by Alex Scarrow
‘My legs are killing me. I’m cold, I’m wet and I’m getting pins and needles.’
‘Nonetheless you must be still,’ said Bob.
He sighed and resumed his uncomfortable vigil on the narrow entrance to this godforsaken courtyard. They’d been huddled here since 11 p.m. Watched a steady procession of drunks stagger home and noisily fumble their way through front doors. A dozen or more dosshouses seemed to have openings on to this place. And everyone, it seemed, in each dosshouse, seemed to enjoy drinking the night hours away.
‘Bob, what’s the time?’
He consulted his internal clock. ‘12.32 a.m.’
‘Maybe we missed it? Maybe it’s been and done?’ He looked at the small dark square that was the window on to Mary Kelly’s downstairs room.
Maybe she’s already in there? He shuddered at the thought of that. Beyond the pale ghost of a net curtain was a small bedroom that quite possibly resembled an abattoir right now. A body almost unrecognizably human slowly losing the last of its warmth. Dots, commas and question marks of blood in arterial lines up the walls, now drying and crusting.
‘Information: someone is approaching,’ said Bob.
Liam heard the clack of footsteps. A shadow cast by one of the gaslights on Dorset Street danced down the rat run, then a moment later the long shadow was followed by the outline of a woman. He could hear the woman’s soft voice, chattering to herself. Clearly, utterly, completely, passing-out drunk.
Mary Kelly.
She stopped outside the front door to her dosshouse, pushed the creaking door in and staggered clumsily inside.
More footsteps, quick, light, pattering down the rat run. Liam saw a long, thin shadow dancing along the wet brick opposite, then a man came into view. Tall and slim, a top hat cast a shadow across his face. He was wearing a thick cloak, but Liam managed to catch a glimpse of a leather surgeon’s bag under one arm. He quickly stole across the courtyard, and caught the front door to Mary’s dosshouse with the toe of his boot before it slammed shut.
The man wrestled the door open and Liam heard a muttered exclamation from the hallway inside. The man pushed his way in and the door shut behind him. A moment later there was life in the room to the left of the front door. A gentle orange bloom appeared behind the tatty net curtain. Liam saw foggy movement going on inside: shadows cast up the walls, across the low ceiling.
‘Jay-zus, this is it,’ whispered Liam. ‘That poor lady’s going to die in a minute. Not just die, Bob, but die horribly!’
‘Affirmative.’
A gnawing sensation had been eating at Liam for the last few hours. That there must be some other way to put history right. ‘Ahh, this feels all wrong, so it does.’
‘We must not intervene,’ cautioned Bob.
Liam ground his teeth. His mind was replaying those two horrific photographs that Maddy had presented him with earlier, but now colouring in the black and white with vivid reds and intestinal purples. But then … wasn’t something else meant to happen? Wasn’t Becks somewhere close by? Perhaps mere seconds away from altering this scene somehow? Saving Mary Kelly? Killing this evil, psychopathic predator.
Where the hell is she?
‘Ah Jay-zus! I can’t do this. I can’t just let that poor lady get carved up right in front of my eyes.’
He’d started to get to his feet when a shrill scream came from behind the fogged window. He saw a lurch of movement obscured by the net curtain and the scream was cut off. A shadow sliding across the ceiling, a sudden jerking movement, then another, and another, and another.
Liam felt the acid burn of bile in his throat, his stomach rejecting food.
Ah Jay-zus, I’m letting this all happen!
He heard a soft keening moan from inside the room.
‘Oh God, she’s still alive!’
Enough.
He got to his feet.
‘Liam!’ growled Bob, reaching out for him.
‘Stuff this, I can’t just watch!’ He ducked out from under the low slate lean-to and darted across the small courtyard, the shotgun in his hands and ready to use.
And it was then, just then, that he noticed a figure to his right, striding quickly down the rat run towards him.
Both Liam and the other figure stopped. The figure wore a dress and a bonnet. Her face, what he could see of it, was so very familiar.
‘Becks? Jay-zus! Is that you?’
