The Witches of Whitechapel

Chapter 2: Now

Chapter 2: NowThe end of the world, or so it seemed to Ralph, started with a phone call no child should ever have to make to their parent, adopted or otherwise: “I don’t feel safe.”

It didn’t need more to make him dismiss everything else, even the man he had fallen in love with, and jump out of bed and into his car. Fortunately, the streets of London were deserted at five o’clock in the morning. The odd sleep-deprived zombie crossed his path on their way back from whatever pub they’d drunk the night away in. One or two commuters on their way to an early start at work zoomed by. There was a lunatic on a soap box under a streetlight preaching to the alley cats about something or other. Whitechapel was becoming stranger by the day, Ralph mused absentmindedly.

When he pulled into the narrow driveway in front of his house, he noticed with alarm that all the lights were out. Not a flicker, not a shadow behind the windows. Even the streetlight in front of it had faded, which Ralph didn’t for one second think to be a coincidence. His daughter was hiding in darkness from the evil she felt; or maybe the darkness had got to her and was keeping her prisoner.

He rammed the key into the lock of the front door and pushed it open impatiently. No answer came when he called out. He tried the light switch and was relieved to see the lamp come on above his head without delay.

She didn’t reply to his shouts. He took the stairs three at a time. On the phone she had said she was in a protective circle, whatever that meant. Ralph thought that maybe she was starting to build circles out of furniture as well, just as Simon had started minutes before Ralph had left him. But when he entered her bedroom and switched on the light, he found his daughter curled up on the floor inside some sort of chalk ring that was lined with strange symbols. She wasn’t moving. Her face was turned towards the door, eyes closed, knees drawn up in a fetal position. The room, the whole house, was terrifyingly quiet. Whatever Saoirse had heard before seemed to be gone.

Ralph laid his fingers on her neck to check for a pulse but didn’t need to—she opened her eyes and looked straight at him. They were red-rimmed and glassy, but focused. She didn’t say anything.

“Saoirse,” he began. The hand that was already outstretched to check for her pulse now cupped her face. He stroked her cheek with his thumb. The skin was flushed and hot. He ran his fingers through her hair. He didn’t know what to say. He was too relieved and at the same time too scared to think of something as mundane as words.

Shakily Saoirse pushed herself off the floor.

“I feel sick,” she breathed.

He helped her into the bathroom.

* * * *

Brewing tea in the kitchen helped to calm Ralph down. Which was preposterous, he thought to himself, it wasn’t he who had just been sick three times after having been visited by whatever evil spirits lurked in this city. But somehow he felt he would be able to cope better with the whole situation, if it had been him. At least then he’d know what he was dealing with. But watching Saoirse become more susceptible to these things over the years without knowing how to help her was a lot worse.

She had always been perceptive of the supernatural, and she always spoke about it quite matter-of-factly. She seemed to walk between the worlds with ease, like a cat on a leisurely stroll through back alleys; innocent and unaware of any danger.

He poured the boiling water over the herbs Saoirse had instructed him to use. He had wrapped her up in a blanket and laid her down on the sofa, then left her to it while he prepared the brew. It didn’t look as if she had moved at all when he returned to her side, tea cups on a tray. Bundled up in the blanket, her hair a mess around her head, she looked ten years old.

“How are you feeling?” he asked as he put the tray down.

“Better,” she replied.

“Feel like telling me what happened?”

Saoirse carefully disentangled her upper torso from the blanket to sit up and take the cup he offered her. Ralph sank into the recliner. He put his feet on the little footstool and watched her take a sip. The warm brew brought some colour back to her cheeks almost immediately.

“It’s faded a bit now,” she confessed. “I remember feeling frightened. The knocking was so close. So loud. I think I visited a place.” She corrected herself immediately, “I know I visited a place. I’m just not sure what it was. It’s where the demons live in the other realm. I can’t describe what I saw, I don’t remember any images, just feelings. Being scared. And lost. And helpless. And alone. And something else—like something was waking up.” Much to Ralph’s discomfort she added, “Or someone.”

For some reason he remembered what the dispatcher had said on the phone not an hour ago. A decapitated corpse in a pub’s toilet and the words Hail the Demon King in blood on the wall.

The two of them drank in silence. Ralph knew he had to show up at work soon. Simon must be waiting.

