Dead Leprechauns & Devil Cats E-Book

Grady Hendrix

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

New York Times-bestselling author, Grady Hendrix (How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group), savagely satirizes Victorian adventure fiction in this steampunk smackdown full of decapitated heads that sing, Tong wars, bacon sex, German holiday demons, and the Potato Homunculus! Some of the most popular stories ever released on audio fiction platform Pseudopod, the White Street Society tells the tales of a band of 19th century gentleman adventurers who investigate the supernatural, often with violence, sometimes with science. Sending up 19th century fears about women, Germans, the Irish, Chinatown, Southerners, politicians, and anyone who wasn't the "right" kind of person (read: male and white), this collection of cases contains shocking details that are sure to tighten the corsets and spin the mustaches of all gentle readers. Animals and pregnant women are advised to KEEP AWAY from "The Hairy Ghost!", "The Corpse Army of Khartoum!", "The Yellow Peril!", and "The Christmas Spirits!" as well as the shocking new story premiering∂ in this collection, "The President Who Would Not Die!" For those bold readers who desire a strong blast of nonsense, allow us to introduce you to the supernatural wonders that these bold men of the 19th century were compelled to shoot, poison, burn, and beat to death with shovels, all in the name of PROGRESS!

Leseprobe

Dead Leprechauns and Devil Cats:Strange Tales from the White Street Society

Copyright © 2012 by Grady Hendrix

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

A previous eBook edition was published in 2012 by Grady Hendrix.

Cover design by Doogie Horner.

ISBN 978-1-625675-25-5

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Includes lines from "And did those feet in ancient time" by William Blake, from the preface to his epic Milton: A Poem In Two Books, 1808.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

The Hairy Ghost

The Corpse Army of Khartoum

The Yellow Curse

The Christmas Spirits

President Who Would Not Die

Story Notes

Also by Grady Hendrix

To Amanda —

It turns out

that you did not

weigh the same as a feather

when thrown from a great height.

My saddest day —

yet what a victory for science.

Introduction

Louis Agassiz was one of the greatest scientific minds of the nineteenth century. This Swiss biologist founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, headed Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, and essentially founded the field of glaciology. When nineteenth century Americans said “science” they pictured Agassiz. Harvard named buildings after him, thousands attended his public lectures, women swooned when he kissed their hands.

He also loved to measure skulls. He measured so many skulls that he decided Black people and white people could not possibly be descended from a common ancestor. Clearly, they were two different species and, to his mind, science had proven that the Black species was inferior. As he wrote, “Social equality is a natural impossibility flowing from the very character of the Negro race. The brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven month’s infant in the womb of a white.”

Louis Agassiz was an asshole, and many scientists of the time thought so, too. But today he is mostly remembered as a Great Man of Science, and so he perfectly embodies both the genius and the stupidity of the nineteenth century, a century that gave us the theory of evolution, the birth of modern psychology, railroads, the telegraph, the first vaccines, and the end of slavery. It also gave us the belief that you could determine human character from the size of someone's skull, a glut of pseudoscientific theories about race, and the belief that a pregnant woman startled by an elephant would give birth to an Elephant Man. Bad nineteenth century science either resulted in or was used to justify grotesque colonial misadventures, the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people, and an opioid epidemic that turned 315,000 Americans into addicts.

Writers love waxing poetic about the heroes of the nineteenth century but ignore the horrors. We love our Queen Victoria, our Freud, Darwin, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln. We try to ignore King Leopold II (Belgian king who turned the Congo into a labor camp and murdered half its population), Horace F. Page (Californian Representative who introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act in Congress), President James Buchanan (who got America into the Civil War), and President Andrew Johnson (who screwed up Reconstruction afterwards). As a result, we continually paint half the picture.

I started writing the White Street Society stories in 2001 because the history I saw in fiction didn’t look like the history I’d learned in university. I’m a nut for the nineteenth century, but at the time I saw it depicted as a Spielbergian Hall of Nobility full of swelling strings and shafts of golden sunlight, a gallery of wise Founding Fathers whose wisdom continued to inform our present day. Both versions stuck in my craw.

It made me gag.

