Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Shangri-La Station was an Escheresque blend of major airport terminal, world-class shopping mall, and miniature city, all tucked away safely inside a massive cavern in the heart of the uplifted limestone massifs of the Himalayan mountains, a cavern which had been gradually enlarged and remolded into one of the busiest terminals in the entire time-touring industry. Portions of the station emerged into the open sunshine on the mountain’s flank, or would have, if Shangri-La’s engineers hadn’t artificially extended that rocky flank to cover the station’s outer walls in natural-looking concrete “rock” faces. Because the terminal’s main structure followed the maze of the cave system’s inner caverns, TT-86 was a haphazard affair that sprawled in unexpected directions, with tunnels occasionally boring their way through solid rock to connect one section of the station with another.
The major time-touring gates all lay in the Commons, of course, a vast area of twisting balconies, insane staircases and ramps, and all the glitter of high-class shops and restaurants that even the most discriminating of billionaires could wish to find themselves surrounded with. But because Commons followed the twists and turns of the immense cavern, there was no straight shot or even line-of-sight view from one end to the other. And station Residential snaked back into even more remote corners and crannies, with apartments tucked in like cells in a beehive designed by LSD-doped honeybees.
The underpinnings of the station descended multiple stories into the mountain’s rocky heart, where the nitty-gritty, daily business of keeping a small city operational was carried out. Machinery driven by a miniature atomic pile hummed in the rocky silence. The trickle and rush of running water from natural underground streams and waterfalls could be heard in the sepulchral darkness beyond the station’s heating, cooling, and waste-disposal plants. Down here, anybody could hide anything for a period of many months, if not years.
Margo had realized long ago that Shangri-La Station was immense. She just hadn’t realized how big it really was. Not until Skeeter Jackson led them down circuitous, narrow tunnels into a maze he clearly knew as well as Margo knew the route from Kit’s palatial apartment to her library cubicle. Equally clearly, Skeeter had taken full advantage of this rat’s maze to pull swift disappearing acts from station security and irate tourists he’d fleeced, conned, or just plain robbed.
Probably what saved his life when that enraged gladiator was trying to skewer him with a sword, she thought silently. Under Skeeter’s direction, their search party broke apart at intervals, combing the corridors and tunnels individually, only to rejoin one another further on. She could hear the footsteps and voices of other search parties off in the distance. The echoes, eerie and distorted, left Margo shivering in the slight underground chill that no amount of central heating could dispel. Occasional screams and girder-bending shrieks drifted down from the enormous pteranodon sternbergi which had entered the station through an unstable gate into the era of dinosaurs.
The size of a small aircraft, the enormous flying reptile lived in an immense hydraulic cage that could be hoisted up from the sub-basements right through the floor to the Commons level for “feeding demonstrations.” The pterodactyl ate several mountains of fish a day, far more than they could keep stocked through the gates. So the head of pest control, Sue Fritchey, had hatched an ambitious project to keep the big sternbergi fed: breeding her own subterranean food supply from an up-time hatchery and any down-time fingerlings they could bring in. The sub-basement corridors were lined with rows and high-stacked tiers of empty aquariums, waiting to be filled with the next batch of live fingerlings. Piles and dusty stacks of the empty glass boxes left the tunnels under Little Agora and Frontier Town looking like the ghost of a pet shop long since bankrupt, its fish sold below cost or dumped down the nearest toilet.
It was a lonely, eerie place to have to search for a missing friend.
Margo glanced at her watch. How long had they been searching, now? Four hours, twenty minutes. Time was running out, at least for her and anyone else heading down the Britannia Gate. She bit one lip as she glanced at Shahdi Feroz, who represented in one package very nearly everything Margo wanted to be: poised, beautiful, a respected professional, experienced with temporal gates, clocking in nearly as much down time as some Time Tours guides. Time Tours had actually approached Dr. Feroz several times with offers to guide “seance and spiritualist tours” down the Britiannia. She’d turned them down flat, each and every time they’d offered. Margo admired her for sticking by her principles, when she could’ve been making pots and kettles full of money. Enough to fund her down-time research for the next century or two.
And speaking of down-time research…
“Kit,” Margo said quietly, “we’re running short of time.”
Her grandfather glanced around, checked his own watch, frowned. “Yes. Skeeter, I’m sorry, but Margo and Dr. Feroz have a gate to make.”
Skeeter turned his head slightly, lips compressed. “I’m supposed to work that gate, too, you know. We’re almost directly under Frontier Town now. We finish this section of tunnels, then they can run along and play detective down the Britannia as much as they want.”
Margo held her breath as Kit bristled silently; but her grandfather held his temper. Maybe because he, too, could see the agony in Skeeter’s eyes. Kit said only, “All right, why don’t you take that tunnel?” and nodded toward a corridor that branched off to the left. “Dr. Feroz, perhaps you’d go with Margo? You can discuss last-minute plans for the tour while you search.”
Margo squirmed inwardly, but she couldn’t very well protest. She was going to spend the next three months of her life in this woman’s company. She’d have to face her sooner or later and it might as well be sooner.
Kit pointed down one of the sinuous, winding tunnels. “Take that fork off to the right. I’ll go straight ahead. We’ll meet you—how much farther?” he asked Skeeter.
“Fifty yards. Then we’ll take the stairs up to Frontier Town.”
