In the gathering dusk all the gas lamps were lit; colored globes strung from trees and atop poles illuminated the grounds like a fairyland. Hundreds of dancing couples whirled counterclockwise around the circular dance platform. At its center, an orchestra played inside a brightly lit pagoda of the eastern fashion. Thraxton dodged through the crowd toward the iron railings that bordered the dance platform. Up close, he spotted a figure in a white top hat swaying to the music. But when he reached the spot, the man proved to be one of three drunken swells ogling the women and braying with laughter. Thraxton knew the man in the white top hat, or at least he knew Thraxton, for the man seized his arm and blathered, “Geoffrey! Come along and have a drink with your old friends.”
A gap opened in the dancers and he glimpsed the man in the white top hat, who met his gaze, smiled and whirled Aurelia away, who sagged in his arms like a broken doll. Thraxton snatched his arm from the drunken swell’s grip and pushed him away roughly. He barged his way in among the dancing couples, fighting the counterclockwise flow, earning himself angry shouts and slaps from some of the dancers, but the white top hat was moving toward him. He lunged through a gap in the dancers and seized the man’s shoulder.
“What the deuce!” The alarmed face that looked into his was not Doctor Garrette. The woman was not Aurelia.
Stunned, Thraxton released the man and looked around just in time to see Aurelia being dragged off the dance floor. But by the time he had fought his way off the dance platform and back on the other side of the iron railings, Aurelia and her abductor were nowhere to be seen. Thraxton ran along the sylvan avenues, eyes scanning for a white top hat, but it was no use.
They had vanished.
Exhausted and despondent, he flopped onto a park bench, walking stick laid across his lap, his head in his hands. A thousand fears and recriminations tumbled through his mind.
Directly across from the bench, a brightly colored poster plastered on a wooden hoarding depicted a gas balloon rising against a night sky bursting with skyrockets. An elaborately flourished script announced: Fireworks at dusk. Balloon Ascents Nightly (weather permitting). Beneath the balloon, a hand indicated the way. Something about the poster leaped out at Thraxton. He jumped to his feet and ran in the direction the finger pointed.
When he reached the large lawn from which the balloon ascents took place, a crowd of spectators milled. The balloon, filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen gas, was a royal blue color emblazoned with winged sylphs cavorting around its mid-section. Below the gas envelope a wicker basket large enough to accommodate five or six adults hung suspended and now paying customers clambered aboard, aided by the balloon pilot and his assistant. The flights were tethered. The balloon, once filled with passengers, was allowed to rise to a height of three hundred feet, providing a night-time aerial vista for adventuresome patrons before being winched back to earth.
Thraxton earned some cutting stares as he roughly pushed to the front of the crowd. His heart somersaulted as he saw a white top hat at the back of the balloon basket, a shorter female figure standing beside. The balloon was already lifting off. Thraxton vaulted the iron railings in time to catch hold of the wicker basket and climb inside. With Thraxton’s added weight, the balloon sagged and bumped back to earth.
The balloon pilot was outraged. “See here! What the devil—?”
“Sir! That man has abducted my fiancée!” Thraxton shouted, pointing. “We must hold him and send for the police.”
All eyes in the balloon turned to the man in the white top hat. With unnerving nonchalance, Silas Garrette drew a scalpel from his coat pocket and pressed the blade to Aurelia’s throat.
A woman shrieked. Yells and shouts followed as passengers panicked.
Thraxton tried to push toward Aurelia, but was shoved back as people leaped and threw themselves over the sides of the basket. When the balloon pilot tried to grab Garrette, the doctor slashed his throat with one quick scalpel stroke, hurling him aside so forcefully he hit the side of the basket and toppled out. Suddenly unweighted, the balloon shot skyward, the handle of the unmanned winch whirring out of control as the tether unreeled.
The doctor kept the blade pressed tight against Aurelia’s windpipe, who looked at Thraxton with sad, helpless eyes. “Shall I sacrifice her now?” he taunted. “So she can bleed to death in your arms like a slaughtered lamb?”
