The Curse of the Wendigo

The cold predawn air . . . the stars fading in the indigo sky . . . the black brougham . . . the blur of darkened storefronts along Fifth Avenue . . . the shoveling of the white-coated sanitation workers calf-deep in the sidewalk filth, a noxious mixture of human and animal excrement deposited daily on the streets of the greatest city on earth.



Indeed, this was the hour of filth, when thousands upon thousands of chamber pots were emptied of their “night soil” directly onto the street from the brownstone and tenement windows, when the two million pounds of manure, produced the day before by a hundred thousand horses, lay piled in stinking four-foot-high drifts—high enough in some neighborhoods that a man might enter his second-floor walk-up without using the stairs. The hour when carts slid along ruts cut into muddy refuse, carrying the remains of the horses that had decayed enough to be broken apart and transported to the rendering house. The average horse weighed fifteen hundred pounds, too cumbersome to remove while whole, and so it would be left to rot on the street where it had died, a bloated, reeking feast for the “queen of the dung heap,” the typhoid fly, until the horse could be dismembered easily and carted away.



It was the hour of filth. The average workhorse produced twenty-four pounds of manure and several quarts of urine every day. The sheer enormity of that waste threatened the human population with extinction, as the waste bore the poisoned fruits of cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, typhus, and malaria. People literally dropped like flies—twenty thousand each year, most of them children—while the flies themselves prospered.



Each morning the manure was collected and hauled to special staging areas, called “manure blocks,” to await transport over the Brooklyn Bridge. The largest manure block was located on Forty-second Street, one block away from where a hundred thousand people got their drinking water, the Croton Reservoir.



The doctor’s haggard profile . . . the cold wind off the river . . . “I should have known. . . . I should have guessed.”



In spring the rains turned the streets into quagmires of mud and manure, and “crossing sweepers” cleared paths for the well-to-do ladies in their sweeping skirts, lest their finery be soiled. In dry weather, dust storms of pulverized manure blew through the broad avenues or floated like the volcanic ash of Pompeii, piling half an inch deep upon windowsills and the stalls of the fruit vendors and sausage sellers, particles fine enough to be inhaled. In this, the proudest city in America, you literally breathed shit.



The cries of the teamsters. The curses of the dray drivers. The harsh call of crows. And the doctor beside me: “I should have known. . . . I should have guessed.”



The dizzying stench of the six-foot-high city-block-long banks of spilth, a foul miasma of garbage, excrement, and animal parts—and the maddening hum of a million blowflies. . . .



A burly black-clad figure appeared against the backdrop of that worm-infested replica of Dante’s hell, the largest manure block, on Forty-second Street. The monstrumologist leapt from the carriage and accosted Chief Inspector Byrnes.



“Where?” Warthrop demanded.



Byrnes pointed to the top of the hill, and Warthrop started up the slick slope to the top. It was a hard climb; he sunk to his calves in the muck.



“No! Stay here,” he called to me when I started to follow.



Byrnes must have concurred, for he laid a huge hand upon my shaking shoulder, his full lips working the expired stump of his cigar. I saw the doctor’s head disappear over the horizon of waste. Only a moment must have passed, but it seemed an eternity before I heard his cry—a sound unlike anything else I have ever heard. It was difficult to imagine a human being producing such a sound. It did not belong to our race, but to the poor beast in the slaughterhouse. That anguished scream was more powerful than the big man’s hold upon me; it pulled me toward it, but Byrnes caught me by the back of the coat before I could get very far, and hauled me back.



“Don’t worry, boy. He’ll come down. There’s nowhere else for him to go.”



And he did come down. Not the same man who had gone up that hill, but a man who looked like him. Not unlike the way John Chanler had retained the vestiges of his humanity, my master’s facade was intact. But my master’s eyes were empty, as empty and soulless as Pierre Larose’s or Sergeant Hawk’s eye sockets, considering the end of the desolation he would never reach.



“Pellinore Warthrop,” Byrnes formally intoned, “I am placing you under arrest for suspicion of murder.”



Though I wailed and screamed, kicked and punched, they separated us, throwing me into the brougham carriage, which took off at once for police headquarters. I turned around and saw them leading the doctor away in handcuffs. I did not see him again for some time.



The city was coming to life, albeit a life wholly foreign to a young boy from a small New England town. Tramps lingered in doorways or loitered around the smoking ash barrels, eyes glowering beneath ratty hats, and hands tucked inside the fraying sleeves of their secondhand coats. Ragpickers pushed wooden carts along the sidewalks, scavenging in the narrow recesses of dark alleys and in the piles of trash that seemed to gather like autumn leaves against stoop and storefront.



