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listen to Christine play from the numbered vials. He would sit on a cast-off bench, eyes closed, and sometimes he would murmur from that poem, strange lines:
    “What then am I? Am I more senseless grown

    Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!

    ’Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.”

    Christine would begin a new piece, and he would pace, then stop, as if remembering some fine evening of love, then he would cry such anguished tears, then laugh. In my gin-soaked fog, I would watch him in loathing, wishing him out of my sight. Even so, he would bring me bundles of money, which I stuffed into a suitcase next to my bed.
    Blood money. In every sense of the word.
    ***
    Thursday, November 8 th , the day before the performance, I was determined to stop him. I had kept myself away from gin in the morning so that I might be sober, so that I might go to the police and tell them the Ripper would strike again, that Dr. Martin Marquavious Davyss would strike again.
    Every time I went to the door, I would turn back. I was shaking, delirium tremens a storm in my body. Would the police listen to me? Or would they have me sent to the insane asylum?
    All day long, all night long, I suffered in my paroxysm. Christine would play, her fingers striking keys in a fury, but it was not music, it was madness. I would go to the door, she would stop. I would open the door, close it, and go back to pacing. And her playing would continue. Had I wound her gears? I must have. Did she have music to play? Of course.
    One of Davyss’ acquaintances had given me an unpublished piece of music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Le Carnaval des Animaux , or, The Carnival of the Animals . I had encoded it for Christine, and she would play it, ferociously, filled with the blood of the innocent slain.
    Thursday night passed into Friday morning. I clung to sobriety, thinking maybe Davyss had lost his desire for blood and murder. No knock had come on my door. Had he given up his wicked ways?
    At noon on that Friday, scarcely an hour before Christine was due to be brought to her evening performance, a knock sounded on my door.
    Davyss. Carrying a satchel. He shouldered off his overcoat to reveal hands half-washed, still stained a pinkish hue. Dried blood flecked his entire suit of dress. Words gushed out of his mouth in a torrent. “Lewand, oh, Lewand, I cannot wait to see how Christine interprets number five, for she was, well, I had time. I could take all the time I wanted with number five.”
    He saw the ill abhorrence on my face.
    “Oh, you had six weeks to come to peace with our arrangement. In that time, you never went to the police, so I think you can live with what I do for us. I am sure the gin helps. Do you want to hear the number five? Do you want to know what agony sounds like? What the desire to live sounds like? For I have it in these vials. That and the innards. Perhaps if we gave Christine this heart, oh, I know, nonsense, but the blood worked, and if the blood worked, so could the heart, could it not, Lewand?” He laughed, loudly, not waiting for my reply. “And that Robert Stephenson, that buffoon from the hospital, he is suspicious of me, but he is so addled, he has mistaken my name. He thinks Morgan Davies is the Ripper, not Martin Davyss. Ha, the fools, all scurrying around at my feet. I could go on with this project for years, Lewand, for years, free to delve like an explorer into the darkest regions of my own psyche.”
    He handed me the satchel, leather stained, seams dripping. Inside, lay the heart and entrails of a woman. And five vials of blood.
    I went to my knees, sickened. I vomited onto my floor. Christine’s thumb fell on middle C. A simple sound.
    “What was that?” Davyss asked suddenly. “She has no sheet music to play.”
    He went over to her and touched Christine’s porcelain mask. “What have I made you into, my dear? For now, truly, you are more than your gears. Do you have my same tastes? My same passions? What are you