Apex Book Company

Short Fiction: The Janus Affair, Part 2 (Orpheus Project)

In 1913 the scientific exploration vessel Kabul was trapped in the ice floes of the Arctic Sea north of Alaska. Eventually, after drifting several hundred nautical miles northwest with the ice, ten crew and other members of the scientific team abandoned ship. They established a crude camp on an uninhabited island encircled by the white expanse of the frozen arctic icepack. The plight of the Kabul aroused considerable public interest, particularly after the captain and one of the Inuit guides made an arduous three-month trek across the ice to the Siberian mainland to seek help. Unfortunately, when rescuers finally managed to get back to the island, no one was left alive.

Much was made in the tabloids of the captain’s heroic rescue bid, even though it came too late to save the castaways. There was also some speculation over how the men who had remained on the island met their end.

Rumours.

One thing that was not made public at the time was that instead of eight bodies being found on the island, the rescuers discovered nine. But the ninth body had been there many years - perfectly preserved in the cold dry arctic air.

It was the body of an Englishman.

In any case, the world was soon caught up in the horrors of the Great War. Amid the darkness that settled over Europe in 1914, little further thought was given to the Kabul and the fate of her crew and scientific team outside the halls of maritime history enthusiasts. And despite the press coverage that had been received, the macabre fact that all but one of the Kabul’s complement had been murdered and mutilated never saw print. The ship’s doctor was the culprit but that wasn’t immediately obvious, as he had committed a bizarre form of suicide.

A bleak island on the edge of the Arctic Circle. A twenty-year-old frozen corpse, seven mutilated men and women, and the ship’s doctor self-crucified upside down on a makeshift cross.

More than a century later the story of the Kabul hit the papers again. Two documents related to the Kabul had been found locked away in the home of the primary suspect for the infamous ‘Campus Killings’ along
with the body of the suspect’s dead wife (the papers did point out she appeared to have died in her sleep after many years of being in a coma, but they did not report that she had been sexually violated around the
time of her death by an unknown assailant).

That the documents had been found was leaked to the press by a police source. Diligence on the part of a persistent journalist resulted in a copy of one of the documents making the papers - the personal journal of Kabul’s doctor, John Macbride. The other document was the journal of the lone Englishman whose remains had been discovered on the island by the castaways; Septimus Grimm.

He also, had been a doctor.

The journalist was told the second journal had been destroyed.

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From the Journal of John Macbride - Ship’s Surgeon: Kabul 1913

5 October

There it is then - Heaphy and Kupu have finally set off. They will try for the mainland to bring back help. The rest of us are either too weak (especially Frank) or too apathetic to try and cross the ice. Consequently, even though I felt sure I could manage the journey myself, I elected to stay and to minister to the others. Try and keep them alive until Heaphy and company return with help. As I am sure they shall. If anyone can make the trek it is Heaphy - he was with Bartlett and Peary’s expedition to the pole in ‘09 after all.

With winter all but on us it is dark for much of the day. The sun stays low in the sky, and the shelters we constructed from the ship’s supplies before the ice crushed the old girl completely are a Godsend against the wind. But even with the growing cold, I find myself restless and eager to be moving. Lord knows there may be precious few days left to us within which we might move about easily. With the growing darkness, the ice and rock are becoming treacherous to travel over.

I shall ask Johnson if he would like to look around with me tomorrow. We don’t even know how big this island is, although my guess is that it is no more than a handful of miles long in any event. Who knows? We may even manage to shoot some seals if we come across another bay on the far side where they are not so bloody pooked.

An honest trek will do my spirit wonders.

7 October

I am writing by lamplight. Johnson has cleared out of my hut and shifted in with Chapman and Goldstein.

We made the most amazing discovery yesterday, not far from where our little camp is perched on the edge of the ice. We went up over the low rise our huts are sheltering under and then a short distance further inland. The terrain rose steadily, and we were walking on bare rock for much of the time. I paused and looked out toward the horizon. I saw the ice flows that brought our poor trapped Kabul so far west, but of course there was no sign of the wreck itself now. The low sun made the ice glitter. With no wind, I could imagine myself caught in a fairy
landscape - a winter kingdom of white beauty and bright cold.

