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Authors: Ramsey Campbell

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BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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A university official frowns through a glass door as if she thinks I’ve brought a gang rather than the tale of one. She’s standing where Lower Milk Street was in 1885—where Richard Morgan was kicked to death in front of his family for not giving a youth some money for a drink. One of the killers lived around the corner in Maiden’s Green, once a fashionable perambulation but by then a narrow court with a filthy central gutter, and another inhabited a nearby cellar just off Leeds Street. The murder became known not just as the Tithebarn Street outrage but as the start of the High Rip gang violence. “I also do the High Rip Trip along the docks,” I take the chance to add.

“They kicked him all the way across the street and back again,” my father says, “and a mob cheered them on. You’d have thought they were playing a footy game.”

This illuminates images in my mind—the family returning by the ferry from a seaside jaunt across the river, the lurid glare of the ale-house transforming this mean end of the dark street into a stage, the shadows of the gang converging on the supine victim, the crunching underfoot of ribs and eventually of a skull as all that Richard Morgan knew and had been and might have become was engulfed by the
marsh of his crushed head. I refrain from conveying any of this, because my father’s words have earned a disgusted scowl from the American. Instead I press the reassuringly modern button at a pedestrian crossing and move the tour onwards to Cheapside nearly opposite. “They used to call it Dig Street, Cheapside,” my father says. “They’re forever digging this town up. You’d think they’d have learned to leave some things alone.”

He’s thinking of the Big Dig, the redevelopment that has overtaken streets along and around the route of the Pool, narrowing them with roadworks so that they’re no wider than they would have been in the Georgian era, and all this to leave the shopping centre indistinguishable from a dozen other towns—at least, that’s one of the themes of his web site. Tithebarn Street has been spared, and patches of waste ground dating from the blitz isolate derelict buildings and a couple of small pubs that stand for the side streets—Highfield, Smithfield—that Lower Milk Street used to parallel. Cheapside retains a few small shops and a pub opposite the black stone Bridewell prison of a disused police station, where shrubbery sprouts behind a massive wall. Much of the narrow sloping street consists of a multi-storey car park facing unadorned offices twice the height of the houses they supplanted. In one of those houses Thomas Cosgrove murdered his wife and poisoned himself, less than a minute’s walk from the High Rip killing but seventy years earlier. Black water streams beneath the Bridewell gate and down to Dale Street as if the well has spontaneously revived and overflowed. Tithebarn Street grows more whole and more Victorian as I lead my audience towards the river, having told the Cosgrove tale, and then my father says “Don’t you take them on the Maybrick walk?”

“That’s where we’re going, where his office was.”

“I’m talking about where he took his constitutional every day he was at work before he went home to his poor scared wife.”

Even if I seem less informed than my customers deserve to expect, I have to admit “I don’t know where that is.”

“Along Dale Street and up Cheapside. He’d stop for a while outside the Cosgrove house and then he’d hang round where Richard Morgan died. Once his clerk saw Maybrick pacing up and down like he was marking territory or in a cell. Tom Lowry, the clerk’s name was. He never dared tell while Maybrick was alive, and he didn’t even when he was a witness at the widow’s trial.”

“He always liked murders, didn’t he, Maybrick?” The loquacious woman has rediscovered her voice. “They say he bought the house he died in because there was supposed to have been one there. And that clerk was in his diary. Maybrick thought he’d found something out and it reads like he’d have killed the boy as well if it mightn’t have given him away.”

“I can’t speak for anyone else,” the American complains, “but I’ve no idea what all this is about.”

“Gav will fill you in,” my father says and rides ahead.

James Maybrick was a cotton broker who often stayed in London with one of his brothers. Six months after Jack the Ripper’s last recorded crime, Maybrick died of arsenic poisoning in the riverside mansion into which he’d moved with his wife and children the previous year. Just over a century later, a Liverpool man produced a diary that was signed Jack the Ripper. Numerous references in the diary lead the reader to conclude that it was written by James Maybrick.