Here the slouching tenements, with acres of laundry fluttering on lines strung from rooftop to rooftop. Here the stale-beer saloons, drunks passed out in their basement doorways, while urchins knelt beside them, picking their pockets for change. Here the gambling house, eerily quiet at this hour; there the concert hall with posters plastered on its blackened windows, advertising the latest burlesque. And at Mulberry and Bleecker, the disorderly house, where young women, their faces heavily painted, leaned out the open windows calling down to anonymous passersby and uniformed policemen alike.



At the station house Connolly took me to a small, windowless room furnished with a table and two rickety chairs. He was not unkind; he offered to find me something to eat, but I declined—food was the farthest thing from my mind. He left me alone. I heard a bolt being thrown, and I noticed the door had no handle on my side. An hour passed. I wept until I was too weak to weep. I swooned at one point and smacked my forehead on the tabletop. It might not be true, I thought. It might not have been her. But I could think of no other explanation for that inhuman cry.



At last I heard the bolt being thrown back with a loud screech. Chief Inspector Byrnes came into the room, threatening to overwhelm the space with his prodigious bulk, followed by another large man wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat a size too small for him.



“Where’s the doctor?” I asked.



“No need to worry,” said Byrnes with a patronizing wave. “Your doctor’s resting very comfortably.” He nodded to the man beside him. “This is Detective O’Brien. He has a boy about your age, I believe; don’t you, O’Brien?”



“Yes, sir, I do,” answered his subordinate. “His name is William too, only we call him Billy.”



“You see?” Byrnes beamed at me as if a significant point had been made.



“I want to see the doctor,” I said.



“Oh, now, we don’t want to rush things, do we? All in good time, all in good time. Will you be wanting anything, Will? We’ll bring you anything you like. Anything at all.”



“What can we bring you, Will?” echoed O’Brien.



“The doctor,” I answered.



Byrnes glanced at his cohort, and then turned to me. “We can do that. We can bring you to the doctor. We just need you to be honest with us and answer some questions.”



“I want to see the doctor first.”



Byrnes’s smile faded. “Your doctor is in a bad way, Will. He needs your help now, and the way you can help him is by helping us.”



“He didn’t do anything wrong.”



O’Brien snorted. “Didn’t he now?”



Byrnes laid a hand on his forearm. He kept his small piggish eyes on me, though.



“You know who was up on that manure block, don’t you, boy? You know what your doctor found.”



I shook my head. I willed my quivering bottom lip to be still.



“And now we’ve got a problem, Will—and so does he. We’ve got a problem, and your doctor’s got a bigger problem. This is serious business, boy. This is murder.”



“Dr. Warthrop didn’t murder anyone!”



Byrnes dropped a paper sack upon the tabletop. “Go on. Look in there, Will.”



Trembling with dread, I peeked inside the sack, then pushed it away with a soft cry. He had forgotten about them, had dropped them into his pocket in the operating theater and forgotten completely.



“It’s interesting, don’t you think, Will? What a man keeps in his pockets. I carry my wallet and a comb, some matches . . . but it’s a rare man who carries eyeballs about!”



“They aren’t hers,” I gasped.



“Oh, we know. Wrong color, for one.” Byrnes jerked his head toward the door, and O’Brien opened it, admitting the man I knew as Fredrico. His face was deathly pale; clearly he was terrified.



“Is this him?” demanded Byrnes, pointing at me.



The big orderly nodded violently. “That’s him. He was there.”



Byrnes said, “You see, Will, we know the doctor’s been brushing up on his technique—”



“That isn’t what he was doing! That isn’t it at all!”



He held up his hand to silence me. “And one other thing you should know. There’s another crime besides murder. It’s called being an accessory. That’s just a fancy way of saying you have to talk to us, Will, if you don’t want to see yourself behind bars till you’re as old as me, and I’m pretty old.”



I sank into the chair. My thoughts refused to be still long enough to form a coherent sentence. You know who was up on that manure block, don’t you, boy?



“It was Mrs. Chanler, wasn’t it?” I asked when my tongue could fashion the words.



O’Brien was grinning ghoulishly down at me.



“Take all the time you need, O’Brien,” Byrnes said on his way out with his quaking witness. “Get it out of him in the usual way, only leave the face clean.”



The “usual way”—before it was abolished by a charismatic young reformer named Theodore Roosevelt—began with verbal abuse. Name-calling, cursing, threatening. This then progressed to the physical—spitting, punching, slapping, pinching, hair pulling. A typical suspect could be expected to break somewhere near the middle of the method’s continuum. Rarely did he last till the third and final degree, which might include the breaking of his thumbs or the rupturing of a kidney. There were rumors that some subjects had to be carried from the interrogation room in a body bag, their premature demise carefully covered up with a ludicrous explanation—Had a heart attack and dropped over dead, the poor bastard!—for a poor bastard whose face resembled hamburger meat.



O’Brien followed orders. He did not mar my face. But in every other way, he applied the tried-and-true formula for wresting confessions from recalcitrant witnesses.



He screamed into my face, “Your precious doctor’s going to hang. It’s over for him—and for you unless you talk!”