Chapter 5: The Dockside Killer

(Boston - 1893)

Malakai Mott did his best to blend into his surroundings and look like just another gent procrastinating going home after a night on the town. And he did, mostly. He didn’t speak Italian or Yiddish though, so his ability to feel truly at home in this part of Boston was hampered. Nonetheless, he’d dressed appropriately for this part of town. He considered taking out a newspaper to pretend to read under the light of one of the new electric street lamps. But, who would be reading in the street at this time of night? No, that would just make him look even more suspicious, plus a newspaper would block his view of the bar where his brother was drinking.

“Aren’t you a fancy lad?” The question came from a smoky female voice nearby. Malakai cringed, both because he didn’t want to get distracted, but also because he’d specifically tried to look anything but fancy. This wasn’t the area of town where grand top hats and gold pocket watches were common.

“I’m not fancy,” Malakai protested, looking away from the bar just long enough to glance at the woman in the alleyway with him. Was it his shirt? He knew it was too white, too crisp. He should have washed it a few times in harbor water. Maybe his shoes? He’d tried to scuff them up a bit.

The woman, a tall brunette nearing thirty, wore a low-cut dress inappropriate for mid-summer, much less the current chilly month of October. On her head sat an out-of-fashion navy blue hat, one that didn’t really match her lemon yellow dress. But, she had a pleasant enough face beneath the rouge and paint common to her profession.

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“No?” she stopped near Malakai, briefly squinting at him before adjusting her decolletage, “Alright, then. Well, if you don’t want to be called fancy, I suggest you roll up your sleeves and take off the tie. Lads around here work on the docks or in one of those smelly factories where a tie like that could get caught in somethin’ and strangle you to death.”

Annoyed at how much sense she was making, Malakai did exactly that and then went back to looking at the Bronze Bell Tavern across the street. He couldn’t make out his brother, but he knew Elijah was inside. Unless he went out the back? Malakai muttered a curse under his breath. Even though he’d been tracking Elijah for weeks, his brother always lost him around this time of evening. It was like Elijah knew Malakai was following him.

Malakai heard the sound of a match striking against the brick in the alleyway and looked over to find the lady-of-the-evening lighting a slender pipe. Malakai, himself, didn’t smoke, but he did like the smell of pipe tobacco. It reminded him of his father, and the long evenings they spent together in the family library.

“Well, then. What’s a not-fancy lad like you doing over here, lurking in this alleyway?”

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

She laughed merrily. “You’re familiar with my business, then?”

Malakai didn’t know how to answer that one. Saying yes meant that he knew she was a prostitute, and that he was intimately familiar with women of her ilk, and saying no meant he was too young or innocent to know such things. He chose to say nothing and simply pressed his lips together.

He’d hoped that ignoring her might intimate that he didn’t wish to speak and cause her to leave. Instead, she asked him yet another question. “You waiting for some particular lass to come out of that bar?”

“Heavens to Betsy, you’re curious,” he replied, exasperated.

“I’m very curious. Quite curious indeed,” she insisted, exhaling fragrant smoke, “Which is why they call me Alice.”

“Well, go chase a rabbit, then.” Though he was surprised to find a literate prostitute, he knew you just couldn’t tell what people might or might not know based on their lot in life. He’d met many completely dull young men with oodles of money.

“That’s not very nice. I just thought that if you weren’t waiting for a lass to come out of the bar, perhaps you’d prefer to go into it with a lady like me.”

Malakai turned faintly red. If he had bushy whiskers and mutton chops like most fashionable men, it’d have been much less apparent. But, his father always said that whiskers were for cats, and anyway, at barely nineteen, he’d not really been able to muster much in the way of impressive facial hair yet. “I’m… I’m not looking for…ah…companionship,” he managed to say.

“No? Ah well, I’m off then. But, if you change your mind, you come find Alice, hm?” She stepped onto the sidewalk and headed across Union Street. As she disappeared into the bar, Malakai let out a sigh. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe his brother Elijah wasn’t the Dockside Killer. Maybe Elijah’s strange behavior had nothing to do with the ghoulish murders, and everything to do with the added pressure of being in charge now that their parents were gone.

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Their mother had died of a fever five years prior. She’d been such a gentle and patient woman. Malakai always thought it completely amazing how she could do things like train hummingbirds to sit on her finger and take sugar water from a child’s teacup. Her demeanor had soothed the boisterousness of a household of men, and without it, they had no anchor to keep them from descending into savagery.

After she died, their father had fallen to pieces. She had been his entire world. Malakai thought he might be trying to drink himself to death. But, the alcohol didn’t have enough time to accomplish any such misdeed. Coming home from a bar, their father had been knifed in a mugging gone wrong, and bled out in an alley not unlike the one Malakai was now haunting. The police had said that it was likely one of the immigrant gangs. The city was just overflowing with foreigners seeking refuge in the United States. The police blamed everything on immigrant gangs, though. It could have been anyone, in Malakai's opinion.

