“You a copper?”
“No.”
“You look like a copper.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Not around here.”
“I’m trying to find a man named Maggs. I was told that he lives nearby.”
“He in trouble, then?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because men who look like you don’t go asking after men like Maggs unless there’s trouble involved.”
“And what kind of man is Maggs?”
“He’s the kind of man I wouldn’t roll with if his cock was dipped in gold and he gave it to me after for a doorstop.”
It was an arresting image.
“I’ve been struggling to find anyone who might say something pleasant about him,” I said. “When he dies, it’s likely to be lonely by the graveside.”
“Shouldn’t have thought so. Lot of people will show up to make sure he’s dead.”
“They offer dancing shoes for just such occasions, I believe.”
She smiled. “If they don’t, I’ll make do with what I have.”
“Is he about, this Maggs?”
“Think so. He came in earlier, I believe. I heard him going up. He coughs a lot, does Maggs. Coughs, but doesn’t die.”
“You really don’t like him, do you?”
“He looks at women like he’s planning to slice them and sell them by the pound. He stinks because he’s bad inside. He’d steal the smell from a corpse, and he wouldn’t spare a penny if it would save a life.”
She finished the cigarette and tossed it into the shadows.
“Number nine, top of the stairs,” she said.
“You, or him?”
“Him. I’m in number five, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t, but thank you anyway.”
“Why? Because you’re too good for a tart?”
“No, because the tart’s too good for me.”
I found some money in my pocket, and I slipped her what she would have charged for a roll. As with the boy from the post office, I didn’t ask for a receipt: Fawnsley and Quayle would just have to take it on trust.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, and her voice was softer than it had previously been.
“You’ve saved me that much in time,” I said.
The money vanished.
“Watch out for Maggs,” she said. “He’s carries a knife.”
“Why?”
“For protection, but from what, I couldn’t say.”
Maggs, it seemed, belied the impression that some might have had of the book world as a place filled with the shy and the studious.
“Thank you for the warning,” I said.
I was about to leave her when a thought struck me. I took the picture of Lionel Maulding from my pocket and showed it to her.
“Have you ever seen this man around here?”
She held the picture in her hand and stared at it for a long time.
“I think so, but he was older than he is in that picture.”
“When was this?”
“I can’t be sure. Not as long ago as a month, but not as short as a week.”
“Was he coming to see Maggs?”
“Well, he weren’t coming to see me.”
She handed the picture back to me, hitched up her skirts to prevent them from dragging in the foul water of the lane, and went off to seek some business elsewhere. I watched her go. She was pretty in a hard way, but if she stayed in her current trade then the prettiness would fade and the hardness would take over, moving from the surface to the heart like ice on a lake. In another life I might have gone with her. I would have paid my money as much for her company as for any physical pleasure I might have derived from it.
Before the war, perhaps: before High Wood.
As I climbed the stairs to Maggs’s rooms, I began to form a narrative in my mind. Maulding approaches Dunwidge & Daughter as part of his search for the Atlas. When they can’t help him, he looks elsewhere, and finds his way at last to Maggs. He’s offering a lot of money for the book, more money than Maggs has ever seen before, but Maulding has led a sheltered life, and Maggs has not. Maggs sees the possibility of greater wealth than he has ever imagined. He lures Maulding with the promise of the book, and then takes his life.
Maggs, the book scout, with knife in hand.
Maggs, the murderer.
All very neat, all very tidy, which meant that it probably hadn’t happened that way. But if the girl was right, then Maulding had been here, which made Maggs a link in the chain of events that had led to Maulding’s disappearance.
I reached the door of number nine and knocked on it. There was no reply. I called Maggs’s name and knocked again. The door, when I tried it, was locked, but a locked door is more the promise of security than security itself. I removed my wallet of picks, and it was the work of a minute before the door was open.
Inside was darkness. The drapes were drawn, and I could hear no sounds of occupancy, no movement, no snores. I called Maggs’s name one more time before I entered, mindful of the reputation of the man I was seeking, wary of his knife.
I stepped inside and was immediately in a large room, furnished with a sagging couch and mismatched chairs. The rest was books, but after time spent in Maulding’s home, and the premises of both Steaford’s and Dunwidge & Daughter, I was growing inured to the sight of so many volumes crammed into every available space. There was a smell of unwashed clothes and unwashed skin, but beneath it was the stink of burning meat: pork, or something like it. The paintwork was new, but I thought I could discern writing beneath, as though some act of vandalism had been imperfectly obscured.
An open door by the empty bedroom led into a small kitchen. There was a man seated upright at a table, his back to me. He wore a waistcoat over a gray shirt that might once have been white, and his feet were bare. He was balding, and wisps of hair clung to his pate like gossamer threads caught on stone.
“Mr. Maggs?” I said.
Maggs, if Maggs it was, did not move. I slipped my hand into the pocket of my coat and gripped my cosh, but as I drew nearer to the figure I could see that his hands were resting flat upon the table, and there was no weapon in sight.
I stopped when I was a few feet from the door. The man remained still. He was either holding his breath, or he was dead. I moved into the kitchen, and the reason for his stillness was confirmed.