Our whitewashed history presented these Great (white) Men in carefully edited versions that preserved their nobility but elided their attitudes toward child labor, racial difference, inflicting violence, and destroying the environment that would be absolutely unpardonable to modern readers. It’s an uncomfortable fact that angels and devils often resided in the same nineteenth century skin. Abraham Lincoln’s belief in the idea that citizenship transcended skin color, Theodore Roosevelt’s commitment to environmentalism, and Susan B. Anthony’s ceaseless struggle for women to be treated as human beings cannot be denied as anything less than inspirational. At the same time, let’s not pretend that Lincoln didn’t personally order carnage on a scale that would horrify most modern minds, that Roosevelt wasn’t an unapologetic imperialist, and that Anthony didn’t advocate hideous views about the humanity of Black men.

The White Street Society stories are my tiny attempt to inject the violence, stupidity, and general horror of that era back into genre fiction in order to re-weird it. To remind readers that history is dangerous, that we share a common humanity only after a long struggle, and that every hero stands on a pedestal made of corpses. Worshipping the past is dumb, and I wanted to make our past so ridiculous that no one could ever take its Great Men and Grand Ideas seriously again.

These stories were also a hell of a lot of fun to write. Stupid characters, pointless violence, and grotesque set pieces are some of my favorite things to put on paper, so there’s a lot of catharsis that comes from writing about stupid people doing terribly stupid things for completely stupid reasons that barely even made sense at the time.

“The Hairy Ghost,” “The Corpse Army of Khartoum,” and “The Christmas Spirits” were all recorded by Pseudopod in excellent versions, with narrators whose throats are made of hammered gold, and you can find them online for free. At the end of this book, there’s also a section featuring historical notes on each story so you can read the weirder, harsher, even more violent real-life incidents that sparked these stories. They appear in the order in which they were written, not according to any internal chronology, and the first White Street Society story was “The Hairy Ghost” written between March 2001 and October 2002, so they started in a pre-9/11 world. The most recent of these, “The President Who Would Not Die,” was written in one feverish week right before the 2020 election. I’ll keep writing new stories whenever frustration and general despair make me want to scream, and they’ll update automatically to people who buy this ebook.

I hope these stories make you laugh, I hope reading them out loud becomes part of your holiday tradition, and I hope they remind you that our heroes are often our monsters, too. History is fun to read about, but worshipping the past is a game for fools.

The Hairy Ghost

We arrived at the White Street clubhouse at a quarter after eight and were led into the dining room by the inscrutable Charles, who promptly whisked our topcoats away into the mysterious bowels of that great brownstone. Our host, Augustus Mortimer, welcomed the three of us and we dined well on the club's excellent fare, none of us mentioning the nervous excitement we felt at being summoned, once more, to convene this meeting of the White Street Society.

After dinner, we retired to the murky clubroom where Lewis stoked the fire into a crackling blaze while Mortimer distributed Russian cigars. Drake, his whiskers trembling with exertion, applied himself to the cork of a dusty bottle of excellent brandy and then passed around snifters of the amber liquid as we settled into our accustomed places. Mortimer raised his snifter and solemnly intoned:

“Spirits for spirits,” and we simultaneously raised our glasses and drained them. The bottle was passed again as Mortimer addressed us.

“You will be surprised to learn that my absence of the past several weeks did not take me to sunny Spain, underdeveloped Mexico, nor balmy Italy. Instead, I have been, gentlemen, in Cow Bay, that epicenter of filth in lower New York.”

“Whyever for?” Drake cried, expressing the astonishment we all felt.

“Wherever the veil of our world is drawn back and glimpses of that other, uneasy shore are revealed. Wherever spirits haunt the steps of man, where time runs backwards, and dogs mutter, wherever the weird and mysterious bedevil our material plane, there shall you find I, bedeviling right back. And, for reasons incomprehensible to the sane and hygienic, this time the veil was drawn back in...the ghetto.”

We all shivered.

“I have never encountered a case as blood-chilling as this one. Never have I, except perhaps once in Majorca, had my sensibilities so affronted as in a sodden tenement on Little Water Street. There, in the filthiest conditions imaginable, I confronted the worst case of the supernatural run amuck that I have ever had the misfortune to witness.”

“Worse than the Infant Aerialist?” asked Lewis, precipitating a chill to pass around the room at the mere mention of that silent marauder.

“Worse, my old friend.”

“Worse than the Devil Cat?” I asked, my tongue stumbling over the hideous name of the demonic presence that had terrorized a buttery in Connecticut and almost cost Drake his life.

“Nothing is worse than the Devil Cat!” said Drake.

“My friends, it is a case worse than that of the Levitating Head of Al Arak, more insidious than the Humming Book, more demonic than even the Devil Cat, dear Drake. This, my friends, is the only time you shall hear told of the Hairy Ghost. And you are the more fortunate for it.”