Saoirse refilled her cup. She said, “I’m sorry I called you at Simon’s. Is he all right?”

“Well,” Ralph began, unsure as to where to start. He hadn’t told her what had happened between him and Simon, but then again, she probably had that figured out by now.

“When I left him, he was building a circle out of furniture in his living room.”

He had intended to make her smile and wasn’t disappointed.

“You’re gonna have your hands full with him,” she said with affection in her voice.

Ralph quite liked the mental image of that.

* * * *

The Red Herring—Hook, Line, and Sinker sat snugly between an off license and a Barclays branch on Sidney Street. It faced, if any of its customers fancied a view of nature before they inevitably entered their preferred state of inebriation, a long strip of green that belonged to a row of apartment buildings across the street. The pub boasted long opening hours, or so the sign on the door told Simon: “week night’s eleven to eleven, weekend noon to midnight.” A tripod blackboard that leaned, apparently broken, against the side of the entry door announced: “quiz night every First Sunday.” The same hand had penned a third announcement that was taped against the window from the inside. A plain, yellowed sheet of paper informed the casual passer-by: “ripper tour’s meet in Courtyard.” Not only had the author of these notes abandoned all rules of capitalization but also of apostrophes.

Curious, Simon took the time to step through the narrow passage between the off license building and the pub and into the aforementioned courtyard. Even though the passageway was as narrow as could be, two cars were parked in the back with room for two more. A random assortment of plastic chairs and tables suggested the pub offered a smokers’ section outside for customers, at least when it was dry—there was no canopy or shelter from rain. There were, however, no additional lights switched on, so a further investigation seemed futile at this point. Simon made a mental note to come back here during daylight, then went round the alleyway again to the main entrance.

The door to the pub was guarded by a uniformed police woman. Taking her job seriously, of which Simon approved, she studied the DI’s warrant card thoroughly before she stepped aside to let him through. Simon made a beeline for the bar, for behind it stood what he supposed to be the proprietor of this business: the man who had found the body. Tall, but shorter than Simon, he emitted a subtle cloud of sweat and indifference. The bar was unprofessionally cleaned and buffed. Simon counted three complete beer stain circles and twelve incomplete ones. Most of them looked like they had been there for so long they had become part of the pattern. Others still looked sticky. Simon avoided touching anything, including the proprietor. His warrant card he showed the man from a safe distance to ensure it wouldn’t get snatched out of his hand by inquisitive, unclean fingers.

“How come nobody found the body before you closed the bar?” Simon asked. He was in no rush to go into the gents to see said body. Anyway, the coroner was in there now, and Simon dreaded being cooped up in a small space with other people—living or dead.

The proprietor, who had introduced himself as Conolly, put his fleshy fingers into the pockets of his jeans and licked his lips. “Stall was locked from the inside, wasn’t it. I knocked on the door at first. Opened it up from the outside—wouldn’t be the first time someone’s passed out in there or fell asleep. Didn’t think anything of it ‘till I opened the door and saw the mess. Called you lot right away. Didn’t touch anything afterwards—it’s all in there the way I found it. Know you’re keen on fingerprints and such.”

Simon thanked him. Had there been many customers last night, he inquired. Conolly seemed to think about that for a long time. He seemed to be the kind of person who didn’t usually think on things and thus was unaccustomed to the activity. Simon imagined the wheels in his brain—greasy and covered in a sticky film of dust—creaking as they began to turn. Eventually the man shook his head. “Nah. Wouldn’t say so. Usual lot. There was a hen night celebration, but they didn’t seem very hen-y.” (Conolly laughed briefly, but Simon didn’t get the joke.) “And of course them from the BandB ‘round the corner.”

The term ‘usual lot’ meant nothing to Simon. Being one who didn’t frequent public houses, his vague idea of how ‘the usual lot’ on a Wednesday night might look like was formed by TV and movies: rough looking hooligans, tarts, and husbands who didn’t want to go home. But on prompting Conolly to elaborate he got a surprising, “You know, students mostly.”

“Is it common for students to go to pubs on weeknights?” Simon asked DC Kate Pollard on her arrival not ten minutes later. They were putting on the plastic gloves, and Simon thought he should have done so earlier, before his fingers had started to feel itchy from the mere presence of grime. But he also knew that if he ventured down that particular rabbit hole, he’d end up wearing gloves 24/7 soon enough. That was something insane people did, and Simon did not want to think of himself as insane.

