by Alex Grecian
He wondered whether Claire had woken up yet, whether she had even gone back to bed after he left. He wondered whether sleeplessness would affect the unborn baby. Thoughts of the baby made him frown, squinting into the sun. He marched on, forgot about spiderwebs underfoot, and found his flask in his pocket. He uncorked it and took a long burning drink. Corked it back up and put it in his pocket, wiped his lips on the sleeve of his jacket.
March was at the back door of the church when Day caught up to him. He raised his eyebrows at Day and jiggled the handle. It moved freely. March held a finger to his lips, telling Day to be quiet in case the prisoner they sought was just on the other side of the door. He turned the handle again as Day brought out his revolver, then pushed hard against the door and stepped back out of the way. Day crouched and moved forward through the door into the darkness of a little windowless room.
In the light from the open door, Day could see that the room was used for storage. It was stacked floor to ceiling with the sort of superfluous items a church might collect over the course of several decades: old broomsticks, candelabras, incense burners, three long dusty pews with broken legs, chairs, buckets, bolts of fabric, an enormous chipped slab of marble, some sort of font that leaned to one side, a chandelier, carefully labeled boxes of clothing and vestments. But no people, no missing prisoners. There was another door on the far wall. It was closed, and Day stepped carefully around a hole in the floor and tested the doorknob. It didn’t move. Locked from the other side. Which might mean that the prisoner had come through here and locked the door after him, but Day was willing to bet the door was always locked. It wouldn’t do to let a child wander into the storeroom. Too many opportunities for an accident.
He went back to the hole in the floor he’d skirted a moment before. March was already there, on his hands and knees, peering down into the darkness. There was a flat slab of wooden flooring upended against a stack of boxes next to the hole, scattered dust and dirt and splinters around the opening where the floor had been pulled up and cast aside.
“He’s down there, then,” Day said. He was suddenly seized by an urge to do something, to make some difference. Things were happening all around him, things he couldn’t control, and he wondered if he would feel better in action. Without time to worry, perhaps he would stop worrying altogether and feel better about everything in his life. What would Hammersmith do? Of course the sergeant would leap into the darkness, whatever the cost. Day had promised Hammersmith that he would stay aboveground, but Day wasn’t a child. He certainly wasn’t Hammersmith’s child. He was on the cusp of becoming a father, after all, someone who made decisions and acted on them.
“I suppose he could be down there,” March said. “It’s possible.”
“It’s definite.”
“By now?” March looked up. His features were pulled down into an ugly quizzical expression by the tension from his neck. “No, by now he’s gone through there, whatever tunnels are down there, and come up somewhere else. Somewhere far away. We’d never find him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s hiding down in the dark somewhere, waiting for us to stop looking for him so he can escape into Ireland next week.”
“How would he do that? What would he eat for a week?”
“I don’t know his plan, Adrian. But I’m saying I think we should go down there and look for him.”
“I’m not going to let you get killed or lost in the sewer with a baby on the way.”
“Baby’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“Anyway,” March said, “we should look elsewhere for this man.”
“Look where? There is nowhere else. We don’t really know who we’re looking for, we don’t know what he looks like. We know almost nothing about him.”
“We know he’s wearing a prison warder’s uniform. Or a part of one.”
“I mean this is the only clue we’ve got,” Day said. “We follow the clue. You taught me that.”
March sat back, leaning on his arms, and smiled. “I did. Very well, then.”
“Even if he’s not there, we may find some trace of him, some indication of where he went, what direction he’s traveling in. It’s a starting point.”
March put his hands up in front of him, palms out. “We’ll go. You’ve made your point. But keep that revolver at the ready. And let’s find another lantern.”
They looked behind the pews and the marble and the bolts of moth-eaten fabric, and they dug through several of the boxes, but they didn’t find a lantern. They did find a can of oil, but it was useless without something to put the oil in. Finally, they settled for pulling several of the candles out of the old chandelier. Day put four of them in his pocket, and March put several in his own pockets. They lit one candle apiece and poked them through the trapdoor as far as their arms would reach, looking around for signs of danger. They saw a crude staircase leading down and there were scuff marks in the dust, indicating that somebody had gone this way recently. But they already knew that much.
Day trained his Colt Navy on the center of the hole and March sat at the edge of it, swung his legs around, and descended slowly down the stairs. When he was out of the way, Day followed him into the shadows below. He felt barely a twinge at the thought that he was breaking his promise to Nevil.
30
Claire gritted her teeth and closed her eyes and held on tight to the thin sheet that covered her belly. Each contraction lasted a little bit longer than the one before it. They were stronger now and they were coming closer together. Claire wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, whether there was something she could do or not do to make the cramps less painful or to make them more productive somehow. She wanted the whole thing to be done with, her baby healthy and in her arms at last.
When it was over, she lay panting, waiting for the next contraction. She didn’t know when it would come or how long it would last. She tried to remember the things Dr Kingsley had told her to expect, but it was hard to concentrate on that when she knew he’d be coming to help soon. He would tell her what to do. If he arrived in time.