We settled back into our chairs, hearts pounding, ears straining to catch every word as Augustus Mortimer recounted to us the following bizarre narrative.

“One morning, overtaken by hunger and fatigue, I abandoned a rather pointed letter to the Times and repaired to a nearby hotel for breakfast. There, my gaze happened to fall on a day-old newspaper. Imagine how upsetting it was for me to read on the front page an account of the self-murder of one Dr. Ebenezeus Hagedorn in a hideous establishment known as Weeping House in the slums of Cow Bay.

“Dr. Hagedorn and I had served one another, unofficially, as consultants on difficult diagnoses, usually through the post as he is the possessor of a singular personal odor: like that of a large, sweating cheese. Being Canadian, it is to be expected, but even after years of association, I was unable to acclimate myself to his unpleasant bouquet.

“The article described, in rather poor taste, the discovery of Dr. Hagedorn dangling lifeless from a noose in a cramped and fetid chamber, helpfully supplying me with the greasy abode's address. I intended to report it to the health authorities and encourage them to burn it to the ground and incarcerate its occupants in lunatic asylums and prison cells, when a tiny paragraph at the bottom of the column caught my eye: The doctor was found with a great quantity of paper currency upon his person, but otherwise he had no possessions save the clothes he wore on his back.

“Why should that alarm you, Mortimer?” Drake asked.

“Because nowhere does it mention his lucky lodestone.”

“Lucky lodestone!” ejaculated Lewis.

“Yes. Hagedorn never went anywhere without a tiny lodestone in his right front trouser pocket.”

“Could it be theft?” I asked.

“Why take the stone and leave the paper currency?” asked Drake.

“It could have fallen out,” I replied, trying to bring reason to this room.

“That is possible,” said Mortimer, “were it not for the fact that the lucky stamp nailed to the heel of his shoe was also not mentioned.”

“Worn off,” I said.

“And the tiny gypsy charm he carried attached to his watch fob?”

“But the watch itself was missing, according to your article.”

“Then what about the splinter of the true cross this fanatical papist wore beneath his shirt?”

“Perhaps he didn't put it on that day?”

“Or the vial of blessed water he carried in his waistcoat pocket?”

“Carried away by rats.”

“Then there is the tiny magnet he wore on a leathern string concealed beneath his copious beard. What of that, William?”

“That, I admit, is very strange. But might not all of this be the work of rodents or light-fingered police officers?”

“Perhaps my boundaries of the fantastic are not as broad as yours, my friend,” Mortimer said. “To me, a Dr. Hagedorn shorn of his numerous charms and talismans is a Dr. Hagedorn awry. And so, after finishing my breakfast — which was quite excellent, I might add — I took myself down to Cow Bay to demand answers to this mystery.”

“Was it...was it in the Five Points?” Drake asked, naming the very black, beating heart of corruption and poverty in New York.

“Not in the epicenter, my friend, but very nearby.”

“But how did you get there?” Drake asked.

“I tramped southwards, down Manhattan Island. Thriving gaudy neighborhoods gave way to blighted streets overseen by dead-eyed buildings and crammed with a species of animal that bore only a passing resemblance to humanity. Gangs of children, maddened by depravity and rum, bit and tore at one another. Human excrement rained from the sky, spilling from broken windows by the bucketful. Insensate women lay in doorways, their garments disheveled so as to reveal gruesome portions of their anatomy.

“I finally arrived at a tall, narrow structure like a vertical kennel, sagging between its two more robust neighbors. An obese, unconscious Irishwoman, sprawled on her back, blocking the front door. I looked about for someone who might grant me alternate access and settled on a pinch-faced hag running her hands through the filth beside the rickety wooden steps.

“‘Old hag, tell me—’ I began.

“‘Yew wanna see the death room? Cost yew a dime,’ she said.

“I was rather taken aback at this crude reception, but the loathsome creature misinterpreted it as an attempt to haggle.

“‘Six cents, then, an’ thas’ as low as I go.’

“Unsure of how to respond, I fished six pennies from my pocketbook and without a word she led me around to the side of the building, through a rough blanket tacked over a hole in the wall of Weeping House, and into its putrescent interior.

