Part One - The Boy With No Name
Chapter One
London, 1842
On a gloomy autumn evening enshrouded in fog and sleet, a baby boy came screaming into the world. He was born to a prostitute named Elissa in a tiny, one-windowed flat after nearly thirty hours of labor.
In secret she had carried him and in shame she had bore him to this world with the sole intent of ending his life, however once he was there in her arms, Elissa found she was in love.
In the dim light cast by a lone candle, she could not see her child. Although her child felt bony and unusually cold, she spent that first night bonding with him.
Those precious few hours would prove to be the only love the boy would feel throughout his childhood, for come morning, when her sister returned she discovered that the baby boy that had suckled at her breast and slept so peacefully in the crook of her arm was a monster.
There was no nose upon his face; a great gaping hole took the place of this most basic feature. His skin was gray and stretched tight across his skull. Though his body carried some of the fat typical of a newborn, he was far thinner than any baby she'd ever seen. With a terrified shriek, she shoved the child away, leaving it on the thin mat that served as her bed.
The small, deformed baby didn't stir, didn't seem to have noticed that the woman who had brought him into the world in pain and blood had practically thrown him across the room. She nudged him further from her body with a long, slender, bruise-covered leg.
No, she decided, he is not the baby that I fell in love with. My baby's gone to heaven and I've been cursed with this thing in his stead.
She contemplated carrying out the plan she had formed when she'd first realized she was with child, but some small part of her was still God-fearing. Small as that part was, it spoke the loudest of all. She knew God could forgive her the sin of selling herself to strangers, she also knew that murder was unforgivable, even if it would be the murder of a demon.
A trial, she thought. This child is a trial put upon me by God. I shall do my duty and try to be mother to this beast. Even as she thought it she looked down at the child and cringed. Sleeping, he nearly looked dead. The longer she stared at him, the more she realized that he looked like a corpse. A living, breathing corpse.
A horrible wail ripped itself from the babe's throat and the woman tasted bile as it worked its way up her throat. The very idea of allowing it to suckle at her breast once more made her long for even the most violent of her customers to drop by unexpectedly.
It screamed and cried, reaching its tiny, grasping hands with unnaturally long, thin fingers for the woman who had held and coddled him through his first night of life. Where was that comfort now? Gone, long gone, she thought, I can't… I won't allow this monster to suckle at my breast!
But the strangled cries coming from the small creature tugged at her heart. Tears welled in her eyes as she imagined the son she'd been so sure of, the normal son she'd held in the dark, crying in starvation. After a long, terrible fight with herself, she reached out and picked the baby up with shaking hands.
In her short life, Elissa had met countless men with voracious appetites, sexual or otherwise, but never to the extent of the babe that clung to her breast. After just a week of attempting to care for her monster child, she was feeling like she was being eaten alive. Her savings were dwindling and her gentleman callers had to be turned away as quickly as they arrived. She couldn't allow them to know of the demon that had come from her. She couldn't subject them to its wailing.
And it was constantly wailing. If she held it, it wailed. If she set it on the softest part of her mat, it wailed. It wailed while feeding and it wailed when she changed its linens. The only time it didn't wail was when it lapsed into sleep so deep she'd mistaken it for dead more than once.
Even though she was exhausted and the brief, silent moments when the baby slept were few and far between, she found she had grave misgivings about sleeping so near to what could very well be a dead body. It was only as an afterthought that these misgivings extended to sleeping so near to her own dead child.
Her life went on this way for weeks before she had to begin accepting visitors again. And so she began hiding the baby in the cupboard, wrapped in every non-essential bit of cloth she had at her disposal. Despite the instincts to protect and nurture her baby that clawed at the back of her mind, she found herself wishing that it would just suffocate while she entertained. She was growing tired of having to pretend the men were great lovers in order to drown out the sound of the cursed creature.
She was always disappointed— quite vocally disappointed— when she'd collect the child from the cupboard after she was done earning her keep for the day and would find that it still lived.
"You're not even worthy of a name, you know," she'd tell it sometimes when she'd finally relent and allow it to suckle. It was rare that she'd speak to it. She complained directly at God when she vocalized her displeasure at her situation. "Barely even an it. What atrocities have I committed to deserve such a malformed child? What happened to the boy I knew briefly? What did you do to my son, you hideous monster?"
Neither God nor the baby ever offered an answer beyond the pained wail of a baby lacking the simplest of human comforts.