The corpse at the table had no eyes, and his sockets now extended so far into his head that, had I a flashlight to hand, I felt sure I could have shone the light into the holes and glimpsed the inside of his skull. I leaned closer, and thought I smelled burning from the twin orifices, as though a pair of hot pokers had been pushed into his brain, searing as it went. I tested his flesh. There was stiffness, but no decay, not yet. This man was not long dead.
On the table before him, resting between his hands, was an envelope. I picked it up and looked inside. It contained five hundred pounds, an enormous sum of money for one such as Maggs, yet there it rested. Where had it come from? I looked again at the envelope. It was cream, and of good quality, with a gentle ridging to the paper. I recalled the desk at the firm of Dunwidge & Daughter, with its pens and papers. In my wallet I still had the list of names given to me by Dunwidge. I unfolded the list and set it beside the envelope. The paper was the same.
And then I heard a scuttling behind me. I turned, expecting to see a rat, but instead I glimpsed a wriggling, jointed carapace, with sharp pincers, disappearing behind the stove. Once I had recovered from my shock at the sight of it, I seized a broom from the corner of the kitchen and went down on my knees. The floor was sticky and had not been washed in years. I peered into the murk beneath the stove and detected signs of movement. Grasping the broom by its bristles with one hand, and placing the other halfway along its length, I stabbed at the presence in the shadows. I felt the top of the broom strike something that writhed as it was pinned to the wall. I pressed harder, but the thi
ng broke free. It moved to my right, but now it was trapped in the corner, and I had it. I stabbed at it, over and over, until its struggles ceased, then used the broom to push its remains into the light.
It was about seven or eight inches in length, its body armored like that of a lobster. Its carapace was a milky red, as though it had somehow survived being boiled in a pot, and I counted twelve pairs of jointed legs, each leg spurred with a vicious curving spike at the first joint. The pincers were at the rear of its body, increasing their resemblance to those of an earwig that had first struck me back at Maulding’s house, but the multiple eyes at the other end were more like those of a spider: two large black orbs were positioned above its jaws, with a cluster of smaller organs scattered around them in what seemed like a random manner. The jaws themselves were lined with twin rows of small, sharp teeth that curved inward, and surrounding them, corresponding to the main points of a compass, were four clawed extrusions for cutting and tearing.
I was reluctant to touch the thing, for small, translucent hairs covered its frame, and even in death they seemed to be releasing a milky fluid that I felt a profound desire to avoid. There was heat coming off it, too, as strong as the flame on a stove, although it was gradually decreasing in intensity. I moved it so that I could look more closely at its mouth, and I thought I glimpsed something caught behind those curved teeth. A knife and fork lay on a dirty plate on the kitchen sideboard, and I used them to force the creature’s jaws farther apart to examine more clearly what lay within. It was white, but with hints of color, almost like a small egg, almost like—
I dropped the knife and fork and stumbled away from the creature, my gorge rising. I had seen so much that was awful in life. I was surprised at my capacity to be revolted by anything, but revolted I was.
Lodged in the creature’s mouth was an eyeball, and I could only assume that it had once belonged to the unfortunate Maggs. I looked again at the corpse in the chair and back to the creature on the floor. I felt again its diminishing heat, and smelled the stink of burning from the eyeless sockets in Maggs’s head, and the twin channels that had been seared through his brain. I had thought that something like a hot poker had twice been forced into his skull, but now I feared I was mistaken. Was it possible instead that something hot had worked itself out of his head, burning as it went, until at last it emerged into the light?
But why had he not moved? Why had he not struggled against it? Why was his body sitting upright in a chair, his hands placed on the table before him like a man waiting patiently for his evening meal to be served? And this thing, this abomination, was too big to have been accommodated by that narrow channel. Could it have grown so much already, swelling in its new environment? But how could such a creature grow? It must have shed its skin. Somewhere on the floor, perhaps. If I looked closely . . .
I was about to return to my knees, ready to find proof of my theory, when I paused. There were two holes in Maggs’s head, two tunnels burned through his brain. This creature, if it had emerged from inside the book scout, having somehow implanted itself in his head, could only have created one of them, which meant—
Which meant that there was another of these horrors somewhere in Maggs’s rooms. I froze and listened carefully for the telltale sound of it. Using the broom, I poked in the corners of the kitchen and under the sideboard. I then made my way into the main living areas and searched carefully, even dragging the sheets from the bed and stripping the mattress from its base, but I could find no sign of another creature. It was not among the piles of books, nor was it hiding on top of the dusty shelves. If I was right about the source of the second injury to Maggs’s skull, then, somehow, the creature had escaped.
I returned to the kitchen. Maggs had not moved, nor would he ever again, and the money was still in its envelope. So, another narrative, linked to the first: Maulding approaches Dunwidge & Daughter, and they, in turn, introduce him to Maggs, although now Maggs is working on their behalf and is not a lone operator. Maggs either finds the book that Maulding is seeking, and in return receives a finder’s fee from Dunwidge & Daughter; or, more likely, he convinces Maulding that the book is in his possession, Maulding brings the money, and once the money is safely in his hands, Maggs disposes of Maulding for the Dunwidges, and gets paid five hundred pounds for his efforts. But where did the creature and its now-missing twin come from, and how did a similar creature end up in a bathtub in Lionel Maulding’s house?
