“Down they go along the broad bright street, their blue shadows marching after them, for they are all bound the same way and are bent like us upon seeing the hanging.” 

--William Makepeace Thackery, Going to See a Man Hanged 

 

 

One rarely mentions them separately. They are practically a unit, Eustace and Parmenides. The pair rose to fantastic renown, their souls steeped in the labors of their calling. But what may have begun as fickle adventures in nocturnal prowling and curiosity about a bracing mystique hatched into a fateful career. 

*** 

Eustace Crepe had the most significant influence over Parmenides Fallowfield. Her birth coincided with an exceptionally cold winter when the odor of scavenging wolves covered the ancient city. Abandoned to the streets at seven, Eustace was taken in by a crooked old woman with a lumpy red nose who was handy with needlework. She taught the foundling to sit before a lacemaker’s hoop, patiently crossing the threads. Later, the girl learned how to interweave the threads and, eventually, made a trade in lacemaking.  

Keen to deepen her understanding, Eustace watched other girls in the old woman’s hovel, orphans like herself. A tall girl, older than Eustace, stirred a pot of green dye of a rich color and with hints of yellow. Eustace longed to have a role in its production, and, in small ways, she made her interest known.  

One day, the older girl, who had lately grown sickly, confessed she was too weak for the work that day. The crone assigned Eustace to stir the pot. The slighted older girl said, “The orphan who can’t twine threads properly—her?” 

Rattled, Eustace splashed some dye onto the floorboards while stirring the concoction, which smelled of garlic. The older girl stepped back, hissing, “Don’t get that on me.” 

Later, a mouse appeared from a hole gnawed in the floorboard, sniffed at the drop, and lapped it up. It fell dead even before it returned to its hole. 

Eustace prodded the lifeless thing with a needle. Yet another mouse appeared from between the planks. She flicked a tiny drop of the emerald brine on the floorboard. The second mouse licked it cautiously, paused a moment, and shivered. But the creature did not die. Eustace repeated the procedure over the week, each time the mouse appeared. The little thing weakened, and its movement slowed; it grew thin, and finally, its rear limbs ceased to work. After a last nip, she never saw it again. 

As Eustace took on more duties in the household, her education sped along. She had settled on the previous pot-stirrer, the petulant girl who had slighted her lacework. Since the girl was ill, Eustace made her soup that evening, noting how she carefully ate it.  

“Too much garlic,” the girl muttered, but she continued. When she finished, Eustace took hold of the cup with steady hands, rose, and returned to her room, waiting and listening. 

The effect was swift. The girl groaned twice, and the housemother asked what the matter could be. She said it was trifling, but malady overtook her, and she collapsed, gray and lifeless.  

Another violent death in the lacemakers’ quarters might raise suspicion. Eustace cast her sights further afield: the gangs of children flitting through the streets offered an ideal of human subjects. Criminal, burdensome, unsupervised. Adopting a charitable mood that might easily be attributed to the shock of tragedy, Eustace secreted table scraps and biscuit crumbs to the urchins. The ragged children gratefully received the gifts, although an inexplicable fatigue overcame many children within the week. By her next visit weeks later, Eustace found some were as thin as skeletons. Others lost sight and speech and breathed with labor. At the end of two months, they were all dead.  

No suspicion fell on Eustace. 

Piecemeal, by this and that method, Eustace gained expertise, learning how to avoid the pitfalls of the art: that her poison not work too swiftly, left no bleeding internal organs or burning of the intestines, and raised no fatal vapors to the poisoner’s lungs. One can append many details, depending on the poison’s nature.  

The wind was at her back, her sails full. Her work displayed countless other signs of superior craft known only to her. So subtle was her art that no dictum could express its nature. 

Science was confounded. 

Eustace snuck away from the crone, old enough to make her way on the streets. The cold of the streets was brutal, but the stench of the sewer vapors was unbearable even in winter. She sheltered in a barren lot of the neighborhood and assembled a shanty, eventually cultivating a small garden from which she harvested enough to sustain herself. She pocketed peaches from negligent vendors on the market stalls in the summer. 

One evening, Eustace stood at the gates of the district psychiatric hospital, the vast structure looming before her, beautiful and terrifying. The walls of dirty-yellow brick vaulted one over the other as if to cast the longest shadow, piers and crenellations whispering of labyrinthine interior passages and clinical decay. 

Eustace fingered a peach in her apron and let her hands curl around the spiked gate bars as if guided to a perch. Deep in the city’s interior, she smelled the oppressive odors of madness. Slowly, a shadow flickered at the edge of her vision, and Eustace felt the bulk of the large man beside her. 

