Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  Another tart, perhaps, or a footpad out to pinch what he didn’t any longer possess. Alarm flared slowly through his drunken haze. He started to turn—but it was far too late. A blow from something heavy smashed across his skull from behind. Light exploded behind his eyes in a detonation of pain and terror. Unable even to cry out, he crumpled straight down into darkness.

  As Morgan toppled toward the filthy alley, a wiry man in his early thirties, dark-skinned with the look of Eastern Europe in his narrow face and eyes and dark moustaches, caught him under the arms. This second man grunted softly, curling his lip at the reek of alcohol and sweat which rose from the boy’s grimy, once fancy clothes. This was no time, however, for fastidiousness. He twisted the boy around with a practiced jerk and heaved the dead weight over one shoulder. A swift glance told him the thick fog and darkness of the narrow alleyway had concealed the attack from any chance observation.

  Well, Johnny my boy, he smiled to himself, you’ve made a good start. Now to finish this pathetic little cockerel. Dr. John Lachley was as pleased with the enshrouding yellow murk as he was with his swift handiwork and the drunken little fool he’d trailed all evening, who’d finally wandered so conveniently close to a place he could strike. He’d feared he might have to trail the boy all the way back to the filthy hole he’d been living in, on the first floor of a ramshackle, abandoned warehouse along the docks, so dilapidated and dangerous it was in the process of being torn down.

  Quite a come-down, eh, pretty Morgan?

  Dark-haired, dark-eyed, darker-souled, John Lachley moved deeper into the darkness of the alleyway, staggering slightly under his burden until he found his new center of balance. The alley was narrow, clotted with rubbish and stench. A rat’s eyes gleamed briefly in the foggy gloom. A street—little wider than the alley he followed—appeared through the murk. He turned to his right, moving toward the invisible docks a mere three blocks away, which were concealed from sight by grim warehouses and tumble-down shacks. Their bricks leaned drunkenly in the night, whole chunks of their walls missing in random patterns of darkness and swirling, jaundiced eddies.

  John Lachley’s clothes, little cleaner than those of his victim, revealed very little about their current owner; neither did the dark cloth cap he wore pulled low over his eyes. During daylight, his was a face that might well be recognized, even here, where many years ago Johnny Anubis had once been a household name, sought out by the poorest fishwives in search of hope; but in the darkness, in such rough clothing, even a man of his . . . notoriety . . . might go unremarked.

  He smiled and paused at the entrance to one of the soot-streaked blocks of ramshackle flats. An iron key from his pocket unlocked a shabby wooden door. He cast a glance overhead and spotted the waning horns of the sickle-shaped moon. He smiled again. “Lovely night for scything, Lady,” he said softly to the sharp-edged crescent. “Grant me success in mine, eh?”

  Sulphurous fog drifted across the faintly glowing horns of that wicked sickle, seeming almost to catch and tear on the sharp points. He smiled again; then ducked inside, swung his victim’s legs and head clear, and locked the door behind him. He needed no light to navigate the room, for it contained nothing but coal dust and scattered bits of refuse. A savage barking erupted from the darkness of the next room, sounding like every hound in hell had been loosed. Lachley spoke sharply. “Garm!”

  The barking subsided into low growls. Heaving his burden into a slightly more comfortable position on his shoulder, John Lachley entered the next room and swung shut another heavy door which he located by feel alone. Here he paused to grope along the wall for the gas light. The gas lit with a faint hiss and pop; dim light sprang up. The windowless brick walls were barren, the floor covered with a cheap rug. A wooden bed frame with a thin cotton tick stood along one wall. A battered dry sink held a jug and basin, a lantern, and a grimy towel. An equally battered clothes press leaned drunkenly in one corner. The chained dog crouched at the center of the room stopped growling and thumped its tail in greeting.

  “Have a pleasant evening, Garm?” he addressed the dog, retrieving a meat pie from one pocket, which he unwrapped from its greasy newspaper wrapping. He tossed it carelessly to the huge black hound. The dog bounded to its feet and snatched the food mid-air, wolfing it down in one bite. Had anyone besides himself entered this room, the dog would have shredded them to gobbets. Garm had earned his meat pies on more than one occasion.

