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Scene #6
In the bitter winter of 1723, a creature in the guise of a fine gentleman with sodomitic tastes hunted amid the sparkling theatres and dance-halls of London. He left a trail of bled-out corpses in those anonymous bed-cabinets one might rent for a penny a day, or a farthing an hour.
He lured me to bed with promises I would never again shiver alone in the night, nor wake aching with hunger.
I did not believe him. But I wanted to.
No one warned me. I would wager no one warned any of the hope-besotted catamites he preyed upon. I found the truth when the glory I'd heard of became real—my first copulative ejaculation—but then he clapped hand over my mouth, and tore open my flesh.
I lay as stone, encharmed, while he noisily sucked my life-blood.
I knew I was dying. I could stop it no more than the Scots with their hammers and hot stones could stop the river of ice crushing Edinburgh.
Surging fury shattered the beguilement. Too late. I scarce had strength to grasp his hair. "I will follow you, creature. By my blood, you shall pay!"
He laughed, and swiped his raw-liver tongue across my mouth.
I bit into his lip. "By your blood—"
With an unholy cry, he struck me. I knew no more.
Until the cabinet door opened, and the goodwife found my corpse. "Cor! Not another one."
Another one? The creature's habit—his kind—were known, and no one warned us?
I felt the creature, a league north, arranging himself in fine woolen bedding for his satiated-piglet sleep. On a polished table beside him, a beeswax candle guttered its final golden spurts of light. The creature likened them to the final spurts of my blood; I felt his contentment.
By my blood, creature. Remember.
Astonishment shot through him, and terror. In that moment he, too, died. But for him dying was like an eel slipping into the mud to rest through winter. He would awaken with the coming night.
Without his thoughts for a handhold, I fell back through the darkness into the cabinet, where my own flop-limbed corpse was being rolled in coarse sacking.
"You'll not cry murther in my house," the goodwife growled to the poxy girl who tended the stove under each bed. "The Thames shall eat this one, shame though it be. Help me set him in the rafters for the nonce. After supper, go find where the ice has been chopped through, hear?"
The body pulled at me, but I anchored myself to the bloody straw bedding. My blood smelled of slaughter, but it was mine. Exchange it for icy black water over my head, in my nose, filling my lights? Eels slipping over my skin, sliding into my mouth and out like the facile words I'd longed to utter on stage?
No. By my oath, no!
Anon, the body ceased its pull. I rested.
In the quietude there came a voice, something like the mermaid's song in a seashell, calling to me. It was... It sounded like my mother's voice. My curtain call. My summons to the next stage, the next script?
Yet... Someone must stop the creature. Someone must mete justice.
The goodwife cleared the bed, pulling me forth like a snail from its bloody shell. She cursed the need to burn such fresh straw.
I recognized, distantly, that such burning would loose my bonds to this house, would send me on to where, perhaps, my mother awaited me.
I could not pass on, leaving that creature to hunt.
Instead I made claws of my fury, and sank them into the cabinet's wood. Then I made them nails, imbedded forever.
Too late, I realized I had made my deathbed a prison.
Night after night, I woke with the creature in whatever new bed he found. I scanned human flocks with his eyes, and with him selected the lamb to seduce. He liked his meat comely, but more particularly used his nose to divine healthful flesh. I learned the scents of fluxes, worms, all manner of bodily foulness.
Night after night, I tried to shock him into revealing himself for the creature he was. I failed. Much less could I become the animating principle that ruled his limbs. My every attempt gave him leverage to thrust me out; I would abruptly awaken in the cabinet bed.
And would seethe.
Finally, I leapt from his consciousness to that of the boy whose eyes he'd captured. The boy fled, crying out, but in the next heartbeat his blood splashed hot and stark over the moonlit snow.
On the next evening, before the creature's awakening called me, I woke to a mumbling drunkard stretching out in my bed.
I shouted, trying to affright him and thus purchase my privacy, but he heard me not. He sang to himself, wept a little, and anon slept. Fragmented dreams danced about me like Punch and Joan puppets unconstrained by their accustomed booths. When he arose, I discovered I could leave with him, and that his name—Horatio—matched mine.
He wandered down by the Stacks, bed-sized chambers arranged like drawers in an apothecary's cabinet, stacked two dozen high and five-score across. The cabinets in the upper three rows were twice as wide and high enough that a man, if not over tall, might sit comfortably within. Behind it rose newer, taller Stacks.
From the fifth row, shades of his cow-eyed sister-in-law and her brat waved at him. The drunkard's vision blurred.
Someone opened a door below them and cast a brown spatter into the street.
Sirens shrieked.
Doors opened throughout the Stacks. Dirty children and scrawny ash-colored women poured out like termites and scrambled cursing down the face of their stack. They clattered past us, wooden shoes hammering cobblestones and echoing off brick buildings to either side.
The drunkard turned away. At least the blighters had their stacks. The wretches left in Scotland and Norroway were fighting over caves.
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