But, Elijah wholeheartedly believed the police’s assessment and took it upon himself to seek out their father’s killer for vengeance. Malakai wasn’t as worried about Elijah being out on the streets. At twenty-six and six-foot-seven, his brother already had made a name for himself on the local pugilist circuit. Malakai knew him to carry a knife or three, and to be as fearless as a hungry grizzly bear. Still, he’d worried from the start about Elijah’s obsession over their father’s murder. Elijah had quickly changed from being a jolly troublemaker to a brooding and sharp-tongued figure looking for violence.

Soon, Malakai began to put together the newspaper articles about the Dockside Killer, and how the murders always seemed to match his brother’s outings and disappearances. But, Elijah went out so many evenings, Malakai couldn’t be completely certain. It could just be a coincidence. He hoped, desperately, that he’d simply been tricked by an imagination his father had always called ‘alarmingly overactive’.

It just didn’t seem possible that someone could change that much so quickly. Yes, they’d lost their father, but that shouldn’t fundamentally change a person’s whole personality, should it? Malakai researched it as best he could, checking out books like Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann, to find out if what was happening to Elijah was a natural reaction to death, or if his brother had something seriously wrong with him. And when books on philosophy and personality didn’t manage to shed any light, Malakai turned to less scientific possibilities. He’d amassed a decent number of religious and occult texts via bookshops and estate sales. The possibility that Elijah had, in his grief, been ripe for possession by a demon loomed as a definite possibility in Malakai’s mind. As much as he didn’t like, in this enlightened age of invention and science, to turn to the relative nonsense of spiritualism and demonism, it offered a much more palatable explanation than Elijah having decided to murder people of his own accord. Either way, Malakai needed to know, needed to figure out how to put a stop to his brother’s self-destructive path. He couldn’t lose the only family member he had left.

Malakai felt his stomach grumble. He’d last dined at lunchtime and hadn’t brought anything along to eat during his quest. A stupid thing to overlook. While he’d hoped that such investigations might make him feel as clever as the witty Mr. Sherlock Holmes whose exploits delighted readers of The Strand, Malakai felt instead like a foolish little boy chasing after his elder brother. Sure, things could never be as they were before their parents died, but that just meant they needed to stick closer together, didn’t it? Watch out for one another? Take care of each other?

An hour passed, maybe more. He tried to inquire as to the time from a passing gentleman, but the fellow replied in a language Malakai didn’t understand. Once the man was gone, Malakai shoved his hands in his pockets and, dejectedly, decided to head home.

A thin fog began to roll in from the bay, and light from gas lamps fought with the mist, leaving brief patches of clarity mixed with sudden areas of obscurement. Malakai considered stopping at a local oyster house he knew to be on the way home, one that kept its doors open quite late, but his worry over his brother had by now caused him such a sour stomach that he decided against it. No reason to tempt fate with oysters.

He turned his thoughts to his schooling. He’d entered university earlier in the year, hoping to study engineering, like his father had once done. It was an exciting time in the world, with many new contraptions and inventions, buildings taller than ever before, and the miracle of electricity making previously unimaginable things possible. Progress made the country exciting, and he often felt as if the buzz in the air meant the world sat on the precipice of an incredible change that could make things better for everyone, from the common milkman or farmer to the richest captain of industry. But, if he kept staying out late instead of focusing on his studies, he'd certainly miss the opportunity to become a part of the sweeping changes blowing across the land.

Lost in his thoughts, Malakai turned to head down a darker lane. The old-style gas lamps provided less of a brilliant glow than the new electric ones in finer parts of the city, but the full moon occasionally cut through the mist to help light his way. In this residential area, there wasn’t much foot traffic, except for an orange tomcat yowling annoyedly as it fled across the street. Malakai turned to watch him go, and when he looked back, he saw a silhouette move out of an alcove further up the street and begin to hurry away in the opposite direction. Something about the shape and height of the shadow didn’t sit well with Malakai, and he picked up his pace a bit, trying to potentially catch up with the man.

He didn’t get far, however, before he almost tripped over a bloody arm laying limply on the sidewalk. In shock, Malakai stumbled backward, one hand coming to his mouth. The arm was connected to a whole lifeless body one slumped to the side in the alcove of a residential building’s front gate. Blood pooled around her, soaking into the light yellow dress that didn’t match her navy blue hat. Malakai’s heart beat so quickly and loudly that he didn’t even hear himself call her name as he crouched, trying to shake her in the hopes that she’d not yet lost enough blood to be gone. “Alice? Alice!?”

But, her dead eyes stared at nothing, and no response came from the woman. Though the deep gash to her throat had likely been the wound that’d robbed her of her life, it wasn’t the only place she’d been stabbed. Blood soaked through her bodice, and even marred her skirts. She hadn’t just been killed. She’d been brutalized, stabbed over and over and over by someone with immense rage.

It was a message. A warning. He knew now that Elijah hadn’t evaded his attempts to trail him by accident. Elijah didn’t want to be followed. Because Malakai’s brother was, indeed, the Dockside Killer.