It began just as it was ending, one autumn morning in the year 1888. There had been another murder in Whitechapel, the fourth so far. I knew it even before I read of it, because the paper boy in the streets kept shouting the news.
Knowing that my friend Holmes had been consulted on the case, I stopped by his rooms on Baker Street to see how the investigation was progressing. I was not greatly surprised to find him absent. Assuming that he had gone to the morgue to inspect the corpse, I made myself at home with a cup of tea and a copy of Coleridge. The Ancient Mariner took my mind from the morning's news. Though as I write this, it occurs to me to wonder did I pick this book by accident or had I some premonition that soon fate would hand me a burden as heavy as the mariner' albatross, a weight which could only be lifted from my shoulders by the act of telling a tale? Poor Mariner, trapped alone on a wide sea with no one to listen. Poor Watson, trapped alone in a city full of people and no one to tell.
But I digress. Though this story will not see the light of day again until the year 1999, I must do my duty as a scribe. I was reading the familiar lines, when I noticed a damp patch on the floor beside my feet. Thinking that I had spilled my tea, I took my handkerchief from my pocket and leaned forward to wipe up the stain before it could reach the carpet. Imagine my surprise and concern when the white linen turned dark crimson. Being a surgeon, I recognized blood by its color and its distinctive smell. It was not fresh but not old either. Had my friend been recently injured? Had he cut himself during one of his experiments? I knelt on the floor and peered beneath my chair. There, half hidden in the shadows, I spied a leather satchel which I removed and opened.
The smell of rust filled the room, giving me some hint of the bag's grisly contents, but this foreshadowing was nothing compared to my horror when I reached into the leather sack and withdrew a knife, coated with sticky blood, its handle also stained with spots of older, long dried blood. Beneath the knife was a scarf that seemed familiar, though the last time I saw it, the wool was grey not shiny black and matted with blood. Beneath the scarf lay a pair of blood soaked gloves I knew well, for I myself had given them to my friend, Sherlock Holmes.
If it were just the knife I could have reasoned with myself "He has solved the case. He has found the fiend and confiscated his weapon." But how could I explain the blood soaked scarf and gloves? Terrible thoughts filled my head. He had caught the murderer in the act and had been horribly wounded as he attempted to save the latest victim. Even now, he might be lying in a surgery somewhere in London, too weak from loss to blood to tell his name or to ask for me, his friend.
But there was a problem with this theory. How did the knife, scarf and gloves come to be in his apartment? A man who has been mortally wounded does not return to his own home to conceal the weapon before seeking the care of a surgeon. Unless the hurt seemed minor at first.
Readers of the future, I am ashamed to admit that another theory occured to me. As my dear friend Sherlock Holmes is so fond of saying, a detective must consider all possibilities. Were this any other man, the most likely explanation for the leather satchel and its grisly contents would be that he was the murderer and he had hidden the incriminating items in his room and was planning to dispose of them at a later time.
Treacherous thoughts, yes, but once they seized hold of me, they would not let me go. I recalled my friend's disdain for women and the way his mood would turn suddenly from mania to despair when he was in the depths of one of his cocaine binges. I recalled that he was fond of dressing in beggar's garb and prowling the streets of London at night, and for the first time in our acquaintance it occurred to wonder what exactly he did in the back alleys of our city.
But then another, less sinister explanation occurred to me. My friend, Sherlock Holmes might have had another visitor this morning, an agent of his nemesis Professor Moriarity. What if the scarf and gloves had been stolen by the murderer and used in the commission of the vile act so that blame would be cast upon the scourge of criminals? The murderer or an accomplis would then have waited for Holmes to leave his rooms and would have crept inside where the evidence could be placed so as to seem hidden. The bag would have been found by his cleaning woman who would have raised an alarm. Even if the police decided to discount the evidence, Sherlock Holmes' name would have been sullied.
Of all the possibilities, this third seemed most likely. And in this case, Holmes was doubtless unaware of the leather satchel or its contents, for if he had discovered them already he would be hard at work studying them for clues.
How could I tell for certain which scenerio was true? I would watch my friend closely. If he had no knowledge of the bag or its contents, then he was innocent. If he knew what the bag contained then I...
My grim reverie was broken by the sound of footsteps in the hall. Hurriedly, I closed the leather satchel and thrust it back beneath the chair just moments before the door opened and Holmes appeared. He looked so much like his usual self that I felt relief wash over me.
"Watson!" he cried. "I was at your house looking for you , and your wife told me that you had come here to see me." He threw himself down on the sofa. Gazing at the ceiling, his eyes focused on some distant, imaginary point he said "I have an most extraordinary story to tell you."
"Indeed. Do tell."
"It is about the Whitechapel murders."
