“Oh, I know the one—he’s kind of shy,” observed another.
“And kind of rich! That’s what I heard. That’s why they won’t take him.”
My mind stalled as my eye remained to the hole. Could they… be talking about me?
A third, barely visible, contributed, “Oh, I know who you mean.” A giggle. “I was upstairs looking in the peep-holes and saw him—you know—playing with himself!”
“No!”
“He pulled himself right off! In the bathtub—”
The other cackled while I, as might be expected, felt my spirit wilt. It could only be me they were talking about…
“—and you’re right, he’s quite a handsome one, but I liked the two others much better.”
“The Boston men?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t have minded being made in the way from one of them.”
“But, Lisa! Neither of them are very handsome now!” and then more giggling broke out.
I could only stare, more at my own bewildered thoughts than the scene within. This was outrageous, women who were more than likely maids spying on hotel customers. It was certainly actionable and I most certainly had a solicitor who’d be more than happy to sue, but…
What’s the reason for all this? I had to wonder through my embarrassment and shock. Women weren’t known to be peeping toms; that was an aberrancy reserved for men alone. And the reference to two Boston men could only mean Mr. Garret and Mr. Poynter. Neither of them are very handsome now?
“God, it’s just so depressing having to do it when they’re like that,” came another observation. “I’m happy to be pregnant.”
“Yeah. And they’re not going to keep the Providence man.”
“Why?”
“I told you, he’s rich. The others are always fly-by-nights—no one knows they’re here—but the Providence man—”
“He’s no fly-by-night if he’s rich. Someone would come looking…”
Even to contort my imagination to its maximum could not account for the words I was hearing, nor the outrageous evidence my curiosity had led me to uncover.
I moved to the next hole…
God in Heaven…
… and found myself looking at the most macabre scene I’d ever witnessed in my thirty-three years of existence…
Several bed mattresses lay on the floor, and in the corners were a few metal pans. “God, I hate this,” snapped a woman’s complaint. It was yet one more pregnant woman, this one rather dowdy and older. She’d perched herself on her knees, to tend to a man who lay on one of the mattresses.
Or, I should hasten to correct: the remnant of a man…
He lay dismembered, naked, scars at the bald nubs where his arms had been removed at the elbows and his legs at the knees. He was lean, pallid-skinned, and bearded, and what the pregnant woman was doing was crudely washing his groinal area with a sopping sponge. Her expression of distaste could not have been more vivid. “They just stink so! And, oh, the lice! I just hate this so much!”
“You hate it!” complained a second woman. “You don’t have to do it!”
This objection had come from the forward-most mattress, on which lay a man in an identical state as the first, only he was clean shaven and blond-headed. I saw stitches showing at the nubs of his injuries. But the woman was not washing this one—she was engaged in an act of overt sexual congress, a look of loath on her face…
But this was a face I recognized:
Monica, I realized, from the pier. I’d just seen her a short time ago, in the stairwell and entering the perpetually locked door to the second floor.
Now I knew why that door was always locked.
What form of madness could explain what I was viewing? These unfortunate men had clearly been made into invalids. For them to have suffered identical accidents? Impossible. And their symptoms of amputation mirrored exactly those of Mary’s brother, Paul. What foul auspication urged me to believe that these men had been purposely and premeditatedly invalidized for this obscene purpose?
The farthest edge of my vantage point showed me a third mattressed victim, and perched vigorously on his groin was another thin, young woman with her skirt hoisted to make her privates accessible. “Hurry, you stinking bastard,” she muttered.
“This one shits himself, too,” added the pregnant woman in her disdain. “He does it on purpose.”
“I do not!” blabbered the victim she was bathing. He seemed stricken with a vocal impediment. “I can’t help it—”
“You know where the pans are!” the woman shrieked. “Maybe we’ll stop feeding you for a while! See how you like that!”
“Leave him alone, Joanie,” suggested the young woman with the hoisted skirt. “I have to do him next, and if he’s upset he won’t be able to. He’ll wind up like Paul.”
Like Paul, my mind droned.
I watched in the utter horror of it all, surely a scene from the Abyss. When this Joanie had finished with her congress, she grunted and rose, glaring down at her crippled purveyor. This poor man, after a minute or so, grotesquely rolled off the stained mattress, belly to floor, then hopped up onto the savaged ends of his limbs, after which he awkwardly ambled—doglike, on all fours—to one of the metal trays, to urinate. Meanwhile, the blond man began to gasp in something akin to tortured bliss while his unwilling partner, Monica, looked at him in a meld of bitter hatred and nausea. Indeed, it seemed some carnal warren in Hell that my eye had happened upon. Incalculable, I thought in the deepest despair. Monstrous… , for the intent, macabre as it seemed, shone all too clearly.
It must have been some imp of the perverse which forestalled my immediate desire to extricate myself from this evil chasm—and from the very building itself—and just simply flee, when, next, I found myself looking instead into more of the appalling peeping-holes. Similar scenes of incomprehensible obscenity were my reward for this effort: men reduced to naked torsos, either lying inert on sullied mattresses or traversing the room on their butchered limb-ends. One lapped water from a bowl, again, like a dog. Room after room glared with these unfathomable scenes of grotesquerie. But in the next peeping-hole…
God, deliver me, I prayed.
This was no chamber of forced-conception. Instead, I spied a room clinically adorned: medical supplies, IV bottles on stands, several elevated beds. Unconscious men with bandaged limbs occupied two such beds: one jibbered, drooling, in the clutches of nightmare, the other lay open-mouthed and utterly still. The man appeared youthful, yet I could clearly discern he had no teeth.
But the forward bed concerned me most.
On it lay Mr. William Garret, limb-ends similarly bandaged from his recent amputations. A tray of bloody surgical instruments, including a bone-saw, occupied a nearby tray, plus bottles clearly labeled CHLOROFORM. This is a surgery suite, I knew now, hidden in the hotel on this floor which is always locked. Cotton clogged Garret’s mouth, and when suddenly he began to blink and shudder on the bed, a pregnant attendant came to his side, to comfortingly pat his shoulder. “There, there, you’ll be all right,” she calmly regarded him. “It’s all for a reason that’s more important than any of us.” She tried to sound chipper. “And just think of all the pretty girls you’ll be enjoying!”
Garret mewled beneath the cotton in his mouth. The cotton had tinged scarlet, and it was then I noticed a smaller stainless steel tray full of recently extracted teeth.