“The newspapers were a disjointed collection, perhaps saved for starting fires or composting. They were dated from just a few months previously to twenty years or more before. Then, one morning just a few weeks ago, sheltering from the battering monsoon rains, I chanced upon a small piece in the Illustrated London Argus, from June 1880. It detailed how a young woman of just sixteen years old had died after throwing herself into the Thames. She had left a note implicating her stepfather, Edward Gaunt, in some manner of involvement in her suicide, but a resulting police investigation ruled there was no evidence. The girl’s mother, Catherine Gaunt, told the inquest that the girl was given to flights of fancy and had never truly recovered from the death of her natural father.”
Fereng locked eyes with Smith. “That was my little girl. My Jane. I was shocked back into myself, as though someone had thrown a bucket of iced water into my face. I had been snapping away at the British Empire on its fringes in India, like a small dog yapping at the heels of a giant. But now I had cause to bring the battle home to the heart of the Empire. I gathered my closest friends—Deeptendu, Naakesh, Kalanath, and dear Phoolendu—and we traveled to England. My vengeance was to be threefold, Smith, and almost as soon as we set foot on English soil we heard the rumors and whispers of the beast held captive in the laboratory of Professor Stanford Rubicon, and the key to our wrath was made clear to us.”
“Threefold?”
Fereng nodded. “My first mission was to Kennington, just Saturday night. The home of Edward Gaunt, the man who sought to step into my shoes as husband and father. He failed miserably on both counts, confining my Catherine to a sanatorium and…” Fereng’s lips drew back in a snarl. “He admitted everything, bloodied and battered, never taking his eyes from the noose I knotted there in front of him. How he abused and brutalized my darling Jane when she was little more than a child. How he drove her to take her own life. I made him pay, Smith. I restored the universal balance. A life for a life. Another thousand years’ delay to Kali’s return. He was my first vengeance.
“My second vengeance shall be Walsingham, the black heart of the British Empire, the shadowy soul of Albion, the darkness-stained core of Britannia. The man who dispatched me to my doom, and who knows how many besides.”
“And your third vengeance?” asked Smith.
Fereng smiled. “One thing at a time, Smith.”
The dinosaur growled, and there were echoing footsteps from the tunnel, Deeptendu leading the other Thuggees into the brick cavern. Fereng rose to meet them. “You have news?”
Phoolendu stepped forward. “Tsk, you let the fire burn low.” He placed three bricks of dried tyrannosaur dung on the flames and turned back to Fereng. “But yes. News. I stationed myself outside the Old Bailey, and not long ago I saw him. Walsingham.”
Fereng’s eyes shone in the newly raging fire. “At last. You followed him?”
“He was in the company of a fat man, a journalist as far as I can understand, and a policeman, one of the kinds who does not wear a uniform. They took a horse-drawn cab outside the courts.”
“You heard to where?”
Phoolendu nodded. “Grosvenor Square. Number 23.”
Smith blinked and tried to speak, his mouth suddenly too dry to make sounds. Grosvenor Square? Number 23? Why that was … that was …
“A very exclusive address,” said Fereng, suddenly dropping low and in one fluid movement whipping a knife from where it was tucked into his boot, flipping it into a whirling arc, and plucking it blade-first from the air, presenting it to Smith. “A very nice place to die.”
26
GHOSTS
Don Sergio de la Garcia had lived, for two and a half years, in a dark and cloying room on the third floor of a crammed tenement that straddled the border between Lambeth and Stockwell. He had seen three summers in this hellhole, the heat and stench from the streets rising to fill his dingy room, and was facing his third Christmas, the howling, icy winds rattling the windowpanes, the snow piling up on the sills. He had chosen the area because it was the haunt of many Portuguese immigrants, close enough in appearance to him that he could hide among them, but different enough in culture that he could live unbothered by attempts at friendship or conversation. He had never divulged his address to his masters, some nameless fear encouraging him to fog and blur his location, even from those who held all the cards. He had hinted at rooms in more salubrious locations on the rare occasions that they had sent envoys—Markus Mesmer chief among them—to check on his progress.