Chapter 71
12.37 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel, London
Faith’s mind was all of a sudden inundated with too many simultaneous decision loops running, each one of them furiously demanding all of her processor time.
Even only as a silhouette she instantly recognized the young man standing in front of her.
[Target acquired: Liam O’Connor]
Not only that, the target was a mere ten yards away AND in a dead end from which he had no hope of escaping her. Command imperatives screamed inside her head to step forward quickly and get on with the job. One of her fists balled and flexed, keen to get on with the task of killing him. But her eyes darted to the door that led to Mary’s room. The very room Faith had been sharing with Mary Kelly … her friend … for days now.
Her … friend … yes. And her ‘friend’ had screamed just moments ago.
Her friend needed help.
Now.
Even now might just be a second too late to save her.
‘Becks?’ whispered the young man. ‘We have to help her!’
Faith realized that he’d misidentified her. He thought he was addressing the child support unit. It was a mistake she could take advantage of right now: draw closer to him while he still thought she was the other unit, perhaps close enough that she could quickly strike with a jab to his fragile neck before he could react and try using that gun he was holding.
But …
But …
Another desperate, dying gurgle from within the room.
But her friend needed help. Now.
‘Jesus! Becks! C’mon … gimme a hand here!’
One imperative won out over the other.
Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’
No sooner had she taken three steps forward when she sensed movement to her left. A dark blur. Something large and fast looming towards her. She turned to face the threat and was halfway towards adopting a defensive combat stance when every process in her mind, every spinning loop of code, every circuit running hot and over-clocked, every data bus clogged with shuttling bytes like a highway jammed with rush-hour traffic … all of it came to a shuddering, grinding halt, as if an iron bar had been shoved through the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel.
Several thousand volts locked her body rigid.
Her grey eyes fixed on Liam’s for a moment before she keeled over, stiff as a board as the taser bolt, fired into her waist, rendered every muscle in her body as rigid as granite. She landed on the ground like a felled tree. And Liam, close enough to see her face clearly, took a backward step.
‘Jay-zus! It’s not Becks!’ Liam turned to Bob. ‘It’s one of them!’
‘Correct.’
He heard movement behind the window. The Ripper was busy.
‘All right, she’s down! Now let’s go and catch that murdering –’
‘No!’ Bob reached out for Liam’s arm.
Liam backed away, stepping up against the window. He turned to look over his shoulder – and got a second’s glimpse through a ragged gap in the net curtains of a scene lit by a single oil lamp inside. A scene of ghastly crimson spattered across exposed ghost-white flesh.
My God …
Bob stepped forward and grasped his arm.
‘Let me go, goddammit!’
‘Negative.’ Bob pulled Liam back towards the unconscious body of the unit. ‘Both mission parameters have been satisfied. We have what we came for. We must let this happen.’
‘The man’s an animal! No, worse than that! A monster … a … a …’ Liam realized he was crying; there was a vague a
cknowledgement that his cheeks were damp with tears for – how crazy’s this? – a complete stranger. A woman he’d glimpsed for less than ten seconds. A poor wretch immortalized in the black and white grains of a scene-of-crime photograph. Forever frozen in her own timeless horror.
Bob gently eased him back from the front door. ‘We must let him go. The killer must escape and must not be discovered or identified.’ His voice managed to soften from its usual Dobermann growl to something resembling empathy. Understanding even.
‘I am sorry. We have to let him go, Liam. And we have to let Mary Kelly die in that room.’
Otherwise stupid, powerful men in the future will blow each other to pieces, right? And not just themselves, but women, children … even innocent young librarians. Why? Because their ideologies don’t agree. Like children who can’t agree on which toys to have at playtime and decide instead to set a match to the lot of them.
Children. No better than children.
He let Bob pull the shotgun out of his hands. The support unit stooped down, picked up the unconscious body of their pursuer of the last few months, their assassin, and hefted her over one shoulder as if she was a pillowcase stuffed with charity shop seconds.
Liam was also dimly aware of the weight of one of Bob’s arms around his shoulders. Not exactly a hug. But the clumsy, heavy-engineering approximation of one.
