There had to be a wonan who would not laugh, not scream, not draw away from his ugliness. These whores had been in their forties, had teeth missing, hair turning gray; he had thought surely one of them would accept him. But one after another had rejected him. One after another had enraged him.
“You will look at me, my dear lady,” Merrick whispered to the woman splayed beneath him. He had slung her inner organs up over her shoulder, cut a kidney free and hidden it away inside his great black cloak. A prize from the secret hot interior of her mysterious woman’s body, like an idol stolen from a temple. “You will look at me,” he wheezed, slicing away the lids of her eyes until the woman did indeed stare up at him like a rapt lover.
Merrick pushed himself off her; rose, panting. He felt guilty again. If Treves only knew…his dear friend Treves. And all the others who looked after his welfare. He should have returned to the hospital after the first one tonight. He should never have embarked on this quest in the first place…
But there had to be a whore in this wretched slum desperate or drunk enough to take his money. To take his lust. He knew, despite the guilt, that he would hunt for that whore again. And despite the guilt, he felt a secret thrill at the warmth of the kidney cradled inside his coat, like a child born of his nightmare union with this woman. He would find a further thrill mailing it to the police with a little note, perhaps. He didn’t fully understand the nature of this thrill. It was, like his face, too horrible to stand close scrutiny in a mirror.
He would not sign his own name, of course. Not John. But a nickname for John, instead.
Jack.
John Merrick hobbled back toward London Hospital, where he lived. London Hospital, which despite its great size and kind surgeons looked directly and helplessly upon the squalor of Whitechapel Road.
Empathy
They would call it a murder-suicide, though it was never fully understood. Perhaps it was one, actually—in its way. Or perhaps it wasn’t just that Marie empathized with the things at Blue Flamingos, but they with her.
There were certainly enough traditional antiques to draw serious collectors, and some of them were willing to part with serious money. The vast ground floor was nearly as neatly laid out as a department store, with tables and counters and shelves, corridors built of merchandise. Clean, well-preserved merchandise; this was no flea market. Edwin had had his name, and the name
But it was the collectibles rather than the antiques for which the place was best known. The article could indicate that. Edwin was a collector of ‘50s paraphernalia. Art Deco furniture. Old radios; a whole tall shelf just of those in the darker, quieter, somewhat less orderly second story. Primitive futuristic TVs, the sad, unlit shells of arcade games, the colorless, translucent bones of neon signs. Items so odd and unique that people were willing to drive here from Boston sometimes for the chic junk of yesterday. Art Deco, old radios and jukeboxes were always hip, but also a few years ago there had been the resurgence of interest in the ‘60s, and
And Marie’s husband knew what they wanted because he loved these things as they did. He might not have been able to part with any of it, jealous collector that he was, if there wasn’t a constant stream of new things coming in to replace those that left. Flea markets, field auctions. He read obituaries, contacted relatives about the possessions of deceased parents and grandparents. College kids and Bostonians didn’t know where to go, and didn’t want the bother of that anyway. They would pay double, triple and more for their cherished junk, while throwing away the stuff they bought in the malls, the treasure of tomorrow’s scavengers.
“It’s like the ultimate attic!” one woman enthused to Edwin at the counter, paying thirty dollars for a Barbie doll he had acquired for five dollars, along with three others in a box of toys at a yard sale.
From across the room, dusting variegated displays that would make the Smithsonian’s attic collections boring by contrast, Marie watched as Edwin smiled at the woman and offered some obligatory banalities. Edwin wasn’t very good with small talk, just with the large talk of his drinking companions. Basically, Marie’s husband preferred things to the human beings who made them. But then, who didn’t?
* * *
As every day, after showering and cleansing herself, Marie set about polishing and cleaning the other, inanimate tenants of
Marie had just finished dusting a baby alligator, which reared on its hind legs like some mummified miniature dinosaur, now extinct. The bright pink feathers of the duster had snared on its grin of fangs and Marie dislodged them delicately with an apologetic smile. Lightly, with the ball of her thumb, she wiped the dust off its unblinking black eyes.
Marie also cherished the many things collected in her husband’s shop. She often felt more pained than he to see them leave. But hers was not the love of a collector. Marie had never collected anything in her life. As a deaf child, living in a school for deaf children during the week and with her mother in a two room apartment on weekends, she hadn’t had the private space to accommodate the luxury of collection. Marie was fond of malls in the way she was fond of museums. She loved to drink it all in, then went home full. She was not materialistic. She loved the collectibles and old things because they were bits and pieces of
Edwin had disgustedly given in to her pleading, for a while, to let her keep a certain old doll or teddy bear or children’s book, and bring it up to their apartment on the third floor, which for its decor could very easily have been mistaken for part of the store. But now he told her she had enough things, and he had a business to run. He made her feel guilty for her sensitivity, made her wonder if she really had gone overboard with it. He mocked her, for instance, for no longer accompanying him to field auctions because she couldn’t bear to see the boxes of rain-soggy stuffed animals, once warm with children’s hugs, and the rest of the items left for junk in the field after the bidders had picked what they really wanted from the boxes they bought—a corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield.
What Marie didn’t tell her husband, however, was that she mostly didn’t accompany him because she sensed that he didn’t really desire her company. He no longer offered to buy her a hot dog under the snack pavilion. No longer talked to her on the way home.
You would think that he didn’t know how to communicate with a deaf woman. He had attended classes for signing when they had first met five years ago, knew how to sign perfectly well…but that would require him to show too much of an interest in her. His brusque signs now were more like impatient gestures of dismissal than sign language.
It was a rainy October day today, and in fact Edwin was at an auction, so perfectly scheduled for such weather. Marie wandered now throughout the second floor, dusting. The shop was tended presently by Mrs. Morris, who couldn’t sign a jot and thus moved her mouth with ludicrous exaggeration so Marie could read her lips.
Dangling from the high ceiling were antlers and pop guns, catcher’s mitts and musical instruments. Marie worked her way toward the back, dusting the rows of uglier, less artistic steel and glass jukeboxes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. She had once been afraid to come up here alone, before she had dared to let herself feel that this was her home. Now when she occasionally glanced over her shoulder, it was only because she felt Edwin would be standing there, arms crossed, some complaint ready. The sad deer head, the fluorescent, crumbling papier-mache ghoul from a carnival horror ride didn’t mean her any harm.
