by Ian Beck
The drum roll stopped. The crowd seemed so intent on watching the bright little parasol spinning and floating over their heads that I went almost unnoticed for a moment. It was time to act; I ran across the rope. I ran all the way back the way I had come, my arms flung out, as if in pursuit of the lost balance parasol. I was so fast that the crowd thought I would fall. A huge roar came up from below, and then I turned and skipped back again the way I had come but even faster. A burst of applause followed. I danced on the rope, I leaped and twirled in the air. I invented moves for myself. I improvised, and the crowd went wild. I went furiously up and down the rope, danced, leaped, and twirled over and over. I had such a sudden surety of balance, such confidence.
I knew that I would not fall, could not fall, I had suddenly, in that moment of athletic showmanship, found not only my true vocation, but my salvation too.
The crowd could see that I had no support, and that no hidden wire was holding me, no safety net protected me. The drum rolls stopped and the cornet tune faded out.
I danced alone on the high rope in the falling snow. I danced with the snowflakes and among the snowflakes. I felt their coldness as they landed on me. It seemed almost as if I had slowed down time itself, so that I actually saw the snow fall slowly all around me. I finished. I stopped and stood perfectly still in the centre of the dipping rope. I raised my arms high above my head and bowed. There was a sudden crash of applause and roars and shouts from the crowd. Clearly I had astonished them. I had astonished Jago too. He looked up at me, the drumsticks in one hand, his face slack and his mouth wide open. I think he had suddenly seen his fortune made.
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Chapter 15
The blind man’s body lay sprawled, half in the gutter, half up on the pavement. An armed ragged man stood guard over it while the rain washed the blood in marbled swirls down the nearest drain.
A crowd of spectral figures had gathered to stare. They huddled under a variety of umbrellas and parasols or else held evening papers over their heads. Some just suffered the wet, regardless. A bobby in a rain cape soon made his way among them. He cleared a path by holding his truncheon out in front of him, nudging and poking people aside. The ragged man turned to face him. The policeman shone his lamp down on to the body.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘A lad knifed him, a young lad in a black suit, he had a skull mask on, ended up round his neck, black hair, skinny thing. He got away.’
The policeman turned back to the crowd. ‘Nothing to see here, now move along please, you are in violation –’ And he cleared them away, pushing his truncheon out at them again, until muttering and mumbling they gradually dispersed, and melted away into the wet fog.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that this will be a “useful” body,’ said the policeman quietly.
‘Very useful,’ said the ragged man, and he produced a little bundle of white bank notes tied round with red string.
‘That useful?’ said the policeman.
‘That useful,’ said the ragged man.
The policeman took the notes. ‘In that case I shall report the body already missing when I arrived. We will have a description of the criminal printed and organise Wanted posters which will be circulated at once.’
‘That would be the best thing,’ said the ragged man. ‘You need to catch young killers like that. Only one punishment they understand.’ He reached his big mittened hands up to his own throat and bulged his eyes out. The policeman nodded, adjusted his cape, slipping the roll of notes into an inside pocket, and set off, away from the body, back down the hill.
Within seconds of his departure the remaining ragged men appeared as if out of nowhere. Together they hefted the sodden body of the blind man up out of the gutter. An old hospital hand cart was wheeled out of a dark doorway and they dropped the body on to the scuffed wooden surface with a heavy wet thump. One of them threw a length of sacking cloth across the body, then put a white hospital orderly’s coat over his rags and set to wheeling the hand cart off down a narrow cobbled side street while the others went their separate ways.
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Chapter 16
Caleb ran across the road and into the confusion of people on the other pavement. He heard a ragged man’s voice call out from behind him. ‘Stop ’im, ’e’s a murderer! ’E’s got blood on ’is hands.’ Caleb dared to look back and saw that yet another ragged man was coming after him. He ran on regardless.
Caleb had been accused of murder, and that was surely subject to the death penalty. He might be hanged and failing that the ragged men would be after him in any case, and if they caught up with him they would finally shut him up. He could feel the rope around his neck, the knife at his heart as he ran.