‘We must go, Liam.’
He nodded. Maddy had a pick-up portal for them arranged for 4 a.m. located down among the warehouses and quays of Blackfriars docks. A couple of hours and change to spare yet, but they would want to get moving away from this crime scene as quickly as possible. The noises out here must have disturbed someone. There might even be people peeking through curtains at them now.
The sooner they were gone, the better. Otherwise, over a hundred years from now a Wikipedia article on the ‘Infamous Whitechapel Murders’ and various ‘Famous Grisly Murders’ anthologies might just feature in their footnotes an eyewitness sighting of ‘a large ox of a man, almost certainly a labourer, accompanied by a slight and slender younger man with dark hair’ directly outside the room of the last-known victim of Jack the Ripper at the estimated time of half past midnight.
Chapter 72
15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London
‘This is incredible,’ said Rashim, looking at the others. ‘We will see the wave approach, you say?’
‘Yeah, it’s like a weather front or something.’ Maddy led them outside the dungeon, through their side door to stand on the kerb of Farringdon Street. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for something that looks like a big bank of dark cloud.’
‘It’s always a spectacular sight,’ added Sal, ‘and a bit scary when it hits you.’
Rashim looked giddy with excitement. ‘You know, we argued about this, Dr Yatsushita and I, about how a universe would accommodate an alteration to its past. What form the reality shift would take?’ He gazed down Farringdon Street. Busy once again, although the usual kaleidoscope of activity was heavily punctuated with clusters of crimson tunics of soldiers and the black morning coats and tall pith helmets of bobbies stationed in protective cordons round the few shopfronts yet to have been stoved in by rioters. There’d been rumours that more riots were going to happen again later on today. But of course they weren’t going to happen. The corrective time wave was going to arrive first.
‘I thought reality would flip its state with some sort of global, instant paradigm shift.’ Rashim shook his head in awe. ‘Some sort of a … a pulse of change. Not like a tidal wave.’ He turned to them. ‘How quickly does this wave arrive?’
‘It varies,’ said Maddy. ‘Sometimes almost immediately. Sometimes hours later. It’s not predictable. It almost seems random.’
He nodded. ‘Like some kind of Schrödinger flux? As if quantum particles are deciding to flip state or not?’
‘If you ask me, more like quantum particles are having some freakin’ union meeting and they need to vote unanimously on a change before something happens,’ Maddy replied. ‘Sometimes it’s a no-brainer; sometimes I guess reality has a real struggle agreeing which way it wants to go.’
Rashim chuckled. ‘You make it sound alive.’
‘I do wonder sometimes.’
‘Liam!’ Sal called out for him. She ducked back inside and cupped her hands. ‘Liam, you coming out to watch for the wave?’ Her voice echoed inside the dark brick-built labyrinth.
He was inside, curled up on one of the bunks they’d improvised. He’d returned from the last short jump in an odd, un-Liam-like withdrawn mood.
‘Best leave him, Sal.’
He’s internalizing something, Maddy figured. Guilt? Disgust? Anger? Bob said he’d glimpsed the murder scene, the inside of Mary Kelly’s room. Maddy could only imagine what horror he must have seen through her window. It must have been the stuff of nightmares. The kind of image once seen that remains in your mind like life-long retina burn.
‘Just leave him be, Sal. The time wave isn’t anything he hasn’t already seen before.’
‘Caution,’ said Bob. He nodded down the street. ‘There is the time wave.’ He pointed.
To the east, above the tall townhouses opposite them, above roof eaves and smoking chimney pots, the afternoon sky was darkening prematurely. Soldiers and policemen, street sweepers, peddlers and traders, the man standing on the flatbed of his coffee shop on wheels … all began to look up with burgeoning curiosity as the crisp winter sky became an overcast and improbable, swirling impressionist’s oil painting.
‘My God!’ uttered Rashim. ‘It’s incredible. Quite beautiful!’
‘Won’t the wave affect our dungeon?’ asked Sal. ‘You know, not having a field up and running?’