“A grand place; that tower is the grandest of all,” said Parmenides Fallowfield as he swept his hand toward the loneliest pinnacle. “Would you like a tour?” 

*** 

 Parmenides Fallowfield was fat with curly black hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over his meaty nose. His tiny ears stuck out beneath a short-crowned hat creased from habitual crushing. A persistent sort of sadness flickered in his eyes. 

From youth, Parmenides had a talent for building trust and foiling his adversaries. He is associated with a handful of deaths of classmates and childhood friends. The most notorious is from an after-school sojourn with a troupe of boys who wound through a neglected thicket beyond the town’s edge. Among them was Parmenides, who was twelve years old and precocious in many ways. 

Parmenides convinced his fellow trekkers that they should stage a mock trial of one of their members, a wonderful game. All the boys grew giddy at the prospect. One boy volunteered to be the victim. A jeering court found him guilty and led him to a hemlock tree for a mock execution. The little mob made a chain of their pant belts into a noose, tossed one end onto a low-hanging branch, and fastened it around the convict’s neck.  

“We need to get him higher,” someone said. 

Another boy said, “It should be a spectacle.” 

Finally, Parmenides offered, “We have our books.” He piled the texts into an unsteady stack. The victim mounted the platform. The noose was drawn tight enough not to slip from the branch and fall back to the ground as they considered the predicament.  

“Go get something more for support,” Parmenides urged. The little gang hastened away in search of props, all but the victim who stood, balancing on the pile, the noose draped around his neck. The result was apparent after calculating the height of the unsteady book pile and comparing it to the length of the near-taught noose. Overcome by some fatal spirit, he kicked the wobbly tower from beneath the victim. 

The convict fell, jerking to a stop just before his toes reached the grass. His gurgle lasted only a moment. Finally, the lifeless boy dangled, slowly rotating. 

After that childhood triumph, Parmenides disappeared into the gray slums, where the taste for deception settled on small shams on market stall keepers, stealing bread and vegetables, portions of meat, and taking all to other quarters to sell at a reduced rate. Yet the taste for human extermination never went away, and death served as a backstop to deceit, sometimes supplanting it for pleasure. A cart woman here, a dockworker there; it added up. Finally, with a decade of crime tuition under his belt, Parmenides emerged from the rookery transformed from a scrawny boy into the hulking figure of adulthood.  

Parmenides took up a new life as a bank clerk. He quickly insinuated his way into the annuities department, secretly making himself a beneficiary of payments upon death by trickery, swindling, and forgery. Unfortunately, his skill at poisoning, the preferred method for forgers as it could work undetected over long periods, was mediocre. The body of his first victim became covered with raw spots, like flea bites. The second showed a reddish liquid in the lungs. Others followed, with little improvement. Parmenides switched to other manners of dispatch to avoid suspicion: falls from windows, trampling by horses, or bundling in the nets of cargo ships. Those, too, stirred doubts in search of a resolution. 

The challenges proved deterring, and he hungered for greater yields. The annuities Parmenides fabricated drew from the toiling class, where windfalls were meager. Parmenides needed a new type of victim, one of wealth yet whose death the law would not scrutinize. 

Parmenides also needed an accomplice at poisoning than he was. Play to your strength, he figured. He would serve as the architect of the crime, convincing a mark, executing forgeries, and managing the disposition of documents. He always had a larger vision, anyway. 

The walls of the royal asylum cast a long shadow over the bank doorsteps. Parmenides wandered among the crooked buildings, lost in thought. A livid moon hung over the city. He paused. A kneeling boy picked discarded rags from the stones; the boy was filthy, his hair matted, and his clothing stiff with stains.  Suddenly, a voice echoed in the narrow corridors of the street, a drawn face howling from the highest tower.  

Parmenides turned his head up. After a moment, other voices from the site joined in from unseen corners of the asylum compound, like a pack of whining dogs. 

The rag-picker snorted, “They are all lunatics in there. He is the worst.” 

Parmenides’ eyes shot to the high window opening. “Who is he?” 

“The Baron,” the rag-picker explained, not lifting his gaze from his search. “His family showers money on the place to keep him out of sight. The royal family.” 

The boy had a pungent odor, like tainted offal. He flicked the sooty remains of a glove into his basket, “As you say, mister.” The boy wrapped talon-like fingers around a lead gas pipe running up the building and climbed fist over fist, disappearing over the tile edge at the top. 

*** 

Eustace’s thin lips stretched in a tentative smile. A colossal fat man with curly hair loomed near the asylum gate, offering, apparently, a tour of the grounds. A passing carriage clattered in the street, the hooves of a huge horse that drew it sparking on the pavement cobbles.  

