From the window of his abominably small, second-story room, Jonathan Nettle could see the alley where he’d found the body earlier that morning. He’d accidentally stumbled onto the corpse while he was wandering the huge, unending slum of London’s East End, looking for the homeless shelter on the Mile End Road where he was to take up his new post as assistant minister. He’d smelled the noisome stench moments before he came across the homeless man’s body, and he’d spun on his heel and vomited all over the sidewalk when he saw the iridescent black flies swarming around the mouth and eyes. After that, he’d stumbled from the alley and grabbed the first policeman he saw. He babbled and pointed and grunted until, at last, he made himself understood enough for the policeman to follow him.
The policeman looked at the body, at the bruise-like splotches on the skin that weren’t bruises, but lividity, at the emaciated, rail-skinny arms and legs, and merely nodded.
“Yer an American, ain’t ye, sir?”
“Huh?” Nettle said, the back of his hand against his lips. “Uh, yes.”
“What are ye doin’ here in the East End?”
Nettle told him he was looking for the homeless shelter, and the policeman merely nodded. “The peg house yer lookin’ for is over there,” he said, and pointed over Nettle’s shoulder.
Nettle could barely take his eyes off the body, but he did long enough to see the tumbledown, soot-stained building the policeman pointed out for him. He looked back at the policeman—at the bobby, he reminded himself—and said, “What… happened to him?”
“This bloke? Prob’ly starved to death’d be my guess, sir.”
“Starved?”
“Aye,” the bobby said.
Nettle had said nothing to that, only nodded as he tried to take in the wonder that a grown man could starve to death in the middle of the largest city on Earth, in the heart of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He tried, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
His stay was supposed to be brief, only long enough for him to get some experience with the great things William Booth and his “salvation army” were doing for the poor here in London, so he could take those practices back to his Methodist ministries in New York and Boston. But he could already tell that the “problem of the poor,” which such great orators as the Reverend Merle Cary of New York had spoken of so eloquently to audiences up and down the New England seaboard all that preceding summer of 1875, was far worse than he had been led to believe.
Just then, as if on cue, several men began lugging bags of garbage out of the hospital across the street and dumping them on the sidewalk below Nettle’s window. The bags split open and soon an almost liquid pile of corruption was festering in the open air. Nettle watched the pile grow into a shapeless mass of rotten vegetables, scraps of meat, orange peels, and bloody surgical rags and blankets. The street was a miasma of squabbling and obscene yelling and fighting, and yet no one said a word about the garbage. Indeed, after it had been sitting there for a few minutes, children converged on it, burying their arms in it up to their shoulders, digging for any kind of food they could find and devouring it on the spot.
One boy, a stunted little runt of perhaps six years old, came up with something black that might have once been a potato, and tried to steal away with it. Several older boys surrounded him, punched him until he fell, then kicked him until he gave up the nasty potato thing he clutched near his groin.
For Nettle, it was too much. His sister Anna had snuck a dozen oranges into his luggage as a treat for him. Fully aware that indiscriminate charity is cruel, he made up his mind to be cruel. He collected the oranges in a paper sack and went down to the street.
“How old are you, son?” he asked the boy.
“Twelve, sir.”
Nettle blinked in shock. Twelve! And he had envisioned the boy a runt of six. How this place must beat them down, he thought.
He handed the boy the oranges, and the boy’s eyes went wide, like he’d just been given all the jewels in Africa.
“Go on,” Nettle said. “Enjoy.”
The boy was gone faster than the sun from a November day, and Nettle, feeling a little better, went back up to his room to write a letter to his sister in New York.
§
The porter’s name was Bill Lowell. He was a weathered, bent-back old man whose job it was to watch the door to the shelter and tell the poor wretches who came there when there was no more space available. Most nights, there was room for between twenty and fifty people, depending on the shelter’s food stores and what work needed to be done—for the cost of a bed indoors and a hot meal was a day of hard, hard labor.
“We open the doors at six,” Bill said to Nettle, who’d been told he’d work at each job in the shelter so he could better learn its overall operational strategy, “but the line’ll start formin’ ’fore noon. By four the blokes’ll be lined up ’round the corner.”
“Even when there’s only room for a few of them?”
Bill shrugged. “We’ll need to search ’em as they come inside,” he said. “Sometimes, they try an’ sneak tobacco inside in their brogues, and they ain’t allowed that.”
