The Fiend in Human Read Online Free PDF

feet even the drain covers carry a message of some kind.
    Whitty confines his attention to the specific object he seeks, or dreads: specifically, any person who might conceivably deal in rats, or associate with people who deal in rats, or search for clubmen who have failed spectacularly in their efforts to profit in rats.
    Thus far, the coast is clear – thanks, perhaps, to the frock-coated Peeler standing patiently at the opposite corner. (Whitty reminds himself to write in favour of an increased police presence at the earliest opportunity.)
    Hallo . The correspondent’s survey pauses at the patch of street formerly occupied by Stump Conners, the armless musician and informant, able to play the violincello with his feet. In his stead (dead probably, Stumpy has not been looking well) now stands a man Whitty has never seen before: robust yet melancholy, fresh-coloured yet weary, with full whiskers and a broad sandy brow, wearing shiny corduroy trousers, a jacket whose seams have been strengthened with brass studs, a pair of stout hobnailed boots, and what was at one time a fine stovepipe hat but is now the colour and consistency of soot, careening at an odd angle to the left as though having suffered a chimney fire. In the hatband are inserted several sheets of paper; other papers fill the crook of his arm. Around his neck is the red handkerchief typically worn by costermongers.

    A standing patterer by trade, announced by the sandwich-board he carries (divided into compartments illustrating the merchandise on offer), and by the roar emanating from his mouth (among standing patterers it is a rule that the greater the bellow the better the chance of a sale). Not that it is possible to ascertain what the man is announcing, it being the way that only isolated words ( Barbarous, Wicious and Full Particulars ) can be discerned.
    A typical specimen, excepting that this particular individual appears to be directing his attentions solely in Whitty’s direction. As the correspondent steps off the kerb (slipping a ha’penny to the Indian crossing-sweeper to preserve his boots), even with his back turned he can sense those watery blue eyes watching him, while a stentorian voice breaks off from its barrage of syllables to recite, with perfect diction, an excerpt from a ballad:

    Hark! the solemn bell does summons
The wretched murderer to his fate,
Let us hope he does repent,
His sins, before it is too late.
See the hangman is approaching,
No one present can him save,
While his victims are in Heaven,
Whitty fills a murderer’s grave.

    Hallo . The correspondent pauses; no doubt his mind is in a dreamlike state, as frequently happens when suffering from morning sickness; yet he thought he descried a familiar name.
    He shakes off this mild hallucination as he turns up the narrow court to Ingester Square, a nondescript patch of grass containing a forlorn plane tree, with a decrepit bench beneath for minimal shelter from the weather.
    Below the square, the byways wind down the embankment to a series of steps containing a warning – ‘Clothing Must Remain Decent’ – and thence to a number of open sewage drains, where boy mudlarks forage for objects to sell; where, to the left, through a mist like hothouse steam, one can see the half-destroyed hulk of Blackfriars Bridge, once the route for children on their way to visit their parents in Marshalsea, the debtors’ prison.
    His father’s investments did not lead him quite so far down as that institution – or perhaps one should say that they took him far beyond it. A solicitor by profession, Richard Whitty had attained a measure of craft sufficient to entangle his holdings in a devaluation dispute at the
Chancery, a web of such intricacy that the matter is unlikely to be sorted out this century; which stratagem afforded ample time for a relocation in the New World – where, Whitty has no doubt, a substantial nest-egg awaited. When last Whitty heard from Mother (Father having