He ran on hard, pushing his way through the tidal flow of pedestrian traffic. He ran back down the hill in the rain. He ran back to that long empty curving road with the caverns and the dark spaces and the railway arches. He turned, looked back again for an instant, and saw that his pursuers hadn’t yet turned the corner. He skidded to a sudden halt, sliding on the wet pavement. Stumbling forward, he turned and squeezed himself into one of the deep, dark brick archways. He caught his breath. Three ragged men soon appeared. He watched them pass, his hands on his knees, drawing breath as quietly as he could. Two of them ran past his hiding place, without as much as a glance at where he crouched. One other, following, stopped and turned. He peered into the dark archway. Then he came forward and crouching under the entrance way he crossed through into the wet darkness. Caleb saw him for an instant outlined against the faint light at the entrance, and then the figure entered the gloom, walking straight in towards where Caleb stood with his breath held and his fists clenched. Caleb moved backwards, lifting his feet very carefully, lightly, and placing them back down as gently as he could on the wet cobbles. The space opened out behind him into some sort of access tunnel with a low arched ceiling of mossy, dank brick. He felt beside him and by touching the slippery wall he slowly guided himself backwards. He held his head down as he went deeper into the darkness. He felt an open niche in the tunnel wall beside him and he slipped into it and crouched down.
He waited then, his heart pounding. He gathered his thoughts with his eyes shut. He counted in his head and then he counted again. He heard the grunts and kicks of whoever was exploring the shallow space of the archway. Heard something being scraped and smacked on to the walls.
‘Come on out, you little skull-faced shit. It’ll be better for you to give yourself up now. Don’t make me find you.’ It was the voice of the broad young ragged man with the umbrella.
Caleb’s breathing finally slowed. He listened to the drops of condensation as they fell from the low arched ceiling above him. He kept his eyes closed; he had the strong feeling that if he opened them he would see the ragged young man standing right in front of him under his tattered umbrella, just waiting patiently, like a cat with a mouse, to kill him. If he kept his eyes tight shut, he would neither be seen nor found. It was a crazy irrational thought, but he clung to it as tightly and as foolishly as his poor father had clung to the belief that he always knew the right way to anywhere with his inner compass. He heard what he realised was the umbrella being scraped, struck and poked at the walls close to him. Heard the harsh metal tip scraaaatch in long, flashing strokes against the bricks close to his head. He was saved by being tucked into the recess. He heard the footsteps scraping and dragging over the cobbles, moving away. Then there was silence.
Caleb stayed still, squatting down against the damp bricks for a very long time. He had nowhere to go now, nowhere to make for. He had no friends to turn to anywhere in the whole huge, dark, filthy crowded phony city. Caleb realised in horror that he didn’t even know the address of the Halloween party. He had taken no real notice of that engraved invitation or of his father’s boasting about it to Mrs Bullock. Their lodgings were miles away in Islington. He had only the vaguest idea of how he might get back to them, and that meant the train. The station was not
that far away but he knew that the ragged men would be looking for him by the station entrance. It would be an obvious place for him to go, so he ruled it out.
He stood up and stretched himself. His head was full of conflicting thoughts and emotions. He thought of criminals like ‘the Fantom’. Pastworld had a reputation for the razor and the knife. Even his father, a once important Buckland Corp. employee, a so-called ‘imagineer’ couldn’t protect himself. His father was now just another brutal Pastworld statistic. Was most likely dead, sprawled on his back, his pockets plucked empty.
No one on earth knew now where Caleb was. He felt a sudden cruel and insane freedom, as if a heavy burden had been lifted from him.
