The Cabinet of Dr Blessing (The Dr Blessing Collection Parts 1-3): A Gothic Victorian Horror Tale Read online

  “Not at all, my friend,” I reassured him. “Not at all. One must play his part.” I begged Margaret’s pardon and took up my bag. Margaret too seemed disturbed by what she had heard and she urged me to be careful.

  Henry accompanied me to the door. “My coach is yours, George. My man will bring you back here, to take both you and Margaret back to your home. Never fear.”

  “I thank you.”

  Henry opened the front door for me and patted my shoulder. “This is a great act of charity, George. I shall recompense you for any supplies you should expend. Forgive my soft-headed wife’s affectation for former employees. She worries about them so.”

  Charlotte appeared behind Henry with her shawl and bonnet on, and having, I noted, changed from her house shoes, to her walking boots, ready to take on the muck of the city. “Do not apologise for me, sir!” Charlotte huffed.

  Henry grinned, amused at the occasional hardness of his wife.

  Charlotte slipped her arm around the young wretch at the porch, who herself appeared to have need of a good doctor. “Come my pretty, tell me where we can find Judith. Oh but you are frozen, let us get you into the coach first, out of the weather and you can tell the doctor and I everything.”

  Along the coach ride, this waif recounted the tale of a working girl who had become pregnant and who now seemed to be miscarrying or suffering a very traumatic premature birth. The girl herself, Judith, had known of no other charitable enough to help her, and so had sent this girl to seek Charlotte.

  This girl, the messenger, who I presume was employed similarly to Judith, was clearly in shock. I had no tonic available, carrying as I did only a very basic supply of emergency equipment. “My dear,” I said, leaning closer to her to be heard over the clatter of hooves and roar of wheels on the cobbles below. “Here is my address. Make sure to call upon me in the morning and I will provide you with a tonic which will pick you right up, I’m quite sure of it.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said quietly, taking the scrap of paper from my hand.

  Charlotte smiled at me in approval. I must admit to feeling quite warmed by either the deed itself, or by Charlotte’s approval. Perhaps being in the company of one so charitable inspired this movement in me.

  I explained to Charlotte that strictly speaking, I was a physician. I had delivered many children in my time, but given that there were complications expected, surgery might be necessary. The truth of the matter was that I had some experience in surgery – I recognised it as a highly-skilled discipline, unlike many of my contemporaries who saw it as a job for barbers. Indeed, they could not bring themselves to call even a highly skilled surgeon doctor, simply referring to them as mister. I hoped to God that my limited surgical skill would not be called upon, for the patient’s sake more than my own.

  We disembarked from the coach in Bermondsey and followed the messenger girl through an archway, through a narrow passage leading to a cluster of what are referred to as dosses, small single-room shacks paid for by the night with room enough for a bed and perhaps a small fireplace, and very little else.

  I saw lamplight ahead where the passage opened into a small courtyard of about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. A murmur of voices told of a small crowd. I correctly guessed that the lamp belonged to a police constable.

  A scream from one of the doss houses rose to a chilling crescendo. Scream does not really do the sound justice. This was like the howl of a wounded animal, lingering in the air.

  I stepped into that courtyard and saw about a dozen people gathered, straining to see around a police constable with his arms outstretched, into a doorway behind him. Upon hearing that horrible sound within, the crowd’s own noise increased in response. Someone screamed, “They are murdering the woman in there! They are murdering the woman in there!”

  Charlotte called out, “I have a doctor here!”

  The doorway to the doss opened fully. From where I approached, with the doss ahead and to my right, I could not see the scene within. Evidently some of the people gathered, could. A second policeman had emerged from the doss. He hurried past his fellow and ran towards my small party. His hands clamped over his mouth, he quickly darted around us. I heard him vomiting in the passage.

  We pressed on and the policeman granted us entry to the small shack. The scene within, I shall carry to my grave.

