Hell is a city much like London—Percy Bysshe Shelley
When Mrs Fernyhough was found dead, her landlady was on holiday. The police were called to the squat, dank house just off Commercial Street, that funereal enclave of post-war decay, where she had rented the attic room for the past ten years. Miss Fletcher, her downstairs neighbour had alerted them when an ungodly smell emanating from above. She was the one to let in the two policemen, Sergeants Baxter and Cooper, who had arrived at the scene on that bleak March morning. They climbed the staircase, narrowly avoiding Mrs Fernyhough’s false teeth, which had been deposited on the landing by the shared bathroom.
Miss Fletcher turned the spare key in the stiff Yale lock and opened the door. Even before the rigour of investigation, murder was irrefutable. The intense smell of blood and viscera reminiscent of Smithfield Market on slaughter day. Miss Fletcher blocked the doorway, swaying back and forth with a handkerchief clutched over her mouth and nose.
A penny for the body of a child. An amulet against the plague. The river brings life into the city and life leaves it by fire.
River of gold. River of blood.
Let it be known that, yes, Mrs Fernyhough’s corpse had been tampered with post mortem. And yes, many ghoulish details discovered that morning went unexplained. The main thrust of the body, though, that is to say, the head, trunk and limbs, though lacerated, were still in situ, though not for lack of trying. The dead are not so easy to manipulate as you’d think, even a frail old woman such as Mrs Fernyhough.
The room was devilishly cold. Of all the things they witnessed that morning, there was one discovery, something trivial and yet unexplained, that played on Sergeant Baxter’s mind throughout and even long after the investigation had been closed. On Mrs Fernyhough’spillow, he had found a single glass eye. Whom it belonged to, no one could say.
A woman in a dark suit follows him down Fournier Street and into a slum house. She is too well dressed for this neighbourhood. Despite the weather, she is not wearing a hat.
Upon questioning, Mrs Bartlett said she didn’t believe that anyone had a specific reason to harm Mrs Fernyhough. Robbery was clearly not the motive for the crime. Poor as a church mouse. Although, she confessed, she felt that she didn’t know her sister very well at all these days. They had become estranged during the war, as she the younger Mrs Bartlett had chosen to evacuate to rural Buckinghamshire, while her elder sister had chosen to stay in London. Mr Fernyhough had died in 1916 when he had been hit in the eye by a bit of flying shrapnel as his battalion marched towards Loos. Mrs Bartlett’s mind wandered, as it did so frequently those days. She found herself ruminating instead on the subject of the vagrant they had found hanging from the lamppost in Bethnal Green that morning, unshod feet dangling in the harsh breeze of that early spring morning.
The death of her husband had affected Mrs Fernyhough profoundly, her sister said. There had been some nastiness between the two of them, though what exactly occurred, she did not elaborate on. Mrs Bartlett understood that, shortly after the war, her sister had found employment at a nearby dressmaking factory, working there until her arthritis forced to her to retire on meagre war widow’s pension of 50s per week. When Mrs Bartlett returned to London, she found it much changed, including her sister.
Mrs Bartlett’s attention drifted and conversation returned to the murder of the vagrant. Her neighbour had told her that he had been alive when they’d strung him up and that the poor chap had strangled to death. What was strange, she said, worrying the wedding band on her swollen finger, was that they had found a crudely drawn eye on the butcher’s shop right by where the boy had been found.
Maledicus
Diabolus
Daemonicus
The death of Mrs Fernyhough had reached the tabloids by the next day and included a photograph of the deceased from VE Day celebrations. It was a gruesome business, thought Sergeant Baxter. He had been a boxer for the army, witnessing his share of brutality in both civilian and military life, much of which had been instigated by Sergeant Baxter himself, a fact that did not deter the metropolitan police from offering him employment. Life was violence and if one was not wielding the truncheon then one could be sure to be on the receiving end of it. The newspaper spoke to some of the deceased’s colleagues at J. Lazarus Ltd Dressmakers, who had described Mrs Fernyhough as a quiet, strange woman whom they knew very little about. Not exactly the kind of warmth one expects from an obituary, though how much did anyone know their colleagues those days? Things had changed. The papers were full of the postwar boom; salaries up, crime rates down, but Sergeant Baxter saw a different side to it all. The men who’d come back from France or wherever, they were wounded, some of the body and all of them of the mind, each of them wrapped up in themselves in a way that seemed new. Many of them had taken to the drink, for what else was there? He tapped the headline with a meaty index finger and considered the photo. It wasn’t a very good one and something about the way it had been reproduced made him feel uneasy. The quality of the print made it seem as if half of her face had vanished and the small union jack flag she was waving was fading out of the frame.