He sighed out loud, as if expelling all of the held-in breath and emotion of the last hour. He leaned back against the brick arch. He was free to escape from himself if he wanted to. He had finally and properly run away from his over-planned, overprotected and over-regulated life. He could live here, hide in all the dark foggy disorder around him, escape as many others had allegedly done before. He was free to reinvent himself as he wished. No longer just a boy from the suburbs. He could be an adventurer, a soldier, a thief, a secret killer bent on revenge. These were stirring and startling thoughts, and they took place at very high speed, somewhere deep in the back of his whirling head, and not even at a conscious level; they just welled there, competing with all the shock and the horror at what he had seen.
All he had left in this particular version of the real world were the clothes on his back, the mixed pile of heavy coins in his pocket and the poor blind man’s rusted pocket watch. It was still attached to its length of dirty string, and he found he was still holding it, gripped tightly in his hand. He moved nearer to the entrance where there was a little light. He stared down at it. The glass cover had been removed, so that the blind man could feel the hands of the watch, to tell the time. Caleb held the watch out in the thin light. He listened; it still ticked; and then he turned it over. Something was cut into the back of the watch case. Caleb tried to make it out in the gloom. He licked his finger, and smeared it across the silvery metal. Words were engraved in a fine copperplate script:
.
.
It had once been his father’s watch.
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Chapter 17
The Fantom looked at the corpse laid out on the big round enamel table. The body had been hastily stripped and vaguely washed in some sort of disinfectant. The limbs were outstretched and arranged as he had ordered in the manner of Vitruvian man, the celebrated image by Leonardo da Vinci. He approached the table almost nervously. He was half expecting Jack, such a very familiar figure to him, to sit up and say something, to remind him of his oh-so-carefully-learned numbers perhaps.
‘Is it really you, Jack?’ he said quietly. He went and stood directly over the body, close to the head. ‘What a mess you’ve let yourself get into. Haven’t been seeing too well lately, I hear.’ He stopped, paused in his flow as if the corpse might reply in that familiar gruff voice. ‘Supposing you were to say something.’ He looked down at the stubbled throat. He quickly produced a straight razor. He slashed right through the throat, almost severing the head. There was a little blood.
Now there could only be silence.
He put down the razor. His Gladstone bag, full of all his other instruments, was on a side table, and a bright oil lamp was hooked on to a pole and shone down clearly on the pale dead flesh like moonlight. He noted the burn scars visible on the hands and the lower arms and all across the bloated torso. The skin looked dark and toughened like the outside of some over-roasted leg of lamb.
‘Tut tut,’ he said, ‘that’ll teach you to play with fire. This won’t take long, Jack old friend, I promise. Just a quick look – I owe you that at least. I’m only after the heart of the matter. I have to be sure, you see. Not that you do see.’ And he coughed and made a little suppressed laugh.
He used a surgeon’s scalpel to make the necessary Y incision from the shoulders down to the pubic bone. Soon the rib cage was exposed and the body looked more like something from a Smithfield market wagon. He looked down at the sad, mushy face and the staring eyes. ‘No point in closing them now, eh, Jack?’ he said.
Eventually he removed Jack’s heart and weighed it on a butcher’s scale. ‘The weight of the human heart, thirteen ounces,’ he said. ‘You have a heavy heart, and so you should after what you did to me – sorry, tried to do to me, to us.’ He lifted the slippery heart and put it to one side on the zinc-topped table.
The Fantom stitched up the autopsy wounds as well as he could; the stitches were not neat but they would do. He straightened the figure and finally, in a sudden and unlikely act of sympathy, or perhaps some misplaced sense of mercy, he shut Jack’s staring pale eyes, pressing them lightly with his fingers. He went out into a dingy, long tiled corridor. An armed ragged man stood guard under a hanging oil lamp. The empty hospital hand cart stood against the wall, draped in bloodied sacking. The Fantom pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it over. ‘This ad will run in the early morning edition of the London Mercury. It’s all arranged, and paid for, and this is the place. Take it. Just dress him as we discussed and go.’
They returned to the room and the ragged man transferred the body on to the hand cart and wheeled it away back down the long corridor.
The Fantom went back into the light and looked long and hard at the heart sitting on its own under the glare of the oil lamp.
