City of Shadows tr-6

by Alex Scarrow

  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 Schrodinger 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 image 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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  ‘Awl right there, me loves?’ he crowed, quite obviously drunk — swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘Come an’ join us lads, eh?’

  Sal flipped a hand gesture at him that wasn’t going to have a proper meaning for another hundred years yet. The drunk shrugged it off with a grin. ‘Your loss, love!’ He tossed a good-natured laugh back at them, turned and staggered to catch up with his mates.

  Maddy sighed. ‘Men, eh?’

  Chapter 73

  2067, Piccadilly Circus, London

  Another warm sunset across the overgrown ruins of mankind. The cry of a fox, the chirp of crickets. The gently swaying ochre sea of tall grass. The predatory swoop of a hawk.

  A peaceful grave of humankind. Like some windswept site of archaeological interest — the ruins of Troy, of ancient Sparta, Babylon. Now, just like those places, worn stubs of masonry overgrown by an emerald carpet of nature. Tumbledown walls, caved-in roofs. Nothing lasts forever.

  Here bleached bones lie amid the tangled roots of wild grass, doing a far better job of weathering time than the rusting, flaking skeletons of cars.

  Peaceful, like a prairie, like the Serengeti, like an African veldt.

  But now there’s a fresh breeze, and the faintest distant rumble. The peach-coloured sunset sky has suddenly gained a faint twisting ribbon of black. At first as thin as a pencil scribble following the line of the horizon across a landscape painting. But, very quickly, becoming as thick as a marker pen as it approaches rapidly, and seconds later a looming, dark, continental crust swallowing the land beneath it.

  A dozen seconds of deafening chaos as this black horizon sweeps in over the ruins of London and this peaceful post-human world is swept away; a possible future that had its short chance to exist. Swept away to join a million other begrudging futures that will never get a chance to see the light of day.

  It’s replaced by noise and chaos of a wholly different kind.

  London, 2067.

  The grass is gone. Piccadilly Circus heaves with humanity, a city crowded with thirty million inhabitants. The statue of Eros looks up at looming mega-skyscrapers encrusted with holographic displays and garish adverts for soyo-protein products. The sky buzzes with corporate jyro-copters and police air-skimmers with winking blue lights and brilliant white searchlights tracking and monitoring the heaving populace below. A torrential downpour cascades from an unhealthy, lemon-tinted sky, overcast with polluted clouds.

  Rain-slicked pedestrians push and jostle each other across waterlogged pavements, every last one of them wearing air filters on their faces.

  London: one of a couple of dozen metropolises around the world playing host to its share of the migrating billions. Even though this city’s levees that hold back the swollen Thames are sure to fail one day soon and it will join New York as another city lost to the rising seas, every day thousands more people swarm in and live cheek by jowl in cluttered tenement blocks that dwarf the old buildings of Canary Wharf.

  In a way it’s not so very different from the conditions of Whitechapel nearly two centuries ago.

  London buzzes like a shaken beehive. Pounding music from hawkers on the street and second-tier pedestrian walkways above. A deafening riot of noise and movement and colour. Kerbside bazaars sell snake-oil cures for toxin-induced asthma. A trader sells slabs of pink-coloured dough that he’s claiming is real meat. If it is… God knows what creature it once was. Genetically engineered apelike work-units marked by tattoo bar-codes and dressed in orange overalls move sullenly among the press of people, clearing trash, carelessly tossing the body of some starved-to-death immigrant into the back of a waste recycler.

  This is the London that will exist a mere five decades after the last-ever Olympic Games are held here. Back in a time before the inevitable end was writ large for all to see and then foolishly ignored by one and all. Back before the first big oil shock, when supplies began to falter, before the sea level really started rising fast, the sky discolouring, crops failing, ecosystems collapsing.

  But of course this is the way it has to be. This is the timeline a certain Roald Waldstein is so very desperate to preserve… at all costs. It has to be this.

  And nothing else but this.