The basket jolted mightily as the tether reached the end of its windings and tore loose of the winch. Unrestrained the balloon continued to climb while a light breeze carried it over the Cremorne Gardens.
As the balloon drifted directly above the fireworks pavilion a fusillade of skyrockets whooshed into the sky and the air around the balloon exploded in starry bursts of fire. Buffeted by the blast, the balloon pitched and rocked, knocking them off their feet. Thraxton used the distraction to leap forward, snatch Aurelia from Garrette’s grip and pull her behind him. In the struggle, Garrette dropped the scalpel. It slid along the floor of the basket and he lunged for it, but Thraxton kicked him in the face, rolling him away. When they both clambered to their feet, Thraxton now held the scalpel in one hand, his walking stick in the other.
Bam, bam, bam… KABOOM! They drifted through choking clouds of gunpowder smoke as more explosions detonated around them. The balloon shuddered as a skyrocket slammed into the ropes holding the basket and snagged, a fiery cone of sparks spraying from its base. Thraxton knew it would explode at any moment and knocked it loose with a blow from his walking stick; it sputtered away and detonated with a deafening bang, sending green and red fireballs whizzing around them, peppering their faces with hot gunpowder.
Through it all, Doctor Garrette laughed uproariously. “You mock death?” he shouted above the din. “We are in a balloon filled with volatile gas, surrounded by exploding fireworks. What a glorious way to die!” He said more, but his words were drowned as a second wave of skyrockets whooshed up from below and blew the sky around them into curtains of glimmering fire.
Their drift had stopped and Thraxton realized that if they remained at that altitude the balloon was doomed. He slashed the cord holding one of the sandbags with the scalpel, releasing it. As its weight fell away, the balloon surged upward. He cut loose a second sandbag and the balloon rushed higher until soon they were looking down on the fireworks bursting below. Climbing past a thousand feet, higher elevation winds caught the balloon and carried it east. The streets and smoking chimney pots of London drifted far below. They were above the lower level clouds now, in a sky lit by the ruddy sun dipping into the cloud tops. Afraid of a fight with Garrette over a sharp blade with Aurelia so close, Thraxton tossed the scalpel away to be rid of it.
“Very clever,” the doctor said. “You have disarmed yourself.” He smiled as he withdrew the leather holster of instruments from his overcoat pocket, unfurled it with a flick, and drew out a small cleaver. “I will carve you into stumps and use what’s left of you as a pillow while I slice open the belly of your whore and take what is mine.”
Thraxton thumbed the release catch on his cane and gave it a twist. He thought he was carrying the sword cane topped by the snarling tiger. Instead, the phoenix head came off in his hand and he found himself holding the slender glass tube filled with brandy.
Dr. Garrette laughed at his befuddlement. “How very chivalrous. Are you going to offer me a drink?”
Thraxton snatched the stoppered glass tube of brandy from the cane and then lunged forward and smashed it across his enemy’s face. The glass tube shattered, its sharp shards slicing open the bridge of Garrette’s nose and dousing his face and chest with brandy. He sputtered, reeling backwards, wiping brandy onto his sleeve.
Now he was furious and came at Thraxton slashing with the cleaver. “Time to jettison the useless ballast.” Thraxton deflected the blow with his walking stick driving the cleaver blade into the edge of the wicker basket where it stuck fast. The two men wrestled, crashing from side to side of the basket as they fought, punching, kicking, clawing at each oth
er’s faces. The two were evenly matched and finally broke apart, gasping for breath. Garrette’s disguise had been destroyed in the fight, and now his false whiskers and eyebrows dangled loose.
“Death is a gift,” Garrette managed between panting breaths. “A gift earned through suffering that cleanses the soul and makes it worthy. I will make you worthy of death—both of you.”
Meanwhile the balloon had continued to climb and now drifted toward the armada of anvilhead storm clouds, towering and mighty. As they passed beneath one, the hair on Aurelia’s head stood on end as the air grew tense with static electricity. Suddenly a jagged bolt of lightning flashed just below the balloon with an almost instantaneous crack of thunder.