They split up. Margo glanced at Shahdi Feroz and felt her face redden. Margo barely had a high school diploma and one semester of college. She had learned more in Shangri-La’s library than she had in that stuffy, impossible up-time school. And she had learned, enormously. But after that mortifying mistake, with Shahdi Feroz correcting her misapprehension about Nichol gangs’ weapons of choice, it wouldn’t matter that Margo had logged nearly two hundred hours through the Britannia or that she spoke fluent Cockney. Kit had drilled her until she could not only make sense of the gibberish that passed for Cockney dialect, but could produce original conversations in it, too. Without giving herself too savage a headache, remembering all the half-rhymes and word-replacement games the dialect required. None of that would matter, not when she’d goofed on the very first day, not when Margo’s lack of a diploma left her vulnerable and scared.
Shahdi Feroz, however, surprised Margo with an attempted first gesture at friendliness. The scholar smiled hesitantly, one corner of her lips twisting in chagrin. “I did not mean to embarrass you, Miss Smith. If you are to guide the Ripper Watch Tour, then you clearly have the experience to do so.”
Margo almost let it go. She wanted badly to have this woman think she really did know what she was doing. But that wasn’t honest and might actually be dangerous, if they got into a tight spot and the scholar thought she knew more than she did. She cleared her throat, aware that her face had turned scarlet. “Thanks, but I’m not, really.” The startled glance Dr. Feroz gave her prompted Margo to finish before she lost her nerve. “It’s just that I’m in training to be a time scout, you see, and Kit wants me to get some experience doing fieldwork.”
“Kit?” the other woman echoed. “You know Kit Carson that well, then, to use his first name? I wish I did.”
Some of Margo’s nervousness drained away. If Dr. Shahdi Feroz could look and sound that wistful and uncertain, then maybe there was hope for Margo, after all. She grinned, relief momentarily transcending worry and fear for Ianira’s family. “Well, yeah, I guess you could say so. He’s my grandfather.”
“Oh!” Then, startling Margo considerably, “That must be very difficult for you, Miss Smith. You have my sympathy. And respect. It is never easy, to live up to greatness in one’s ancestors.”
Strangely, Margo received the impression that Shahdi Feroz wasn’t speaking entirely of Margo. “No,” she said quietly, “it isn’t.” Shahdi Feroz remained silent, respecting Margo’s privacy, for which she was grateful. She and the older woman began testing doors they came to and jotting down the numbers painted on them, so maintenance could check the rooms later, since neither of them had keys. Margo did rattle the knobs and knock, calling out, “Hello? Ianira? Marcus? It’s Margo Smith…” Nobody answered, however, and the echoes that skittered away down the tunnel mocked her efforts. She bit her lower lip. How many rooms to check, just like these, and how many miles of tunnels? God, they could be anywhere.
No, she told herself, not just anywhere. If they had been killed, the killer would either have needed keys to unlock these doors or would’ve had to use tools to jimmy the locks. And so far, neither Margo nor Shahdi Feroz had found any suspicious scratches or toolmarks indicating a forced door. So they might still be alive.
Somewhere.
Please, God, let them still be alive, somewhere…
Their tunnel twisted around, following the curve of the cavern wall, and re-joined the main tunnel fifty yards from the point they’d left it. Kit was already there, waiting. Skeeter, grim and silent, arrived a moment later.
“All right,” Skeeter’s voice was weary with disappointment, “that’s the whole section we were assigned.” The pain in his voice jerked Margo out of her own worry with a stab of guilt. She hadn’t lost anything, really, in that goof with Shahdi Feroz, except a little pride. Skeeter had just lost his only friends in the whole world.
“I’m sorry, Skeeter,” she found herself saying, surprising them both with the sincerity in her voice.
Skeeter met her gaze steadily for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “Thanks. I appreciate that, Margo. We’d better get back up to Commons, get ready to go through the Britannia.” He grimaced. “I’ll carry the luggage through, because I agreed to take the job. But I won’t be staying.”
No, Margo realized with a pang. He wouldn’t. Skeeter would come straight back through that open gate and probably kill himself searching, with lack of sleep and forgetting to eat.… They trooped wordlessly up the stairs to the boisterous noise of Frontier Town. With the Wild West gate into Denver set to open tomorrow, wannabe cowboys in leather chaps and jingling spurs sauntered from saloon to saloon, ogling the bar girls and pouring down cheap whiskey and beer. Rinky-tink piano music drifted out through saloon doors to mingle with the voices of tourists speculating on the search underway, the fate of the construction workers who’d attacked Ianira, her family, and her acolytes, on the identity of the Ripper, and what sights they planned to see in Denver of 1885 and the surrounding gold-mining towns.
In front of Happy Jack’s saloon, a guy with drooping handlebar moustache, who wore an outlandish getup that consisted of low-slung Mexican sombrero, red silk scarf, black leather chaps, black cotton shirt, black work pants tucked into black, tooled-leather boots, and absurdly roweled silver spurs, was staggering into the crowd, bawling at the top of his lungs. “Gonna win me that medal, y’hear? Joey Tyrolin’s the name, gonna win that shootin’ match, l’il lady!”
He accosted a tourist who wore a buckskin skirt and blouse. She staggered back, apparently from the smell of his breath. Joey Tyrolin, drunker than any skunk Margo had yet seen in Frontier Town, drew a fancy pair of Colt Single-Action Army pistols and executed an equally fancy roadhouse spin, marred significantly by the amount of alcohol he’d recently consumed. One of the .45-caliber revolvers came adrift mid-air and splashed into a nearby horse trough. Laughter exploded in every direction. A scowl as dark as his clothes appeared in a face that matched his red silk bandanna.
“Gonna win me that shootin’ match, y’hear! Joey Tyrolin c’n shoot th’ eye outta an eagle at three hunnerd yards…” He bent, gingerly fishing his gun out of the horse trough.