But then my reverie was broken by Johnson’s cry. I hurried over to him, and he was pointing to a nearby rock face. Wind and ice had carved small caves and twisted shapes from the grey stone. We could see the body of a man dressed in heavy arctic clothing lying in the entrance to one of the caves. I went closer and bent to examine him. That he was dead was immediately apparent to me. What was less apparent was how long he had been in that unfortunate condition. There were no obvious signs of injury or illness, although he was an ungodly colour. I called Johnson over. ‘We must take him back to the camp so I can examine him,’ I said. He looked at me as if I were a stranger.

‘What you want to be doing that for, Doc?’ he asked me. ‘This geezer is dead. You aren’t going to be getting no consultation fee for examining him when he’s already dead.’

‘Don’t be foolish, man. He’s English!’ I chided him.

‘Why, so he is,’ he replied. ‘He looks like a bleeding Eskimo all got up in furs like that. But you’re right. Best we get him back to camp for a Christian burial then.’ Between the two of us we managed to carry (and drag) the dead man back to camp.

I spent all of yesterday stripping the corpse and searching through his belongings and examining him. He appears to have either died abruptly from the sudden onset of some sort of disease, or to have frozen. Given our location, I tend to favour the latter. I suspect the very conditions that prove so deadly while we are alive, ironically provide for a semblance of life when we are dead. The man looked as though he had lain down to his final sleep only weeks ago.

In fact he has been dead some twenty years. He has a diary, but parts of it are in Latin and there are many diagrams and mathematical formulae, and I have not yet read it beyond the first few entries or so (enough to tell me the approximate date of his journal but more on that later). I shall look at the rest in the morning and record tomorrow night what I manage to discern.

8 October.

I was reading back through this account, and I realised I mentioned Johnson had moved out of our hut, but I failed to mention why. He moved out because he didn’t want to be anywhere near the dead man. When I stripped away the fur clothing we had found the Englishman had a tattoo on his chest, just below his left nipple. Johnson made the sign of warding. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Doc,’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s an evil mark and no mistake.’

‘Do you recognise the device?’ I asked. It was of an eye framed by a triangle, and behind both of those, a simple Star of David. I had never seen that particular design, but it was like any number of society or clan emblems.

‘Not I, and nor should you if you’re any sort of God fearing man,’ he replied. ‘But I know the type. That’s devil work. Lots of sailors believe in it, and they all meet a bad end, mark me.’

‘Balderdash,’ said I. ‘Most sailors meet a bad end, whether they take up with mysticism or not. This chap is probably a Freemason or some such thing.’

‘Well you take it as you like, Doc,’ Johnson said. ‘I’m shipping out.’ And with that he gathered up his things and moved over to Chapman and Goldstein’s tent.

That entire exchange took place the day before my last entry. Most of today I spent reading from the journal of the Englishman. His name was Septimus Grimm, I have discovered. My task was made more difficult because Grimm’s journal has been battered and stained. I suspect the stains are blood, and in many places fingerprints and smudges obscure the writing.

I have yet to find what led him to this frozen lump of rock on the edge of the world, and it is slow going. My frostbite seems to be improving (or perhaps enough nerves are now dead that it no longer hurts as much as it did), and I am ready to copy some of Grimm’s own words from near his journal. The early entries are plain enough:

I went to Bedlam today. I should say rather ‘Bethlem Asylum’, but I shall bow, here in my private memoir, to the vernacular. I am convinced my theory is sound, and I am confident my machine will be effective even on the most extememe [sic] lunatics. I had written to Dr Wilkins before my arrival, of course, but the fool was befuddled when I got there, and claimed no foreknowledge of my coming. I blamed the postal service, but from his demeanour I suspected laudanum or opium the more likely culprit. I brought the machine with me, and wasted over three hours explaining the working of the thing to Wilkins. When I described the linking of the therapist’s very thoughts to those of the patient, he laughed and said, ‘Even a female patient’s thoughts?’

Needless to say I did not express my disgust to him, as I wanted access to his charges. So I smiled and nodded and said, ‘Of course, Wilkins. Who knows? Perhaps my machine might settle the debate regarding whether those damnable suffragettes think like men and only look like women, or if instead they are all frigid and plan to do away with us men altogether.’