He had never felt so alone in his entire life. The summers in London were typified by thick, hot smog, through which the blue sky could be glimpsed only occasionally. He dreamed of the big country he had left behind, the far horizons, the endless skies, the air you could breathe deeply. The friends and family he had once had. There was none of that here, and he was alone.
Almost. For his dark and tiny room, paid for monthly with the bag of gold coins he had brought with him from New Spain—where he used to have coffers filled with such riches!—and which now lived beneath a loose floorboard under his bed, this room was never empty. It was always filled with young women.
Or, at any rate, their ghosts. The quiet ghosts of the women he had systematically murdered over the course of his two-and-a-half-year exile in London. They stood in pale battalions in the shadows of the room, crowding out the air, suffocating him, never speaking but always watching, each one with an accusing gash across her forehead, long-dried rivulets of black blood running into her eyes, her dead eyes that stripped away his soul, paper-thin layer by paper-thin layer.
His soul, and his sanity, too. Among the jostling ghosts he could swear he saw a more substantial spirit, a beautiful young woman with cascading blond hair, a rope wound tightly about her arms and torso, a filthy rag gagging her mouth. She had no telltale cut above her eyes, which implored him, tearful, beseeching. Then he remembered, half-giggling to himself. She wasn’t a ghost at all. She was the mechanical girl, the automaton with treasure in her head.
Finally, Don Sergio de la Garcia could go home.
He looked again at the notice in the newspaper.
Congratulations, Man in Black! Meet us at the place that bears the family name of the girl you left behind! Eight o’clock tonight! It is almost over! Mr. Brain.
Garcia had puzzled over that for a good while. “What do you think this means?” he had asked the gagged automaton, who watched him with wild, tear-stained eyes. He paused to wonder at the workmanship that had gone into the mechanism, that it could weep so convincingly, then stalked up and down the tiny room. He still wore his black outfit, the cowl pulled back onto his shoulders, revealing his face with its high cheekbones and pencil-thin mustache. He had always been considered handsome back in New Spain, but now he knew he had acquired a sickly pallor beneath the London smog, and his once-black hair was going gray, as if each murder he committed somehow drained a measure of color and vitality from him. He was generally careful about hiding the El Chupacabras costume away in the daylight hours, but he felt so close to the end of it all that he allowed himself a little recklessness.
Garcia fell to his knees before the terrified-looking automaton. “I was a hero, back in New Spain. I fought for the poor and the weak. I was a champion. Then they came for me. I thought they were taking us to Madrid, at first: my wife, Julia, my beautiful daughters Sophia and Eloise, and I. Important business, they said. But it was not the Spanish Government. It was … they took us to New Orleans. I had no idea those stories were true. I was given a mission.” Garcia reached up and stroked the hair of the flinching woman. “Find you. Find what is in your head. They have your creator, you know. Professor Einstein. They know that you escaped him in London, that you have the brain of a whore in your head as well as the ancient treasure. Thus they sent me here, two years ago, more, to begin slicing open the heads of whores, to find the treasure.”
Garcia stood quickly and whirled around, hefting an imaginary rapier and dancing across the bare floorboards. “Jack
the Ripper they called me! Mary Ann Nichols!” He swiped his invisible sword. “Annie Chapman!” Parry. “Elizabeth Stride!” Lunge. “Catherine Eddowes! Mary Jane Kelly!” He began to slash and swipe furiously and wildly, falling to his knees once again. He peered into the shadows, at the milling ghosts. “All here. And more. I am sorry, I am so very sorry. Lo siento. But now it is over. And I can finally see my beloved Julia and the girls again.”
He retrieved the newspaper from where he had tossed it. “But … the girl I left behind? The family name? My Julia’s family name is Marcos, but I have scoured the maps and gazetteers and cannot…” He paused, squinting at the ghosts. “You think? Teresa? But how could Mesmer know of that? We were always so careful, and then she married Juan Batiste and had her baby girl, Inez.…” He frowned. “Teresa died seven years ago. Her name? Palomo.” He scurried back to the maps, peering at them in the dull light. Then he straightened and turned back to the automaton. “The Dove.”
* * *
In the suite of hotel rooms in Soho the party had commandeered, Markus Mesmer was sitting in the bay window, watching the gloom already gathering over London. He’d had the mechanical girl right in the palm of his hand, and she had escaped.