Nettle glanced through a window next to the door, and sure enough, a long line had already formed and was snaking its way down the sidewalk and around the corner. Word had gone out earlier that there was only room for twenty-five, and yet no one in the line seemed to want to leave his spot.
The faces he saw all looked hollow, the eyes vacuous. It wasn’t until several days later that Nettle learned why everyone he saw shared the same corpselike expression. London law didn’t allow the homeless to sleep outside at night. The idea was that if the homeless weren’t allowed to sleep outside at night, they would find somewhere indoors to sleep. To those who only saw the problem from the stratospheric heights of wealth and power, it was a clear example of give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. The reality, though, was a homeless population that was constantly driven from one doorway to the next by the police, forced to stay awake by the toe of a boot or the bite of a baton, resulting in an expression of slack-jawed exhaustion that stared back at Nettle from every pair of eyes he met.
Bill himself had nearly shared that fate, he told Nettle. He had had a family once—a wife, three daughters, and a son—but had outlived them all. His wife and daughters he’d lost to scarlet fever, all within a month of each other, but the son survived and had helped Bill in his work as a carpenter in days past.
One day, Bill had been carrying a load of nails that was too much for him. “Something in me back just broke,” Bill said. His load of nails had spilled, and he’d ended up flat on his back, unable to get up. He was taken to a hospital, but they refused to admit him, telling him, essentially, to “walk it off.”
This he had tried to do, but two hours later was on his back again. He was taken to a different hospital, and this time spent three weeks in bed. He emerged a broken man, unable to do the hard labor that was, unfortunately, the only kind of work that he and most of the men like him were qualified to do, only to learn his son had fallen from a rooftop and died the week before his release. The boy was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked, along with a dozen others.
He lived on the streets after that—carrying the banner, as the expression went—chased from one doorway to the next by the police, until, as luck would have it, he ended up in the Mile End Road shelter on the day they had an opening for a porter who could also do a little light carpentry. His nine-pounds-a-year salary made him a veritable Croesus among the East End’s poor.
Nettle thought idly that such a man as Bill, who had narrowly escaped a cruel death by exposure and malnutrition, would be more charitable toward his fellow men, but such was not the case.
Much to Nettle’s unease, Bill seemed to heartily enjoy his position of relative power over the poor and stared down his soot-blackened nose at all who entered, demanding from each their name, age, condition of destitution, and what kind of work they were good for, before searching them all with a rough, hard hand.
In one of his searches he found a ragged pouch of tobacco inside a man’s sock. Bill beat the man with a stick, evidently left by the door for just such a purpose, and probably would have gone on beating him indefinitely, Nettle figured, had he not intervened.
When Nettle berated him for his violence, Bill only scoffed. “Why ’e’s nothin’ but a worthless beggar, ’e is,” he said, and, with all the sour disposition of a man who kicks the cat because he’s afraid to kick his wife, went to the door, where a wrecked shell of a man stood on the threshold waiting for admittance, and said, “Be gone, you. Full up!”
“Please, sir,” the human wreck said. “Please, I ain’t ’ad food in me belly for five days.”
“Full up!” Bill said.
Nettle’s heart broke to see the pain in the man’s eyes, and before Bill could close the door, he was at Bill’s shoulder and said, “We can take this man in, I think.”
“But, sir,” Bill said, “there’s only room for twenty-five tonight. We’re full up.”
“And that man,” Nettle said, pointing at the bleeding bag of bones Bill had beaten for the insolence of smoking cheap tobacco, “was to be number twenty-five. Now, I believe, this man is twenty-five.”
Bill said nothing, but his eyes did.
“Thank ’e, sir,” said the wreck, and walked inside.
§
Bill’s other job at the shelter, after the doors were locked and the homeless shuffled inside, was to monitor the bathing room.
Making the homeless take a bath seemed like a good idea to Nettle—that is, until he saw the process in motion. The overnighters were all lined up, and one by one let down into a dark room with a single tub of warm water and a single threadbare towel hanging from a hook on the wall. Each man used the same water and towel as the man before him, and by the time the man Nettle had forced Bill to let in got his turn, the water in that tub was a frightful stew.
But the human wreck didn’t notice. He stripped off his rags and his appearance made Nettle gasp. His body had no meat on it. He was all ribs and distended belly, his back a mass of dried and fresh new blood where he’d been attacked by vermin.