Parmenides put his thumbs in his waistcoat and gave a half-bow. He studied the slight woman; her cropped hair and large gray eyes. She was hardly larger than a child. “Do you grow peaches?”  

Eustace clasped her hands around her wrists to cover the cloth, “Not at all. What a strange thing to ask.” 

The wind fluttered down the narrow lane, eddying where the fat man and the bird-like woman stood. “You are a gardener; your hands are grimy with dirt.”  

Eustace gazed at the tips of her fingers. “I am poor; I garden for my food.” 

Parmenides laid a large finger on her crossed wrists. “But your sleeves are veined blue like the paper of an antique map, like the ocean at night.” 

“Well, so they are.” 

“Madam, the trace of cyanide made inert by long exposure to the air is harmless and that blue color beautiful. Peach stones contain cyanide.” 

Eustace turned to leave.  

“Don’t worry,” he persisted, “I am not interested in peach stones; I am interested in a person who harvests peach stones.” Parmenides gazed down the lane to a graying board announcing an establishment as a coffeehouse; the din of the interior crowd thumped the glass windows.  

“A refreshment, madam?” 

“Only if you’re buying, Mister.” 

Seated inside, the big, strange man angled himself into a chair and placed his long hands on his bony kneecaps. He laid out his plan against an incessant hum of voices and clattering porcelain.  

Eustace tilted her head slyly.  

“Are you a guide offering tours of the royal asylum?” 

“Of sorts, yes.” 

After a prolonged interval, Eustace said, “How shall we get in?” She meant the asylum grounds. 

Parmenides cast a long finger at an iron plate beneath their table at his feet. A vault below the coffeehouse led to a sewer that joined a catacomb beneath the city streets; its winding tributaries fanned under the asylum grounds. The passage they would traverse was now dry as a bone, with only ancient crystalline lees suggesting tides of waste that had once run through the chambers.  

“And to what end is this visit?” 

Parmenides crooked a finger, whispering. “To visit the Baron who lives in the highest pinnacle of that benighted place, a wealthy man, a figure who wants to be relieved of his worldly burden—his money. You see, the baron is as mad as a cricket in a cellar.”  

*** 

The sewer was like a vault, its arches rising in macabre splendor, buttresses pressing the walls as if to brace against a force greater than that held within. Irregular overhead street openings every twenty or thirty yards brought thin light and a mild city stench. Eustace and Parmenides progressed slowly, sometimes standing erect with open expanses overhead and scrabbling on their knees through dark recesses. 

As they advanced through the derelict system, Parmenides unfolded his plan. Eustace would make the Baron a new nightcap of the most beautiful midnight blue. “He loves his bonnet and wears it constantly; no struggle to establish an easy method. And you can make the tincture from the pits of peaches you steal.” 

Eustace shrank back. “Those peaches are my treat for myself; I don’t save the pits for anything.” She swept a hand through her cropped dark hair. “Besides, I favor cherry laurel, used by Nero on his enemies. I will line the inside of the brim for the greatest contact.”  

Meanwhile, her co-conspirator would create a document for the Baron to sign. “I have my conferees in the coffee shop, a hotbed of the insurance racket. Life insurance developed in coffee shops as a means of covering gambling debts. Men formed clubs and pooled some of their earnings. They have the latest scuttlebutt.” 

Both tasks would take a few days to complete, as they had to be perfect and undetectable. 

The wandering pilgrims finally reached a junction through a cast iron engine house painted bright red, yellow, and green. “This is the heart of the defunct sewage system and a marvel of engineering. We are nearly there. One more passage to escape the labyrinth,” 

Parmenides said, turning the cast iron door handle. 

Settled on the scheme, the pair wound upward through many ink-black flights to a final opening draped with a curtain. “No door,” Eustace observed as she moved into the room. Cold drafts curled through the open space beneath a ceiling ribbed like an overturned ship. 

The Baron was a small man, not five feet tall, with bony limbs, pale lips, and a narrow chin. A burning taper lit his face, and a shapeless cloth worn from handling topped his head. The flowered chintz sleeping gown that was his perpetual costume rustled along the floor.  

Parmenides towered over the small man, sharing his voice booming through the room. 

“Our lord needs a new headcap, madam.” 

Eustace opened a hand revealing a marked tape measure, “I have come to measure Your Grace’s head.” 

The Baron dragged his feet as he walked, as if he had no strength to lift his slippers. A lighted candle in one hand, the bent nose, drawn-in lips, and perpetually blinking eyelids framed a somber fire in the hollow eyes.  