Margo muttered, “Maybe he’ll fall in and drown? God, am I ever glad we’re going to London, not Denver.”
Kit, too, eyed the pistolero askance. “Let’s hope he confines his shooting to that black-powder competition he’s bragging about. I’ve seen far too many idiots like that one go down time to Denver and challenge some local to a gunfight. Occasionally, they choose the wrong local, someone who can’t be killed because he’s too important to history. Now and again, they come back to the station in canvas bags.”
Shahdi Feroz glanced up at him. “I should imagine their families must protest rather loudly?”
“All too often, yes. It’s why station management requires the hold harmless waivers all time tourists must sign. Fools have a way of discovering,” Kit added with a disgusted glance toward the drunken Joey Tyrolin, who now dripped water all over the Frontier Town floor and any tourist within reach, “that the laws of time travel, like the laws of physics, have no pity and no remorse.”
Skeeter said nothing at all. He merely glared at the drunken tourist and clamped his lips, eyes ravaged by a pain Margo could literally feel, it was so strong. Margo reached out hesitantly, touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Skeeter. I hope you find them. Tell them… tell them we helped look, okay?”
Skeeter had stiffened under her hand. But he nodded. “Thanks, Margo. I’ll see you later.”
He strode away through the crowd, disappearing past Joey Tyrolin, who teetered and abruptly found himself seated in the horse trough he’d just fished his pistol out of. Laughter floated in Skeeter’s wake. Margo didn’t join in. Skeeter was hurting, worse than she’d ever believed it possible for him to hurt. When she looked up, she found Kit’s gaze on her. Her grandfather nodded, having read what was in her eyes and correctly interpreted it, all without a word spoken. It was one of the reasons she was still a little in awe of him—and why, at this moment, she loved him more fiercely than ever.
“I’ll keep looking, too, Imp,” he promised. “You’d better scoot if you want to get into costume and get your luggage to the gate on time.”
Margo sighed. “Thanks. You’ll come see us off?”
He ruffled her hair affectionately. “Just try and keep me away.”
She gave him a swift, rib-cracking hug, having to blink salty water out of her eyes. “Love you, Kit,” she whispered.
Then she fled, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tears.
Time scouting was a tough business.
Just now, Margo didn’t feel quite tough enough.
The night dripped.
Not honest rain, no; but a poisonous mist of coal smoke and river fog and steam that carried nameless scents in the coalescing yellow droplets. Above a gleam of damp roofing slates, long curls of black, acrid smoke belched from squat chimney pots that huddled down like misshapen gargoyles against an airborne, sulphurous tide. Far above, an almost forgotten moon hung poised above the city, a sickle-shaped crescent, the tautly drawn bow of the Divine Huntress of the Night, pure as unsullied silver above the foul murk, taking silent aim into the heart of a city long accustomed to asphyxiating beneath its own lethal mantle.
Gas jets from scattered street lamps stung the darkness like impotent bees. The fog dispersed their glow into forlorn, hopeless little pustules of light along wet cobblestones and soot-blackened walls of wood and stone and ancient, crumbling brick. Diffuse smells lurked in eddies like old, fading bruises. The scent of harbor water thick with weeds and dead things afloat in the night drifted in from the river. Wet and half-rotted timbers lent a whiff of salt and moldering fungus. Putrefied refuse from the chamber pots and privies of five million people stung the throat and eyes, fighting for ascendency over the sickly stench of dead fish and drowned dogs.
The distant, sweet freshness of wet hay and muddied straw eddying down from the enormous hay markets of Whitechapel and Haymarket itself lent a stark note of contrast, reminding the night that somewhere beyond these dismal brick walls, fresh air and clean winds swept across the land. Closer at hand came the stink of marsh and tidal mud littered with the myriad flotsam cast up by the River Thames to lap against the docks of Wapping and Stepney and the Isle of Dogs, a miasma that permeated the chilly night with a cloying stink like corpses too long immersed in a watery grave.
In the houses of respectable folk, rambling in orderly fashion to the west along the river banks and far inland to the north, candleshades and gas lamps had long since been extinguished. But here in the raucous streets of Wapping, of Whitechapel and of Stepney, drunken voices bellowed out the words of favorite drinking tunes. In rented rooms the size of storage bins, huddled in ramshackle brick tenements which littered these darkened streets like cancerous growths, enterprising pimps played the blackmail-profitable game of “arse and twang” with hired whores, unsuspecting sailors, and switchblade knives. Working men and women stood or sat in doorways and windows, listening to the music drifting along the streets from public houses and poor-men’s clubs like the Jewish Working Men’s Association of Whitechapel, until the weariness of hard work for long, squalid hours dragged them indoors to beds and cots and stairwells for the night. In the darkened, shrouded streets, business of another kind rose sharply with the approach of the wee hours. Men moved in gangs or pairs or slipped singly from shadow to shadow, and plied the cudgels and prybars of their trade against the skulls and window casements of their favorite victims.
Along one particular fog-cloaked street, where music and light spilled heedlessly from a popular gathering place for local denizens, bootheels clicked faintly on the wet cobbles as a lone young man, more a fair-haired boy than a man fully grown, staggered out into the wet night. A working lad, but not in the usual sense of the word, he had spent the better part of his night getting himself pissed as a newt on what had begun as “a quick one down to boozer” and had steadily progressed—through a series of pints of whatever the next-closest local had been selling cheapest—into a rat-arsed drunken binge.