He cleaned off several layers of dirt and blood and changed into a shirt and pants from the shelter’s wardrobe. Then he followed the others to the dining hall for a meal of stale bread and skilly—a sort of oatmeal mixed with tepid water so unclean Nettle doubted a dog would drink it—and he would have received that meal had he not had the misfortune to pass Bill on his way inside.
“You!” Bill said, his eyes turning hard as flints with surprised anger, his tone like that of a man who’s just found the boy who made his daughter pregnant and then made a run for it.
The man stopped in his tracks.
“Look who we ’ave ’ere,” Bill said loudly, looking around at the crowd.
Slowly, every head in the place turned to look.
The man kept his eyes on the floor.
“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Barlow the Butcher. Look ’ere, we got Barlow the Butcher!”
This meant nothing to Nettle, but it clearly did to the peg-house crowd, for in short order, they became a riotous mob. They fell on Barlow and began to beat on him with a savagery that would have made a tribe of cannibals blush.
Nettle waded in and pulled Barlow from the flurry of fists. Barlow, though, didn’t wait around to thank him. As soon as he was clear of the mob, he made for the door and ran into the night.
Nettle was left with a decision. He was ringed by angry faces, some bleeding where they’d been hit by others trying to land blows on Barlow, and he had a feeling he knew what would happen if he stayed there, now that they had the taste of blood. He wisely went for the door himself, stepping out into the street in time to see Barlow, or rather, a crowd of homeless at the end of the street, separating for Barlow, as he rounded the corner onto Stepney Green.
Nettle ran after him, and managed to follow him for a good ways before he lost him in the maze of the East End’s soot-stained back alleys. He became lost in short order, every cross street and alley meeting him with endless vistas of tumbledown misery and bricks.
Trying to find something familiar, he eventually stumbled onto the Brown Hay Road, where he stopped in front of an enormous abandoned warehouse. It was a blackened, eyeless hulk, not a single window down its entire length, and it made him feel strangely uneasy. There were, Nettle had seen already, very few empty buildings in London’s East End. Real estate, any real estate, was at a premium, as landlords could pack as many as eight families into a home no bigger than the small, one-story apartment he had shared in New York with his mother and his sister, Anna. One was more likely, he’d been told, to see a giraffe swimming down the Thames than to find an unoccupied building in the East End.
But the moldy warehouse in front of him was most certainly abandoned, and something about it made the skin crawl down his spine. And then someone was there, staggering toward him from the other side of the street. A patchwork of shadows played across the man’s face, but the little Nettle could see was ghastly. The man’s joints had swollen, and his body had withered away to almost nothing. His skin was black in places, almost mummified, like it had begun to rot, and it wasn’t until he got halfway across the street that Nettle could tell part of the man’s leg had been torn up as if by some sort of animal.
The man raised his hands and flexed his fingers in a weak grab at Nettle, moaning as he stumbled closer. At first, Nettle thought it was just a moan, meaning nothing beyond the pain it obviously conveyed, then he recognized the word inside the pain.
“Fooooood,” the man moaned.
Nettle turned on his heel, thinking robbery, and started to walk the other way.
“Fooooood,” the man groaned again.
“See here,” Nettle said, “I don’t have anything for you.”
He was very close to running and had already stepped up his pace, when a hansom cab lurched around the corner at a full sprint and mowed the man down. The driver of the hansom never slowed and, a moment later, he was gone.
Nettle was frozen with shock. What was left of the man after he’d been trampled by the horses and his body sliced open and dragged by the hansom’s wheels was in two gory pieces connected by a clotted smear of liquefied meat.
The man’s legs were still in the street, but his torso was near the curb. Nettle staggered that way, hands over his mouth, and knelt down next to the mess that the hansom had made of the man.
He started to pray… and the man opened his eyes.
Nettle fell backward onto the wet cobblestones. The man’s eyes were horrible, like staring into the void.
“Fooooood,” he groaned, and tried to claw his way toward Nettle, his fingers digging so hard into the edges of the cobblestones that the fingernails shattered and tore.
Nettle got up and ran and ran and ran. He ran till he broke down, and then he cried. He was still crying when, by chance, he stumbled back onto the Mile End Road.
§
The next morning, still badly shaken by his encounter, Nettle packed his bags and knelt by his bed to pray. He had fully expected to leave that afternoon, but his prayers had taken him in another direction, and when he rose to his feet he had decided to stay, half-convinced that what he seen the night before couldn’t have happened. He was upset, nothing more.