I’ve barely finished relating this when the woman and her companion start to disagree about the authenticity of the item. The man who took it to a London literary agent said he’d had it from a friend who wouldn’t tell him where it came from and who’d died, you might think conveniently, the previous year. Yes, but experts have tested the paper and confirm that it’s a real Victorian journal. Fair enough, but why are nearly fifty pages missing at the front? Maybe they contained things that someone didn’t want the rest of us to
read. Not so likely considering what was left in, and mightn’t the writer have needed a Victorian journal to convince the experts and just cut out pages that were already used? He made it look as if they were written by the same person, because the diary starts in the middle of an entry, but it’s pretty convenient to have Whitechapel on the first page to explain why he killed women there. The experts say the ink is the kind Maybrick might have used, and you can’t buy it any more. Maybe, but they don’t say the writer made a mistake about Michael Maybrick. It’s full of verses like the ones the Ripper sent the police, and the writer says he’s as good at poems as his brother Michael. Only Michael never wrote any. He was well known as a composer and set verses to music. For James Maybrick not to know this is as likely as that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s brother would believe Sullivan wrote the words of
The Mikado
when Gilbert did.

By now we’re abreast of the offices that have occupied Exchange Station since the railway went underground along a new route. My father is still playing outrider, as if he’s looking for danger ahead, and the woman turns to me. “What do you think?”

I think the diary reads like the work of someone trying to sound like the Ripper of the letters that have been public for many years—the work of a writer dreaming of publication. The narrator keeps forgetting how sophisticated or otherwise his language is meant to be, and addressing not just himself but the reader. In the last entry he writes “I place this now in a place were it shall be found” but is compelled to add several sentences before signing himself “Yours truly Jack the Ripper.” How artificial is all that? Later the man who made the diary public signed an affidavit that it was forged and then denied it was, supposedly because someone had scared him into keeping the legend alive. I don’t want to undermine my tour, and so I say “I think there are arguments on both sides.”

This satisfies neither the woman nor her companion. As
we overtake my father the man asks him “Do you think the diary’s real?”

“We’ll never know. That’s how legends work. It’s another tale like Liverpool’s full of. You should wonder who dreams them all up.”

A drain beside the kerb emits a gurgle that could be mistaken for mirth as I lead the way to Exchange Street East, which is almost opposite the station. Maybrick’s office used to be in Knowsley Buildings, a gloomy Victorian hulk close to the far end, now the site of modern offices. A security man behind a desk in the lobby gives me a resigned look of recognition. As I direct the tour across the side street to a stubby alley between two Victorian office blocks, my father pedals ahead.

The alley opens into Exchange Flags, a wide square enclosed on three sides by offices and on the fourth by the back of the town hall. The square is dominated by a central group of black statues, spotlit from high on the white facades and radiating pale shadows like stains seeping up through the flagstones. In Maybrick’s day the square was known as the Change. Cotton dealers conducted their trading on it, and I invite my audience to imagine Maybrick in the midst of a multitude of shouting men crowned with bowlers or, like him, top hats. What might he have been plotting while he fought to make a profit? Was he unsuccessful because his mind was deep in its own dark, making plans unsuspected by his rivals? Was the greatest clamour around him in the Change or inside his head?

Recounting all this feels like continuing someone else’s dream. My father has cycled through the shadows around the statues before halting to listen to me. In a moment I’m aware of a surreptitious movement above and behind him. The nearest statue is betraying signs of life. Its blind eyes, so black they might never have seen the sun, have started to water.

As a trickle of liquid escapes from the side of its mouth I hear a whisper almost underfoot, and the flagstones break out
in a black rash. I’m distracted by thoughts of the plague—of the fear the townsfolk had that it would rise out of the earth however deep its victims were buried—until two people jerk open their umbrellas and the rain begins to tap on my scalp as though it’s impatient to waken my mind. My father is already cycling across the square, calling “Here’s a bit of shelter.”