A kerb crawler of indeterminate years appeared from out of the yellow murk and flashed a saucy smile. “You look to be a bloke what likes jolly comp’ny, mate.” She took his arm solicitously when he reeled against a sooty brick wall, leaving a dark streak of damp down his once-fine shirt, which had seen far better days in the fashionable West End. She smiled into his eyes. “What about a four-penny knee trembler t’ share wiv a comfy lady?” A practiced hand stole along the front of his shapeless trousers.
He grabbed a handful of the wares for sale, since it was expected and he had at least the shreds of a reputation to maintain, then he sighed dolefully, as though a sluggish, drunken thought had come to him. He carefully slurred his voice into the slang he’d heard on these streets for weeks, now. “Ain’t got a fourpence, luv. No ackers a’tall. Totally coals an’ coke, ’at’s what I am, I’ve spent the last of what I brung ’ome t’night on thirty-eleven pints.”
The woman eyed him more closely in the dim light. “I know ’at voice…”
When she got a better look, she let out a disgusted screech and knocked his hand away. “ ’Oo are you tryin’ t’fool, Morgan? Grabbin’ like it’s me thripenny bits you’d want, when it’s cobbler’s awl’s you’d rather be gropin’ after? Word’s out, ’bout you, Morgan. ’At Polly Nichols shot ’er mouth good, when she were drunk, ’at she did.” The woman shoved him away with a harsh, “Get ’ome t’ yer lovin’ Mr. Eddy—if th’ toff’ll ’ave you back, whoever he might be, unnatural sod!” She gave a short, ugly bark of laughter and stalked away into the night, muttering about wasting her time on beardless irons and finding a bloke with some honest sausage and mash to pay her doss money for the night.
The cash-poor—and recently infamous—young drunk reeled at her sharp shove and plowed straight into the damp wall, landing with a low grunt of dismayed surprise. He caught himself ineffectually there and crumpled gradually to the wet pavement. Morgan sat there for a moment, blinking back tears of misery and absently rubbing his upper arm and shoulder. For several moments, he considered seriously what he ought to do next. Sitting in muck on a wet pavement for the remainder of the night didn’t seem a particularly attractive notion. He hadn’t any place to go and no doss money of his own and he was very far, indeed, from Cleveland Street and the fancy West Side house where he’d once been popular with a certain class of rich toffs—and until tomorrow night, at least, when Eddy would finally bring him the promised money, he would have nothing to buy food, either.
His eyes stung. Damn that bitch, Polly Nichols! She was no better than he was, for all the righteous airs she put on. Just a common slattern, who’d lift her skirts for a stinking fourpence—or a well-filled glass of gin, for that matter. Word on the streets hereabout was, she’d been a common trollop for so many years her own husband had tossed her out as an unfit mother and convinced the courts to rescind the order for paying her maintenance money. Morgan, at least, had plied his trade with respectably wealthy clients; but thinking about that only made the hurt run deeper. The fine West End house had tossed him out, when he’d lost their richest client. Wasn’t my fault Eddy threw me over for that bloody mystic of his, with his fancy ways and fine house and his bloody deformed…
And Polly Nichols, curse the drunken bitch, had found out about that particular house on Cleveland Street and Morgan’s place in it, had shoved him against a wall and hissed out, “I know all about it, Morgan. All about what you let a bloke do t’you for money. I’ve ’eard you got a little rainy day fund put aside, savin’s, like, from that ’ouse what tossed you onto the street. You ’and it over, Morgan, maybe I won’t grass on you, eh? Those constables in H Division, now, they might just want to know about an ’andsome lad like you, bendin’ over for it.”
Morgan had caught his breath in horror. The very last thing Morgan needed was entanglements with the police. Prostitution was bad enough for a woman. A lad caught prostituting himself with another man… Well, the death penalty was off the books, but it’d be prison for sure, a nice long stretch at hard labor, and the thought of what would happen to a lad like himself in prison… But Morgan had come away from the house on Cleveland Street with nothing save his clothes, a half-crown his last client had given him as a bonus, which he’d managed to hide from the house’s proprietor, and a black eye.
And Eddy’s letters.
“Here…” He produced the half-crown, handed it over. “It’s everything I’ve got in the world. Please, Polly, I’m starving as it is, don’t tell the constables.”
“An ’alf a crown?” she screeched. “A mis’rable ’alf-crown? Bleedin’ little sod! You come from a fine ’ouse, you did, wiv rich men givin’ it to you, what do you mean by givin’ me nuffink but a miserly ’alf-crown!”
“It’s all I’ve got!” he cried, desperate. “They took everything else away! Even most of my clothes!” A harsh, half-strangled laugh broke loose. “Look at my face, Polly! That’s what they gave me as a going away present!”
“Copper’s’ll give you worse’n bruises an’ a blacked eye, luv!” She jerked around and started to stalk away. “Constable!”
Morgan clutched at her arm. “Wait!”
She paused. “Well?”
He licked his lips. They were all he had… but if this drunken whore sent him to prison, what good would Eddy’s letters do him? And he didn’t have to give them all to her. “I’ve got one thing. One valuable thing.”
“What’s ’at?” She narrowed her eyes.
“Letters…”
“Letters? What sort of fool d’you tyke me for?”
“They’re valuable letters! Worth a lot of money!”
The narrow-eyed stare sharpened. “What sort o’ letters ’ave you got, Morgan, that’d be worth any money?”
