‘What does he think the mixture might be?’ Wolf asks me.
‘So far he has no idea,’ I say. ‘He thinks it might be based on laudanum, which is opium in alcohol, but isn’t sure. He knows it’s active as a liquid, so he has ruled out nitrous oxide – laughing gas – and chloroform, both of which you have to inhale. Other candidates include ether, a substance made from sulphuric acid and alcohol, and chloral. He’s also trying to obtain more exotic herbals from further afield, and concocts a weird theory about some foreign witch doctor giving the information to the fairground doctor. But if this is true, then the mixture won’t be something he can concoct from ingredients to be found in any Victorian pharmacy. This basically throws him into total depression. But after a while he comes to the conclusion that it can’t have been an exotic mixture. For two shillings it was unlikely to have included Peruvian tree bark, African snake venom, unicorn blood, or whatever. He works out that, for two shillings, the mixture must have contained relatively cheap ingredients. But what?’ I shrug. ‘Even if the ingredients aren’t exotic, they could be anything.’
‘And you have no idea yet?’ Wolfgang asks.
I shake my head. ‘No. But I’m looking forward to finding out; if you ever do get to find out, that is.’
Wolf lights a cigarette and falls into a deep contemplation of his glass of slivovitz. I consider telling him about the preface to the book, and the hint that there could be something ‘real’ about it, but I don’t. Instead, I get up and rinse the coffee cups while Wolf drains his glass and gets up to go.
‘I can do something gourmet tonight, if you like,’ he offers.
I am tempted. What I’ve got here is at best ‘very gourmet’, but I do want to finish the book.
‘Thanks, Wolf,’ I say. ‘But I think I’m just going to keep reading.’
‘And complete the curse?’ he says, with a raised eyebrow.
‘I really don’t think there is a curse,’ I say.
By eight o’clock it’s freezing and I have to switch on all the gas rings. I am nearing the end of the book and it seems clear that Mr. Y is well on his way towards bankruptcy and destitution as the result of his obsession with the Troposphere and the method by which he might return there. He has taken to experimenting with various drugs and potions and lying there on his couch gazing at a black dot, but none of the drugs he has tried have worked. At every corner he is assaulted by advertisements suggesting cure-all panaceas like Dr Locock’s Pulmonic Wafers, and Pulvermacher’s Improved Patent Galvanic Chain-Bands, Belts, Batteries and Accessories. What was in the wafers, and could the fairground doctor’s vial of liquid have contained it? And what about Pulvermacher’s electrical objects? Perhaps the fairground doctor had in some way electrified whatever fluid he had concocted. Mr. Y realises that there is no way he’ll be able to find the concoction by chance. The only way he will ever be able to revisit the Troposphere is by finding that doctor and persuading him to tell him how.
By the beginning of Chapter Twelve, Mr. Y has discovered that many of the people who travel the country with fairs in the summer end up in London in the winter, exhibiting their sideshow horrors in run-down shops and backstreet houses. As a last resort, Mr. Y has taken to spending his evenings, and much of his money, touring these establishments, trying to find some clue to lead him to the fairground doctor.
My search continued into November. The weather had turned bitterly cold but I kept at it every night, even as I began to doubt that I would ever find my man. It seemed to me that London had become a sort of Vanity Fair, with many of the establishments in the back streets of the West End – and beyond – dressed up with gaudy crimson hangings and advertising, by way of vast painted representations and pictorial facsimiles, such unsavoury offerings as the Bearded Lady, the Spotted Boy, the Giantess of Peru and various other mutants, savages and freaks of nature.
Although most of these establishments remained open all day, I had discovered that it was in the evening and nighttime hours that one should expect to encounter the fullest range of their offerings. And so it was that I would venture out after supper every evening and pay my penny at the doors of establishments both gaudy and drab, populated by crowds of people or empty. In every place I asked the same question, and in every place I received the same response. No one had ever heard of the fair-ground doctor.
November grew older and greyer, and each night it snowed a little more. I decided to confine my investigations to my own locality until such time as the weather improved, although I confess that by that time there was barely a waxwork or living skeleton in London that I had not already seen. However, I had been told of a new premises on the Whitechapel Road, opposite the London Hospital, formerly the site of an undertakers, and, previously to that, a drapery business with which I had been familiar. So, after a small supper of bread and dripping, I set off on foot towards Whitechapel Road. My journey took me past the Jews’ Burial Ground and the back of the Coal Depot and then along the Southern side of the workhouse behind Baker’s Row. Not for the first time I experienced the direst of premonitions that, if I did not succeed in my undertaking, my own family would be forced inside such an establishment. I did not imagine worse, because I knew of no worse.
I followed the railway line down towards the London Hospital, looking behind me all the time for the thieves who dwell in areas such as this. I was not carrying very much money with me but I had of course read the horrible stories of the new breed of East End thieves who, if they find you with only a few pence, will easily kick out one of your eyes – or worse – as thanks for it. The snow fell softly on me as I walked through the smoky air, with coal dust from the depot mingling with the smog already thick around me. I coughed a little, and rubbed my hands to keep warm. I thought then that if I were fully in possession of all my senses I would surely not have been out on a night such as this one. Yet on I walked.
As I turned into Whitechapel Road, my eyes almost immediately fell upon the establishment of which I had heard. The upper part of the house was adorned with a large sheet of canvas, on which various entertainments and spectacles were depicted, including yet another Fat Lady, along with the World’s Strongest Woman and various other oddities. It is alarming how one so quickly tires of these sorts of spectacles, especially when one visits these establishments with such regularity as did I over those months, and if one chances, as I did, to observe the dreary reality behind the lurid and gruesome teratology presented by the showmen. Once, early on a Saturday morning, I happened to walk past an establishment I had visited two or three nights previously. There, in an overgrown garden, I observed the ‘amazing’ bearded woman, who by evenings was a sombre, backlit, half-human spectacle, pegging out her washing and engaging in an argument with an African ‘savage’ who was to be found after sunset adorned with a straw skirt, golden tunic and hoop earrings, and who apparently made only the utterances ‘Ug, ug,’ but was at that moment wearing the rather less exotic outfit of shabby stockings, corduroy britches and a grey cloth cap, and was demonstrating an advanced grasp not only of English, but of its myriad vernacular words and expressions. I also once chanced upon the Boy with the Gigantic Head, a child of perhaps twelve or thirteen years, outside of his darkened room, and removed from all costume, lime-light, and painted advertisement. He was no longer a gaudy freak but clearly a sick child who required medical attention.
Feeling rather half-hearted, I paid a penny to enter the Whitechapel establishment. On the ground floor, and requiring no further payment, were the usual trivial spectacles of ships-in-bottles, shrunken heads and the like. There were also various wax-works of prominent political figures, and a scene depicting the glories of Empire. There were also, seated at small card-tables, various scoundrels engaged in the dark art of hiding the ‘Lady’ from those gentlemen who would find her for a shilling, and other similar forms of petty embezzlement. As I left this room and made towards the stairs, a young girl attempted to entice me into a back-room in order that I might have my fortune told by a Madame de Pompadour. I assured the woman that all the possibilities of my fortune were already well-known to me and proceeded up the stairs. Here I found a troublesome display indeed: eleven wax-works, each depicting one of the victims of the Whitechapel Murders. I confess I had to avert my gaze after briefly regarding a mutilated copy of Mary Kelly lying on a bed in