‘It shouldn’t. Holborn Viaduct is here in either timeline. Mr Hook and his dodgy import/export business were here in either timeline too, so they won’t change. And everything Liam and Rashim have done setting this place up had happened, would happen, whether Jack the Ripper had been killed or not. Two timelines, Holborn Viaduct and everything inside the same in either one.
‘In theory we should be all right.’ Maddy looked at Rashim for confirmation as she spoke. ‘Our dungeon shouldn’t be affected by this.’
He nodded. ‘Maddy is right.’ As he spoke, his eyes remained on the sky. ‘But this street, the rest of London … all of this will change. The riots will have never happened. This damage will never have happened.’
All returns to normality once more. Maddy watched as a cloud of pigeons fluttered from a rooftop nearby, startled by the first gasp of a squalling wind.
The poor remain poor and subservient, ignorant of a gentleman psychopath whose sport was carving up the bodies of unfortunate fallen women.
It didn’t feel particularly good this time around restoring the status quo. But, as Foster had once explained, sometimes you have to allow space for a little evil in order to sidestep a much greater one. An irradiated earth, that’s what they were avoiding by allowing a murderer to escape and live the rest of his life undiscovered, perhaps even going on to murder again and again, indulging his secret, grotesque pleasure, undiscovered. Of course they were never going to find out for sure if this evil monster went on to kill again, whether ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ victims went on to secretly number far more than the commonly accepted five.
The Wikipedia article listed many more prostitutes who died grisly deaths after Mary Kelly, who might have also been Ripper victims, but somehow didn’t quite fit the same pattern of mutilations as the first five. Perhaps he was going to kill more. Perhaps his near capture and discovery frightened him off his grisly pleasure once and for all.
Maddy decided she needed to sit down with Liam and remind him that whatever that sick animal did, and possibly went on to do, once again their actions had saved this world. A fair transaction in the greater scheme of things.
A woman fifty yards down from them screamed out in alarm as a spectral tendril suddenly curled across the sky, like a negative ima
ge of forked lightning. The time wave was almost upon them. Much closer – Maddy had seen it coming from across the East River, roiling and boiling – she knew it would no longer resemble a bank of cloud, more a pulsating school of mackerel, twisting, turning, extruding tentacle-like outgrowths. As for Rashim, he’d only briefly witnessed it roar past the archway’s open entrance. This time, they were going to be standing amid the swirling mass.
‘Don’t let it freak you out, Rashim!’ cried Maddy. ‘It’s weird but it’s totally harml–’
Her voice was lost in the sudden roar of a tsunami.
Wind buffeted and rocked them on their feet. They all suddenly became enveloped in a wind tunnel of blurring reality, streaks of matter twisting, curling, changing. Fleeting visions of Hell and Heaven like an insane zoetrope.
Sal narrowed her eyes against the onslaught. She saw gargoyle faces whip past her; one or two seemed to sense her presence, wretched hands clawing towards her. She thought, in one fleeting moment, that she saw a face she recognized. A woman … dark-skinned, much older, grey-haired, with bulging cataract eyes full of raging malice. The face imploded into the snarl of some beetle-black underworld horror, claws, pincers, teeth.
Standing two feet to her right, yet entirely alone in her own wind-tunnel Hell, Maddy watched reality-soup conjure up momentary nightmares. She too thought she spotted a familiar face: pale and slim, a young man, framed by flailing hair – was laughing or was it screaming? Was that Adam? She reached out towards him, wondering if she might just be able to rescue him – pull him out of this swirling matter to have him join them once again. Her hand almost but not quite touching his slender fingers, then he was whipped away into a swirling reality tornado and became a thousand and one impossible things.
Then, as always, it was all gone in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
They were left staring at a Farringdon Street busy with the clop-clop-clop of horse-drawn hansom cabs and private carriages. Street hawkers barked the price of their wares; a knot of leering dock workers passed right in front of them, sharing a dirty laugh at some muttered punchline. One of them turned to Maddy and Sal.