He licked his lips once more. “Love letters,” he whispered. “From someone important. They’re in his handwriting, on his personal stationery, and he’s signed them with his own name. Talks about everything he did to me when he visited me in that house, everything he planned to do on his next visit. They’re worth a fortune, Polly. I’ll share them with you. He’s going to give me a lot of money to get them back, a lot of money, Polly. Tomorrow night, he’s going to buy back the first one, I’ll give you some of the money—”
“You’ll give me the letters!” she snapped. “Hah! Share wiv you? I’ll ’ave them letters, if you please, y’little sod, you just ’and ’em over.” She held out one grasping hand, eyes narrowed and dangerous.
Morgan clenched his fists, hating her. At least he hadn’t told the bitch how many letters there were. He’d divided them into two packets, one in his trouser pocket, the other beneath his shirt. The ones in his shirt were the letters Eddy had penned to him in English. The ones in his trouser pocket were the other letters, the “special surprise” Eddy had sent to him during that last month of visits. The filthy tart wouldn’t be able to read a word of them. He pulled the packet from his trouser pocket and handed them over. “Here, curse you! And may you have joy reading them!” he added with a spiteful laugh, striding away before she could realize that Prince Albert Victor had penned those particular letters in Welsh.
Now, hours later, having managed to find himself a sailor on the docks who wanted a more masculine sort of sport, Morgan was drunk and bitter, a mightily scared and very lonely lad far away from his native Cardiff. He rubbed his wet cheek with the back of his hand. Morgan had been a fool, a jolly, bloody fool, ever to leave Cardiff, but it was too late, now, to cry about it. And he couldn’t sit here on his bum all night, some constable would pass and then he would be spending the night courtesy of the Metropolitan Police Department’s H Division.
Morgan peered about, trying to discern shapes through the fog, and thought he saw the dark form of a man nearby, but the fog closed round the shadow again and no one approached nearer, so he decided there was no one about to help him regain his feet, after all. Scraping himself slowly together, he elbowed his way back up the wall until he was more or less upright again, then coughed and shivered and wandered several yards further along the fog-shrouded street. At times, his ears played tricks with the echoing sounds that spilled out onto the dark streets from distant public houses. Snatches of laughter and song came interspersed faintly with the nearer click of footfalls on pavement, but each time he peered round, he found nothing but swirling, malevolent yellow drifts. So he continued his meandering way down the wet street, allowing his shoulder to bump against the sooty bricks to guide and steady him on his way, making for the hidey hole he used when there was no money for a doss-house bed.
The entrance to a narrow alley robbed him of his sustaining wall. He scudded sideways, a half-swamped sailboat lashed by a sudden and brutal cross-wise gale, and stumbled into the dark alley. He tangled his wobbling feet, met another wet brick wall face on, and barely caught himself from a second ignominious slide into the muck. He was cursing softly under his breath when he heard that same, tantalizing whisper of faint footfalls from behind. Only this time, they were no trick of his hearing. Someone was coming toward him through the fog, hurrying now as he clung to the dirty brick wall in the darkness of the alley.
Another tart, perhaps, or a footpad out to pinch what he didn’t any longer possess. Alarm flared slowly through his drunken haze. He started to turn—but it was far too late. A blow from something heavy smashed across his skull from behind. Light exploded behind his eyes in a detonation of pain and terror. Unable even to cry out, he crumpled straight down into darkness.
As Morgan toppled toward the filthy alley, a wiry man in his early thirties, dark-skinned with the look of Eastern Europe in his narrow face and eyes and dark moustache, caught him under the arms. This second man grunted softly, curling his lip at the reek of alcohol and sweat which rose from the boy’s grimy, once fancy clothes. This was no time, however, for fastidiousness. He twisted the boy around with a practiced jerk and heaved the dead weight over one shoulder. A swift glance told him the thick fog and darkness of the narrow alleyway had concealed the attack from any chance observation.
Well, Johnny my boy, he smiled to himself, you’ve made a good start. Now to finish this pathetic little cockerel. Dr. John Lachley was as pleased with the enshrouding yellow murk as he was with his swift handiwork and the drunken little fool he’d trailed all evening, who’d finally wandered so conveniently close to a place he could strike. He’d feared he might have to trail the boy all the way back to the filthy hole he’d been living in, on the first floor of a ramshackle, abandoned warehouse along the docks, so dilapidated and dangerous it was in the process of being torn down.
Quite a come-down, eh, pretty Morgan?
Dark-haired, dark-eyed, darker-souled, John Lachley moved deeper into the darkness of the alleyway, staggering slightly under his burden until he found his new center of balance. The alley was narrow, clotted with rubbish and stench. A rat’s eyes gleamed briefly in the foggy gloom. A street—little wider than the alley he followed—appeared through the murk. He turned to his right, moving toward the invisible docks a mere three blocks away, which were concealed from sight by grim warehouses and tumble-down shacks. Their bricks leaned drunkenly in the night, whole chunks of their walls missing in random patterns of darkness and swirling, jaundiced eddies.
John Lachley’s clothes, little cleaner than those of his victim, revealed very little about their current owner; neither did the dark cloth cap he wore pulled low over his eyes. During daylight, his was a face that might well be recognized, even here, where many years ago Johnny Anubis had once been a household name, sought out by the poorest fishwives in search of hope; but in the darkness, in such rough clothing, even a man of his… notoriety… might go unremarked.
He smiled and paused at the entrance to one of the soot-streaked blocks of ramshackle flats. An iron key from his pocket unlocked a shabby wooden door. He cast a glance overhead and spotted the waning horns of the sickle-shaped moon. He smiled again. “Lovely night for scything, Lady,” he said softly to the sharp-edged crescent. “Grant me success in mine, eh?”
