to drag him the last few yards.
Lewis grabbed a length of rope that had been hanging from a hook on the outside wall and with Spicer’s help, bound Simms’s arms and — as extra insurance — tied him to one of the porch posts.
“Ride,” Lewis said to Spicer. “Take my horse and get the constable as fast as you can. Tell him to bring an extra man.”
Simms slumped against the ropes that bound him, and appeared to be in a stupor. Lewis dashed into the cottage and retrieved the baby, who had woken and was screaming its discomfort. As he jounced and cuddled it, Simms’s head jerked up, his eyes glittering, fixed on the screaming infant. Only when the child’s cries had settled to a whimper and Simms closed his eyes again did Lewis begin to speak in a low even tone. “Why, Isaac? Why? I understand the pressures you were under. I understand that you were carrying a terrible burden. But why visit your rage on these poor innocent women?”
Simms eyes flew open again. “She is no innocent. She is an abomination and unclean and God will punish her with everlasting hellfire.”
Lewis struggled to understand. “This woman? This woman in the cabin here? You had dealings with her?”
“This woman?” Simms looked wildly around him and Lewis realized that the man had no recognition of where he was. “This woman is the same. They are all the same. Instruments of the devil and the only thing that will satisfy is death. I can smell the blood from here, I can smell it and I know that it means the Lord is taking his revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. My God is a jealous God and he will punish the daughters of Eve for time out of mind. He smells the blood, too, and when the blood starts to flow there is no stopping it. It must be fed, a never-ending stream that washes clean the foulness of the earth.”
Simms raved on, and Lewis realized that this was indeed the madness he had been seeking, the madness that would make sense of five senseless murders. How does someone hide this, he wondered. How does someone live what seems a normal life, selling pots and pans and tools, travelling from house to house, passing the time of day with honest, hard-working folk, when all the while there is this fury waiting only for a crack that would allow it to bubble to the surface? Was Simms possessed? Was Satan himself directing these foul deeds? Had the devil taken control of Simms and forced him to murder again and again? There were some who would subscribe to this notion, many in his own church, and it was a tenet that he himself had thundered in many a sermon. But watching Simms, knowing what he had done, groping toward an understanding of his reasons for the crime, he had to wonder if the devil lived not in hell, but in men. Evil ever there, ever awaiting its chance to spring.
He had seen it in a lesser way in others and, all too often, a germ of it in himself. There was no talisman against this taint, only vigilance. No charms could guard against it, no number of prayer pins or books of Bible verses could hold it at bay, and nothing could vanquish this evil but the recognition of its presence and the will to overcome it.
Simms continued to babble, muttering a perverted litany that Lewis could only just make out: “And God shall smite thee … Thrust in thy sharp sickle and cast it into the wrath of God … the abominable and the murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire …”
“It’s all right, Isaac,” he said. “The last blood has been spilled.” But in this he was mistaken.
Spicer returned with two constables, and another five men followed. Lewis wasn’t sure why such a number was required, and suspected that the extra men were merely curious and wanted to see the carnage in the cabin. The constables were vigilant though, and made the others wait outside while they inspected the murder site —even afterward they refused them entry.
“Trust me, you don’t want to see it,” one of them said. “I don’t want to see it, but I have to.”
As succinctly as he could, Lewis related the series of events that had led them to Simms and recounted the capture, giving full credit to Morgan Spicer for having given chase and wrestling the man to the ground. One of the constables wrote it all down, with Lewis’s help, for he wasn’t quite practiced enough to spell everything correctly.
“You say you suspected this man in connection with other murders?” the second constable said. “Why didn’t you notify the authorities?”
“I tried,” Lewis said. “But they all occurred in different jurisdictions, and in two of the cases no one believed it was murder at all. With the others there was no hard evidence to point to Simms.”
“Well, we’ve got him to rights on this one, and after all, we only need one to hang him.”
This outcome hadn’t occurred to Lewis, although he supposed it should have. “This man is quite mad,” he objected. “Surely it would serve a better purpose to simply lock him away.”
“That’ll be up to the magistrate and a jury, but the law is quite clear. There’s been a murder done and he must pay the price.” And Lewis watched with a heavy heart as they took Simms away.
They took their time going home. Their horses were exhausted and they fell into a rhythm of riding for a half mile or so, then climbing down and leading the animals along to give them respite. Neither spoke for the longest time, but when they were within a mile of Demorestville, Spicer finally turned to Lewis.
“What would make a man do that?”
“I don’t have all of the answers yet. I found out who, I’m just not entirely sure why. Frustration is part of it, guilt another. Desire, I suspect. There was a heavy weight that bore him down, and it slipped sideways somehow and twisted.”
“That could describe a lot of people.”
“That describes most of us.” Lewis smiled a little, for the first time in what seemed like months. “For a time, you know, I thought it was you.”
He expected Spicer to protest, but the day’s experience had sobered the boy. “I expect you did, now that I think about it. What were you looking for in the beginning? Someone who had had a tough time in life and who wanted some sort of revenge?”
“No, I was on the wrong trail altogether for a long time.” He thought of Francis Renwell, and hoped that he had managed to slip into New York unnoticed and had found a new life there. “I let some of my own burdens get in the way. Then I did what I should have done in the first place — I thought about who would have had opportunity in the greatest number of murders, and that led me to two people — you and Simms. If I’d done that sooner, some of those women might still be alive.”
“No, I don’t think you can blame yourself for that. Who would ever have thought that such a monster was on the loose? It’s not your fault you didn’t realize it sooner.”
In his head, Lewis knew Spicer was right, but in his heart he still berated himself for not recognizing Simms for what he was. So many things had clouded his mind — Renwell, Spicer himself, the notion that evil looks like evil when so often it masquerades as something else, and he brooded about this as they travelled. He didn’t know all the details yet, the things that had led Simms to his desperate acts, but he knew that the sister, Esther, was tied up in it somehow — there was something unholy and unclean between the two and it was this that had given bloody birth to further unholiness. He stood little chance of ever speaking to her, given the reception they’d received at the brick house in Belleville, but he hoped that at some juncture he could question Simms, try to find what had driven him to seek such horrific release.
They