“The house was as black as pitch, its windows barricaded with dirty rags and broken boards, while all around me in the dark I dimly perceived sleeping bodies. The floor was be-slimed with filth, and with each step, it oozed up almost to my shoe mouth. Pale faces leered at me out of the dark as I passed. The rank smell of boiled cabbage oppressed my soul. We passed from room to room, each packed with pallid shapes moving suggestively in the darkness. I observed leaking buckets of filthy water over which harlots would raise their skirts and relieve themselves, and into which children would dip their tin drinking cups. The house was permeated with a sense that the collective dregs of humanity inhabited it and they were up to something vicious, secret, and disgusting in its shadows.

“After winding through these intestinal corridors for some time, we arrived at a door. The old witch brusquely pushed it open and stepped aside.

“‘I doan go in,’ she said by way of reply to my unspoken query.

“‘Madam, I thank—’ but before I had finished my courtesies, she was but a dim shape, scuttling away from me down the hallway and swallowed up by the darkness.

“I shook my head at the typical Irish rudeness of her manner, then stepped into the room, which was little more than a closet, illuminated by one broken and dreary window. The walls were covered with graffitoed crudities and childish attempts at anatomical diagrams. I even found a hole in the planking, beneath which was a rat's nest containing five blind ratlings, Hagedorn's lucky lodestone, and the leathern strap and magnet which he wore beneath his beard.”

“Ah-ha!” I said. “It was the rats!”

Mortimer dismissed me with a languid wave of his hand.

“I have no time for rats and talk of rats,” he said, and then continued.

“I looked around this forsaken room and wondered what on earth could have brought such a great, albeit odorous, man as Hagedorn to this pit of poverty. I must admit I was tempted to join a reform movement and burn this filthy hovel to the ground immediately if I could have ensured that cremation would not release harmful gases into the atmosphere.

“A creak of the floor caught my attention and I turned sharply, expecting to find my guide creeping up behind me with a jackblack in her hand and murder in her Irish eyes. Instead, I beheld a waif with a waxen pallor, protruding bones, and papery skin crawling through the doorway. Her furtive creeping was arrested when she saw me. Raising herself up to her full height, she fixed her watery eyes on me and said:

‘Harry don't like you.’

“I was about to strike her for her insolence when her face slackened and she swooned. I stepped forward to catch her, then noticed spittle running from her mouth, and stepped back just as quickly to avoid soiling my garments. Fortunately, she was very light and the fall did her no great damage. With an empty room at my back, an unconscious child at my feet, and no way of locating my guide or escaping from Weeping House, I was in a tight spot.

“After due consideration, I decided to make for the street. Unfortunately, the dim hallways proved to be more than my match and I found myself passing deeper and deeper into the filthy core of the blasted house. Ghoulish faces babbled, ‘Arby, arby rose,’ at me as I ran by, and I saw such scenes of depravity that I shudder to recall them even now.

“Finally, I heard distant voices raised in excitement, and I directed my steps towards them, eager not to lose this slightest spoor of humanity. It shames me to confess it now but I was not a little afraid that I would never again see daylight. When I rounded that final corner and saw a knot of broken-down inebriates gathered around a doorway, my heart raced as if confronted with the Heavenly Host itself. A cry of greeting on my lips, I stumbled towards this clump of subhuman excrescence who were mumbling to themselves and staring down at a fallen form. They turned as I approached them, and my relief crumbled into dismay as I recognized the fallen figure as the emaciated trollop who had assaulted me earlier. She had somewhat recovered and was in the doughy arms of my guide. Turning her baleful gaze upon me, she coughed up a sticky brown substance.

“‘Fret not,’ I said. ‘I’m a doctor.’

“‘She sez yew left her on the floar,’ snarled my decrepit Virgil.

“‘She is obviously hallucinating. She is a sick girl and belongs in a sanitarium.’

“‘She’s got fits, that's awl,’ the creature said.

“‘She seems well enough now. Tell me, Miss...’

“‘Miss Kathy,’ the girl said.

“‘Miss Kathy,’ I said, kneeling down in her general vicinity. ‘Tell these...people how you attacked me and fell to the floor on your own.’

The wizened crone who had brought me into this hellhole narrowed her eyes.

“‘She says yew left ’er on the floor. What kind of man be ye oo’d do sech a thing to an innercent child like ’er?’

“The crowd of derelicts mumbled assent from behind their yellowed falls of unkempt facial hair. I realized instantly that I must take charge of this situation or risk being trampled and sodomized.”

“Sodomized?!?” cried Drake.