Sulphurous fog drifted across the faintly glowing horns of that wicked sickle, seeming almost to catch and tear on the sharp points. He smiled again; then ducked inside, swung his victim’s legs and head clear, and locked the door behind him. He needed no light to navigate the room, for it contained nothing but coal dust and scattered bits of refuse. A savage barking erupted from the darkness of the next room, sounding like every hound in hell had been loosed. Lachley spoke sharply. “Garm!”
The barking subsided into low growls. Heaving his burden into a slightly more comfortable position on his shoulder, John Lachley entered the next room and swung shut another heavy door which he located by feel alone. Here he paused to grope along the wall for the gas light. The gas lit with a faint hiss and pop; dim light sprang up. The windowless brick walls were barren, the floor covered with a cheap rug. A wooden bed frame with a thin cotton tick stood along one wall. A battered dry sink held a jug and basin, a lantern, and a grimy towel. An equally battered clothes press leaned drunkenly in one corner. The chained dog crouched at the center of the room stopped growling and thumped its tail in greeting.
“Have a pleasant evening, Garm?” he addressed the dog, retrieving a meat pie from one pocket, which he unwrapped from its greasy newspaper wrapping. He tossed it carelessly to the huge black hound. The dog bounded to its feet and snatched the food mid-air, wolfing it down in one bite. Had anyone besides himself entered this room, the dog would have shredded them to gobbets. Garm had earned his meat pies on more than one occasion.
Lachley dumped his victim onto the bed, then pulled back the rug and prised up a wooden trap door cut into the floorboards. He heaved this to one side, lit the lantern and set it beside the gaping hole in the floor, then retrieved the unconscious boy from the bed and shouldered his inert burden once again. He paused when he approached the edge and felt downward with one foot, finding the top step of a steep, narrow staircase. Lachley descended cautiously into darkness, retrieving his lantern as he moved downward. A wet, fetid smell of mold and damp brick rose to meet him.
Light splashed across a clammy wall where a rusty iron hook protruded from the discolored bricks. He hung the lantern on this, then reached up and dragged the trapdoor back into place. It settled with a scrape and hollow bang. Dust sifted down into his hair and collar, peppering his clothes as well as his victim’s. He dusted off his palms, brushed splinters from a sleeve, then rescued his lantern from its hook and continued the descent. His feet splashed at the bottom. Wavering yellow light revealed an arched, circular brick tunnel through the bowels of Wapping, stretching away into blackness in either direction. The filthy brick was chipped and mottled with algae and nameless fungi. He whistled softly as he walked, listening to the echoes spill away like foam from a mug of dark ale.
As Lachley paralleled the invisible Thames, other tunnels intersected the one he’d entered. The sound of rushing water carried through the sepulchral darkness from underground streams and buried rivers—the Fleet River, which had blown up in 1846 from the trapped rancid and fetid gasses beneath the pavements, so toxic was the red muck leaking from the tanneries above; the once-noble Walbrook, which ran through the heart of the City of London; and River Tyburn, which had lent its name to the triple-tree where convicts were hanged at the crossroads—each of them was now confined beneath London’s crowded, filthy streets, churning and spilling along their former courses as major sewers dumping into the mighty Thames.
John Lachley ignored the distant roar of water as he ignored the sewer stench permeating the tunnels. He listened briefly to the echoes of his footfalls mingle with the squeals of rats fighting over a dead dog’s corpse and the distant sound of mating cats. At length, he lifted his lantern to mark the exact spot where the low entrance loomed. He ducked beneath a dripping brick arch, turned sharp left, and emerged in a narrow, coffin-sized space set with a thick iron door. An brass plaque set into it bore the legend “Tibor.”
Since the word was not English, the owner of this door had little fear of its meaning being deciphered should anyone chance to stumble across the hidden chamber. Lachley was not Hungarian by birth, but he knew the Slavic tongues and more importantly, their legends and myths, had studied them almost since boyhood. It amused him to put a name that meant “holy place” on the door of his private retreat from workaday London and its prosaic, steam-engine mentality.
Another key retrieved from a coat pocket grated in the lock; then the stout door swung noiselessly open, its hinges well oiled against the damp. His underground Tibor welcomed him home with a rush of dark, wet air and the baleful glow of perpetual fire from the gas jet he, himself, had installed, siphoning off the requisite fuel from an unsuspecting fuel company’s gas mains. Familiar sights loomed in the dim chamber: vaulted ceiling bricks stained with moss and patchy brown mold; the misshapen form of gnarled oak limbs from the great, dead trunk he’d sawn into sections, hauled down in pieces, and laboriously fitted back together with steel and iron; the eternal gas fire blazing at its feet from an altar-mounted nozzle; huddled cloaks and robes and painted symbols which crawled across the walls, speaking answers to riddles few in this city would have thought even to ask; a sturdy work table along one wall, and wooden cabinets filled with drawers and shelves which held the paraphernalia of his self-anointed mission.
The reek of harsh chemicals and the reverberations of long-faded incantations, words of power and dominion over the creatures he sought to control, spoken in all-but-forgotten ancient tongues, bade him welcome as he stepped once more across the threshold and re-entered his own very private Tibor. He dumped his burden carelessly onto the work table, heedless of the crack of his victim’s head against the wooden surface, and busied himself. There was much to do. He lit candles, placed them strategically about the room, stripped off his rough working clothes and donned the ceremonial robes he was always careful to leave behind in this sanctuary.
