Chapter Text
Rage is a powerful emotion, I have come to learn. It is subtle at first, a delicate seed planted deep within the dirty recesses of humanity’s collective soul. The delicate seed unfurls differently in each person, springing deep roots before growing taller and taller until its fiery buds bloom in the meaty grey matter of our brains. This seed, the blooming of rage and fury, has been planted by different people in the collective lives of humanity.
For Nikola Tesla, rage was planted and tended to by Edison and Pendrick. His seed is one of righteous fury I suspect, one fueled by years of negative press and being overshadowed by those who have stolen his inventions. For Murdoch I suspect that it was planted by his father and tended to by many others. His is slow growing, hampered by the religious dogma of the Catholic church but still fueled by the daily injustice he witnesses at station house four. I do believe that it is there though, festering like a squalid wound. Perhaps one day I will rip it out of him, bring him to the precipice of greatness and push him off.
My rage, as it is, began when I was a young man and has steadily grown since then. I was six years old when I believe the seed was planted in me, by a nun nonetheless. Sister Agnes had been cruel and capricious as long as I had known her and took great delight in tormenting all of the children at the orphanage. During one such mood I had asked her a simple question about the teachings of the bible, as to why God had punished his people for so long with the flood if he had truly loved them like we were taught. She took me then and bent me down against her knee, beating me so soundly that I could not sit at supper time with the other children.
Nuns truly are something else, I must admit. While some are as virtuous as they claim to be, many others are not so saintly. Between the curse I heard uttered behind closed doors and the beatings sustained by both myself and many of the other children, these women were not women of God. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing, beautiful angelic faces hiding demons beneath. It’s funny really, how those with the sweetest facades often have the most secrets.
My rage continued to grow long after I left the orphanage though the roots didn’t take and dig into me until Edmund. You know the story by now, a helpless child with confused feelings being taken advantage of by someone much older and wiser who should have known better than to do what he did. This rage is different from that of my experience with the nuns. It runs deeper, runs hotter, runs darker than anything I have ever experienced before.
It’s hard for those who have not experienced what I have to imagine what it feels like, to feel the raw pain of being violated so deeply. Your body has no control over itself, over how it reacts to the intrusion, to the feeling of another person so wholly taking over your will. For me, it was a mixed bag of feelings. I had wanted him for so long, had trusted him so deeply, that I had not seen the warning signs early on. Had I seen them, had I known, I never would have allowed myself to become so enamored by him. The first kiss had been a shock, cold lips on mine and in my stupor and seeming euphoria, my body froze. It froze as I felt his hands travel further down, as I felt him reach the pants that I slept in. I did not recognize the look in his eyes, that dark glinting glare that spoke of a deep compulsion that he could not help, and it scared me. Try as I might to get out of his grasp, my body fell victim to him and responded as it should. I did not know then that in those situations, one cannot control their body and their arousal but I cried and begged in my mind for my body to stop doing what it did but it didn’t stop.
What happened is not my fault, I know that now. There was nothing I had done to invite that violation and even if I had done something, I was not deserving of that against my will. It felt like my fault following what happened, felt like I had done something wrong. Was God punishing me for my thoughts by allowing that to happen? I didn’t know if he was and even then, I didn’t care. It’s a peculiar feeling, being afraid to look at yourself in the mirror for fear of seeing your body and being disgusted by it. I had been disgusted by myself, had avoided the mirrors and the baths until the maids forced me under the water in the tub. They had seen the marks he had left, the bruises on me, but they had said nothing. Complacency and complicitiness are one in the same, the same vein of disgusting bystanding. It’s like seeing a body and being unable to tear your eyes away from it, the same combination of morbid fascination and horror.
Despite the knowledge that it was not my fault and that I could not be held accountable for it, I still hated myself. This disgusting body held my broken soul, held the marks of my irreparable trauma. The shame has not left me to this very day and while I do carry it within myself, it has changed over time. This shame, this trauma, has warped and watered the seeds of rage that are growing deep within me as I write this down. I am angry now, wielding a sword flamed with righteous fury as if the archangel Michael has come down to earth.
Edmund Donahue was the first man I ever killed. I was fifteen and suffering deep in the throes of a severe melancholy when the idea to do so first occurred to me. It had been a fleeting thing, a simple thought of picking up the knife I was using and plunging it into his neck. I almost did it then too, but something held me back. If I was going to kill this man, he was going to suffer for what he had done to me. Killing him was easy, far easier than I thought it would have been. I lured him to our garden wanting to talk about what had happened, a picnic laid out for the two of us on a blanket. He seemed apprehensive as I poured him his tea but soon relaxed as I told him that I wished to put it all behind us in the spirit of friendship.
I lied of course, I would never be cordial with a monster like that. You may ask how I killed him and it is simple really; oleander flowers and leaves brewed into a tea poured into the cup he drank from. The entire plant is poisonous you see, one leaf enough to kill an adult if they do not receive medical attention in time. He had no idea he was drinking himself to death. The symptoms start out simple enough with nausea and dizziness but they progress rapidly if left unchecked. A few hours after he drank the tea a maid informed me that he was violently ill, vomiting and sweating like he had influenza. By the morning he was dead, his face pale and lips blue. My parents seemed upset by his death, I was not.