  A chubby midwife hunched over the bed – this woman in her late thirties, perhaps early forties – her skin as ashen as the messenger girl’s. Her clothes were drenched in blood.

  Judith, a thin girl in her late teens or early twenties, lay on the bed, in the position one would instruct her to assume in readiness for birth. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy, the bulge sitting low. She let out a low moan as an attack of convulsions wracked her body. With every wrench of her body, a dribble of blood pushed from her sex. The bedclothes were soaked.

  All of this I had taken in, in seconds. The messenger, I noted, cowered in the corner behind the door, hands over her eyes.

  “This will not do,” I said, voice raised. I pointed to the midwife. “Step aside. We have no need for eighteen shilling and four pence charlatans here.”

  The midwife did not protest. Most unusual, I considered. She was obviously well aware that she was out of her depth. However, I felt that further admonishment was in order, that she might take that Bishop’s Licence of hers and tear it up. “See the damage you have caused with your amateur tending. See the blood lost already. If I lose this girl and this infant, by God you will swing, lady!”

  Charlotte’s hand met my elbow. She nodded to Judith, whose eyes were barely visible through the black hair matted to her face.

  “Indeed.” I took off my coat. “Charlotte, would you be so kind as to bring me clean water and any clean cloths you can lay your hands on?” I turned my attention to the poor wretch shrinking further and further into the corner. “My dear, please help the good lady to fetch those things for me.”

  The girl did not move. I knelt by her as I rolled my sleeves up. “I promise to use every ounce of my skill to ensure she will come to no harm, child. You can better help Judith by ensuring the cleanliness of the articles around her.”

  Charlotte reached down and helped the girl to her feet. “Come, lovey.” She turned to the midwife and gently urged her to the door. “You too, dear. You look like you need air too.”

  “Please close the door,” I called over my shoulder.

  I turned my full attention to Judith as I picked up my medical bag and approached the bed. “Hello, I am Doctor George Blessing. I am here to help you. Your friend tells me you have been in the state of pregnancy for approximately eight months, is that correct?”

  The girl mumbled that this was so.

  “Can the father be contacted?” I had to ask this. It was clear that if the child lived, which was highly unlikely, Judith would not be alive to raise it.

  “No! No! No!”

  I was startled by the sudden burst of energy. “Judith, please. Rest, rest. The next contractions will give you plenty of work. You will require all of your strength.”

  I set my pocket watch on the small table at the bedside, annoyed that I had not noted the time of that first fit I observed.

  Charlotte returned with a washbowl of clean water and as much clean material as she could find. In this area, that amounted to very little.

  I handed a small knife to Charlotte. “Please, cut that sheet down to handkerchief sized pieces and that other, to strips as long as you can, that I might use as bandages.”

  Within five minutes of setting the watch up, I estimated within eight minutes of the first fit, Judith was contorting and baying once more. More cries of murder from outside.

  I washed my hands with coal tar soap, and with several small cloths I wiped away as much blood as I could, but more flowed. Charlotte held a candle close by. The blood obscured my vision so badly that I was unable to see the head of the child – which had to have been near, given how low the child sat. Then I n
oticed something odd. The bulge of the child began to shift upwards, drawing away from the birth canal.

  Judith screamed, this was shrill and long. Tears poured from her eyes. She cried again and again.

  Charlotte provided what soothing words she could muster through her own tears.

  I inspected her again and could see no evidence of dilation. I dared not to say it at the time, but I could see that Judith’s body was not preparing itself for birth. I wondered and became more convinced that this was not a premature delivery at all. Nor was it a miscarriage, the child was yet moving inside her.

  “My stomach!” Judith yelled.

  “Don’t worry, lovey, it isn’t your stomach,” Charlotte said, scraping hair away from Judith’s face. “You’ll be fine. Just a few big pushes and it’ll be all over.”