“Roar! Roar on!” Garrette laughed. “Death is awakened and has come for us all.”
Aurelia pressed her face into Thraxton’s chest, her small body trembling. “Geoffrey,” she whispered, “I am ready to die with you… but I want our child to live.”
Thraxton looked down into her face. “Our child shall live. We shall live.” He gently pushed her away and crouched down, gathered the pieces of his walking stick, and screwed the phoenix head back into place. Then he raised the stick to strike at Garrette.
“Geoffrey!” Aurelia called. “Look!”
When Thraxton turned his head, the brass phoenix was surrounded by a glowing ball of St. Elmo’s fire.
Garrette unleashed a snarl and sprang forward while his adversary was distracted. The two wrestled for the walking stick, crashing from side to side, until Garrette pinned Thraxton to the floor of the wicker basket. With inhuman strength he pressed the walking stick into Thraxton’s throat, crushing his windpipe.
“Life is weak, but Death is strong!” Garrette said. He shifted his weight until his thin knees straddled the walking stick. Thraxton’s face purpled as his windpipe was crushed flat.
The doctor calmly snatched up his white top hat and settled it upon his bald pate. “Die slowly, Lord Thraxton. I do enjoy a good prolonged death.”
“Geoffrey!” Aurelia screamed. She looked around the inside of the basket for a weapon but there was nothing. In desperation, she snatched the gold Ankh from her neck, breaking the chain, and flung it at Dr. Garrette. It hit him in the face. By reflex, he grabbed it.
“What’s this?” he said, pulling the chain away and staring at it. “A pagan charm?”
Just then the tiniest of sparks leapt from the gold Ankh and Dr. Garrette’s clothes, splashed with brandy and permeated with volatile chemical vapors, ignited. He leaped up from the floor of the balloon and staggered drunkenly around the basket, yelling, hands beating at his face and chest which crawled with a weird blue flame. Aurelia rushed to help Thraxton sit up. By now, the doctor was fully engulfed. Realizing that the balloon would be the next to catch fire, Thraxton burst upward, slammed a shoulder into the doctor’s stomach driving him up and over the side of the basket.
Silas Garrette fell earthward trailing a faint comet’s tail of gray smoke. The white top hat, also burning, tumbled slowly after. He plunged through the top of a small black cloud and out the bottom, screaming all the way—a scream not of fear but of impotent rage. Thraxton watched the meteoric plummet until Garrette vanished from sight in the glimmering constellation of gas lights burning in the streets of London.
“Geoffrey!”
He pulled Aurelia into a crushing, desperate embrace. But now, suddenly loosed of the weight of a grown man, the balloon rocketed upward faster than ever. Above them towered a thunder cloud the size of a mountain. The base of the cloud concaved in a dome that could have swallowed St. Paul’s Cathedral and a dozen more. The balloon began to lash and writhe as it hit the swirling vortex of air being sucked up into the cloud. The light turned a sick, ominous green, and Thraxton realized with dread that they were about to be drawn into a thundercloud from which there could be no survival.
“We are going to die, are we not, Geoffrey?”
“I had a life, but never lived until I met you.”
Thraxton looked into Aurelia’s violet eyes, bright and unafraid. “It does not matter… because I am here with you, and I shall never let you go.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“And I shall never let go of you.”
They were ascending at tremendous speed, sucked into the cloud’s converging updrafts.
Their embrace tightened as the world turned opaque white, faded to gray and then black. For a time there was nothing but darkness and then a deafening concussion as the world exploded in a blinding white dance of luminous atoms.
36
A NEWSPAPER REPORT
THE DAILY DOINGS
MAD DOCTOR IN BALLOON MURDER RAMPAGE!
The Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in Chelsea witnessed one of the most heinous crimes in London history on Wednesday night. As the evening balloon ascent began, one of the passengers, a tall man in a white top hat produced a knife, seized a young lady, and threatened to cut her throat.
