The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr Read Free Book Online Page A

throat.
    I walk on, and the streets get darker. Shadows and flame flicker, a single taper in a window. Guttering blue and yellow lights, glimmering from some drunken Romany conjurer’s fire tricks. The stink is grotesque, crawling under my clothes to lick me like a hungry dog at a corpse.
    The crowded maze of the rookery is even more crowded now. When the slum-clearers tore down a swath of tenements to build New Oxford Street, they didn’t find this grubby lot aught else to live in. They just moved ’em on, jammed ’em tighter into what remained. Now they’re five and six and ten to a room down here, where makeshift plank bridges lead from window to window, dank tunnels crawl beneath the streets, hidden doors lead into flash houses and slop houses and low lodging houses, where you pay a penny to scrounge a few hours’ sleep on the floor or a shared bug-infested bed in a freezing airless shithole with no light. And in monstrous factories and power stations, workers inhale deadly cotton fibers, and dip matches in jaw-rotting poison, and shovel coal into hungry generators until they die.
    And all in a world where they can hang you for stealing tuppence, and the price of bread’s kept artificially high so the rich can get richer. Things matter more than people. It’s enough to make you sympathize with them Frenchies chopping off their king’s head and dancing around his bleeding corpse.
    Heh. Nosy prickfaces like that idiot Temple should write about this in their fool pamphlets. Except, poor people dying slowly don’t sell no papers. Never did. Never will.
    I sidestep a wooden sewer trap, what looks like a sturdy cover only it’s not. Step on that, and you’ll fall to your death in a stinking pit. Traps like these—spring-loaded spikes, deadfalls, trip wires—are everywhere. If the crushers chase you in here, they might never come out. The Royal’s fancy Enforcers, with their dumb clockwork justice? They don’t dare even come here.
    So everyone piles in, freaks and fortune-tellers, the fey and the fell, idiots and opium-eaters and them what’s touched in the head by the weird . Some tell of a secret den called the Rats’ Castle, a magical underground place where strange folk can go. Pish, says I. If it’s real, I ain’t never found it. Ain’t no true fairy folk left, that’s what I reckon, leastaways not in London. Years of witch-finders, greedy bounty-hunters, and plain bloody-fingered murder finished ’em off or drove ’em into hiding long ago.
    But plenty of people can still claim fairy ancestors. If you’ve magic in your blood? The rookeries are where you hide. It’s a laughing lunatic’s idea of hell.
    I cross Broad Street, where outside the bright-lit gin palace, an impromptu street fair is going on, a giggling riot of color. The crowd is a dirty rainbow, mismatched duds snatched from washing lines and pawnshops, the cast-off finery of dandies and high-born ladies. A mad fiddler in a crooked green top hat plays a raucous reel, competing with a bloke on a box who’s hollering fine treasons about voting and workers’ rights and how them bloodsuckers in the Commons don’t stand for nobody nowhere.
    â€œGod save the Queen!” I yell, and a few people cheer. It ain’t Her Majesty they’ve got a quarrel with.
    Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers roam, and acrobats flip and tumble on long whippy limbs. A dwarf with a scaly face frightens passers-by for a penny with his cage of freaks. A pair of sinister carnies work an erotic shadow-play show, string puppets in silhouette behind a sheet doing all manner of dirt. On the corner, cheering folk circle around a cock-fight, and the stupid birds squawk and shed bloody feathers in clouds.
    A change from the drab streets above, where everything’s gray or black or cat-shit brown, and people toff about with noses held high. Here in hell, at least we know how