The Sinister Fate of Joseph Redding

7. A Man of a Thousand Pieces

It was as though Corgaine noticed me in the room for the first time. His impossibly dark eyes narrowed beneath his brow and his loathsome grin had all but withered.

"I should think that is enough time wasted with talk, Frederic," he said. The staccato of his words came like knife blows. "I wish to retire early for tonight. Another rainstorm heads in from the west and I should not like to find myself caught in it. Please make your preparations for tomorrow. And Frederic?" Corgaine thrust his chin in my direction. "See that your charming friend does not forget his effects when you show him out."

"I will show myself out," I told him, standing without need of further cue. Had I been uncouth I might have yet spat at the man for such undisguised contempt. "Indeed, I am to present myself at Lord de Veyra's supper by eight. I should be on my way."

Your friend. It was not the first time that Jonathan Corgaine had forgotten himself; spoken of me as though he knew not what relations bound me to him and his clandestine school of science. I scrutinised him as I snatched up my coat and hat and exited his lab with as much feigned nonchalance as I could stomach. His gaze had been equally as frigid.

The earthy smell of impending rain impregnated the air around the chapel. I took in a lungful of it and cleared my chest of the sour odour of formalin from the lab, though the lingering decay of the cemetery hardly served as finer olfactory indulgence.

A brisk wind beckoned a cloak of leaden rainclouds as I marched towards the main road with a mix of urgency and indignation. The night had grown especially dark and dense around these parts, blotting out the moon in fog so dense I could no longer see the crucifix atop Saint Kristopher's.

Having taken a humbling trip to the bank a few days prior, I now possessed enough coinage to hire a hansom on the return to 57 Clement Street so that I might this time evade the rainstorm. It was a small expense to pay to arrive home warm, dry and before the clock tower struck eight. Of course, the invite to sup at the de Veyras' had been something of a poor and unscripted lie.

The rain fell in cold pellets by the time I found a vacant hansom. Its driver sat high upon the back of it, hunched like a gargoyle beneath a black umbrella; his horse, a despondent looking thing, did not seem to notice the sudden turn in weather at all. I was fortunate to find a cab and driver operating at this hour in winter, more notably so far from the centre of Glasten, and yet, so relieved was I at my luck that I climbed aboard the carriage and did not question it.

I offered the driver my destination and he jostled his horse into an about turn, heading northeast into the town proper. There came the telltale click of the lock on the door, but I banished any regard for it, still reeling from Corgaine's coarse dismissal.

Instead I threw back my head on the threadbare seat and audibly sighed, releasing with it every ounce of resentment at bay. Anger was not good for me; it was unbecoming of the perfect gentleman husband. Full glad was I to have the privacy of collapsing in that cab, however. Gone were the days I had looked and felt so haggard, and I meant for no-one else to know of it. To my misfortune, Jonathan Corgaine, as he had been before earning his physician's licence in 1885, was the only person still alive to have known me prior to adopting the life of a young auctioneer and painter named Joseph Redding.

Despite our history and the intimate way in which our fates were twisted upon themselves like cords of ivy, Corgaine still clung to his bad habit of deriding me. He was almost charming about it, as though the animosity that had initially struck a wedge between us was a mere fabrication of my mind. He had never liked my approach; could never truly bend me to his warped methods, unlike poor Frederic. Ah, yes, the good doctor troubled me as ever, though the why of it remained mostly in the realms of contempt. Still, of one thing I knew with certainty regarding my old acquaintance: devilry danced behind that comical grin and those calculating, doe-ish eyes...

And yet, the horrors of our past pale against what happened next.

The rain outside drummed on the roof of the hansom; its wheels sent spatters of mud into its underside. But even here, in the remotest part of Glasten, still so far from any farm or mill, I heard something else. It was a dreadful sound no mild man should be able to bear – it was the drawn, broken sobbing of a desperate woman.

I lurched upright in the bench and listened for its direction. I detected none. I found it queer that it should come from all around me at once, whichever way I turned my head. I threw open the shutter on the cab door and, with my nose pressed against the glass, I peered out into the night. Through my clouded breath on the pane I distinguished the endless backdrop of countryside far in the distance, miles beyond the borough's outermost limits.

The driver was headed the wrong way.

The rain struck harder than I had ever known, flooding the road in an inch of water that rushed sickeningly beneath me. The remains of ancient walls lay cracked and crumbled – sad memories of the hamlets antedating Glasten by centuries – but there existed no sign of anyone or anything to be seen out there in the blackness.

And yet the eerie cries persisted, louder, longer, fiercer, if any more of their terrible detail should be described. I slammed the shutter closed and called up to the driver so that he might return me to Clement Street, but the rattling rain and the spatter of puddles as the wheels carried me on through narrow lanes swallowed my voice. I could scarce even hear myself above those inconsolable wails, but they seemed not to perturb the driver or his horse, and after some time of yelling in vain I was left short of options.

I tried the door several times and to my horror found then that it was locked. As frightful as this revelation should have alone been, it was not the sense of entrapment that clutched my heart in ice.

My gaze fell to the growing movement on the floor of the carriage. I no longer saw my shoes for the black fog encircling them; inky tendrils writhing around the hems of my trousers as if alive, impervious to the light of the lamp swinging dangerously from the hansom's ceiling. The fog condensed in on itself, locked in gravity with my feet until the tendrils weaved gnarled, blackened fingers, sharp as splinters.

I snatched my foot from their grasp ...

And there, as if the floor of the carriage beneath me ceased to exist, I saw her face.