Readers of 1999, try to imagine what it must feel like to have one's blood turn to ice in one's veins. That was what I felt at that moment. My eyes were drawn to his hands. Did those long, tapered fingers commit murder, I wondered? Surely there would be some sign. A murderer's hands could not look like an ordinary man's hands. Nor could a murderer's face be so innocent as my friend's was at that moment. He appeared tired, but there was no sign of guilt, worry or anger on his countenance. About his grey eyes there was a slight sadness, as if he had seen something that troubled him, but his were not the eyes of a murderer.
Sternly, I reminded myself that I had encountered many murderers and few of them bore any physical signs of their guilt.
He turned his gaze from the ceiling towards me. "I see you have looked under the chair," he remarked drily. I almost fainted from shock. "What do you make of the evidence? Am I a heartless murderer? Or a fanatical moral reformer bent on cleansing the streets of London? Or, to quote my associates on the street is it 'a frame up'?"
My face must have registered my horror, because he changed his tone. Lightly he said "Let this be a lesson to you, Watson. You should learn from Pandora. Never open a box--or a bag--unless you are prepared for what you may find inside. Fortunately for you, what you have found does not mean what you think that it means."
He stood up and began pacing back and forth across the room. I admit that I was nervous. Though he is not a large man, he is strong, and insanity can give a man superhuman strength.
It had to be a malady of the mind, I reasoned. Sherlock Holmes was neither a heartless murderer nor a fanatical moral reformer. Perhaps it was the cocaine. I had seen men experience fits of passion while under its effects. Or maybe he had acquired a taste for some more exotic and dangerous hallucinogen.
"You might as well stop imagining the worst and let me tell you the whole story." Holmes sat down at his desk. His chair was little more than a foot from mine. His eyes were on the satchel. He made a slight forward motion as if to reach for it but paused when his eyes caught mine. "Watson, please, I promise not to murder you. Why would anyone want to murder the man who has made him immortal?" He reached into a drawer of the desk and removed a pistol. Again, my blood froze, but he merely handed the weapon to me. "Here. Point this at me. If I start foaming at the mouth or make threatening gestures towards you, you have my permission to shoot me." He leaned back in his chair. Folding his arms, he asked "May I now begin my story?"
I am ashamed to admit that I actually checked to see if the pistol was loaded. But I had the decency to point the barrel at the ceiling rather than at my friend.
"My dear Watson, I am not the Whitechapel murderer," he told me solemnly. "If anyone deserves that title it is Marie Kelly."
"Marie Kelley?" I interrupted. "But that is the same name as the latest victim."
"Not just the same name, the same woman."
Our conversation was becoming increasingly strange though his demeanor seemed normal. "But Holmes, even if a woman were capable of such horrors, how could she commit such acts upon her own body?"
He shook his head as he so often did when I said something dense. "She could not. That is why my gloves and scarf are soaked in her blood. I am responsible for the grisly scene which the police discovered."
Foolishly, I had hoped that he would provide some explanation that would relieve me of my awful suspicions, but this was as good as a confession. "So you admit it? You killed her?"
"No," he corrected impatiently. "She was already dead. I can see that you are not going to solve this case for yourself, so I will tell you.
"The police consulted me after the second poor woman was found. Unfortunately, by the time I was called in, the coroner had already mangled the body and the police had destroyed the evidence as they always do, and I was left with few clues to follow. But I left specific instructions that if the killer struck again I was to be summoned immediately, and when the third corpse was found, I had a chance to examine both the murder scene and the body.
"It took me no time at all to determine that the victim had died before the first knife cut and that her body had been dragged to the location where it was found prior to the time the first wound was inflicted. The coroner scoffed at my findings." His expression made it clear what he thought of the coroner and his methods. "No doubt the first two 'victims' also died of natural causes before they were butchered. But by that time the bodies were too decomposed for a second autopsy to be of any use.
"Fortunately, once I knew that this was no simple case of serial murder, the few clues which were available to me fell into place, and I found Marie Kelly. I was with her the night she died--please, my dear Watson. If you judge me before you hear all the facts you will despise yourself later for doubting me."
His tone was so sincere that I began to wonder if it was possible that he was telling the truth, and he was not, in fact, a murderer. But I kept a firm grip on the pistol all the same.
Restlessly, he rose and began to pace back and forth across the room, his movements cat-like in their grace. Or rather, he moved like a panther which had decided for the moment that it would pretend to be civilized, but which, at the slightest provocation, might revert to its wild ways.
"Marie Kelly was close to death when I found her in her tiny room in Whitechapel. Had I come the next day, I never would have learned her story. And it is an amazing tale." He turned to me. "Watson, I must have your promise before I tell this story. Marie Kelly confided in me on the condition that I keep her confession a secret for not less than one hundred eleven years. She was very specific about the time. I will require the same assurance from you before I can proceed."
"Holmes, you can not expect me to keep quiet---"
He held up his hand to silence me. "I will prove to you beyond any doubt that no deaths of this sort will occur in Whitechapel again and that the poor women who live there have nothing to fear except the poverty, disease and indifference which society has inflicted upon them. But first, will you give me your word?"