  Lachley dumped his victim onto the bed, then pulled back the rug and prised up a wooden trap door cut into the floorboards. He heaved this to one side, lit the lantern and set it beside the gaping hole in the floor, then retrieved the unconscious boy from the bed and shouldered his inert burden once again. He paused when he approached the edge and felt downward with one foot, finding the top step of a steep, narrow staircase. Lachley descended cautiously into darkness, retrieving his lantern as he moved downward. A wet, fetid smell of mold and damp brick rose to meet him.

  Light splashed across a clammy wall where a rusty iron hook protruded from the discolored bricks. He hung the lantern on this, then reached up and dragged the trapdoor back into place. It settled with a scrape and hollow bang. Dust sifted down into his hair and collar, peppering his clothes as well as his victim’s. He dusted off his palms, brushed splinters from a sleeve, then rescued his lantern from its hook and continued the descent. His feet splashed at the bottom. Wavering yellow light revealed an arched, circular brick tunnel through the bowels of Wapping, stretching away into blackness in either direction. The filthy brick was chipped and mottled with algae and nameless fungi. He whistled softly as he walked, listening to the echoes spill away like foam from a mug of dark ale.

  As Lachley paralleled the invisible Thames, other tunnels intersected the one he’d entered. The sound of rushing water carried through the sepulchral darkness from underground streams and buried rivers—the Fleet River, which had blown up in 1846 from the trapped rancid and fetid gasses beneath the pavements, so toxic was the red muck leaking from the tanneries above; the once-noble Walbrook, which ran through the heart of the City of London; and River Tyburn, which had lent its name to the triple-tree where convicts were hanged at the crossroads—each of them was now confined beneath London’s crowded, filthy streets, churning and spilling along their former courses as major sewers dumping into the mighty Thames.

  John Lachley ignored the distant roar of water as he ignored the sewer stench permeating the tunnels. He listened briefly to the echoes of his footfalls mingle with the squeals of rats fighting over a dead dog’s corpse and the distant sound of mating cats. At length, he lifted his lantern to mark the exact spot where the low entrance loomed. He ducked beneath a dripping brick arch, turned sharp left, and emerged in a narrow, coffin-sized space set with a thick iron door. An brass plaque set into it bore the legend “Tibor.”

  Since the word was not English, the owner of this door had little fear of its meaning being deciphered should anyone chance to stumble across the hidden chamber. Lachley was not Hungarian by birth, but he knew the Slavic tongues and more importantly, their legends and myths, had studied them almost since boyhood. It amused him to put a name that meant “holy place” on the door of his private retreat from workaday London and its prosaic, steam-engine mentality.

  Another key retrieved from a coat pocket grated in the lock; then the stout door swung noiselessly open, its hinges well oiled against the damp. His underground Tibor welcomed him home with a rush of dark, wet air and the baleful glow of perpetual fire from the gas jet he, himself, had installed, siphoning off the requisite fuel from an unsuspecting fuel company’s gas mains. Familiar sights loomed in the dim chamber: vaulted ceiling bricks stained with moss and patchy brown mold; the misshapen form of gnarled oak limbs from the great, dead trunk he’d sawn into sections, hauled down in pieces, and laboriously fitted back together with steel and iron; the eternal gas fire blazing at its feet from an altar-mounted nozzle; huddled cloaks and robes and painted symbols which crawled across th
e walls, speaking answers to riddles few in this city would have thought even to ask; a sturdy work table along one wall, and wooden cabinets filled with drawers and shelves which held the paraphernalia of his self-anointed mission.

  The reek of harsh chemicals and the reverberations of long-faded incantations, words of power and dominion over the creatures he sought to control, spoken in all-but-forgotten ancient tongues, bade him welcome as he stepped once more across the threshold and re-entered his own very private Tibor. He dumped his burden carelessly onto the work table, heedless of the crack of his victim’s head against the wooden surface, and busied himself. There was much to do. He lit candles, placed them strategically about the room, stripped off his rough working clothes and donned the ceremonial robes he was always careful to leave behind in this sanctuary.