It’s a passage one storey high that leads through an office block to Chapel Street, the continuation of Tithebarn Street down towards the river. It only just shelters the tour as we huddle in the middle while the July downpour intensifies, veiling both ends of the passage with translucent bead curtains that swing inwards to find us. “Seems like you should provide umbrellas,” the American says to me.

The leaping of rain in the square and in the equally deserted streets has begun to subside. Is it worth leading the way past the cellars where the Allies had their local headquarters, close to Maybrick’s office? Apparently the pressure of monitoring Japanese and German communications made some of the personnel imagine they heard voices in the earth beyond the walls. As the shrill hiss that encloses the passage diminishes to a whisper, my father says “Hands up whoever’s voting to go to a pub.”

In one way I’m glad of the rain, because I’ve just realised that I omitted part of the tour. From St George’s Hall we should have turned along Lime Street to the Royal Mail sorting offices, where builders digging the foundations unearthed coffins lined with lead. The detour to the library must have driven the route out of my mind, but I feel as if I’ve made almost mindlessly for the river. Before I can own up, the Ripper fan says “How about the Slaughterhouse?”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” says the American.

This earns him a chorus of sympathy, ironic or otherwise, and I see my father readying a remark. I’m not swift enough to head him off from drawling “Ain’t a man ever laughed at the Milkshake Kid and lived.”

The debunker of the diary peers out at the square, in which just the odd raindrop twitches on the flagstones, and tells his companion “Maybe we’re best going for the train.”

As they turn away I promise anyone who’d like to know “You can join another of my tours free when it’s not raining.”

“Tell us when that’s going to be,” says the woman.

True enough, the city seems to have acquired a monsoon season. “Remember I do the High Rip Trip as well,” I say, “and during the day I’m Pool of Life Tours.”

The party disperses into the square, past the statues that appear to be dreaming of flexing their watery muscles. I’m disconcerted to realise that although my head count outside the library and since then was correct, I’ve kept including my father. Presumably someone stayed in the library, and I wonder if it was the unidentifiable informant who knew more than me about Frog Lane. The American stays with me, and I’m afraid my father may find more opportunities for teasing. He cycles past the stealthily restless statues and the monumentally silent Town Hall, however, and I follow, alert for bits of yesteryear that may be to my companion’s taste. I can’t show him the sanctuary stone in Castle Street, where it indicates one limit of the oldest market, because it’s hidden by a limousine double-parked alongside a cash dispenser in a classical facade. There’s no trace of the enormous hand that used to be erected on market days, supposedly symbolising or appealing to some element of the Pool. I point out the stone figures nesting high on the Victorian frontages, mermaids and mermen and serpentine monsters that might almost be dreams that have risen from the banks and restaurants at street level. I summarise the history of Derby Square at the end of the street, where my father is riding around a giant statue of Victoria under a dome that drips like an umbrella. The monument is where the tour begins and ends. Part of the Castle of Lyverpull occupied the site of the square, and later St George’s Church did, a reference my father elaborates upon. “There used to be graves under the
church,” he says, “only the coffins came up through the floor. Seems like the Pool got into them even though it was filled in. The town covered up the graves so fast hardly anyone saw what was in them.”

“I should hope so.” Having paused to emphasise his disapproval, the American says “May I ask who’s supposed to be running this tour?”

“I’d tell you who’s not,” my father retorts, “if I knew your name.”

The American gives him a long look and me a longer one. “I’ll be calling you,” he informs me and marches down James Street towards the giant birds perched on the Liver Building to survey the river.

My father widens his mouth in a grimace at the comment, though presumably the call will be about a free tour. Rain is pooling at the foot of the steps to the monument, and I wonder if that was how the church floor looked as the coffins prepared to appear. “Come back to my flat,” I say, “and we’ll have a talk.”

“You want to think about selling while all the money’s coming up from London. Make yourself a profit and buy somewhere bigger further out.”

Is he regretting the deal he made on my behalf with a friend on the council when Liverpool offices converted into flats were both rare and cheap? “You haven’t told me what was so important at the library,” I point out.

“I’ll show you.” His eyes flicker as if the streetlamps are guttering with age. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Not here.”

BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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