  Chapter 74

  1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

  Wednesday 19 December

  This is where we live now. It’s not so very different to our last home, I guess. I’m getting used to it. We don’t get the twenty-times-a-day rumble of a train over us. Instead, we have the constant deep engine rumble of Holborn Viaduct’s power generator. Not so different, I suppose, to listening to the back-up generator we used to have.

  We’re settled now. Finding new routines. It’s a different feel in here with Rashim and SpongeBubba keeping us company. I think I like it. SpongeBubba makes me laugh; the thing looks so ridiculous with that wobbling nose. We have to keep him out of sight of that nosy man Delbert. God knows what he’d make of that lab unit.

  We have a decision to make about the killer support unit. Its organic body is being kept alive. It’s like some person in an almost vegetative state; the eyes are open but there’s nothing going on inside its head. The thing drools when we try and feed it this barley gruel. Totally disgusting. Rashim says we can keep it going indefinitely if we keep feeding it. The big question is whether we open up its… her… cranium and flip the ‘hard-set’ switch inside. I’m not sure how Maddy feels.

  Liam, of course, says we should.

  Me? I’m not sure. This support unit spent the last couple of months wanting nothing more than to kill us all. I know its programming will all be erased… but will it really be? Completely?

  So, we have our new home. A new place in history, which I do find very fascinating. In many ways it feels like when we were first woken up by Foster. Scary, but exciting, new. It does feel a bit like that again. But it won’t ever be the same. Not now that we know we’re fakes. Pretend-humans. In fact, there’s only one real person in here. Rashim.

  Perhaps this time around, though, it’s better. Like Maddy said, we’re in charge now. We can decide whether or not we want to fix history. And who’s going to stop us now? No one, NO ONE knows where we are now, not even Mr Roald Waldstein.

  I like that. That makes me feel safe.

  Maddy joined Liam standing in their side door. He was watching Farringdon Street slowly come to life. It was just gone seven in the morning and wisps of morning mist spun like silk across the wide cobbled street. Today looked like it was going to be another nice one. A clear blue sky waiting for the sun to get up and join it. A lamp-snuffer was putting out the street’s gas lamps with his long-handled snuffer tray. Above them, on top of the viaduct, the electric-powered lights would be turned off manually by a man from the Edison Electric Company. They were beginning to learn the morning routine along Farringdon Street.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Maddy.

  Liam nodded. He seemed a lot brighter since returning from the Whitechapel jump less than a week ago. ‘Aye, looks like it’ll be nice today.’

  She had an enamel mug of coffee f
or him. Handed it to him and took up a place on the doorstep beside him. ‘I like that we’re not endlessly recycling in a two-day loop,’ she said. ‘Things change. That’s kinda nice.’

  ‘You sure we don’t need to set up a field?’

  ‘Yup. We’re quite safe here. No one’s looking for time travellers.’ She laughed. ‘No one in this time has even thought about time travel, I’d say. I mean… wasn’t it that writer guy, H. G. Wells, who first thought up the idea of time travel?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘I’m sure somebody must’ve thought of the idea before he did. It must be the oldest fanciful notion ever; that it might be fun to travel backwards or forwards through time.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He was the first one to write a fiction book about it.’

  ‘Mark Twain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mark Twain wrote a book about time travel. I’m sure he did. A Yankee Fella in King Arthur’s Court I think it was called. Or something like that.’

  Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘Oh well, whatever. My point is we don’t have to worry quite so much about staying under the radar here. Nor do we have to worry about time waves. None of us are real. None of us belong in this timeline, so it really doesn’t matter.’

  He looked at her. ‘You’re OK, are you? Not… uh, not upset about — ’

  ‘About not being the real Maddy Carter from Boston?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not really. Not any more. I think I quite like the feeling of freedom. I quite like not missing my mom and dad and my cousin Julian. Somebody made all those people up. Put painful memories of them into my head. I’m damned if I’m going to spend another second grieving for figments of someone’s imagination. Stuff ’em.’

  Liam laughed. ‘Aye, that does seem a bit daft.’