  White and voluminous, a mockery of priestly vestments, and hooded with a deep and death-pale hood which covered half his face when he lowered it down, the semi-Druidic robes had been sewn to his specifications years previously by a sweatshop seamstress who had possessed no other way to pay for the divinations she’d come to him to cast for her. He slipped into the robes, shook back the deep hood for now, and busied himself with the same efficient industry which had brought him out of the misery of the streets overhead and into the life he now sought to protect at all cost.

  John Lachley searched the boy’s appallingly filthy, empty pockets, then felt the crackle of paper beneath Morgan’s shirt. When he stripped off his victim, a sense of triumph and giddy relief swept through him: Morgan’s letters were tucked into the waistband of his trousers, the foolscap sheets slightly grimy and rumpled. Each had been folded into a neat packet. He read them, curious as to their contents, and damned Albert Victor for a complete and bumbling fool. Had these letters come into the hands of the proper authorities . . .

  Then he reached the end and stared at the neatly penned sheets of foolscap.

  There were only four letters.

  John Lachley tightened his fist down, crushing the letters in his hand, and blistered the air. Four! And Eddy had said there were eight! Where had the little bastard put the other half of the set? All but shaking with rage, he forced himself to close his fists around empty air, rather than the unconscious boy’s throat. He needed to throttle the life out of this little bastard, needed to inflict terror and ripping, agonizing hurt for daring to threaten him, Dr. John Lachley, advisor to the Queen’s own grandson, who should one day sit the throne in Victoria’s stead . . .

  With a snarl of rage, he tossed Morgan’s clothing into a rubbish bin beneath the work table for later burning, then considered how best to obtain the information he required. A slight smile came to his lips. He bound the lad’s hands and feet, then heaved him up and hauled him across the chamber to the massive oak tree which dominated the room, its gnarled branches supported now by brackets in ceiling and walls.

  He looped Morgan’s wrist ropes over a heavy iron hook embedded in the wood and left him dangling with his toes several inches clear of the floor. This done, he opened cabinet doors and rattled drawers out along their slides, laying out the ritual instruments. Wand and cauldron, dagger, pentacle, and sword . . . each with meanings and ritual uses not even those semi-serious fools Waite and Mathers could imagine in their fumbling, so-called studies. Their “Order of the Golden Dawn” had invited him to join, shortly after its establishment last year. He had accepted, naturally, simply to further his contacts in the fairly substantial social circles through which the order’s various members moved; but thought of their so-called researches left him smiling. Such simplicity of belief was laughable.

  Next he retrieved the ancient Hermetic deck with its arcane trumps, a symbolic alphabetical key to the terrible power of creation and transformation locked away aeons previously in the pharoahonic Book of Thoth. After that came the mistletoe to smear the blade, whose sticky sap would ensure free, unstaunchable bleeding . . . and the great, thick-bladed steel knife with which to take the trophy skull . . . He had never actually performed such a ritual, despite a wealth of knowledge. His hands trembled from sheer excitement as he laid out the cards, mumbling incantations over them, and studied the pattern unfolding. Behind him, his victim woke with a slow, wretched groan.

  It was time.

  He purified the blade with fire, painted mistletoe sap across its flat sides and sharp edge, then lifted his sacred, deep white hood over his hair and turned to face his waiting victim. Morgan peered at him through bloodshot, terrified eyes. Morgan’s throat worked, but no sound issued from the boy’s bloodless lips. He stepped closer to the sweating, naked lad who hung from Odin’s sacred oak, its gnarled branches twisting overhead to touch the vaulted brick ceiling. A ghastly sound broke from his prisoner’s throat. Morgan twisted against the ropes on his wrists, to no avail.

  Then Lachley shook back his hood and smiled into the lad’s eyes.

  Blue eyes widened in shock. “You!” Then, terror visibly lashing him, Morgan choked out, “What—what’d I ever do to you, Johnny? Please . . . you got Eddy for yourself, why d’you want to hurt me now? I already lost my place in the house—“

  He backhanded the little fool. Tears and blood streamed. “Sodding little ponce! Blackmail him, will you?”

