Stalking Jack the Ripper (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #1)(50)

Crouching in the corner of his little stone cell, he rocked back and forth while unearthly laughter poured from cracked lips. An upturned jug of water sat beside him, having run dry a long time ago from the look of it.

“What has happened to him?” I grabbed on to the nearest bar, steadying myself against shock. How did he unravel so quickly? Surely he couldn’t have lost that much of his mind in just a few short weeks.

Something was very wrong. Blackburn said nothing.

When Uncle wasn’t cackling, he mumbled something too low for me to hear. Someone had only given him a thin shift to wear, and it was stained brown and yellow. What little food he’d been given had mostly ended up on his clothing.

“How anyone can treat a person this way is beyond my comprehension,” I snarled. “This is… this is beyond unacceptable, Mr. Blackburn.”

Satan himself must lord over these lost souls. I didn’t know what could be worse than Hell, or this place, but wished a thousand terrible deaths on the blackguards responsible for such cruelty. These were people and they deserved to be treated as such.

Grabbing a threadbare blanket from the floor, I shook it out, allowing dust motes to swirl in the pale light streaming in from the bars on the door. The cell was in the supposed heart of this place, yet there was a chill here that hadn’t been present in the humid corridor. I approached my uncle slowly, not wanting to startle him, but desperately curious to learn what he was repeatedly whispering.

The closer I got, the thicker the odor clung to molecules in the air. It smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in the last two weeks and was using the floor to relieve himself. I fought a bout of rising nausea. His blond mustache was long and unkempt, meeting new facial hair growth in haggard tangles. There was something strange about his eyes, apart from their unfocused, mad glaze. He looked terrified.

After draping the blanket around his shoulders, I knelt down, inspecting him closer. That’s when I noticed the upturned bowl of slop and strange consistency of it. My blood turned icy as the Thames in winter, freezing the rivers and tributaries of my veins in sickening waves. I’d kill whoever did this. I would slay the miserable beast so violently, I’d make our Whitechapel murderer seem like a harmless kitten playing with a ball of intestinal string once I was through with them.

“He’s been drugged.” I glared at Blackburn as if he had a personal hand in the matter. Which, since he’d arrested him, it could be argued he had.

He slowly crossed the room and crouched beside me, avoiding my accusing stare. It wasn’t uncommon for the so-called insane to be given tonics to calm their minds, but my uncle was neither insane nor in need of such medication.

“God only knows what this powder is capable of,” I said. “Can’t you at least protect him while he’s in here? What good are you, or do you simply excel at being terrible?”

Blackburn flushed. “In a place like this, intoxicants are often the only way of keeping the peace…” His voice trailed off as I glared at him. “It’s inexcusable, Miss Wadsworth. I assure you, it wasn’t done with malice. Most everyone here is dosed with… experimental serums.”

“Wonderful. I feel so much better.” I tugged a ribbon from my hair, then tore a length of fabric from the bottom of my skirts and scooped some of the goo into my makeshift cloth bundle before tying it. I’d bring it back to Uncle’s laboratory and test it for poisons or lethal toxins. I didn’t trust anyone with telling me the truth. It might be a harmless tonic given to “most everyone” or it might be something worse.

Anyone who could administer something like this to a healthy man was too foul and tainted to be trustworthy. Blackburn fell into that same category.

Sitting back on my heels, I peered into my uncle’s face. “Uncle Jonathan, it’s me, Audrey Rose. Can you hear me?”

Uncle was awake but might as well have been sleeping with his eyes open. He didn’t see me or anyone else in the room, only whatever images were playing in his own mind. I waved my hand in front of his face but he didn’t so much as blink.

His lips moved, and I could just make out what he’d been repeating since we first stepped into his cell. He was saying his full name, Jonathan Nathaniel Wadsworth, as if it were the answer to all the mysteries of the universe.

Nothing useful then.

I gently shook him, ignoring the wave of disappointment crashing around me.

“Please, Uncle. Please look at me. Say something. Anything.”

I paused, waiting for some sign he’d heard me, but he only chanted his name and giggled, rocking back and forth so hard it was aggressive.

My eyes pleaded with him to look at me, to respond, but nothing broke the trance he was in. Tears of frustration welled up. How dare they do this to my uncle. My brave, brilliant uncle. I clutched his shoulders, shaking him harder, not caring how abysmal I must look to Blackburn. I was a terrible creature. I was selfish and scared and didn’t care who knew it.

I needed my uncle. I needed him to help me exonerate him, so we could stop a madman from a murder spree that surely wasn’t over yet.

“Wake up! You must fight your way out of this.” A sob broke in my throat and I shook him until my own teeth rattled. I couldn’t lose him, too. Not after losing Mother to death, and Father to both laudanum and grief. I needed someone to stay. “I cannot do this without you! Please.”