“Yes, dear Drake, for it was immediately clear to me that this crowd was composed in no small part of sodomites. Their lack of energy, their sallow skin, their unkempt hair. The sure signs of sodomy were writ large upon their broken bodies.

“‘Look here, you old harridan,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full height. ‘I am a gentleman and a doctor and I am used to being addressed with the respect due my position. Now show me to the kitchen. We shall lay this hapless creature on the table, boil some water, and examine her. Then,’—and here I made my eyes flash menacingly—‘you shall answer some questions.’

“My speech had the exact opposite effect than I had intended. The woman cursed and formed her hands into claws, and the men shuffled forward en masse, many of them wielding boathooks and cudgels. I retreated until my back was pressed to the doorframe. The rabble continued their lethal advance, and so I shot one of them. Crying out, he fell backwards, and his fellows froze as one. They looked at their fallen comrade, then withdrew to a respectful distance. I could tell the attitude of the crowd had changed significantly.

“‘I am here to help you,’ I said.

“‘You shot Fergus,’ an unseen voice protested.

“‘Only in the shoulder; now carry this girl to the kitchen.’

“‘You’ll shoot us.’

“‘No, I won’t.’

“‘We’re going to call the coppers.’

“‘He’ll recover.’

“‘You still shot him.’

“At that point, the unfortunate Fergus awoke and bestirred himself, mumbling in his incoherent Irish brogue. A wave of relief passed through the crowd.

“‘You see; I told you he'd recover. When I leave this place, I shall take Franklin with me, and I shall employ him in my household as a coachman and he shall never want again. I so solemnly swear.’ The crowd was greatly moved by this fine promise. ‘Now bring the girl to the kitchen. I shall follow!’

“So, with the lack of efficiency that is the hallmark of their race, we made our way to the greasy, soot-blackened kitchen of this hellhole. The filthy animal who called herself Kathy was fully conscious by the time we laid her on the rough, splintery trestle that served as a kitchen table, and despite my instructions to the contrary, she attempted to rise.

“‘You there,’ I said to my guide.

“‘Mrs. O’Hanlon,’ she said.

“‘Yes, make this beast hold still,’ I said. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

“So saying, I tossed her a penny and she raised a wooden ladle and delivered Kathy a great rap on the head that dropped her flat upon the table. Flush with success, she rapped the unconscious Kathy on the head again, then raised her arm for another blow.

“‘That will do, Mrs. O’Hanlon. Now boil some water and remove these rogues from the room. I require utmost privacy for the acts I am about to perform.’

“‘I rapped ’er two times,’ said Mrs. O’Hanlon. ‘Yew owe me another penny.’

“‘Very well, you beast,’ and I threw the penny into the hall. The disgusting woman ran after it, fighting for it with her fellow tenants as wild pigs will do battle with one another over a small helpless child, giving me the opportunity to close the plank door and secure the baling-wire hook upon its latch. I pulled my leather work gloves from my coat and set to work.

“I shall spare all of you a description of the gruesome geography of this unfortunate mongrel’s body, but there were several points of interest: a strong, greasy smell of pork was upon her; her skin was unnaturally smooth and clean around her most animalistic regions; tiny bruises covered the majority of her thighs, both inside and out; and needle scratches were much about her neck, ankles, wrists, and stomach.

“Finished with my examination, I covered the girl and unlatched the kitchen door. The populace of the house stood outside in the dark, sooty hallway, and they all turned their hairy, blank faces towards me as I spoke.

“‘There are interesting things in this house, for a man of learning and education such as myself, and I wish to study them at my leisure. I shall rent a room in which to work. Here, old crone,’ I said, passing a dime to Mrs. O’Hanlon. ‘Take my lodgings out of this.’

“A murmur went through the dense knot of inebriates as the coin flashed in the firelight from the kitchen.

“‘I do not want any obstacles to my work, nor do I intend to smooth my stay here with liberal dispensations of coin. I am a doctor and I am here to help you. It is in your own best interests to give me your full cooperation. Do I make myself clear?’

“The murmuring turned dark and ugly.

“‘What’s ’e say, then?’

“‘E’s not going to pay us?’

“The largest, and ugliest, of the crowd stepped close to me, pushing me back with his puffed-out chest.

“‘Look ’ere. The way we see it, yoar our boarder and you owe each of us a coin like the one yew gave to Mrs. O’Hanlon ’ere.’

“‘I do not.’

“‘Yew do.’

“‘I’m warning you, Mick, don’t put me in a position where I must do you harm.’