She knew that Constable Winthrop was somewhere downstairs, but that didn’t reassure her. He was nice, but seemed a bit hopeless about practical matters. Much like her husband sometimes was. She thought of Walter and hoped he was safe. She hoped he would come home very soon and hold her hand and simply be there with her. There was nothing he could do to help her, but he could be there. That would somehow be enough.
She rolled onto her side and sat up at the edge of the bed. She felt like some wild animal in a trap, a fox with the dogs at her heels. The lamplight hurt her eyes and so she closed the shutter. She stood and tottered the four steps to the window and opened the shade. Just enough light filtered through to illuminate the room, but it was diffuse enough that it didn’t make her headache any worse. She got back into bed and breathed a sigh of relief. Then the next contraction hit.
Eventually, she opened her eyes again and lay there, drained. She wondered how she could be so limp and tired and yet so tense. It didn’t seem possible.
Outside, a cloud moved in front of the sun and Claire watched the shadows on her wall flow. They contracted and then expanded, moved smoothly along the top of the baseboards and danced around the corners of the room. She wondered about the baby inside her, about what shapes and colors it would see with its new eyes.
She reached for her diary and the pencil on the table beside her and, using her belly for support, scratched out the fruitless lines about skipping rope. She began to write a new poem for her future child.
The door is closed, the candle snuffed.
Hear Mummy’s footsteps in the hall.
Claire stuck the point of the pencil in her mouth and sucked on it while she thought. It was good to have something to puzzle over besides the workings of her own body.
Something moves, but nothing’s there.
It’s just a shadow on the wall.
She decided she didn’t like the first two lines and cr
ossed them out, thought a bit, and added more. She worked out the verse in her head and smiled as she rearranged the words on the paper, building couplets as she went.
Distracted, she only paused long enough to ride out each new contraction, and she didn’t fret about the passage of time. She didn’t notice the room grow darker and the shadows on her wall begin to converge.
31
The wagon had not yet reached HM Prison Bridewell when the cannibal had a seizure. Napper’s eyes rolled back in his head and the handcuffs kept his hands restrained, but his right shoulder rotated forward and his right leg twisted up and across his left leg and he curled down and toppled off the bench onto the floor of the police wagon.
Watching this from the other side of the wagon, Hammersmith immediately drew his truncheon from his belt, but didn’t otherwise move. He had no way of knowing whether Napper was tricking him, trying to get him to come closer, or if something was actually wrong. Hammersmith could hear Napper’s teeth grinding above the sound of wheels on the cobblestones outside. It occurred to the sergeant that Napper might swallow his own tongue, and so he dropped down and knelt beside the cannibal, his truncheon at the ready. Napper made no move on him, but seemed to be breathing, and so Hammersmith eased back on his haunches, his spine resting against the front of the bench behind him, and waited. At last Napper’s limbs relaxed and his eyes closed. A great streamer of thick drool escaped from his mouth and ran across the toe of Hammersmith’s boot. Napper’s breath steadied and slowed and he appeared to sleep.
Hammersmith put his truncheon away and made a halfhearted attempt to lever Napper back up onto the bench, but the prisoner was limp and unhelpful. Finally, Hammersmith gave up and kept a watchful eye as Napper slept.
Several minutes later, Napper’s eyes opened to half-mast and he spoke. The words were slurred, and Hammersmith leaned marginally closer.
“What?”
“Not just us,” Napper said. But Hammersmith thought he said not justice.
“Never mind justice for you,” he said. “What about your victims, huh?”
“No,” Napper said. “More than us now.” This time Hammersmith heard him correctly.
“What does that mean?”
“You might catch us, but you’ll never catch him.”
“Catch who? Either make some sense or shut up, you.”
“Somebody set the Devil free and it’s too late to put him back,” Napper said. Then he closed his eyes and began to snore.
Hammersmith frowned and settled back against the bench. Outside, a cloud drifted in front of the sun and the interior of the wagon went darker and colder. The lantern’s light seemed to dim. A shiver scurried up the sergeant’s spine, and he felt the hair at the base of his neck stand up. He shook off the feeling, but he tightened his grip on his truncheon and fastened his eyes on the slumbering cannibal.
32
The crude staircase ended at a tunnel that led off in either direction, farther into the city and farther away from it. March argued that the prisoners would have run as far away from London as possible, but Day disagreed.
“These men were all scheduled to die in prison,” Day said.
“Precisely why they would want to get far away from it,” March said. “They would be heading north, toward open country.”
“That’s what you or I might do. We’re rational people. But these escapees are the worst specimens London has to offer. They’re animals, predators. I think they’ll go looking for prey.”
“Surely not right away. Surely they’d hide first. They’d want to be certain they wouldn’t be caught.”
“No,” Day said. “They’ve been forced to deny their true natures for months and years. They’ll be hungry. They’ll want to experience a kill. They’d go where they can find the densest concentration of people. Of victims.”
“There are people to the north of us.”
