Page 62 of The Unweaver

Felix’s gang played familiar games of survival. With practiced fingers, Cora could pick a lock in under a minute and made herself indispensable. Some hauls she brought straight to Felix, others she kept for herself. The first was a bottle of hooch so acrid it burned her stomach lining and blurred her vision. But it numbed her enough to snatch a few hours of sleep.

A nicked bottle a month became a bottle a week, then a bottle a day. Not downing it in one sitting became a test of willpower. She had to steal more and more to chase the same old nightmares. Soon booze wasn’t enough to quiet them. Her daily bottle was accompanied by whatever she could steal. Marijuana cigarettes, laudanum, morphine, opium, cocaine.

But it was never enough. In the morning, she invariably felt worse. She started reaching for the bottle or pipe earlier just to get through the day.

She did pride herself on how well she hid it. She could be drunk or high or strung out on uppers in a room full of people and no one would suspect. It became another game, to see how fucked up she could get and still pass as normal.

If anyone did notice, they never said. As long as she kept bringing in fat hauls like a smug cat dragging home a deadbird, why should they care? She’d gone from nicking purses and wallets to window jobs, where her lankiness and quick fingers proved useful.

After one job, she didn’t sneak into her room fast enough. Felix had stayed up, awaiting her return by the side door she thought no one knew about. There he sat, illuminated by a single lamp.

“And where d’you think you’re going?” he said with a terrible smile. “Come. Here.”

Her nails bit into his arms but he didn’t relent. A clammy hand silenced her scream.

An awful sensation coursed through her. She smelled the decay before she saw it. On Felix’s forearms were her hands imprinted in his rotted flesh, and on hers were ropes of black veins.

They both gaped in horror. He was the first to scream. “Abomination!”

Weeks later, most of her bruises had faded. Felix hadn’t sought her out since that night, and she wasn’t going to press her luck. She slipped in and out of the squat undetected, hauling in more than her share and not complaining about her measly cut.

“I have a job for you,” Felix said one evening, tossing her into the hotel manager’s office he’d repurposed as his own. Hands deep in his pockets, he shot her furtive glances from behind the water-stained desk. “There’s a sickness in you, no doubt about it. The devil’s oozing out your fingers and corrupting everything you put your filthy hands on.”

His words were a hatchet to what remained of her self-esteem. She shrunk back.

“But with your sickness there’s also an… opportunity.”

An opportunity?No one had ever said that to her before.

“You’re lucky I ain’t killing you outright after maiming me with your rotten sickness. No one else would give a freakof nature like you another chance. But Felix Rabin ain’t like everyone else. Is he? No, no. Felix Rabin is destined for bigger and better things. And your sickness is gonna come in handy. We’re starting us a freak show and you’re the starring act. We’ll charge a penny a pop to see what all you can rot. You do this, and I’ll be pleased. Don’t you want to please me?”

She still bore the marks of his displeasure, bruises inside and out.

I’m only aggressive out of necessity, he’d explained once while gripping her by the throat and pushing her against a wall.Why do you make me be aggressive with you?She had apologized as he throttled her.

Cora managed a weak nod.

Felix gave his word he wouldn’t hurt her if she cooperated and she was putty in his hands, eager to be molded. She stowed her fear and shame. To Felix and Felix alone, her abomination was anopportunity.

The more Felix learned of her devilry, the more elaborate the games became. Freak sideshows of her rotten spectacles evolved into fake seances when she accidentally revealed how a necklace’s prior owner had died. One touch of the paste gemstones and she felt a bone lodging in her throat and choking the air out of her.

When she’d come to, clawing at her neck on the ground, Felix was staring down at her with a curious expression.

“That necklace was my Aunt Mildred’s,” he said. “She had it on when she died. Choking on a chicken bone.”

He pushed the boundaries of what she could withstand to squeeze their marks dry. Victorian London had no shortage of superstitious toffs with spare change. They exploited them all—the sick, the grieving, the heartbroken—raking in haul after haul with their seances. Well-off matrons were their bread andbutter. Those too embittered by love to move past it; wives sick with jealousy or lust for another.

Word spread. The whole gang got involved, under the assumption the seances were a sham. Cora wished they were.

They had the game down to an art. Decked out in shawls, Cora spoon-fed the mark’s desperation back to them, a cycle of regurgitation until they were satisfied with the answers and left, hopefully before realizing they’d been cleaned out by unseen hands.

When the winter’s blight left a wake of bereaved, the gang made a killing off it. They ran seances day in and day out, manufacturing miracles for a quid each. Few noticed that the ghostly presences were actually ragged children flickering the lights and shaking the table when Cora said certain phrases.

The game changed with the mark. Sometimes she guessed what they’d die of. With alarming accuracy, she later discovered. People paid good money for that morbid knowledge, delusional to the end they could change their fate.

Sometimes she met the marks at allegedly haunted places. Graveyards. Abandoned houses creaking with memories. Cobwebbed attics and the dusty bedrooms of dead children frozen in time. She sensed the echoes of death, and if she listened carefully, the walls and graves whispered their secrets to her. She charged extra for that. Felix was delighted.

Other times, she conjured visions of the dead for their mourners. Withered old stalks of women who hadn’t been lucid in years, and yet they were still plagued by memories of those who had abandoned them in their youth. Clutching a beloved hairpin or cuff link or toy, she communed with their dead. A quid a question.

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