
—maybe she has it maybe she has the—
“You are Walter Laster,” said the woman. “Jacob Marber was your friend.”
Yes, he thought, my friend. Jacob was my friend. Is my friend. I love him. He peered suddenly up at the woman, grateful. She had a lovely throat.
“I am Mrs. Harrogate, Walter. I am here to help you.”
Yes, he thought. Mrs. Harrogate will help us.
But as he rose to his full height he could feel all that he was, his thoughts, his brief flicker of understanding, begin to slide back into a room in his skull, and then the door to that room was closing, and he was going away again, he was going to sleep again, and the voices were whispering, growing louder. He wanted to warn her about the voices, but he did not.
The woman walked over to his sweet ones where they turned in their jars, glowing with an otherworldly fire, and she studied them closely in the green light they cast.
—why is she looking at us Walter what does she want Walter does she have the hurting thing—
The hurting thing, the weapon, yes … She had her back to him and he shifted nearer, just an inch, just a half inch, creeping, creeping. He did not know what he was doing, oh, he was doing nothing, nothing at all, then why were his fists clenched, oh, now he could smell the lilac powder in her hair—
—do it Walter do it now—
“Oh, Walter,” he heard the woman, Mrs. Harrogate, murmur, as if from a long way off. “I am disappointed. You really must try harder to control it.”
—now now now now now—
He slid nearer. She was rummaging in her handbag. But as he reached for her neck, her stout little figure turned fluidly in the gloom, impossibly fast, something clutched in her fist, and then a fierce pain bloomed inside his skull.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate slid the mangler’s cosh back into her handbag, buttoned it fast. She had struck him so hard her wrist hurt.
Walter Laster, she thought. Well, well.
She knelt beside him and felt for a pulse but his wrist was cold, freezing really, cold as death, and she hesitated only a moment and then took off her hat and her gloves and laid her ear over his chest. She could not hear a heartbeat but she knew this meant nothing, less than nothing, and she carefully lifted his upper lip and saw the long yellow teeth, all the longer for the red gums that had withdrawn from them, just as she had been told would be there. His pallor was bloodless, the bluish-gray of bad milk. He was smoothly bald, his body hairless. Three red lines, like folds of skin, ringed his throat.
After that she stood, and adjusted her hat, and stepped gingerly over Walter to the dead woman on the cot. Something would need to be done about it, and like always, she supposed, it would be her having the doing of it.
She took a quick inventory of the miserable little room, the damp that was creeping up the bricks, the darkness almost like a living thing around the far wall, those strange three glowing fetuses adrift in their examination fluid. Then she got to work. There was a rag Walter had been using as a towel and she used this to scoop the dead woman’s insides back into her cavity and then she stuffed the two tidy eyeballs in as well and she rolled the entire corpse in the ripped blanket and lugged it, thumping, onto the floor, the stain already leaking through. She had got none of the mess on her clothes and she stood with her hands on her hips, satisfied. Then she lifted Walter in her arms and carried him outside into the courtyard and leaned him against the wall in the mud. His frailness surprised her, how light he was, in truth little more than dust and bone. Lifting his hand was like picking up a bird’s nest.