White and voluminous, a mockery of priestly vestments, and hooded with a deep and death-pale hood which covered half his face when he lowered it down, the semi-Druidic robes had been sewn to his specifications years previously by a sweatshop seamstress who had possessed no other way to pay for the divinations she’d come to him to cast for her. He slipped into the robes, shook back the deep hood for now, and busied himself with the same efficient industry which had brought him out of the misery of the streets overhead and into the life he now sought to protect at all cost.
John Lachley searched the boy’s appallingly filthy, empty pockets, then felt the crackle of paper beneath Morgan’s shirt. When he stripped off his victim, a sense of triumph and giddy relief swept through him: Morgan’s letters were tucked into the waistband of his trousers, the foolscap sheets slightly grimy and rumpled. Each had been folded into a neat packet. He read them, curious as to their contents, and damned Albert Victor for a complete and bumbling fool. Had these letters come into the hands of the proper authorities…
Then he reached the end and stared at the neatly penned sheets of foolscap.
There were only four letters.
John Lachley tightened his fist down, crushing the letters in his hand, and blistered the air. Four! And Eddy had said there were eight! Where had the little bastard put the other half of the set? All but shaking with rage, he forced himself to close his fists around empty air, rather than the unconscious boy’s throat. He needed to throttle the life out of this little bastard, needed to inflict terror and ripping, agonizing hurt for daring to threaten him, Dr. John Lachley, advisor to the Queen’s own grandson, who should one day sit the throne in Victoria’s stead…
With a snarl of rage, he tossed Morgan’s clothing into a rubbish bin beneath the work table for later burning, then considered how best to obtain the information he required. A slight smile came to his lips. He bound the lad’s hands and feet, then heaved him up and hauled him across the chamber to the massive oak tree which dominated the room, its gnarled branches supported now by brackets in ceiling and walls.
He looped Morgan’s wrist ropes over a heavy iron hook embedded in the wood and left him dangling with his toes several inches clear of the floor. This done, he opened cabinet doors and rattled drawers out along their slides, laying out the ritual instruments. Wand and cauldron, dagger, pentacle, and sword… each with meanings and ritual uses not even those semi-serious fools Waite and Mathers could imagine in their fumbling, so-called studies. Their “Order of the Golden Dawn” had invited him to join, shortly after its establishment last year. He had accepted, naturally, simply to further his contacts in the fairly substantial social circles through which the order’s various members moved; but thought of their so-called researches left him smiling. Such simplicity of belief was laughable.
Next he retrieved the ancient Hermetic deck with its arcane trumps, a symbolic alphabetical key to the terrible power of creation and transformation locked away aeons previously in the pharoahonic Book of Thoth. After that came the mistletoe to smear the blade, whose sticky sap would ensure free, unstaunchable bleeding… and the great, thick-bladed steel knife with which to take the trophy skull… He had never actually performed such a ritual, despite a wealth of knowledge. His hands trembled from sheer excitement as he laid out the cards, mumbling incantations over them, and studied the pattern unfolding. Behind him, his victim woke with a slow, wretched groan.
It was time.
He purified the blade with fire, painted mistletoe sap across its flat sides and sharp edge, then lifted his sacred, deep white hood over his hair and turned to face his waiting victim. Morgan peered at him through bloodshot, terrified eyes. Morgan’s throat worked, but no sound issued from the boy’s bloodless lips. He stepped closer to the sweating, naked lad who hung from Odin’s sacred oak, its gnarled branches twisting overhead to touch the vaulted brick ceiling. A ghastly sound broke from his prisoner’s throat. Morgan twisted against the ropes on his wrists, to no avail.
Then Lachley shook back his hood and smiled into the lad’s eyes.
Blue eyes widened in shock. “You!” Then, terror visibly lashing him, Morgan choked out, “What—what’d I ever do to you, Johnny? Please… you got Eddy for yourself, why d’you want to hurt me now? I already lost my place in the house—”
He backhanded the little fool. Tears and blood streamed. “Sodding little ponce! Blackmail him, will you?”
Morgan whimpered, the terror in his eyes so deep they glazed over, a stunned rabbit’s eyes. John Lachley let out a short, hard laugh. “What a jolly little fool you are, Morgan. And look at you now, done up like a kipper!” He caressed Morgan’s bruised, wet face. “Did you think Eddy wouldn’t tell me? Poor Eddy… Hasn’t the brains God gave a common mollusk, but Eddy trusts me, bless him, does whatever I tell him to.” He chuckled. “Spiritualist advisor to the future King of England. I’m at the front of a very long line of men, little Morgan, standing behind the rich and powerful, whispering into their ears what the stars and the gods and the spirits from beyond the grave want them to say and do and believe. So naturally, when our distraught Eddy received your message, he came straight to my doorstep, begging me to help him hush it all up.”
The lad trembled violently where he dangled from the ropes, not even bothering to deny it. Not that denial would have saved him. Or even spared him the pain he would suffer before he paid the price for his schemes. Terror gleamed in Morgan’s eyes, dripped down his face with the sweat pouring from his brow. Dry lips worked. His voice came as a cracked whisper. “W-what do you want? I swear, I’ll leave England, go back to Cardiff, never whisper a word… I’ll even sign on as deck hand for a ship out to Hong Kong…”
“Oh, no, my sweet little Morgan,” Lachley smiled, bending closer. “Hardly that. Do you honestly think the man who controls the future King of England is so great a fool as that?” He patted Morgan’s cheek. “The first thing I want, Morgan, is the other four letters.”
He swallowed sharply. “H-haven’t got them—”
“Yes, I know you haven’t got them.” He brushed a fingertip down Morgan’s naked breastbone. “Who has got them, Morgan? Tell me and I may yet make it easier for you.”