Nettle’s faith had never led him astray, and the next few days, and a chance encounter with the man the mob had chased out of the peg house on his horrible first night there, reinforced the wisdom of the decision he had made during prayer.
Nettle took to wandering up and down the Mile End Road, watching the people as they struggled for existence, and he noticed a curious little thing. The homeless always seemed to keep one eye on the spittle-flecked sidewalks, and when they’d see a morsel, they’d snatch it up and eat it on the fly. Most, it seemed, could pluck an orange peel or an apple core from the cobblestones without ever losing a step.
Late one afternoon, Nettle had been watching people pass, and Barlow had been coming the other way on the same sidewalk. Barlow had stooped to pick up something nasty, and when he rose, his nose collided with Nettle’s chest, for Nettle was a good six inches the taller.
“Oh, hello,” Nettle said, and had a devil of a time over the next few moments trying to assure the man that he had no intention of braining him to death.
They talked in the eaves of a coffee shop, and gradually the look of a rabbit trying to find an opening through a pack of hounds faded from Barlow’s eyes. Then a strange thing happened. Nettle, whose over-stimulated humanitarian urges were in danger of melting down if he didn’t find some specific point, some single human face to put on all this misery he had been witnessing, bought a pint of beer for Barlow, who was desperately in need of some kind person to buy him a pint of beer. It was the first pint of beer Nettle had ever bought, and it was the first full pint of beer Barlow had had in a long time. Nettle bought a second round, and by that afternoon, as the windows of the coffee shop sizzled with rain, he had come to a conclusion. He was not going to be the salvation for all the world’s poor—indeed, there was no way he could be, and it was vain to think so—but he could be the door to this man’s salvation. Nettle had a project now, something he could manage.
So they sat there in the coffee shop, the rich, well-meaning American, and the homeless, nearly starved Londoner, and the American talked about God and goodness and reward, and the Londoner drank his beer and nodded.
§
Over the next week, they met in the afternoons at the same coffee shop, and gradually Nettle realized that it wasn’t the man’s grotesque, almost troglodyte appearance that had sparked his philanthropy, but rather his cynicism. The man cared little for his own life and not at all for anyone else’s, and Nettle found it hard to believe that a creature who so hated life could actually go on living.
“Beer,” Barlow said. “Beer’s what makes a man feel like a man. You can take all the rest of it away, but you take away a man’s beer, and there ain’t no reason left for ’im to go on bein’.”
Nettle squinted at his own almost untouched beer and thought about that as a philosophy of life, and it seemed tragic, empty.
“What about a family?” he asked. “A home? A wife and kids?”
Barlow snorted with laughter. “I saw enough of that growin’ up,” he said. “I saw what me ma did for me old man. That was enough. Made ’im mis’rable, she did, always a-bangin’ me brothers and sisters about, makin’ ’is ’ome a noisy racket. ’E no sooner walk through the door and she’d be a-yellin’ at ’im, barkin’ at ’im like a dog. Take me word for it, mate, and don’t waste yer time on a wife ’n kids. Do nothin’ but take yer ’ard-earned money and keep you from drinkin’ a beer when it suits you.”
Nettle was stunned, bewildered. Such a wasted life! His mind raced for a response, for something worthwhile to say, and at last, he found it. “William,” he said, “I want you to pray with me. Will you do that?”
“Pray?”
“Yes, William. There’s a power in prayer that has sustained me through my hard times. I think it can do the same for you.”
Barlow wrinkled his brow, then a huge smile crossed his face. “Let’s pray for another beer, mate. You want me to pray? I’ll pray for that.”
§
But Barlow wasn’t Nettle’s only project. He was still expected to learn the ropes at the shelter, spending time in each of the numerous jobs necessary to keep the operation going day to day, and a few nights later, he was back with Bill, the porter, passing out blankets in the sleeping quarters. The overnighters would come in, take a blanket from Nettle, and head to a long, narrow room with two large oaken beams traversing its length. Rough pieces of canvas were stretched between the beams, and the men slept on the canvas. When he first heard about the arrangement, and before he had seen it, Nettle thought of seamen in hammocks, rocking to sleep with the rhythms of the open sea, but the reality was nothing like that, and the actual arrangement lacked any of the adventurous dignity a landsman could envision for the life of a sailor at sea. The men were packed in shoulder to shoulder, and the room was dreadfully noisy with snores and coughs and breaking wind, and in the right light, the whole room shimmered with a living cloud of fleas.
