And we spit on the wager, which I taught him, and we shake on the wager, which he taught me. And we both know that’s that. He stands, takes a last drag off his butt, and says, “Good night, Stevie,” pretty near pleasantly, like none of our earlier conversation ever happened. The whole thing’s moved to another level: it’s not what he’d call an intellectual exercise anymore, it’s a wager, and further talk would only desecrate it. From this point on there’ll just be the playing out of the game, the run to the wire, with one of us ending up a winner and the other a loser; and likely I won’t see him much or at all ’til we know which of us is going to be what.

Which leaves me alone for tonight (and, I’m guessing, for many nights to come) with my memories of the Hatch case: of the people what gave us a hand and what got in our way, of the friends (and more than friends) what were lost to us during the pursuit, of the peculiar places we were led to-and of Libby Hatch herself. And I don’t mind saying, now that Mr. Moore’s gone and I’ve had a chance to think it over some, that most of his statements were square on the mark: in many ways, the tale of Libby Hatch was more frightening and disturbing than anything we ran across in our hunt for the butcher John Beecham. Under ordinary circumstances, in fact, the bumps on my skin and the shivers in my soul that are right now multiplying with my memories might even tempt me to concede the wager.

But then the hack starts in: out of nowhere, rough, racking, shooting bits of blood and God-knows-what-all onto the page before me. And funnily enough, I realize it’s the hack that’ll keep me writing, no matter what mental jitters I get. Dr. Kreizler’s told me what this cough probably means; I’m not sure how many more years or even months I’ve got left on this earth. So let Libby Hatch come after me for trying to tell her story. Let her strange, sorry ghost take the breath out of me for daring to reveal this tale. Most likely she’d be doing me a favor-for along with the hack, the memories would end, too…

But Fate would never be so merciful, and neither would Libby. The only place her memory will haunt are the sheets of paper before me, which will serve not the purposes of a publisher but to settle a bet. After that, I’ll leave them behind for whoever happens across them after I’m gone and cares to take a look. It may horrify you, Reader, and it may strike you as too unnatural a story to have ever really happened. That was a word that came up an awful lot during the days the case went on: unnatural. But my memory hasn’t faded with my lungs, and you can take this from me: if the story of Libby Hatch teaches us anything at all, it’s that Nature’s domain includes every form of what society calls “unnatural” behavior; that in fact, just as Dr. Kreizler has always said, there’s nothing truly natural or unnatural under the sun.

CHAPTER 2

It was a scratching sound that started it all: the light scrape of a boot against the stone-and-brick face of Dr. Kreizler’s house at 283 East Seventeenth Street. The noise-familiar to any boy who’d had a childhood like mine-drifted through the window of my room late on the night of Sunday, June 20, 1897: twenty-two years ago, almost to the day. I was lying on my small bed trying to study, but without much luck. That evening, too, was far too charged with the breezes and smells of spring and too bathed in moonlight to let serious thinking (or even sleeping) be an option. As was and is too often the case in New York, early spring had been wet and cold, making it fairly certain that we’d get only a week or two of tolerable weather before the serious heat set in. That particular Sunday had been a rainy one earlier on, but the night was beginning to clear and seemed to promise the onset of those few precious balmy days. So if you say that I caught the sound outside my window partly because I was just waiting for some excuse to get outside, I won’t deny it; but the larger truth is that, ever since I can remember, I’ve kept careful track of night noises in whatever place I happen to find myself.

My room in the Doctor’s house was up top on the fourth floor, two stories and a half a world away from his splendid parlor and dining room below and another twelve vertical feet from his stately but somehow spare bedroom and overstuffed study on the third floor. Up on the dormered plainness of the top story (what most folks would write off as “the servants’ quarters”), Cyrus Montrose-who split the Doctor’s driving and other household duties with me-had the big room at the back, and off of that was a smaller room what we used for storage. My room was at the front, and not near as big as the rear one; but then, I wasn’t near as big as Cyrus, who stood well over six feet tall. And the front space was still plenty plush by the standards of a thirteen-year-old boy who’d been used to, in order since birth, sharing a one-room rear tenement flat near Five Points with his mother and her string of men, sleeping on whatever patches of sidewalk or alleyway offered a few hours’ peace (having first left said mother and men at age three, and for good at age eight), and then fighting his way out of a cell in what the bulls laughingly liked to call the “barracks” of the Boys’ House of Refuge on Randalls Island.

Speaking of that miserable place, I might as well get one thing straight right now, being as it may make a few other things clearer as we go along. Some of you might’ve read in the papers that I near killed a guard what tried to bugger me while I was confined on the island; and don’t think me coldhearted when I say that in some respects I still wish I had killed him, for he’d done the same to other boys and, I’m certain, went on doing it after my case was swept under the rug and he was reinstated. Maybe that makes me sound bitter, I don’t know; I wouldn’t like to think of myself as a bitter man. But I do find that the things what angered me as a boy still rankle all these years later. So if it seems that some of what I’ll have to say in the pages to come doesn’t reflect the mellowing of age, that’s only because I’ve never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

There was only one other room on the top floor of Dr. Kreizler’s residence, though for all the practical purposes of the household the chamber had long since ceased to exist. Removed from Cyrus’s and my rooms by its own short hallway, it was usually occupied by the maid of the house; but for a full year it had been uninhabited by any living soul. I say “by any living soul” because it was, in fact, still occupied by the few sad possessions and the even sadder memory of Mary Palmer, whose death during the Beecham case had broken the Doctor’s heart. Since that time we in the house had been served by a number of cooks and maids who came before breakfast and left after dinner, some of them capable, some of them downright disastrous; but neither Cyrus nor I ever complained about the turnover, for we had no more interest than the Doctor did in taking on somebody permanent. You see, the both of us-though in very different ways from the Doctor, of course-had loved Mary, too…

Anyway, at about eleven P.M.on that June 20th I was in my room attempting to read some of the lessons Dr. Kreizler had assigned to me for that week-exercises in numbers and readings in history-when I heard the front door downstairs close. I felt my body tense the way it always did and still does when I hear the sound of a door at night; and then, listening, I made out one heavy, strong set of footsteps on the blue-and-green Persian carpet of the stairway. I relaxed: Cyrus’s gait was as recognizable as the deep breathing and gentle humming that always accompanied it. I fell back onto my bed and held my book at arm’s length above me, knowing that my friend would soon poke his broad black head in to check on me and waiting for him to do so.