He nodded, but I could tell he had been compelled to utter his query by lewdness rather than scientific curiosity. My theory revolves around the idea that order can be imposed through strength of will. I first conceived of the idea having seen mesmerists at work at the Royal College. It occurred to me that there were many examples of a man imposing his will on another, and indeed it was the basis of shamanism and mysticism. I had been exposed to much of the latter while stationed in Afghanistan during the second war with that benighted country. Both there, and in India, mystics were able to exert their will upon not only other men, but also animals and the elements themselves.

I conceived of a machine that used magnetism and electricity to bind the minds of two men. If one of those minds were disciplined, the machine would allow the order and structure of that mind to be imposed on the chaos and confusion of the weaker mind.

A cure for madness.

I explained all this to Wilkins, but he was agitated and I suspected his addiction was giving him gyp. I pressed my advantage, and urged him to take me into the asylum so I could choose a subject.

Bedlam indeed.

I was dismayed by the conditions of the asylum proper — naked inmates, both men and women, defecating and fornicating freely in the main area. The guards looked like armoured soldiers, with helmets and heavy
padded clothing. They carried sticks and I saw that they were not afraid to ply them upon the bodies of the lunatics.

The stench and the noise were both incredible.

I put a kerchief to my nose, and quickly made my selection. A dark-haired Polish-Jew by the name of Aaron Kosminski. Wilkins agreed to have him cleaned up and ready for me tomorrow.

Most of the next few pages defy intelligibility. I can make out only a few sentences here and there - descriptions of the principles of his device and the preparation for his experiment. There are diagrams and charts. Tables of questions and spaces for answers. The whole thing seems to have revolved around the therapist linking to the patient and then reinforcing his own thought structure through a series of codified mental exercises.

The interesting point is that the section after that (the section immediately following the day of the experiment) is where some of the entries are being written with occasional words (and sometimes whole
passages) in Latin. The first entry after the date of the experiment makes chilling reading. As close as I can make it, it reads thus:

Kosminski was waiting for me. He knew I would come for him. The [foul one(?)] had hidden in Kosminski’s broken mind, and Kosminski, in turn, hid his broken body in Bedlam Asylum.

When I attached the [magnets and wires, I think] he laughed at me and bared his chest. His keepers had given him a nightshirt for the occasion, and when he tore it off I saw a mark over his heart [He
has drawn a picture on the page at this point: it is the same image he has tattooed on his own chest]. ‘You think you can know my thoughts, [piglet(?)] but I tell you that my thoughts are my own. If you
would know them you must become me.’ I agreed with him, thinking to placate his concerns. In my experience, madness often includes religious delusions.

I am not sure what happened after. The machine activated well enough, but I blacked out and recall nothing until I found myself leaving the asylum with Wilkins. I paused, and he looked at me strangely… almost knowingly. ‘Did you witness me conducting the experiment?’ I asked him.

‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘I looked in from time to time.’

‘Was anything amiss?’

‘Nothing appeared to be amiss.’

‘What did I do?’ I asked, convinced by the exchange that I must have had a seizure of some sort.

‘You asked questions and wrote answers.’

I was disturbed by this news and reflected on it as I took a hansom cab home. I suspect I may have damaged some part of my brain as not only can I not recall what happened during the experiment, I find I can no longer write some words in English. Although my Latin is passingly poor, I appear capable of writing in that language fluently.

The section ends there, and the next is written in a hand that bears little resemblance to the writing thus far. I shall read it tomorrow.

9 October

Am ill. Fever.

11 October

Dreams. Screaming. Nightmares.

12 October

Am still weak, but illness appears to have passed its worst. No one has come to feed me today, which is unsettling. I remember Johnson bringing gruel two mornings ago (I think) and sponging my forehead at some stage over the last few days. I am writing under the ‘12th October’ but must say I am unsure whether that is the true date or not.

I am also disturbed by Grimm’s continuing account. Here is a copy of what I read this morning:

I have been plagued by dreams over the last few nights. In the first, it was night and raining. I was in a wide street, with hansom cabs passing and it was well lit. Then I found myself elsewhere - a narrow, cobbled, mean street, having on one side shabby, dirty little houses of two stories, and only a three foot pavement separating them from the road, which was no more than twenty feet from wall to wall. On the opposite side were the high walls of warehouses which shadowed the dirty street in a far deeper gloom than its own character would have in broad day light suggested.