“‘What’d yew call me?’

“‘Stand down, sir,’ I said, firmly.

“‘I’ll stand down yoar arse,’ he roared.

“And so I shot him.

“He went down like a load of coal and the crowd rushed forward like a surging wave to tend to their injured companion.

“‘You’ll notice that I have only wounded him in the leg,’ I pointed out.

“It was Mrs. O’Hanlon who eventually pushed herself forward and shook her gnarled and crooked finger in my face.

“‘I expect yew’ll be givin’ ’im a job in yer house next, sir.’

“‘Oh, yes, he shall be employed as a footman and I shall pay him three dollars a week.’

“An admiring murmur rippled through the gaggle of miscreants but did not take hold. Their eyes were still hard.

“‘And I shall give him free room and board.’

“With that, the floodgates opened and they clapped their bleeding companion on the back in a congratulatory fashion which caused him to grin through his bloody teeth.

“‘God bless ’ew, sir.’

“‘Nonsense, you’re a hardy fellow. You shall fit right in with my staff. Now, if there's nothing further to discuss, I wish to establish an examining room here by the kitchen fire and examine each of you in a scientific manner.’

“Hours later, my joints stiffened with exhaustion, my fingers and ears grown cold, two pairs of leather examining gloves soiled beyond reclamation and burnt in the fire, I looked up from my last subject to see that night had fallen as thoroughly as if the house had been submerged in a brackish lagoon. Unwilling to die for science, I rejected Mrs. O’Hanlon’s offer of a bowl of greasy water dotted with floating gristle, and retired to my room upstairs, where I pored over my notes late into the evening.

“My clear penmanship combined with my vivid writing style made the situation instantly clear: many of the pathetic residents of this hovel shared similar symptoms. The men bore bruises around their nether regions. The few women — many of whom had to be sluiced with water and have their matted hair removed with a knife before I could even determine their sex — bore the same symptoms, but no scratches were found on any but tiny Kathy. Nor were the unspeakably animalistic regions of the other women as clean, or as bruised, as Kathy’s.

“I sat back and lit a cigar while pondering this enigma, and realized that I still did not know the identity of this Harry whom Kathy had mentioned. Determined to spend not a minute more in this stinking pile than I must, I launched myself into the bowels of the house to find Kathy and question her severely. To that end I brought with me a short length of leather filled with shot to make a sturdy yard-long cudgel. A crude weapon but an essential diagnostic tool.

“The hour was late and the sound of drunken squabbles echoed throughout the halls. Suddenly, an increase in the smell of rotten garbage informed me that the kitchen was near, and from behind its door I could hear a wet sucking sound. On stealthy feet I approached and peered around the jamb to be greeted by a most un-Christian sight.”

Mortimer poured himself another drink.

“What was it, man!” said Drake.

“It was the young ragamuffin, Kathy, in a state of complete dishabille. She was standing next to the kitchen table, illuminated faintly by the orange glow of the dying hearthfire. And here is where this story takes a turn towards the grotesque, gentlemen. In her hand she was holding a cake of bacon fat and she was slathering her body with it. Rubbing the greasy block over all her limbs and torso, and around her darkest unspeakables. She performed this activity with no small measure of excitement, briskly and sensuously lathering her body.

“I was struck dumb but had the presence of mind to secure my grip upon the cudgel. She soon finished her oleaginous chore and dressed herself lightly in rags. My heart leapt into my throat as she moved directly towards the doorway where I lay watching. In one deft move, I sprang into the deepest shadows. Kathy walked out of the door, looking neither left nor right, and quickly made for the interior of the house. I followed her as best I could. It was a task of no small difficulty to keep her in sight as she darted through the dim passages of the sleeping hellhole as if she had been born there.

“Our journey came to an end at the suicide's dormer of Dr. Hagedorn. The girl plunged into the room and closed the door behind her. I pressed my eye immediately to the keyhole, and through it I observed the mean apartment in which she was conducting her rendezvous with the unknown.”

“What was she doing?” asked Lewis, unable to contain himself.

“She stood undraped in the center of the room, lit only by a cheap tallow candle which cast its sickly yellow glow upon her skin, which shone brightly with bacon grease. She turned herself this way and that, as if dancing to unheard music, exposing every inch of her flesh to the moon’s blind eye. Little sighs and moans escaped her parted lips, and I quickly realized that she was not alone.”

“Not alone?!?” cried Drake.