Woman Found Dead

1

You want to look away, you really do, but somehow you aren't strong enough to drag your eyes away from the scene. Your entire body is tense, geared up to run – though you know you must walk – away at the very next opportunity. The problem is, you've always had that opportunity, as long as you've needed it, but you just haven't walked away. Somehow, the scene before you, however morbid, tugs your gaze toward it, as the moon around the Earth.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see others, staring with a disgusting attentiveness to match your own. No one is shuffling or shoving any more, absorbed as they are by the spectacle. You hear the sound of retching from someone in the crowd, but everything sounds so distant you're not really sure where it came from. As you listen to the dry heaving sounds, you begin to feel a little ill yourself. What you're looking at is horrific; you know it. You also know that it is wrong, and someone should go up there and try to do something about it – fetch someone, maybe - but at the same time you don't want it to be you. You should go. Even if you can't stop it, for it is far too late for that now, that doesn't mean you have to see it. You try again to look away, but the force of attraction is still too much. So you stay, you stand, and you observe.

There had been a fire at Shadwell Dry Dock earlier that night, and you can still see its eerie sunrise-glow on the horizon. The rest of the sky is an ominous and threatening grey. Your clothes are sodden and the warm glow of the early-morning beer you drank just a half-hour ago has begun to fade. Your mind is quite lucid now, though you rather wish it wasn't. Everyone in the crowd jumps slightly at the bright flash of white, which is almost instantaneously followed by a deafening clap of thunder. Suddenly the cluster of on-lookers who were trapped here mere moments ago begun to shuffle away. You dimly acknowledge that perhaps someone has asked the crowd to depart, but your feet are still too heavy to move. As the crowd disperses you realise it is now just you and a couple of others – a washerwoman, and a man who appears to you to be a doctor although you recognise neither, and the man doesn't seem to be helping the officials at all - who remain by the cadaver.

In the pre-dawn gloom of Buck's Row, the woman's body could almost be mistaken to merely be drunkenly slumped against the wall in a stupor. The police officer's lantern illuminates the reality of her predicament, however. Her already filthy dress is stained a reddish-brown from where her throat has been violently slit open, almost enough, you think dimly, to have passed right through her neck and decapitate her entirely. Her eyes, two glass marbles fractured with red blood vessels you can only see when you squint hard, seem to be watching the first tendrils of sunlight staining the sky far above and away, and yet you know that those eyes see nothing, not now. You had never seen a dead person before.

A policeman walks up behind you and you find you can turn. You watch his mouth form words with absent fascination, but you hardly register what he's saying. You think you recognise him from earlier on, and resist the consequent urge to grin stupidly and wave. He speaks again, and this time you really hear what he says.

"If you could come this way please. We just need to move the body from the street."

He places his hand on your back and you allow him to guide you away from the crime scene. Your mind still hasn't fully processed what you just saw, but at least now your feet can move. You are in control of yourself again. You apologise and thank the policeman politely when he asks if you are alright from here. Then you stagger half-blind away, hardly caring where you end up, so long as it is nowhere near Buck's Row and the pool of blood and the very dead woman. You suppose that they are probably washing away the blood into the sewers as you walk, and somehow that thought almost comforts you. You wonder which tavern to sleep in for the night. Then you remember, with faint amusement, that it is in fact morning now, and so it will have to be the streets for you today.