Thank God for El Chupacabras. Had he not captured the automaton, Mesmer would not have dared return to New Orleans. The swordsman might be half-mad, but he had finally come good. And that evening Mesmer would finally have Maria back in his custody, and he could take her to his paymaster.
Louis XVI, the Witch-King of New Orleans.
Markus Mesmer’s long and varied career had led him to work for many masters, but he could safely say that his current one was the strangest by far. Still, Mesmer was a free agent, and while there was still much in New Orleans to interest him, when he had assuaged the hungers that the Witch-King’s court fed so well, then the world in all its richness was still his oyster. There was a knock at the door of his room and the burly Spaniard, Alfonso, peered around it, bearing a folded newspaper.
“The notice is in?” said Mesmer.
Alfonso crossed the room to Mesmer’s desk and handed over the newspaper. “Sí, señor, however…”
Mesmer snatched it from him and took a moment to decipher the advertisement in Spanish. He frowned at Alfonso. “I thought I said to have Garcia bring the automaton here. What is this girl you left behind nonsense?”
Sweat beaded on Alfonso’s vast, shaved head. “I do not know. This is not the notice we placed at the newspaper office.”
Mesmer screwed the paper up in his hands. “Someone is playing us for fools. Either Garcia has switched allegiances and is in league with our enemies, or someone has intercepted our notice and means to divert Garcia and the mechanical girl to a meeting point of their choosing.”
He tossed the newspaper back at Alfonso. “Try to find out what this means.”
He did not have much faith in the ability of the motley gang of Frenchmen and Spaniards he had been saddled with to solve the riddle, though, and when Alfonso had left and closed the door behind him, Mesmer sat thoughtfully for a moment then took up his Hypno-Array and considered the framework of wires, lenses, and cogs, the one that he had used to convince that innocent shopkeeper that he was, in fact, Jack the Ripper. The man’s confession—though delivered, no doubt, to the police with utter conviction—would not stand up to much scrutiny, but it would distract the constabulary sufficiently and buy Mesmer enough time to get away from London with Garcia and Maria. Or so he had supposed until this latest turn of events.
Mesmer’s devices were complicated structures that took a long time to create. They were not the source of Mesmer’s powers—that was deep within his head, nurtured and exercised over many, many years of training and development—but they did amplify and direct his talents. As such, his Hypno-Arrays were finely tuned with Mesmer’s own mind. He had lost enough of them in the past to improve and modify each successive design, and now, though an array might be stolen, it was not necessarily lost … and it could still cause his foes harm.
The automaton had stolen his only other Hypno-Array, but the latest version he now placed over his head had a new function he had not had the opportunity to fully test yet. He closed his eyes and switched on the array, focusing his mind and funneling it into the lenses that turned and came together to create a telescope of sorts, which he trained upon the tumultuous hiss of millions of London minds suddenly turned on as though they were a gramophone disc and the Hypno-Array the needle. For many minutes he stood, turning on the spot, until somewhere amid the morass of white noise a pinprick of something else appeared. There. His missing Hypno-Array. But wait … a second signal? From exactly the same location? How was that possible?
Mesmer carefully triggered the mind signal he hoped would be received by these two stolen Hypno-Arrays, then watched with a satisfied smile as the pinpricks became flares of blinding light, and a location was revealed to him.
* * *
“The first thing you’ve got to understand,” said Bent through a mouthful of cake provided by Mrs. Cadwallader, “is that the poor sap you’ve got locked up is most certainly not Jack the effing Ripper.”
In the study, surrounded by the trophies and mementoes of Captain Trigger and John Reed’s adventures, George Lestrade looked over the rim of his teacup with narrowed eyes. “How can you be so sure?”
Maria spoke up. “Because Jack the Ripper is a man from Uvalde in New Spain by the name of Sergio de la Garcia, who also had another identity as the masked champion of the oppressed, El Chupacabras.”
“And we’re going to nail him at eight o’clock tonight in Hammersmith, and get back Charlotte Elmwood before someone slices her bleeding head off, if they haven’t already. We could probably use your help with that, George, seeing as we’ve also got until ten tomorrow morning to save Rowena Fanshawe from the noose by finding Charles Collier.”