Pollard, stout, bright eyed, and with a Mediterranean temper, snapped the elastic rubber around her wrist. “I guess so,” she replied.

“I thought students were perpetually short of money.”

She looked at him. “Were you?”

“No,” he admitted. But then again, Simon’s late family had not only left him their accumulated wealth but also a good handful of rich and influential friends. Simon had never experienced any deprivations, neither as a student nor after.

“Have you already been in there, boss?” she wanted to know before entering the crime scene.

His reply sounded sheepish even to himself, something about questioning the proprietor first and checking out the area, when in fact he had simply postponed going into the toilet for as long as possible. He feared she might see through that flimsy excuse, but if she did, she let it slide gracefully.

The room was filthy, just as Simon had feared. He could feel the grease in the air around them, touching his skin, taunting him. He felt his face screw up in a grimace of disgust but managed to control himself after a few seconds. The mirrors on the right hand side were covered in a thin film of dust. The two sinks below looked superficially clean but a ring of dark stains around the drain gave evidence of mould. One pissoir in the corner looked sadly abused and neglected, and covered in something that Simon did not want to study up-close. He felt his throat closing and his oesophagus clenching. His eyes scanned the room for something inoffensive to repose upon, but only the three doors to the stalls presented themselves; heavily embellished with witticisms and lecherous one-liners though they were. A man clad in the white overall that was standard issue for the crime scene unit emerged from the middle stall just then. He was clasping a camera and nodded to the two detectives by way of a greeting.

“All yours,” he mumbled behind a face mask and exited hurriedly.

Simon wasn’t sure what he had expected, but surely not the body of a man in corduroy trousers and a knitted sweater sitting wide-legged on the loo as if he were taking a brief rest, hands neatly folded in his lap. The sweater was drenched in blood, and there was a fair amount of red that had sprayed onto the walls of the stall. Simon noticed that the hands were wrinkled and showed liver spots. An old man, Simon wondered; he mustn’t have put up a big fight, then; the body looked unfit from age.

“You want to close the door from the inside and look at it,” came Doctor Jones’ voice from behind. Simon motioned for Pollard to step outside; the stall was definitely too small for two people. It was cramped and stuffy as it was with the headless man sitting on the toilet already. On the inside of the door, written in what looked like blood from the victim, the words Hail the Demon King had been smeared over the usual obscenities. The lack of proper usage of capitalization irritated Simon ever so briefly. Why not use all caps and be done with it? The killer must have locked themselves in with their victim and then taken the time to dip their fingers in the blood—it had probably still been warm then—and write. That, in turn, meant that the toilets must have been deserted or blocked in some way so that nobody could come in for at least a few minutes. From behind him, Simon heard unintelligible whispering. It registered almost as a hissing in his brain, and when it did, he also registered with some delay that there was nothing behind him except the outer wall of the public house. And the corpse.

Simon carefully turned around, hyper-aware of the blood all around him and the dirt, the ever-present grime of a pub toilet. He was aware that he gave a hysterical little moan. He simply couldn’t suppress it, because for a fraction of a second, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw movement—thought he saw movement, anyway—like something scuttling away. And then he noticed that the blood around the toilet had not randomly sprayed at all and it hadn’t simply dripped or even gushed down either but had been daubed into a circle that went around the toilet. Simon felt his fingers tremble with the urge to dip them into the blood and add more circles around it, add to the madness, complete the picture, even if he didn’t know what that meant. Quickly, frenetically, he pried open the door again—did it seem harder to open it than to close it because someone held it in place on the other side?—and stepped away from the nightmare. He realized his face must show signs of distress, because Pollard moved towards him impulsively ere she stopped herself, probably remembering in time that he disliked being touched.

“That bad, huh?” she asked.

Simon didn’t nod, nor did he shake his head. He turned to Doctor Jones and told her to check the circle on the floor for fingerprints. As an afterthought he added, “Please check whether the blood on the floor is the victim’s.”

Something hadn’t looked right about the red circle around the toilet, but Simon couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Perhaps the lab would have an answer—or perhaps it was nothing.