Page 89 of If Looks Could Kill

Jack slowly wakes with a throbbing head and a neck and back twisted out of kilter. He can’t move, and he cannot see. The cellar is dark, and it reeks of smoke, but it sounds empty. Just him and the rats.

And ghosts. The ghosts of gutted corpses, in all their gruesome glory, dancing before his vision.

Pearl joins the parade of dancing cadavers. Her dress is soaked in blood. She and her sisters in mutilation seem intent on performing a danse macabre for him for eternity. He sees them, and he sees the dark cellar. Two realities swim before his view.

She is dead, then.

He killed her, and got nothing for his pains—that old familiar refrain. Here he lies, in pools of her blood and his, in the cellar of the house where briefly they both lived. What on earth had he been thinking? He knows better.

He has to get out of this house.

Every woman you touch will rise up and hunt you.

She must have managed to get away, since she’s not here, but she would have soon bled out. Good. A corpse on the streets is harder to trace to him than a body in a cellar.

He waits for his fingers and hands to thaw, for his arms to respond to his will. As blood flow resumes and the nerves awaken, his hand is pierced by a thousand needles.

The house above him is still quiet. It must not be morning yet.

And he understands. It’s so simple. How has no one yet figured it out?

That last girl in London. The girl on the ship. Now this girl.

It’s not a fluke. It’s not him.

Every woman is a she-devil. Every female a fiend.

They’re all made of snakes. The legacy of their Mother Eve. Plotting man’s destruction.

They will claw at you for vengeance for your murders and your sins.

Too dangerous to touch. Too treacherous to allow near him. Too toxic, even, to kill, to harvest, to mine for the materials of endless life. Even their generative bodies that hold the secrets of creating life are accursed objects, poison vessels.

Hasn’t he always known it? His body always rejected them immediately.

We are anathema to you.

It was never they who could save him. They couldn’t save themselves from age and decay and devastation.

For now, he will flee to the safety of his sister’s home in Waterloo.

No more officious landladies. His sister will hide him.

She will protect his secrets. She’s not a woman ; she’s a relative.

They don’t count. Now, while the hour is dark, he might yet be able to slip away unseen, after a bit of hasty cleanup. It’s time for Jack to go.

His experiments are over. Only God can heal him now.

And if God won’t, if his sojourn here must soon close, the life to come will reveal him in the eyes of all as the deathless spirit, the messenger of immortality, the prophet of resurrection he has always been, but which the world, in its stubborn ignorance, was too narrow-minded to see.