Again, a break in the continuity of what I was seeing, and I was standing over a woman. Pretty, although missing her front teeth. She was lying on her side, and her skirts were all hiked up exposing her privates.

The second dream was similar to the first. Night, but this time I was standing in a yard next to a wooden fence. Again, a woman was lying at my feet, but she had been mutilated and was most definitely dead. Her
throat was dissevered deeply; the incision through the skin was jagged and reached right round the neck. On the wooden paling between the yard I was in and the next, smears of blood could be seen. They were about a
foot from the ground, and immediately above the part where the blood from the neck lay. I looked down at my hands and saw they held an evil looking knife, with a blade as sharp as sin.

The woman was wearing red and white-stripped stockings, and I remember laughing.

The third dream had me standing some way off from the body of yet another woman. Although it was night, we were in a small square and the moon was high enough that I could see quite clearly. Again, she had been
mutilated - her nose cut off, her belly opened and intestines draped up and over her shoulder as she lay there in a pool of her own blood and faeces. I wiped my hands on a strip of apron, and then tore the piece off. I threw the scrap of apron to the ground, and then bent to scrawl on the wall in white chalk: “The Juews [sic] are the men That Will not be blamed for nothing” [the capitalisation and spelling are as Grimm has them].

A voice spoke to me then, mocking and laughing. ‘Welcome pig,’ it said. ‘I will be waiting for you in Bedlam.’

The fourth and last dream - I cannot describe except in the briefest outlines. The mutilations I have described thus far are the careful ministrations of a lover compared to the evil visited upon the woman in my
last dream. I was in a room, and her clothes were folded neatly on a chair. Her mutilated corpse lay upon the bed. Parts of her lay strewn around the room, or stuffed into her gaping abdominal cavity. I’ll describe no more than that. But the voice was with me again. ‘You have a strong mind, pig,’ it said. ‘But mine has the weight of aeons. Can you bear that?’ and then it laughed and the sound turned my bowels to water.

I awoke this morning to find the same tattoo that Kosminski had has now appeared on my own chest. I recall the hullabaloo surrounding the Whitechapel Murderer who was killing prostitutes in the East End a few years ago. I am convinced that Kosminski was involved, and that I am being plagued by his memories. Perhaps my mind was not so strong as I suspected. This… unholy stigmata on my chest must be psychosomatic. I have read in the journals of many such instances. If Kosminski is truly the Ripper, how can I inform the Scotland Yard when my evidence consists of nothing more than suspicion and some dreams? I must think carefully.

13 October

I awoke with the mark on my own chest. Still no word from anyone else in the camp, and I am too frightened to investigate. I have blood on my hands, and my belly is full. Have finished Grimm’s journal. His last entry said only:

I killed last night. The beast rages and attempts to consume my
every thought. I have made plans to flee London and have signed on as
ship’s doctor with a vessel heading north. My mind is strong enough to
hold it for the moment. I am no peasant East End Jew. But I need to flee
civilisation. I need to take this thing from among men, and bury it
where it can never be found.

If you discover this journal, take heed and fly for your life - you
stand on cursed ground.

I am either possessed by a madman, or am a madman possessed.

_____________________

John Macbride’s journal has no further entries.

DNA analysis of the ejaculate found in Dr Grimm’s dead wife showed it came from a pig.

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Bryn Sparks lives in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, with his wife Christine and their three daughters. He owns no sheep. Bryn is CEO of a medical device manufacturing company, and is completing a PhD in Medicine at the Otago University, Christchurch School of Medicine.

Bryn’s previous publications include “Wing and a Prayer” in the February 2004 issue of Frothing at the Mouth, “Seven Wives” in the 2004 volume of the award winning Agog! anthology: Smashing Stories, and “Whiskey in the Jar” in the December 2004 issue of Aoife’s Kiss.

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Bryn Sparks’s short story “On the Shoulder of Giants” appears in the Apex Publications anthology Aegri Somnia. Order your copy today.

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