The Beast Within

BOSTON ADVERTISER Thursday, September 29, 1892 Killings Frighten Neighborhoods Roxbury, Dorchester stalked by "Beast" The good citizens of Boston's southern suburbs are frightened, frightened by a rash of bestial slayings that have targeted children and elderly... so far. On September the nineteenth, Boston foot police on patrol in Roxbury, at approximately 6:30 a.m., found the body of one Theodore Ferman, a child of eight years of age, brutally eviscerated, lying in a pool of his own blood. The officers, Messrs. Woolsey and Peters, so saddened by the sight of the innocent young boy in his schoolclothes lying there murdered, wept uncharacteristically at the brutality of the scene. The officers told this reporter that the crime shocked them beyond anything they'd seen in their combined twenty-three years on ''the rounds.'' A second boy, a young street-arab whose identity is currently unknown to the authorities at Suffolk County Morgue, was found killed in a similar way three days later, on the evening of the twenty-second. On this occasion, the boy's body was found stuffed into a garbage receptacle behind a local saloon. The owner of the saloon, a Mr. Hyde Nesbitt, told this reporter that the poor lad seemed ''less murdered than eaten.'' A third victim was found just last afternoon, also by Boston police on regular patrol. A retired builder, aged sixty-four, whose identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, was found on the sidewalk of Lindsey Street in Dorchester. Police investigators have no leads as to the identity of the ''Beast,'' but most believe it is a wild, perhaps rabid animal of some kind. The Department of Animal Control has begun patrolling the streets of Roxbury and Dorchester in an effort to root out the beast.

Along with this article, the Colonel managed to procure the police reports on these crimes from his contacts in the Boston Police Department. Colonel Rice gave the investigators his pet theories about the identity of this beast -- perhaps it was a lycanthrope of some kind. Explaining the nature of the Lupines, the investigators were sent out to discover information about the victims and their places of death. The group began with a look around the neighborhoods of the Ferman boy.

The Fermans, living in Roxbury, were home on the Saturday in question. The mother, Sara, and the grandmother of the boy, Anna, sat in mourning on the Jewish Sabbath. The siblings of the dead boy were also present at home. Oddly, the father, Max, had been to his place of employment on that Saturday, and came home to find this menagerie questioning his poor wife, and asked them to leave rather quickly.

Out on the street, the investigators talked to one of the boy's playmates and he told them the usual route the child took home from school every day. Investigations along this route were inconclusive.

Next, the investigators looked into the death of the unidentified street-arab. Hyde Nesbitt, the owner of the "Cavern" saloon, was amenable to the investigators, if a bit wary. The alley behind his tavern held the garbage receptacles where the boy's body was stowed. The bloodstains were still there when the agents arrived; they hadn't been washed off the alley wall. It seemed that the killer let the body slide downward into the metal trash receptacle, a metal cube about 3 feet on each side. These blood stains first tipped Mr. Nesbitt off to the presence of something queer.

The Lindsey Street murder provided the agents with clues that led them to an apartment on Brenton Street in Dorchester, where the investigators found a dank, fecund room where a Beast was lairing...

That single room flat, reeking of the pungent odor of rotting meat, betrays a huge nest of discarded newspapers, cloth, and twigs. Investigating the sink, the agents found a few joints of meat about the size of human thighs festering inside the basin. Gagging on the stench, our intrepid heroes looked up in time to see a huge eight-foot tall deformed Beast rearing up before them.

Injured in the combat, the Beast leapt out his second-story window and ran off at superhuman velocity. The investigators were now free to investigate this morbid lair. One clue soon presented itself as the most promising lead.

"Manual Laborers, an honest 12 hours of work a day, contact Mr. Lewis at 44 Pembroke St., Boston."

This advertisement, ripped from a newspaper, led the investigators from the rough streets of north Dorchester to the opulent homes of Boston's Back Bay. The address in the advertisement was the address of a doctor, Dr. Lawrence Bates Osgoode. At the office on Sunday evening was Mr. Timothy Lewis, a student of Boston University and personal secretary to the doctor. When the investigators inquired about the advertisement, Mr. Lewis told them that all inquiries into the "labor" job were forwarded to the doctor's storage space in South Boston. The doctor was needing strong backs to help his moving the items either into or out of storage, Mr. Lewis was not sure which. Given this address, the investigators decide to take another day to stake out the place.

The night of October 3, the investigators converge on a large warehouse on P Street in South Boston. The building lay on the corner of two cross-streets. The area around the warehouse was not well-lit by street lights. Approaching the warehouse, the investigators could not see clearly through the windows, but the only part of the warehouse was on the southeast corner. The agents found a safe place on top of a neighboring building to watch the warehouse.

Safely in hiding, the investigators' surveillance was interrupted by the arrival of the Beast they battled back in Dorchester. It made its way, again at supernatural speed, across the streets of South Boston and towards the warehouse.

Following the Beast's rampage into the warehouse, the investigators were then harried by a strange alley cat, possessing claws with the sharpness of steel. Making their way forcibly into the building, they found a house of horrors of science run rampant. The doctor, standing before an examination table, clutching a jar half-full of a weird elixir, which he'd just apparently administered to his (former) assistant, the now late Mr. Lewis.

The Beast was busy with the doctor's henchmen, two quite burly men in derby hats which the investigators had noticed in the Cavern pub in Dorchester. The investigators immediately made for the doctor. Young Jared, still on the roof of the neighboring building, was able to see everything when the windows were blown out out by an explosion from Professor Murphy's Electro-Static Particle Accelerator. Soung attempted to make mental contact with the Beast.

Meanwhile, down in the street, Alec was remaining on watch for any bystanders who might make their way by the scene. Alec encountered a man dressed in a black suit, hat, and cloak on the street, who apparently had been hiding there during the agents' entry into the doctor's laboratory. Alec attempted to feed from him, and after a few minutes of combat, Alec got his grip on the man. When he began feeding, the man simply melted away into nothing, leaving only his clothes behind.

The combat inside the laboratory had kept Professor Murphy, Jared, and Finbar busy, with Professor Murphy trying to target the doctor with blasts of electricity, Finbar holding the doctor's giant rats at bay with his pistol, and Jared working old and mysterious magic from the nearby building. Dr. Osgoode, meanwhile, was targeting Professor Murphy with powders from a spray apparatus.

The continuous blasts from Murphy's weapon, however, created a raging inferno, and, after the Beast had made work of the doctor's physically-enhanced henchmen, the Beast tumbled into the fire, taking the doctor with him. Quick thinking enabled Professor Murphy to save some of the doctor's notes from the fire.

The next day, the fire in the newspaper oddly only mentioned the death of the two henchmen and the young Mr. Lewis. Dr. Osgoode's presence was not mentioned.