Reluctantly, I agreed. Though a part of me feared that I was bargaining with the devil, I had to hear the story.
"It began, she told me, when her friend Polly lay dying. I will try to quote her exact words. 'Me friend were ill and it were clear that nothing could be done for her. I sat beside her, wiping her brow with a damp towel, talking to her about this and that. To ease her mind a bit. For a while she were delirious with fever, but then all of a sudden like, at the end she opens her eyes wide and says "Marie, don't let them throw me in a pauper's grave. Don't let them forget my name, Marie. Don't let them forget." And with these words she died.'"
Strange how the voice that came from my friend's throat had changed. He was now a woman of the lower classes, telling a tale of sorrow and dark despair.
"'I sat with her a bit, thinking about how there was no money to bury her and about how she would be thrown in a pauper's grave and forgotten. No one cared about one whore more or less. Every day we died of fever or consumption and the world paid us no mind. It was as if we had never lived. As if our feet had never walked the earth and the air never moved in and out of our lungs. There was sickness and sadness and poverty all around, but no one saw it for the evil it was. Aye, evil. And that was when I was seized by the notion. I picked up a knife and butchered my friend Polly. I cut her dead body to pieces so that they would not forget her. I cut her so that they would have to say to themselves "This was a woman. Her death was an evil thing."'
"'Afterwards, I vomited. But it was just as I planned it. Polly, whose death from fever would never have been noticed, became famous So, when me friend Annie went, I did the same for her. And for Lizzie. I sat beside them, giving them comfort in their last hours of life and then I made their deaths count for something. I made the world mourn them.'
Holmes' voice resumed its normal pitch. "Watson, if you could have seen her. If you could have heard her voice. Even weakened from her illness and burning with fever, she spoke with conviction. 'And now my time has come and I will be thrown in potter's field and and no one will care that I lived and no one will understand the evil that killed me---'" Abruptly, he stopped pacing and turned to me. His eyes were bright, his face flushed. "Watson, if you could have seen and heard her, you would have done as I did.
"Her last words were a request. 'Please, Mr. Holmes, do for me as I did for them. And keep my secret the way you promised. I want them to know the horror. I want them to understand it in the only way they can.' And then she breathed her last and closed her eyes. And when I was sure that her heart would not start beating again, I did as she had requested." With a sigh, he lay down on the sofa and folded his arms across his face.
I knew my friend too well to doubt him. Every word was true. "But Holmes, you can not mean to keep the bargain you made with that woman--"
"Marie Kelly," he interrupted irritably. "She has a name. And yes, I do intend to keep it. Just as I intend that you will keep the bargain you made with me."
"But think of the panic. All those poor women who are afraid to go to sleep at night for fear that someone will cut their throats?"
He shook his head impatiently. "Would anyone care about 'the poor women' if it were not for tales of the Whitechapel murderer? Marie Kelly was correct. When her kind died of consumption, no one spared them a moment's thought. And there are worse things on the streets of London than a stranger with a knife."
Still, I could not reconcile myself to silence. "What if some deranged man hears the tale of the Whitechapel 'murders' and decides to copy them? Innocent blood will be on our hands."
He laughed "Watson, you know human nature better than that. Does a boulder roll down a hill because it sees another boulder roll down the hill? No, it rolls down the hill because that is its nature. The nature of a killer is forged young. If you search the killer's past you will find the roots of his crime in his childhood or sometimes in the childhood of his parents. Murderers do not choose to be what they are. They are created by this world. Just as Marie Kelly was created by this world." He leapt to his feet. His expression was fierce. "The world made her and then it said to her 'You are are imperfect. We will deny you. We will forget you.' But Marie Kelly would not be forgotten. No, Watson, you will tell no one what I have told you. And if you break your promise, I will show this bloody knife to the police, and I will confess myself the Whitechapel killer."
"They will never believe you capable of it."
He laughed at this. "Why not? You thought me capable of it. And people of lesser intellect fear genius. They think it but one step from madness which leads to chaos and from chaos to evil. Admit it, Watson, were I to confess to the crimes, the public would have no difficulty believing me."
As always, he was correct, and so, reluctantly I agreed to abide by the terms of our agreement. But he did allow me to write this account of our conversation, with the provision that I would seal the document and place it with my attorney along with strict instructions that it was not to be opened and read until the year 1999. And since he is my friend, I will do as he asks and trust in his good judgement and hope that no harm comes of this. But I worry that Marie Kelly's plan will fail, and that one day it will be the "murderer" that people remember and not the "victims." For I know human nature, and it is human nature to try to give a name and a face to evil while we ignore the evil within ourselves.
Poor woman. I am glad that someone was there with her at the end. And I know that she will be long remembered by at least one man, my friend Sherlock Holmes.
McCamy writes speculative fiction with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Besides Aphelion, she has published stories in Dragon's Lair and Little Read Writer's Hood.
E-mail: taylorjh@nationwide.net
URL: http://www.nationwide.net/~taylorjh/
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