Mr Bartlett, nephew of the deceased, assumed responsibility for boxing up Mrs Fernyhough’s belongings. Miss Fletcher, who had taken to bed on account of her nerves, slid the key toward him from under her door.
It seemed strange to him that he should be burdened with the task of attending to his late aunt’s affairs. He didn’t resent the task as such, after all his sisters lived in Shrewsbury and Wiltshire respectively and his mother had suffered quite enough already. It had just never occurred to him, because he had pushed his aunt out of his mind to point he wasn’t sure that she had even existed. The murder had made the whole situation even more odd, though he would confess there was part of him was morbidly intrigued. It wasn’t the kind of thing one expected to happen to one’s family.
He had met his aunt on only one occasion and he was thankful such was the case, though he remember the Fernyhough home in Limehouse vividly. She had a penchant for strange ephemera; the kind which children are often sensitive to and he remembered how every corner of that angular house was littered with some trinket that he felt was watching him.
It had been the summer holiday and along with his mother and his two of his sisters, they travelled across London on three buses to visit his aunt. The city flung itself past the bus window, but his sense of adventure quickly faded as they headed east, the darkness of the buildings closed in around him, quite different from suburban Wimbledon where they lived. The people were different too. His aunt resembled his mother in only the most peripheral ways. The flat bridge of the nose, the thinness of the ankles. But she had small eyes, so unlike his mother’s, that constantly watered. She dabbed with a handkerchief absently, as if she did not know that she was doing so. Old fashioned before her time and in a way that even as a child he found repulsive.
It was after tea when his Aunt had found the broken majolica ballerina. It was a grotesque and sentimental piece that had been severed at the neck. He’d never been struck before, not even at school. They had marched out behind their mother, his sisters snivelling from vicarious fear. The patch of his skin on his cheek where she had slapped him would remain wine red for the rest of his life.
When his father got home from work that evening, he took him into his study and questioned the boy. Had he broken the ornament? His father was a doctor and believed himself to be an excellent judge of character. If his son said he did not break the ornament, then that is what happened.
Mr Bartlett maintained to this day that it had broken of its own accord.
When he’d arrived at the house on Commercial Road, he was relieved then to find the attic room strikingly spartan. It couldn’t have been more different from the terraced house he had visited as a child. A formica table, a bed so narrow it would have looked more at home in a monk’s cell. No a scrap of comfort to be found. What had she done with all of her junk? He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all still here. In a box under the floorboards, perhaps, watching him through the cracks in the slats.
It didn’t take long to sort out her belongings. He would put most of it out for the bin men, a couple of items could go to the Salvation Army. No treasure, but nothing unsavoury either. The day had been a success all things considered. Mr Bartlett walked to the window and lit a cigarette. On the bomb-cracked tarmac stood a woman, well dressed, in a dark suit. She was so beautiful she stood out like a bunch of red roses laid on a sombre tomb.
Later he did not feel so foolish for having been so afraid of her.
He returned to an empty house; both his wife and son were holidaying in the Lake District. Their absence was never more notable than that night. When he turned on the light in the hallway, it took him a while to notice it, first removing his overcoat and stowing his umbrella. It wasn’t until he bent down to untie his laces that he noticed that the telephone socket had been ripped out from the wall.
There were no signs of forced entry. It was a Thursday, so the cleaner had probably damaged it when she went to clean behind the console. And yet, he couldn’t help the feeling he was being watched. No sleep was to be had that night. It was natural to be on edge, he told himself, and the thoughts of what terrible brutality had occurred to his Aunt lingered in his mind for long after.
She’s waiting, but Jerry’s never on time. The station is filled with the breath of everyone around her. She sits, knees pulled to chest, the weight of darkness pushing down on her. Two hellish months of this. Adrenaline has been replaced with despair. At least tonight she’s found a spot on platform, thank God, for when she has to lie on the tracks, she cannot help but imagine being crushed by a train. Sleep doesn’t exist down here, only the blur between dreaming and consciousness.
She stares down the length of the tunnel. This is the kind of darkness that can only be found underground. It is unnatural. Evil. And the longer she stares, the firmer its shape becomes. And the more she sees, the swifter the grinning darkness transforms black into vermillion and gold. It inches its way toward her and crawls into her belly. A flower of fire unfurls deep inside her, in that barren place where she believed nothing could seed. Not a birth but rather a rebirth, like straw stubble burning to make way for regrowth.
In the gloom, she begins to see light and colour as she has never experienced it before. It is ecstasy. And, with a gasp, she senses that the eye has opened.