“We don’t know who’s down here, if anyone is. But if Cinderhouse made it this far, if he’s down in these tunnels, he’ll want a child. I know this man, I captured him once before, and I know that he’ll go looking for a child. He would go south.”
March argued his point for a few more minutes, but finally gave in and followed Day into the tunnel going south.
As they walked, smaller tunnels branched off to either side of them, black mouths in the rough stone walls, only barely visible in the glow of candlelight. At first they would stop and advance a few feet into each of these offshoots, examining the ground for any sign that a person might recently have passed over it. But eventually they stopped bothering with the smaller tunnels and stuck to the big main passage where they could see occasional scuff marks in the dirt. Someone had used this tunnel. The same someone who had opened up the church floor.
Eventually the tunnel widened out and they found themselves in a huge chamber. The ceiling arced high above them, invisible in the darkness, and they could hear water streaming past them, off to their left. A stream traveling south and a bit west, burbling over ancient brick and cobblestone. Day ran his hand over the wall beside him and thrust his candle into an alcove. There was a pile of bones on the ground, heaped four feet tall and at least as deep. Above the bones, yellow skulls were stacked on some kind of shelf, row after row of them, grinning out at him, their black eye sockets glittering with imaginary wit. Day poked at one of the skulls with the barrel of his revolver and it rolled forward to reveal another skull behind it.
March came up behind him. “Catacombs,” he said. “Probably attached to the church graveyard at some distant point in the past.”
“All these people,” Day said. “Forgotten.”
“As we all will be. Every human being who has ever lived or ever will live. We’ll all be forgotten when the people who loved us and remembered us die in their turn.”
“There’s a sad thought.”
“Not at all,” March said.
“By your way of thinking, nothing matters. Not a bit of it. Whether we catch these men today or not, whether they kill more innocent people or not. Hell, it doesn’t matter whether anybody falls in love or has a child, dies young or dies old. We’re all destined for this.” He gestured at the wall of skulls, the blank hollow features dancing in the light of the shivering candle flame. The candle had nearly burned down to his fingers now. Day reached into his pocket and found another candle, lit it from the old stub. He held the stub up and blew out its flame. “I can’t believe in that,” Day said. “That’s not a thought I want to wake to every morning.”
March shook his head. “But that’s not at all what I mean. It all matters. Everyone and everything matters because every moment that we have matters. We must make the most of our lives while we can.”
“That would seem to run contrary to your philosophy.”
“You don’t know my philosophy, Walter.” March’s voice was barely audible. “Don’t presume to know what I’m about.”
Day looked at the skulls, big and small, young and old. He moved past March, out into the tunnel, and walked on. Ten feet down the passageway there was another alcove. Bones were stacked in the tunnel, mounded high and wide. Skulls had rolled down this enormous pile and were scattered randomly in the dirt. Day stuck his candle into the alcove opposite the bone pile and peered in after it. This niche in the tunnel wall was identical to the one next to it, but it was empty. Clearly the bones had been taken from it and thrown outside to make room. Day entered the alcove and looked around it. There was an iron ring hammered into the floor and chains fastened to the back wall. Shackles rested on the shelf under the chain, the shelf that had been built to hold skulls. He set his revolver on the shelf and picked up one of the shackles with his free hand. It was a simple grey iron band, not a speck of rust on it. The chains were also new, strong and shiny. Day frowned and turned to March, still holding the shackle. The older man reached past him and grabbed the revolver off the shelf. He backed up and pointed it at Day.
“What is this?” Day said.
�
�I’m sorry, Walter,” March said. “You really don’t seem to understand my philosophy, and I’m afraid we’ve come to a bit of a turning point here.”
33
Kingsley waited on the top step of the porch and let Fiona go ahead of him. She rapped lightly at the front door, then opened it and led the way inside. An awkward young man with ginger hair was posed in the foyer, half-risen from his chair, his hand on the end of a truncheon stuck in his belt. His mouth was open and his forehead was creased, and he appeared to be frozen with indecision. Then he saw Fiona and smiled and let out a great sigh of relief.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I was afraid . . . Well, I wasn’t afraid, mind you, but I was worried, concerned you might be . . . you know, a fugitive.”
Kingsley smiled and transferred his bag to his left hand. He took a step forward, past his daughter, and patted the young constable on the arm. “If we had been fugitives,” Kingsley said, “I’m sure you would have dealt with us.”
The boy nodded, his expression serious. Fiona closed the door and ran to the foot of the stairs.
“How is she?”
“It doesn’t sound good,” the boy said. “By the way, sir, my name’s Winthrop. Constable Rupert Winthrop.”
“Dr Bernard Kingsley.”
“Kingsley? Are you . . . ?” He gestured vaguely at Fiona and back as if drawing a line in the air between them.
“Yes, we are. Tell me, you said just now it doesn’t sound good?”
“Sir, she’s done a good bit of screaming and shouting since Fiona left.”
“Yes, well, she’s having a baby. But she’s a healthy young woman and her pregnancy has been relatively normal, so there’s little enough to fear.”