Mr. Walsingham placed his cup and saucer on the low table. “Ah. Charles Collier. The dead refuse to stay buried once again.”
“He’s not dead,” said Bent. He placed the crumpled issue of World Marvels & Wonders on the table. “Gideon sent this as a message. At first I thought he was trying to tell us something about the Captain Trigger adventure in it. But he was being more obvious than that. Collier’s on the effing cover. Perhaps you ought to tell us what you know about him.”
“I suspect there is a spiderweb here that connects Collier to Markus Mesmer and your Sergio de la Garcia, however obliquely,” said Walsingham.
“It takes a spider to know one,” said Bent. “We know, thanks to Maria, that Mesmer and Garcia have the same boss, and that whoever that is also has Professor Einstein.”
“And you said that Mesmer has both Spanish and French henchmen?” Walsingham said to Maria.
“Odd, that,” said Bent. “You normally can’t put a Spaniard and a Frenchie in the same room without one of them ending up dead.”
“Strange bedfellows,” agreed Walsingham. “But something I have come across in the past.” He looked at Maria. “To do with the very artifact in your head.”
“I’ll get Mrs. Cadwallader to bring in a fresh pot of tea,” said Bent. “Sounds like you’re going to be doing a lot of talking.”
* * *
“Many years ago, some very old pages extracted from a larger volume came into my possession,” said Mr. Walsingham, after Mrs. Cadwallader had brought in a tray of fresh tea and seated herself on a footstool beside Bent’s chair. “This was early in my career, and there were many strange and wonderful things in the world to come to grips with. These pages detailed just another enigma, another mystery, which I gave cursory attention to, not realizing just how important they were going to prove.”
Walsingham steepled his fingers beneath his chin, as though considering how much to tell them. Bent said, “Come on, man!”
“The pages were old and concerned an account of rumors and stories about an ancient treasure, lost on an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean. They hinted that
this treasure could have considerable, though not fully explained, power. I managed to extrapolate a possible location, and I dispatched one of the Empire’s operatives to find it.”
“Charles Collier,” said Bent.
Walsingham nodded. “We never heard from him again.”
Maria stared at him. “So you just abandoned him?”
“You must remember, young lady, that this was twenty years ago. Airship travel was not as sophisticated as it is today. We did not have the resources nor Collier’s expertise in the air to send a rescue mission. Other matters and needs subsumed that particular endeavor.” Walsingham took a sip of tea. “Then, some years later, the wider volume from which the pages had been extracted came into my possession. This was called the Hallendrup Manuscript, and it appeared to be the work of monks in Denmark in the mid-seventeenth century. It gathered oral and written reports from around the world of many similar, if not identical, ancient treasures that had surfaced at different times and locations. One of them had seemingly originated in ancient Egypt and had been lost, and found, and stolen, and regained, and ended up in the possession of the crew of a Viking longship which had been lost at sea somewhere off the Faroe Islands.”
Maria gasped and touched her temple. Walsingham smiled and nodded. “Yes. The Atlantic Artifact that I gave to Professor Hermann Einstein and that ended up giving you your strange life.”
“I must say,” said Bent, “you’re being awfully free and easy with your secrets today, Walsingham.”
Walsingham spread his hands in an expression of innocence. “It is in all our interests that this Garcia is captured as soon as possible.”
Bent made a harrumphing noise. “I don’t believe you ever give anything away unless it benefits you.”
Walsingham smiled. “Not me, Mr. Bent. The Empire.”
“Let’s say that’s so,” said Bent. “How did you come by the Atlantic Artifact?”
“Three years ago the Royal Navy had developed a prototype submersible, an underwater boat. Captain James Palmer—who took you and Gideon to rescue Professor Rubicon and Charles Darwin from the Pacific this summer—and Dr. John Reed effected a retrieval mission. There were a number of unrelated treasures rescued from the wreck of the longship, though the artifact was the only one to return to London. The others were stolen in a betrayal by Palmer’s temporary crew, a strange—I thought at the time—alliance of French and Spanish sailors, spies who had evidently infiltrated the Lady Jane.”
Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper Page 29