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Chapter 18
Caleb watched the water as it dripped off the bricks and down into the dank puddles at his feet. He had been silent for so long, his mouth would hardly open.
‘They’ll kill me if they find me,’ he said quietly.
There was no answer.
He had to go, and go now. He went and peered out of the dark archway and into the bleak street. There were no signs of any of the ragged men. There were some street sellers on the other side of the road. He stepped back into the shadow of the arch. He closed his eyes and waited. He heard footsteps pass close to him. He stood stock-still, with his eyes closed. He counted in his head, and tried to be exact in his seconds. One one thousand, two one thousand. Someone had once told him that this was the way to measure a proper second. It had been his father, of course, being a precise man. The image of his father’s punched face swam back to him again. Three, one thousand, four, one thousand. He calmed himself, then opened his eyes and walked straight out from under the wet arch and back into the street.
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Chapter 19
Bible J, the dip, was to some by outward appearance perfectly respectable. He was the personal assistant to Mr William Leighton, aesthete, dealer and collector, who lived in an historic house in Fournier Street, Spitalfields. In truth Bible J was also a hardened little thief, a common pickpocket. He was a magician with his hands, a virtuoso conjuror with his fingers. He could lift a wallet, or a coin purse, without the victim discovering the loss until it was much too late. He had lived rough on the streets of Pastworld for a good half of his eighteen years. However, inside of him there was at least a kernel of sympathy. There were also traces of a warm, almost sentimental heart, and above all there was a sense of humour and a winning charm. He was not like the other feral boys he had run with on the streets when he was younger. They had been hard-faced, ruthless, swift to beat or kick, or to use a knife, who made ideal recruits when they were older as the Fantom’s ragged men. There was some tenderness about Bible J. He could spot someone in real trouble; he recognised anguish, and he would act accordingly. He had brought the odd waif and stray back to the Fournier Street house, where they had been fed, given a little money, helped on their way.
He had waved loaded revolvers at bank tellers during robberies. He had fired at the Fantom’s ragged men high among the tangle of rooftops and chimneys. He had been pursued many times by Buckland Corps Cadets and police officers. He had been listed as Wanted, and been the subject of posters and procla
mations, but had never yet actually killed anyone, and had never yet been caught. Being caught after all was a serious matter in Pastworld.
On Halloween night he was to be seen walking purposefully among the late groups of partygoers and stragglers. He was often dressed as a smart and personable young man about town, but tonight he was wearing his butcher boy cap and ‘raggy’ dip’s clothes that he had worn for a day or two now. Indeed had been wearing them since he had narrowly missed being recognised and sliced up by the Fantom, who, for some reason, had not registered who Bible J was. He would surely dine out on that one soon, and just wait till Mr Leighton found out that the Fantom was back on the streets. He wouldn’t like that at all.
There were some drunks heading, or staggering rather, down the hill towards the big railway station junction at Clapham. Bible J lost himself among them with intent, like a wolf among a fold of sheep. He slipped through the jolly groups, assessing them, rattling pockets, slipping off watches and rings, stuffing them all into his poacher’s pockets. He padded through them, light on his feet, and then quickly turned off on to a quiet side road. It was dark and empty, and had a string of wan, flickery gas lamps, which were spaced so far apart that there were long stretches of darkness between the pools of light. This was a perfect escape route. He set off, walking quickly with his head down. Another figure was walking ahead of him. A youth of about his own age, nicely dressed too. Bible J walked behind him for a few paces as quietly as he could. He didn’t much like dipping off someone as young as himself. A boy who might be fitter and run faster than him. He drew alongside him. He studied him from the side. Black hair, white face, he thought. The boy made no acknowledgement of Bible J, just kept walking, his face as pale as one of the Halloween skull masks he had seen everywhere on the streets. Bible J leaned over and tapped him on the arm. The boy stopped, frozen on the spot. He kept his eyes down, and his head tucked under his collar.