He was watching this sad display with a heavy heart when Bill appeared at his shoulder.
“What are you about, sir, talkin’ with Barlow the Butcher?”
“Excuse me?” he said, alarmed by the man’s tone, even though he was a good six inches taller, and maybe forty pounds heavier.
“You become ’is reg’lar drinkin’ mate’s what I ’ear.”
“I have not,” Nettle protested. He stammered, trying to rise to his own defense, and finally managed to tell Bill his plan, how his goal was the man’s salvation.
Bill just laughed.
“What’s wrong with going after a lost sheep?” Nettle said.
“’E ain’t no sheep,” Bill said. “A devil, aye, but ’e ain’t no sheep.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s an em’ty warehouse down on the Brown Hay Road. D’you know it? A big, ugly brute of a buildin’?”
“I’ve seen it,” Nettle said, cringing inwardly at the memory of the beggar and the hansom cab.
“Your mate used to be the union man there. ’Bout two years ago.”
Nettle eyed him warily.
“Did ’e tell you ’bout the people ’e killed there?”
“Killed? What are you talking about?”
Bill sneered at Nettle. “Aye, I thought not.”
“Tell me what you mean, sir. You cannot accuse a man of such a crime and not state your proof.”
Bill only shook his head. “Nothin’ was ever proved ’gainst ’im. Didn’t ’ave no blood on ’is ’ands. None that the courts could see, anyway. But ’e killed ’em all right. Just as pretty as you please.”
Nettle searched the man’s face for some indication that this was a joke. It had to be. He searched the creases in the old man’s face, the cracked red map of lines that colored the whites of his eyes, but found nothing to indicate that this was a joke.
“When you say killed, do you mean...?”
“I mean ’e murdered ’em. Sure as the Pope eats fish on Fridays. Murdered more’n an ’undred people. Men, wimmen, and children, just as pretty as you please.”
Nettle felt his legs go to gelatin. He fell against the wall and said, “A hundred people?”
“Aye.”
“But, how?”
“Why, ’e starved ’em. Locked ’em in that warehouse for full on twelve days. When they finally opened ’er up, every one of ’em, men, wimmen, and children, was dead as dead can be.” Then he leaned close and said, “I ’eard tell some of them bodies was eaten on.”
“That’s impossible,” Nettle countered. “How could he do such a thing?”
“I already tol’ you, sir. ’E was the union man, and those people went on strike. The comp’ny tol’ ’im to fix the problem, and ’e did.”
“A man can’t starve to death in twelve days,” Nettle said.
“You’ve seen these men,” Bill said. “Not a one’s more than a week away from death’s door.”
“But somebody would have done something to stop him,” Nettle said. “You can’t just kill a hundred people and expect to get away with it. Somebody would have said something.”
But Nettle didn’t need see the blank expression on Bill’s face to know that wasn’t true. Not here in the East End.
Feeling angry and confused and betrayed, Nettle ran from the peg house for the coffee house where he and Barlow had been meeting. He knew no other place to look for the man, but as it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to look anywhere else. He found Barlow in the back alley behind the shop, rifling through a paper bag of trash he’d found on the curb, pulling out little bits of orange peels and tearing what remained of the pulp from the pith with his blackened front teeth.
“Mr. Barlow,” Nettle called out from across the street.
Barlow looked up and smiled. But then his smile fell. Perhaps he saw the savage expression in Nettle’s eyes, or heard something sinister in his tone, but whatever it was, his expression instantly changed, and he ran into the night.
Nettle didn’t bother to chase him. It was enough, for the moment, to see him run. That was all the proof he needed that Mr. Barlow, also known as Barlow the Butcher, was a devil of the highest magnitude.
§
Some men snap by degrees. Like green wood, they bend a long ways before the tension takes its inevitable course. But other men break like porcelain. They cleave with sudden fury, shattering into thousands of irredeemable pieces, their edges left razor sharp.
Nettle was of the later sort, and when his mind snapped, it came with the illusion of sudden clarity. It seemed he was thinking clearly now for the first time, as if somebody had turned on a light switch in his mind, and the path before him seemed clearer now than it had ever been before. He suddenly saw in Barlow, not an individual’s face to put on all of humanity’s troubles, but a cause of its misery, and there was only one thing to do with such causes. The fact that he had befriended such a beast, that he had bought such evil a drink, for God’s sake, didn’t terrify him so much as instill in him a sense of personal responsibility. His proximity had given him ownership over the ending to Barlow’s sordid little history, and he set out to bring that history to a close.
