Page 144 of If Looks Could Kill
She crumples to the floor.
Idid that.Me.Little Miss Sunday School. Little Miss Salvation Army.
My right hand hurts like a sonofagun.
But thank God for Captain Paddy, who had insisted on teaching us how.
Rosie’s gun is wobbling in my hands, its owner cringing on the floor, when the door bursts open.
She is a ghost when she enters. A pallid corpse. She sways on her feet. Red blood runs down her side. Her golden snakes hiss with fangs bared.
Thisisa ghost. He’s killed her. My Salvation Army friend.
Rosie rises on one elbow. Pearl turns and opens her mouth in a silent battle cry.
The Bowery madam screams herself to sleep, till her eyes roll back in her head and her body lies stiff and senseless upon the floor.
Pearl staggers forward and topples onto a couch. Another Medusa appears in the doorway, looking ready to kill. What on earth? She disappears into the flat. I hear muffled screams and thumps. She returns in a moment, carrying my clothes. She drapes a throw blanket over me.
I pull Pearl onto my lap. She is cold. So terribly cold. I enfold her in my blanket and hold her close to me. She is soaked in blood.
On the floor, Mother Rosie starts to stir. I keep the gun in one hand.
“This way,” a voice says. I look up to see the wide-cheeked face of Oscar the newspaper boy, staring at me. I must be hallucinating. Next thing I know, the whole Salvation Army brass band will appear.
I focus on Pearl. She is, at least, still breathing. Stay with me, Pearl. Don’t leave me now.
In moments, someone is at my side, taking my gun from me. I struggle, until a voice speaks in my ear.
“It’s all right, Miss Tabitha,” a familiar voice says. “You’re safe now.”
I blink into the eyes of Captain Paddy himself. I’m so confused. Maybe the brass band will show up after all.
I cry out, “Pearl is dying.”
“We need to get her to St. Vincent’s,” he says. “Are you all right?”
I hold Pearl close and cradle her head, snakes and all. They move about in my hands, mournful, distressed. Soft as velvet to my touch.
Lower East Side, ManhattanJack’s Waterloo(Early Morning, Tuesday, December 4, 1888)
Jack slowly wakes with a throbbing head and a neck and back twisted out of kilter. He can’t move, and he cannot see. The cellar is dark, and it reeks of smoke, but it sounds empty. Just him and the rats.
And ghosts. The ghosts of gutted corpses, in all their gruesome glory, dancing before his vision.
Pearl joins the parade of dancing cadavers. Her dress is soaked in blood. She and her sisters in mutilation seem intent on performing a danse macabre for him for eternity. He sees them, and he sees the dark cellar. Two realities swim before his view.
She is dead, then.
He killed her, and got nothing for his pains—that old familiar refrain. Here he lies, in pools of her blood and his, in the cellar of the house where briefly they both lived. Whaton earthhad he been thinking? He knows better.
He has to get out of this house.
Every woman you touch will rise up and hunt you.
She must have managed to get away, since she’s not here, but she wouldhave soon bled out. Good. A corpse on the streets is harder to trace to him than a body in a cellar.
He waits for his fingers and hands to thaw, for his arms to respond to his will. As blood flow resumes and the nerves awaken, his hand is pierced by a thousand needles.
