[Formerly Featured/Historical Horror] Masquerading as a gentlemanly bachelor living in Victorian England, Joseph Redding is a fraud amongst the living. After splitting from his partner in unspeakable, underground crimes, he must now pay the price fo...
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Mr Rawlings grew angry when he caught me marching after Frederic through the front door of his house. He did not spare me a single word, yet the disbelieving rage that gained on his face revealed all ... That I should have the sheer nerve to bring this household strain and disgrace, and then depart without comment as the police still investigated the gruesome death of one of their own, was one misdeed too many.
I turned my back on the door with the deepest of regrets, but the business with poor, flustered Frederic could not have waited until I was cleared. I shudder at how unrighteous my disappearance must have seemed that morning; after all, since I had not yet given Corgaine's name in answer to criminal involvement, it was unsaid that my own remained atop the list of chief suspects in both murders. Of one thing I could not afford: formal police investigation of the life of Joseph Redding lest they unearth the entire despicable and inconceivable truth of it. Oddly, despite my fate in the balance if I did not supply any kind of lead, I still could not bring myself to incriminate the man who had simultaneously saved and ruined my life.
We arrived at the grounds of Saint Kristopher's chapel and to another dense snow-front half an hour later. As a boy, whenever I'd passed the chapel I seldom had reason for pause when I looked upon it. It was one of those exceptional areas of Glasten that had never changed – hardly aged, even – completely apart the rest of the town where the names of shops and plaques of houses swapped every few years as its inhabitants went either or up or down with the economy. A new glover or the closure of a hatter there, a second solicitor to rival Valentine and Sons across the green, a new abode for Clarice Clifford as she moved in with her fourth husband in just as many decades ...
Only ... that morning there was something about the chapel that had changed, though nothing in its appearance gave me cause to fall for this conclusion. It was the feel of the place; ordinarily a harsh, grey behemoth, with a single, looming spire of spiralling black windows, that had only ever felt solemn and forgotten. The trees overhanging the wrought iron fencing were twisted and bare in the winter, and the graves jutted at all angles like a beggar's teeth. No, it was not the hardness of winter that had warped the place I so often paid no mind. There existed something unseen in the air there, toying with my perception of the place, and the effect of it was uncanny.
I did not wish to follow Frederic on the path through the gravestones to the other side because of it, where hidden beyond the towering evergreen hedges stood a two-storey house that had once been home to Reverend J. Vetter. It was because of a generous, private bursary (though of its true origin, Corgaine had never disclosed) allotted to the unmentionable study of death that allowed me and Jonathan Corgaine the outright purchase of such a house, so innocently close to a place nobody would grow suspicious of the regular delivery of cadavers.
I found it uncomfortably ironic that we chose to perform this clandestine practice so near to a house of God, but until my untimely departure from the study, Corgaine had been respectful to those cold, stiff donors and to the science of death itself. Back then I could not have imagined bearing witness to so gruesome a scene upon the surgical table as I had last night, and Corgaine, as I had known him then, was certainly no butcher.