He carried the banner that night, walking the streets of the East End without stopping for rest or sleep—indeed, without even feeling the need for rest or sleep—ferreting out the hiding places of the homeless, but with his mind on only one man.
He caught up with Barlow in a doorway, the man sitting on the top step, his knees bunched up to his chest and his head bent down between them, trying to sleep.
Nettle kicked his foot. “Wake up,” he said. “I want a word with you.”
Barlow thought him a policeman at first, and had already half pulled himself to his feet when the haze of sleep left him entirely, and he realized who was standing in front of him.
“You owe me an answer, Mr. Barlow.”
But Barlow didn’t stand still to give it. He turned and ran with all the energy a scared, weather-beaten, and prematurely old man could muster.
Nettle followed him at a jog, yelling “I want an answer!” over and over at Barlow’s back, and as they slipped deeper and deeper into the warren of slimy streets that were the bowels of the East End, a cold, light rain began to fall.
Nettle closed on him in a back alley off the Brown Hay Road, the streets deserted now and splashy beneath their feet. Barlow had curled up under a flight of stairs, trying to hide his face with his arms.
“You have some explaining to do,” Nettle said. The rain rolled off his face unnoticed.
Barlow stared at him with abject fear.
“What did you do? Answer me!”
“For the love of all that’s ’oly, sir, please don’t yell. You’ll—”
“I’ll what? Wake the dead? Go on, you villain, say it! Say it! Are you afraid they’ll hear us?”
Barlow looked seasick. His eyes pleaded for silence but got none.
“Spill it!” Nettle roared. “Tell me what you did.”
Nettle waited, and for a moment, there was no sound but the pattering of a gentle rain on cobblestones, but then it came, as both Nettle and Barlow knew that it most assuredly would, the sound of slow, plodding feet dragging on the cobblestones behind them.
Nettle looked over his shoulder and saw a small crowd of shamblers in the mist. There were men, women, even children. Their faces were dark with disease and their cheeks empty from extreme hunger. Their eyes were carrion eyes, and a smell that could only be death’s smell preceded them, filling the street with its sad, inexorable power.
A man in front raised his arms, and it looked like one of his hands had been partially eaten. He groaned “Fooooood” and Barlow jumped to his feet and tried to run.
“Where are you going?” Nettle yelled after him. “Don’t you know you can’t run from this?”
Barlow didn’t make it very far, only to the middle of the Brown Hay Road. There, he stopped, wheeling around in panic, surrounded by the dead on every side. They stepped out of every doorway, out of every alley, from behind every staircase, taking shape in the shadows. He fell to his knees in front of Nettle and started to cry.
“Please,” he begged.
“Tell what you’ve done,” Nettle said.
Barlow looked at the groaning, starving dead, and he shook his head no. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!
“Say it,” Nettle said. “While there’s still time.”
But there wasn’t any time. Barlow could no more belly up to the magnitude of what he’d done than he could force himself to stop breathing, and as the rotting dead shouldered their way past Nettle and closed on Barlow, all he could do was close his eyes.
The dead tore at Barlow with their hands and their teeth, ripping his flesh like fabric. Nettle stumbled away, into the dark, and as he walked, he heard Barlow’s screams carry on and on and on. They seemed to go on far longer than it was possible for any one man to suffer, but go on they did, and they echoed in Nettle’s mind even after the shrillness disappeared from his ears.
After that, Nettle wandered, his mind unhinged, until he began to see people. He tried to tell them what he had seen, but they flinched away from him, alarmed at the intensity in his eyes and the urgency in his voice and the complete lack of sense in his speech.
As day broke, a russet stain behind plum-colored smoke clouds, Nettle collapsed less than fifty feet from the doors of Stepney Green Hospital. He lay there, lips moving soundlessly, eyes still as glass beads, until an orderly from the hospital knelt beside him and said, “Hey, mate, are you hurt? What is it? Are you ’ungry?”
If the horror wasn’t on Nettle’s face, it was nonetheless there, in his mind. Eat, he thought, and sensed his body in complete revolt at the idea. God no, I’ll never eat again.