The Alienist - Caleb Carr [220]
I needn’t have bothered. It was a spare, empty chamber, with a window that looked out over Bank Street. There were no furnishings other than an old four-poster bed, an equally aged wardrobe, and a plain set of drawers. A washbasin sat on a large doily atop the drawers, along with a matching pitcher; other than that, the room was absolutely empty.
“Just as he found it, is how he left it,” Mrs. Piedmont said. “He was that way, Mr. Beecham.”
Under the guise of deciding whether or not we wanted to rent the room, Sara and I went through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, without finding any trace of human activity. There was simply nothing in the ten-by-twenty-foot confines of that chamber that would have made you believe that it had ever been inhabited by anyone, much less by a tortured soul whom we suspected of having done away with at least half a dozen children in a bizarre and brutal fashion. The lingering scent of decay in the air only reinforced this conclusion. Eventually Sara and I told Mrs. Piedmont that, though it was indeed a lovely little room, it was nonetheless too small for our purposes. Then we turned to go back downstairs.
Sara and our hostess, who once again began blathering about her cats, had already reached the staircase when I caught sight of something just inside the door of Beecham’s room: a few small stains on the bland, striped wallpaper. They were of a brownish hue, and in a pattern that indicated that whatever the substance was—and it could easily have been blood—it had hit the wall in a hard splatter. Following the path of the stain, I arrived at the bed; and, seeing as Mrs. Piedmont was now out of sight, I pulled the mattress up to have a look.
A stench hit me, suddenly and hard. It was identical to that which I’d detected on entering the room, only of an increased strength that immediately made me close my eyes, cover my mouth, and want to retch. I was about to drop the mattress again when my eyes opened long enough to catch sight of a small skeleton. A furry hide was stretched over the bones, though in some spots the hide had rotted away, revealing the dried remains of inner organs. Old, rotting string was wound around the four legs of the skeleton at the feet, and next to the rear legs lay several sections of jointed bone, almost like tiny vertebrae—a tail, I realized, that’d been cut into pieces. The creature’s skull, barely covered by a few small patches of skin and fur, lay some eight inches from the rest of the skeleton. Both the mattress and the spring beneath it bore broad stains of a color that matched the splotches on the wall.
I finally let go of the mattress, then jumped out into the hall and took out a handkerchief, dabbing at my face. Resisting one more urge to vomit, I took a few deep breaths and stood at the top of the stairs, trying to determine if I felt sound enough to navigate them.
“John?” I heard Sara call from downstairs. “Are you coming?”
The first flight of stairs was a bit tricky, but by the second I was doing much better; and when I reached the front door of the house, where Mrs. Piedmont was standing in the midst of her mewing cats, holding Sara’s hand, I even managed to arrange a smile. I thanked Mrs. Piedmont quickly and then stepped out into the cloudless night, the air of which seemed especially clean given what I’d been breathing inside.
Sara followed me, still talking to Mrs. Piedmont, and then the same gray-striped cat bounded out onto the stoop. “Peter!” Mrs. Piedmont cried. “Miss Howard, could you…?” Sara already had the animal in her arms, and she handed it to Mrs. Piedmont with a smile. “Cats!” Mrs. Piedmont said one more time, and then she called more goodbyes and closed the door.
Sara came down the steps and