  Judith screamed again. I know this, but I did not hear it. By this I mean, I was immediately distracted by a different set of noises. There was a crawling, squelching sound, then by God a ripping sound and the sound of bones breaking.

  Judith lost consciousness. Charlotte screamed. The messenger girl howled in sorrow and rushed to the bedside. The midwife looked on from the corner of the room in horror. A constable came to the door.

  In her state of unconsciousness, Judith vomited blood. She was still breathing because she breathed some of the blood in and began to cough and choke.

  The stirrings in her abdomen became more pronounced, more severe. Beneath her tattered, bloody nightgown, angled bulges pushed outward.

  “My God,” I muttered, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

  “What the hell’s going on, doctor?” the constable boomed.

  “Doctor?” Charlotte implored. “Her mouth.”

  “Jesus!” the constable cried.

  Judith’s body trembled violently. Her life’s fluids poured freely from both ends of her. The flow was slow. Her pulse was waning.

  “Cut it out of her, man!” the constable shouted.

  “Are you a surgeon, sir?” I yelled back at him.

  “My apologies, doctor. I, I’ve just never seen anything so…”

  Judith’s body arched up, her shoulders and feet bearing her weight. The scream rose with her back.

  From her cavity, a small hand burst forth, bringing with it such gore and offal that I am convinced this tiny hand had opened the gate to hell itself.

  All around me was chaos, screams and shouts. A high-pitched squeak was heard. The crowd outside, I could tell, had grown.

  “Constable, keep those people back!” I ordered.

  The constable was grateful for my demand and he extricated himself from this horrific show with all haste.

  Judith collapsed back to the bed. That was the moment I glanced at my pocket watch, convinced I was looking at her time of death. I knew that there was no way this poor young woman could have any life left in her. She lay completely still. I held my fingers under her nose. No breath. I used my fingertips to pry open her eyelids and saw no reaction to the light. I checked her pulse. There was none. “Make a note of the time, Charlotte. At 12:36am on this the seventeenth of July 1856, I have pronounced Judith…”

  “Judith Cloonan.”

  “… Judith Cloonan, dead.”

  I looked at those about me. Charlotte shoulders heaved with each of her sobs, stroking Judith’s cheek over and cover again. The messenger girl had returned to her corner, crying quietly into her knees Charlotte soon turned her attention on the young girl, knowing it was too late to give Judith any comfort at all.

  I happened to glance back at the unfortunate patient’s cadaver and to my surprise I noticed the tiniest of movements amidst the gore. A hand, which on closer inspection appeared more like an animal’s claw, such was the growth and pointed nature of the fingernails. Although the mother was certainly quite dead, it seemed her offspring was alive. I picked up the small knife that I had given Charlotte to cut the material. In the other hand I took one of the rags and wiped the tiny limb before me. The hand thrashed about, very deliberately, it seemed, attempting to cause harm. My grip tightened on the small knife.

  “Doctor… what are you doing?” Charlotte muttered with no lack of concern in her voice. Indeed I am sure she thought that I had completely taken leave of my senses, tampering with the dead body.

  I ignored her. I pressed the knife against the flesh of Judith’s labia and made a small cut. This action promoted such excitement in the tiny limb before me, and the body to which it was connected, that I leapt back, startled. The sound of bones grinding met my ears. Then the sound of bones snapping. The hand withdrew, back into Judith’s body, then thrust back into view, causing new bleeding and further damage. This was repeated several times and Judith’s abdomen flexed and moved as though this child was pushing itself out of her body.

  Judith’s vaginal cavity began to tear, soon a deep rent reached up over her pelvis and almost to her navel. Her lower intestine became discernible, two tiny hands clutching that tubing.

  Peering into that black mass of blood and waste, I saw teeth.

  Hastily I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper in my bag and pulled the young girl out of the corner. “Go outside, go to the coachman. Send him back to his master’s house. He is to travel directly to my home with Margaret, my wife. She is to give him the items on this list, all to be found in my study. He is to return to me without delay. Do you understand, girl?”

