Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

underneath my pillows and pull out
As Every Day Goes By
– which is now my favourite magazine with its stories serialised each week; with all those eerie real-life tales that appear beneath the banner that asks, ‘
Is it Possible?
’
    Cook gives me all her old copies. Mrs Hibbert would tut if she knew. She prefers me to read things like
Woman’s World
with advice on fashion and etiquette, all the latest musical arrangements to play on the parlour piano or harp, with pictures of devoted wives who pose as angels of the hearth alongside their perfect children, inside their perfect homes. But Cook says we are all fallen angels here, and better not to dream of lives that have no bearing on our own – which is why I like
As Every Day
. And those pages
are
educational. The things I have learned. You would be amazed! Did you know there are hogs living wild in the sewers, breeding as fast as rats, and rats that grow to the size of dogs that would tear out your throat anddrain your blood if you so much as dared to cross their paths? And tonight I was reading of Spring Heeled Jack – a supernatural being who once caused a spate of hysteria among half the women of London town, tormenting them with his blazing red eyes and his fingers like claws and a mouth that could vomit blue tongues of fire. Imagine being confronted by that! The ugliest of customers!
A Murderer. A demon from Hell!
Well, that’s what all the headlines said. But never once was that devil caught because of the springs that were fixed to his boots, that gave him the power to fly over walls, after nobbling his victims half out of their wits – and some of them really did go mad, thereafter committed as lunatics.
    The stories are stashed back under my pillow. But I am awake. I cannot sleep. What is that creaking outside the door? I hold my breath when it opens up. A golden light comes trickling in. Watery circles lap over the ceiling. Watery shadows creep over the walls. I freeze at a jingle-jangling sound, a faint scratching patter across the boards, then the sudden weight on the end of the bed which causes the mattress to dip right down. For a moment there I almost scream. I am thinking –
Jack has come for me!
    Oh, this is no supernatural beast, whatever the aura of menace that seeps from his every pore. I know that dial all too well and I know that low and mellifluous voice when he spouts his soft enquiry, ‘Are you sleeping, or are you pretending again? Won’t you wake for the present Tip’s brought tonight?’
    He’s always coming in at night bringing me his midnight gifts, posies of flowers, old books of verse, a wooden box full of Turkish Delight: sweet fragrance of honey, lemon and rose seeping out through the tissue paper’s folds. Those jellies melt upon your tongue like something sent from Paradise. But I only eat them when he’s gone. Only then do I stop pretending sleep, squinting through the narrowed slits of my eyes to make out his silhouette on the bed as he sighs and lowers his head in his hands, getting corned from the gin in his pocket flask beforeleaving his tributes for me to find, nestled like eggs in the folds of the quilt, the dipping little womb of silk that proves Tip Thomas was really there, not some goblin conjured from laudanum dreams.
    I know when I am dreaming, all of those tumbling, dancing forms. I know I am awake, not dreaming now, while holding the sheets up tight to my throat, peering through the murky gloom and answering with as much hard brass as that in my metal bedstead, ‘Get out of my room! You’ve no right to be here!’
    ‘Oh, Pearl,’ he groans in mock despair, ‘we are an impertinent little minx. Why would you speak to your saviour so, the one who found you as a babe? Don’t you think it’s time to offer Tip some token of your gratitude . . . to warm the cockles of his heart?’
    His hands are fumbling on the stand – hands with long nails – nails like knives – eventually finding the tinder box,