When Morgan hesitated, Lachley slapped him, gently.
The boy began shaking, crying. “She—she was going to tell the constables—I hadn’t any money left, all I had was the letters—gave her half of them to keep her quiet—”
“Who?” The second blow was harder, bruising his fair skin.
“Polly!” The name was wrenched from him. He sobbed it out again, “Polly Nichols… filthy, drunken tart…”
“And what will Polly Nichols do with them, eh?” he asked, twisting cruelly a sensitive bit of Morgan’s anatomy until the boy cried out in sharp protest. “Show them to all her friends? How much will they want, eh?”
“Wouldn’t—wouldn’t do any good, all she has is my word they’re worth anything—”
He slapped Morgan again, hard enough to split his lips. “Stupid sod! Do you honestly think she won’t read your pitiful letters? You are a fool, little boy. But don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I am!”
Morgan was shaking his head frantically. “No, Johnny, no, you don’t understand, she can’t read them! They’re not in English!”
Surprise left John Lachley momentarily speechless. “Not in English?” It came out flat as a squashed tomato. “What do you mean, not in English? Eddy doesn’t have the intelligence to learn another language. I’m surprised the dear boy can speak his own, let alone a foreign one. Come, now, Morgan, you’ll have to do better than that.”
Morgan was crying again. “You’ll see, I’ll get them for you, Johnny, I’ll show you, they’re not in English, they’re in Welsh, his tutor helped him—”
He backhanded the sniveling liar. Morgan’s head snapped violently sideways.
“Don’t play me for a fool!”
“Please,” Morgan whimpered, bleeding from cut lips and a streaming nose, “it’s true, why would I lie to you now, Johnny, when you promised you wouldn’t hurt me again if I told you the truth? You have to believe me, please…”
John Lachley was going to enjoy coercing the truth from this pathetic little liar.
But Morgan wasn’t done blubbering yet. His eyes, a watery blue from the tears streaming down his face, were huge and desperate as he babbled out, “Eddy told me about it, right after he sent the first one in Welsh, asked me if I liked his surprise. He thought it was a grand joke, because the ever-brilliant Mr. James K. Stephen—” it came out bitter, jealous, sounding very much, in fact, like Eddy “—was always so smart and learned things so easily and made sure Eddy was laughed at all through Cambridge, because everybody but a few of the dons knew it was Mr. James K. Stephen writing Eddy’s translations in Latin and Greek for him, so Eddy could copy them out correctly in his own hand! He told me about it, how much he paid dear Jamesy for each translation his tutor did for him while they were still at Cambridge! So when Eddy wanted to write letters nobody else could read, he got the doting Mr. James K. Stephen to help him translate those for him, too, paid him ten sovereigns for each letter, so he wouldn’t whisper about them afterwards…”
It was, Lachley decided, just possible that Morgan was telling him the truth. Paying his tutor to translate his Latin and Greek at University was very Eddy-like. So was paying the man to translate his love letters, God help them all. He caught Morgan’s chin in one hand, tightened down enough to bruise his delicate skin. “And how much did Eddy pay his tutor to keep the secret that he was writing love letters in Welsh to a male whore?”
“He didn’t! Tell him, I mean. That I’m a boy. He told Mr. Stephen that ‘Morgan’ was a pretty girl he’d met, from Cardiff, said he wanted to impress her with letters in her own native Welsh, so Mr. Stephen wouldn’t guess Eddy was writing to me. He’s not so very bright, Eddy, but he doesn’t want to go to prison! So he convinced Mr. Stephen I was a girl and the gullible idiot helped Eddy write them, I swear it, Eddy said he stood over his shoulder and told him all the right Welsh words to use, even for the dirty parts, only when Eddy wrote out the second copies to me in private, he changed all the words you’d use for a girl’s body to the right ones for a boy, because he looked that up, himself, so he’d know—”
“Second copies?”
Morgan flinched violently. “Please, Johnny, please don’t hit me again! Eddy thought it would be funny, so he sent me the first copies attached to the ones he wrote out especially for me…”
His voice faded away as Lachley’s white-faced fury sank in, mistaking Lachley’s rage honestly enough. My God, the royal bastard is stupider than I thought! If it would do any good, I’d cut off Eddy’s bollocks and feed them to him! Any magistrate in England would take one look at a set of letters like that and throw away the bloody key!
He no longer doubted Morgan’s sordid little tale about Welsh translations. Eddy was just that much of a fool, thinking himself clever with such a trick, just to impress a money grubbing, blackmailing little whore not fit to sell his wares for a crust of bread, much less royal largesse.
Morgan was gasping out, “It’s true, Johnny, I’ll prove it, I’ll get the letters back and show you…”
“Oh, yes, Morgan. We will, indeed get those letters back. Tell me, just where might I find this Polly Nichols?”
“She’s been staying at that lodging house at 56 Flower and Dean Street, the White House they call it, rooming with a man, some nights, other nights sharing with Long Liz Stride or Catharine Eddowes, whoever’s got the doss money for the night and needs a roommate to share the cost…”
“What did you tell Polly Nichols when you gave her the letters?”
“That they were love letters,” he whispered. “I didn’t tell her who they were from and I lied, said they were on his personal stationery, when they’re on ordinary foolscap, so all she’ll know is they’ve been signed by someone named Eddy. Someone rich, but just Eddy, no last name, even.”
“Very good, Morgan. Very, very good.”
Hope flared in the little fool’s wet eyes.
He patted Morgan’s cheek almost gently.
Then Lachley brought out the knife.