THROAT SLASHED
When the balloon pilot, Charles Green Spencer of Battersea, attempted to apprehend the man, he was brutally murdered by having his throat slashed. His body was then thrown from the balloon in full sight of the horrified crowd. Fearing for their lives, screaming passengers leaped from the basket, whereupon the lightened balloon quickly ascended, bearing aloft the helpless woman along with a gentleman who observers say claimed to be the lady’s fiancé.
LIFE AND DEATH STRUGGLE
Witnesses on the ground reported seeing a tremendous struggle between the two men in the basket as the balloon drifted over Cremorne, narrowly avoiding being struck and destroyed by an aerial bombardment during the nightly fireworks display.
IMPALED ON RAILINGS
It is unclear what happened next in the balloon, which was seen to ascend to great altitude above the city of London in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. It appears that the madman was either struck by lightning or fell from the balloon’s basket. His badly burned body was found impaled on railings in front of a private residence in Kensington. The condition of the corpse indicated that the body fell from a great height. The madman in question has been preliminarily identified by the Metropolitan Police as one Doctor Silas Garrette, although this identity is now in question following the discovery of a gruesome murder committed at the said physician’s office in Hogarth Road. Here detectives discovered the grossly mutilated body of Augustus Skinner, a literary critic who wrote for Blackwell’s Gazette. Police now speculate that the true identity of the man is Doctor Jonas Hooke, an army surgeon who served with the 34th Regiment of Foot in Crimea. The police are not revealing the specifics of what they discovered in the doctor’s office, although one officer described it as “a scene of horror,” and as “the lair of a truly diabolical mind.”
CRASHED TO EARTH
The remains of the Cremorne balloon, the Sylph, crashed to earth in a farmer’s field some one hundred and twenty miles away. The survival of the young lady and her male companion is currently in doubt. It is believed they perished when the balloon entered a thundercloud, although no bodies have been reported discovered along the presumed flight path of the balloon.
37
THE NEW SEXTON
Highgate Cemetery, London, 1869.
Algernon and Constance Hyde-Davies strolled along the paths of Highgate as their children, Nathaniel (aged ten) and Rebecca (aged eight), skipped through the leaf-strewn grass, hide-and-seeking behind the grave markers and stone angels, then springing out and shrieking as they surprised each other.
“Rebecca! Nathaniel!” Constance called out. “Mama wishes you to stay near!”
As they rounded the curving path, they noticed an elderly gentleman pushing a bath chair fitted with tight-shuttered curtains.
“Good lord!” Algernon said. “I believe I know this fellow.”
The pathway was narrow and eventually the two parties converged. Although a decade had passed, Algernon instantly recognized the man, much
older and grayer, the once-rigid back now stooped by time.
“Mister Greenley.”
The man stopped upon hearing his name. His eyes flickered over Algernon’s face. Recognition was instant. He seemed a little suspicious of meeting his former superior, but the presence of Constance and the children visibly softened his demeanor.
“Mister Hyde-Davies, sir.”
The two shook hands.
“This is my wife, Constance, and my children, Nathaniel and Rebecca.”
“Say hello, children,” Constance said.
The girl clung to her mother’s skirts, suddenly bashful while Nathaniel bowed smartly from the waist and said, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Do you have a monkey in the basket?” Rebecca asked, looking at the enclosed bath chair.
“Rebecca!” Constance snapped. “Where are your manners, young madam?”
The young girl looked hurt. “I am sorry, Mama.”
Greenley unfastened and drew aside the curtain. The children peered into the dark bath chair and even Algernon and Constance craned forward.
Inside they saw a slender girl of around the same age as Nathaniel. She was very beautiful, if extremely pale. A delicate tracery of veins showed faintly at each temple. She had her mother’s long auburn hair but the violet eyes were striking.
“I should like you to meet Hope Aurelia Thraxton, daughter of Lord Geoffrey Thraxton and Aurelia Thraxton,” Greenley said with deep pride in his voice.
“Hello,” said the pale little girl. She smiled as her eager gaze swept over them. For both Constance and Algernon there was something uncanny about the young face.
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