  Morgan whimpered, the terror in his eyes so deep they glazed over, a stunned rabbit’s eyes. John Lachley let out a short, hard laugh. “What a jolly little fool you are, Morgan. And look at you now, done up like a kipper!” He caressed Morgan’s bruised, wet face. “Did you think Eddy wouldn’t tell me? Poor Eddy . . . Hasn’t the brains God gave a common mollusk, but Eddy trusts me, bless him, does whatever I tell him to.” He chuckled. “Spiritualist advisor to the future King of England. I’m at the front of a very long line of men, little Morgan, standing behind the rich and powerful, whispering into their ears what the stars and the gods and the spirits from beyond the grave want them to say and do and believe. So naturally, when our distraught Eddy received your message, he came straight to my doorstep, begging me to help him hush it all up.”

  The lad trembled violently where he dangled from the ropes, not even bothering to deny it. Not that denial would have saved him. Or even spared him the pain he would suffer before he paid the price for his schemes. Terror gleamed in Morgan’s eyes, dripped down his face with the sweat pouring from his brow. Dry lips worked. His voice came as a cracked whisper. “W-what do you want? I swear, I’ll leave England, go back to Cardiff, never whisper a word . . . I’ll even sign on as deck hand for a ship out to Hong Kong . . .”

  “Oh, no, my sweet little Morgan,” Lachley smiled, bending closer. “Hardly that. Do you honestly think the man who controls the future King of England is so great a fool as that?” He patted Morgan’s cheek. “The first thing I want, Morgan, is the other four letters.”

  He swallowed sharply. “H-haven’t got them—“

  “Yes, I know you haven’t got them.” He brushed a fingertip down Morgan’s naked breastbone. “Who has got them, Morgan? Tell me and I may yet make it easier for you.”

  When Morgan hesitated, Lachley slapped him, gently.

  The boy began shaking, crying. “She—she was going to tell the constables—I hadn’t any money left, all I had was the letters—gave her half of them to keep her quiet—“

  “Who?” The second blow was harder, bruising his fair skin.

  “Polly!” The name was wrenched from him. He sobbed it out again, “Polly Nichols . . . filthy, drunken tart . . .”

  “And what will Polly Nichols do with them, eh?” he asked, twisting cruelly a sensitive bit of Morgan’s anatomy until the boy cried out in sharp protest. “Show them to all her friends? How much will they want, eh?”

  “Wouldn’t—wouldn’t do any good, all she has is my word they’re worth anything—“

  He slapped Morgan again, hard enough to split his lips. “Stupid sod! Do you honestly think she won’t read your pitiful letters? You are a fool, little boy. But don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I am!”<
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  Morgan was shaking his head frantically. “No, Johnny, no, you don’t understand, she can’t read them! They’re not in English!”

  Surprise left John Lachley momentarily speechless. “Not in English?” It came out flat as a squashed tomato. “What do you mean, not in English? Eddy doesn’t have the intelligence to learn another language. I’m surprised the dear boy can speak his own, let alone a foreign one. Come, now, Morgan, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  Morgan was crying again. “You’ll see, I’ll get them for you, Johnny, I’ll show you, they’re not in English, they’re in Welsh, his tutor helped him—“

  He backhanded the sniveling liar. Morgan’s head snapped violently sideways.

  “Don’t play me for a fool!”

  “Please,” Morgan whimpered, bleeding from cut lips and a streaming nose, “it’s true, why would I lie to you now, Johnny, when you promised you wouldn’t hurt me again if I told you the truth? You have to believe me, please . . .”

  John Lachley was going to enjoy coercing the truth from this pathetic little liar.

  But Morgan wasn’t done blubbering yet. His eyes, a watery blue from the tears streaming down his face, were huge and desperate as he babbled out, “Eddy told me about it, right after he sent the first one in Welsh, asked me if I liked his surprise. He thought it was a grand joke, because the ever-brilliant Mr. James K. Stephen—“ it came out bitter, jealous, sounding very much, in fact, like Eddy “—was always so smart and learned things so easily and made sure Eddy was laughed at all through Cambridge, because everybody but a few of the dons knew it was Mr. James K. Stephen writing Eddy’s translations in Latin and Greek for him, so Eddy could copy them out correctly in his own hand! He told me about it, how much he paid dear Jamesy for each translation his tutor did for him while they were still at Cambridge! So when Eddy wanted to write letters nobody else could read, he got the doting Mr. James K. Stephen to help him translate those for him, too, paid him ten sovereigns for each letter, so he wouldn’t whisper about them afterwards . . .”