“One document will do,” Parmenides whispered. “Tomorrow, I shall acquire his signature.”  

*** 

Parmenides studied the model document he worked from, drawn up by a lawyer now log since deceased and retrieved from a neglected bank chamber. It had foxing, and the signature was moldered away. Parmenides moved the broad-tipped pen from the inkpot. “Let us see: actuarial basis…never mind. Single lump sum. Excludes suicide and dueling—that’s a shame. Ah, here we are: death benefits; beneficiary.” 

Meanwhile, Eustace dipped her brush in the cherry laurel, painting it around the cap’s interior. She would witness for a significant fee, he muttered, drawing the pen from the ink on the page. 

The effortless lineation and intricate letter flourishes were a work of art.  Parmenides pressed an authenticating wax seal onto the policy document with a signet ring. 

“Fetch the chapeau, Parmenides. He must sleep with it on.” She waved her hook lazily, like a wand.  

*** 

After a week, the Baron’s mouth began to slip open as he drifted to sleep. The conspirators emerged through the passage curtain into the Baron’s chamber on the ninth night. Sparks crackled from the dying hearth. Eustace pointed at the open mouth with a slender wig hook. “See the gum lesions and missing teeth, and how the tips of the incisors curl forward like a garden spade? A good omen.”  

The Baron stirred at the sounds. 

“Finally, this document, sir, for you to sign. You must protect your assets to ensure they pass to the right party. Notice the wax seal, which ensures authenticity.” The Baron’s head slipped to the side, and he jerked, perhaps a nod. Parmenides motioned for Eustace to step forward. “The haberdasher will witness.”  

The baron seemed stymied. Eustace said, encouragingly, “What a handsome chapeau, your grace, blue as the breast feathers of a peacock.”  

The Baron’s skin turned a high cherry red. Recovering briefly, the little man muttered, “I feel nauseated.” 

Parmenides presented the document. “Time is a friend of no one.” 

The Baron signed, then convulsed and cried, as if to no one present, “Behold, the goblin!” 

Eustace received the paper from Parmenides and dusted fine sand over the signature to dry the ink. Eustace poked the Baron’s face with the wig hook when the ink had set. He did not move; his eyes were frozen in a rictus. 

As the two partners turned with the document to the drapery to exit, a soot column drifted down from overhead. A cold breeze was pouring through a hole in the window pane. Parmenides’ eyes darted about, drawn up finally to the source of soot. In the niche of a window gable sat the alley ragamuffin, the brown fabric of his trousers that ended at the calf, fluttering. His eyes were liver-colored and huge, as if they had no pupils, his open smile filled with narrow sharp teeth, too many for his face, the surrounding gable light nebulous and malign.  

The boy laughed, shrill, prolonged, an unholy mewling echoing among the shadows, until the glass in the gable behind him vibrated. The pane burst, showering the pair with silvery glass like ice petals, an order of beauty that mingled astonishment with pain. 

Eustace and Parmenides found themselves more shaken than harmed. “You! You goblin!” Parmenides shook his hand at the rafters. 

And just as abruptly, the boy turned and escaped through the shattered gable. 

*** 

Workers knocked and hammered the scaffold into place with clattering blows; a ladder was painted black and set in place, the space between the platform planks and the earth left open for viewing. A dense crowd gathered early in the morning to watch the event, milling, forming small groups, and enjoying the bright sun and brisk metropolitan air.  

By noon, the gin-shops had closed and the mob had quieted. The day’s business was at hand. 

*** 

 Eustace and Parmenides walked side-by-side; wrists bound with cords at their waists. 

Parmenides studied the cross-timber high above, the noose hanging slack at neck level. 

“Such are the gallows,” said Parmenides. 

Eustace trembled a little at the sight of the thick planks. “I wish I had achieved more.” 

“It was a good career,” said Parmenides, his tone mingling with sorrow and pride. “You were a model of productivity, Miss Crepe.”  

A sentinel uniformed in grey and purple stood in one corner of the square, rifle upright at the left shoulder. Eustace sighed, “Pearls before swine,” and diverted her gaze at the crenelated walls of the prison house.  

A youth's visible short pants and scabbed ankles hung from a high niche. The boy was partially hidden, darker than the shadow that enveloped him, his eyes and countless teeth visible from the gallows. A sharp cackle penetrated the high distance as the guards tugged the eyeless hoods over the conspirators’ heads.  

“Demon,” whispered Parmenides.  

The plank was pulled, and the thieves plummeted to the lengths of their ropes, halting like the swift crack of birds’ wings.