I looked at Maggs, as though he might give me the answer.
And Maggs, it seemed, tried to do so, for his mouth began to move. His chin shifted, and his lips parted, but instead of words a quartet of claws emerged, forcing his already stiffening mouth open wider, and I heard his jaw cracking with the force of it. The head of the second creature appeared from the gap, its own maw pulsing redly as it chewed on some unknown fragment of Maggs’s innards.
I attacked it with the broom handle, striking at Maggs’s face so hard that I felt his teeth shatter under the impact, and the broom itself broke in two. Maggs’s body toppled and fell to the floor, landing on its back. The blow had caused the creature to retreat into his mouth, seeking the safety of his gullet, but I was not to be denied. I could see its dark eyes gleaming in Maggs’s throat, so I took the sharp end of the broken broom and forced it again and again between the dead man’s lips, beating at it until his palate and his tongue were reduced to so much meat, and his teeth had been knocked entirely from his head, and the mess of the creature inside him was barely distinguishable from the general ruin.
And then I wept.
IX
I don’t know how long I stayed that way, seated in a corner of the filthy kitchen with Maggs’s body lying beside me on the floor. During that time, it seemed that I fell in and out of my earlier life—no, not life, but lives, for in each one was a different man: a son, a husband, a father, a soldier, a patient, and now a soul adrift. I felt and heard again the broom handle striking Maggs’s flesh, and then it was no longer a broom handle but a rifle, and the bayonet at its tip was lodged so hard in the breastbone of the man in the mud before me that I had to place my right foot on his chest in order to wrench it free. I was crouched down at Crucifix Corner, beside the pitted figure of the tortured Christ, High Wood in the distance, Death Valley before me, with the shelling, the endless shelling. I was standing over a crater on a September morning, watching as the first of forty-seven men from the London battalions was interred in the gray mud, enveloping their forms so that they became part of it, presaging the greater decay to come.
And then I was broken, and the world itself became a fragmented place.
Craiglockhart: a nurse was wheeling me into a small, private room where a chaplain and a brother officer were waiting, and someone was whispering the impossible to me, tales of a raid by Gotha bombers on June 13, of a woman, and a girl, and a boy buried in rubble.
Finally, I was standing by another hole in the ground, and more bodies were being lowered into it. I had not been permitted to see their remains before the coffin lids were screwed down, as though I had never before witnessed human beings reduced to raw meat and shattered bone by bombs, as though what I imagined could be any worse than the reality of the damage done to them.
If I am not a husband, not a father, not a soldier, then what am I?
Who am I?
• • •
I should have called the police, but common sense prevailed. Maggs’s face was terribly damaged, and I was responsible. The dead creature on the floor had finally cooled. As it did so it turned to a dried husk, and when I touched it with my shoe it fell apart as though it were made of ashes. The one lodged in Maggs’s throat had disintegrated in a similar fashion, coating the dead man’s mouth and gullet with flakes of dark matter. If the police came, I did not doubt that I would be charged with the mutilation and murder of the book scout. I remembered the girl who had directed me to his rooms. She did not know my name, but she would be able to describe me without any trouble,
and I didn’t believe I had paid her enough to buy her silence. Maggs was a scrawny man, and, were we in a more isolated place, I could have carried his body from the house and disposed of it, but I could hardly walk through the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel with Maggs’s remains hanging over my shoulder.
There came a knocking on Maggs’s door. I ignored it, but it came again, and I heard a woman’s voice, a familiar one, calling out from the other side.
“Sir? Sir? Are you all right?”
It was the girl from the lane.
“Sir?” she said again.
I got to my feet. If I ignored her, she might well take it upon herself to call the police. I had no choice but to answer the door.
I opened it about halfway: just enough to let her know that I was safe while preventing her from seeing into the rooms behind me. She looked both relieved and puzzled.
“I was worried,” she said. “Mr. Maggs—”
“Has a reputation,” I finished for her. “Undeserved, I might add, or no longer applicable.”
“Is he all right?” she asked. “You didn’t have to hurt him, did you?”
“No. Actually, he’s just a little under the influence.”
I made a gesture of drinking, for I had seen the empty bottles of cheap gin piled up in a corner by Maggs’s bed. The girl nodded in understanding.
“That’d be him,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s better with or without it. It’s as little as makes no difference.”
“Well, I’ll put him in his bed and turn him on his side so that he doesn’t choke in the night, and then I’ll be on my way,” I said.
“You look ill,” she said. “Are you sure you’re feeling yourself?”
“Now that you mention it . . .”
There was sweat on my face. I could taste it on my lips.
“Why don’t you come down to the Ten Bells,” she said. “A whisky will sort you out. It’ll be on me, for your kindness earlier.”
I was tempted to refuse, to get as far away from there as quickly as I could, but a drink sounded good, and not the poor stuff that Maggs was in the habit of imbibing. Neither did I want to look in any way suspicious by fleeing the scene.