I would have thought the rage in me to have subsided knowing that my assaulter was dead but that didn’t happen. The anger was still there, still permeating every fiber of my being. But there was something else that was lying in wait just under the surface, some sort of new emotion I could not identify. It was not new in the sense of never having experienced it before as it felt remarkably similar to the feelings that occurred during my childhood. This feeling was not akin to an itching obsession, a need for control and wanton destruction.
For the sake of simplicity, I shall call the feeling a malicious glee or perhaps bloodlust.
I will not bore you with the details of my adolescence for nothing of importance occurred there. Sure I was cunning in the often cruel pranks I would play on the servants and on Clara but I never did kill another. Not until Samuel Bennett of course.
Here George paused, setting the journal page down on his desk as he leaned back to process what he had learned. It was no surprise to learn that James Gillies had killed someone else before Samuel Bennett and admittedly, he was less disturbed than when he had first started reading the writings of this madman. What disturbed George were the emotions ever present, penned to life and memory by the scratched ink on the pages. This assault Gillies had suffered was something George had hardly expected.
George was no stranger to the world of assaults, having investigated countless attempts and having seen and heard about his fair share while living with all of his aunties. He had been eight when the first assault occurred and he remembered sitting in the kitchen with his nose in a book when there was a crash from his aunt Begonia’s room. George had known not to enter their rooms but fearing the worst he did so anyway, coming face to face with a scene he would never forget.
A man was on top of his aunt, pinning her down and hitting her with the back of his hand. George hadn’t seen the rising petticoats or the lack of the man’s pants and spurred on by the fear of what was occurring he leapt into action and tried to pull the man off of her, earning a sharp backhand to his face before the man hurried out of the room and then out of the rectory as a whole. Aunt Begonia had collected herself and led George back into the kitchen, dabbing at his face with a cloth as she explained to him what had been happening and how there had been no need for him to come in and defend her like that.
Snapping back to reality at the echoes of a female voice, George looked up to meet the concerned face of Doctor Ogden. Her creased brows softened when she noticed the troubled look and pallor of George’s skin, clearly assuming he had been spooked. “Are you quite alright George? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yes, I’m fine. Just had a bit of a shock from this novel I suppose.” He replied, taking a moment to calm himself. “Since you’re here though, could I ask you a few questions pertaining to something I’ve been looking at on the side. Murdoch doesn’t know about this so if we could keep this private, I would greatly appreciate it.”
“Of course, this stays just between us. What did you want to ask me?”
“Uhm well I guess I wanted to ask if you think that something like a sexual assault could trigger psychopathy in a person? Moreso would that apply to every person who’s a psychopath? And also, is it possible for a man to be sexually assaulted? I know the lines on that one are quite blurred.”
“So you want a psychological consultation on a potential criminal profile then?” She asked as he sat down beside his desk, knowing this conversation would likely take quite a while.
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Well, I do think that men can be sexually assaulted though you may be hard pressed to find many people who agree with me. Assault is based on a lack of consent from at least one party so if the man did not consent then yes, it would be sexual assault. May I ask for more details of the assault if that’s possible? It may be hard for me to make a profile based on such little detail.”
“I don’t have many details save for it was a thirteen year old boy assaulted by an adult male who I think may have been in his mid to late twenties. This child is showing incredibly psychopathic tendencies and has admitted to murdering his assaulter.” George answered, carefully scanning Julia’s face to gauge her reaction.
“If this is an ongoing case then you have an obligation to report this George.” She sighed, shaking her head. “That being said, I did swear to keep this between us and I will honour that. As for your other questions, those are a bit more involved and harder to answer. Not every psychopath is going to be a victim of sexual assault and assuming that is a gross mischaracterization of all previous sexual assault victims. It is possible that the act of the assault triggered the psychotic tendencies in the victim but those would have existed long before the actual assault. There’s a debate raging currently about whether or not these tendencies are genetic or environmentally brought about. Likely it’s some combination of both but no one is certain for sure yet as it’s rare to study a person with those specific tendencies. I hope this has been helpful but I'm afraid that I cannot provide any more information and that I do have to be going.”
“I’m sorry to have kept you so long but yes, this was helpful. Thank you doctor Ogden.” George nodded, watching her excuse herself before turning back to the journal.
As of the discussion with the good doctor, George had not wholly convinced himself that Gillies was a victim or evil. He seemed to be a flawed individual, yes, but every human being was flawed. Gillies was a murderer then but not the callous and evil individual George had come to know him as by this point in his life. The assault was a turning point for James Gillies, that was undeniable, but that hadn’t made him evil.
There was something undeniably relatable about the way James Gillies spoke of rage, of the quiet boiling under the surface ready to erupt. George had felt it as much as any man, that fist shaking shout inducing emotion that seemed to rule over the inspector and guide Murdoch’s cool almost chilly demeanor at times. His rage was subtle, purposefully buried under an easygoing Nova Scotian demeanor and friendliness that at times felt fabricated. He had grown up too fast, had forced himself to become the kind of man that his aunts would have been proud of and while he thanked them for it, he was bitter and angry.
But George Crabtree knew that he was not the same as James Gillies.
No one was like James Gillies.