  “Yes, sir,” she sniffed.

  The girl left, I followed her to the door and saw the policeman who had vomited earlier. His fellow was roughing up a man who had tried to break their blockade of the doss. “Call for more men. Get these people far away. I feel that this woman may have suffered some terrible disease, which may be highly contagious. I have sent a messenger to bring some scientific equipment from my office. Until then, nobody is to enter this building, and nobody is to leave without my consent.”

  The constable nodded his understanding. He was soon blowing on his whistle to draw other nearby constables to the site. I had noticed about thirty people gathered outside and others in the passage.

  All I could think of at that time, was those teeth. These were no child’s teeth – these were crooked, pointed, even jagged. This had been no birth, this creature had eaten its way through Judith. It had bitten and clawed through her organs – it was not even in her womb, but among her intestines.

  In the doss I sat at the end of the crimson pit of a bed and stared into the tear, my heart fluttering in my chest every time the creature stirred. There were occasional squeaks and a noise like a dog lapping water from a bowl. My mind raced with possibilities and very few of them conformed to conventional science.

  It was in one of my more lucid moments that I turned to the midwife. “I must apologise to you, madam. I spoke harshly of your skill. I am now of the opinion that you did very well to keep this poor woman alive for as long as you did.”

  She said nothing, she stared down at her brown stained hands.

  “My threat to you was… unforgivable. Would you accept my apologies?”

  She nodded.

  I turned to Charlotte, who stared down at the unfortunate who had once been in her employ.

  “There is nothing more you could have done for her, Charlotte. You tried to spare her the need to take the path of prostitution,” I said as I moved over to her.

  “If I hadn’t have sacked her, she wouldn’t have ended up in this state.”

  “What else could you have done, Charlotte? You gave her more opportunities that most would have. I for one, would have had no hesitation to put her onto the street for theft. You gave her money and a reference, you still tried to improve the girl when she was beyond your employ. And she knew that you cared, for who was it she turned to?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “You know I’m right, Charlotte. You must never blame yourself.”

  Having ensured that things were as right as they could be with the two ladies, I turned my attention back to that creature and I wa
s struck with an idea. I reached into my medical bag and returned to that savage wound with a small bottle of chloroform.

  “What are you doing, doctor?” Charlotte asked, quite disturbed as I withdrew the cork from the bottle.

  I knew that I must lie to them, in order to secure the time to study my new discovery. “I must cleanse the wound. In truth, I have found evidence of cancerous growths which may have ruptured, presenting as pregnancy. A most rare occurrence, but one with which I have had some experience. This will be a gory business. You should both take some air.” I then commenced to pour the fluid over the wound, letting it pool deeply in the curves of the woman’s lifeless organs as Charlotte and the midwife took seemed glad of my advice and took their leave.

  I breathed through my handkerchief, stepped back and observed as the beast struggled and tore at its gruesome nest, viciously at first, and then becoming ever more sluggish. Then it was still.

  I probed with the knife once more, careful to cut at the organs and musculature around the clawed hands, without injuring the creature itself. Within minutes I was able to draw the being out of Judith’s body.

  An hour later, with the women still absent from the doss, the coachman and messenger returned. They had brought Henry with them. Henry and the coachman entered the room after the constable obtained my permission to let them pass. Henry and coachman both pressed their gloved hands against their mouths as they took in the carnage.

  “My God! George, what have you done to her?” Henry asked, eyes wide like a madman.

  “I have done nothing, Henry! Nothing save attempt to keep her alive.”

  “She has been torn to pieces!” Henry cried.

  “Did you bring the items I requested?”

  The coachman brought in a case from outside. The young girl appeared at the doorway and gasped as the disgusting scene began to register with her. The coachman must have been a man of family, because in a moment he had scooped up the child and carried her from the room. He closed the door in his wake.