by Andy Conway
Daniel felt his legs thickening, becoming leaden. One last effort. He fell in alongside the carriage, the rear wheel spinning within reach. He calculated the jump. It was impossible. And it was pulling further away with each moment. Another three seconds and it would be gone.
He closed his eyes and jumped.
He thought he might bounce off the door and be crushed under the wheels. He opened his eyes to find himself hanging off the rear baggage trap, his feet treading air.
There was no way he could have made it. He must have grown wings and flown.
He clawed his way up the baggage trap till he got a foothold. In moments he was crouching on the roof staring at the back of Turner’s head as the Clarence swerved into Pinfold Street and lurched down the steep hill. He held on.
Bury’s trap was just ahead. His carriage was lighter and should have been faster, but the two horses that pulled the Clarence were bigger and healthier and had more power than the ill-fed nag that pulled Bury’s Victoria.
They gained and pulled alongside it as they thundered down Pinfold Street.
Daniel tried to stand, knees bent, arms out, surfing the air, and glanced across. He could jump.
Another violent explosion tore the air.
He saw Bury flinch and a window explode behind him. Arthur had tried to shoot him.
Daniel saw the great glass roof of New Street Station, swollen like a whale rising from the sea, and was surprised momentarily, seeing it from such an angle.
The air cracked and a sharp pain spat across his face. He fell to one knee, still holding on. Bury leered and swung his whip back to try again.
He knew he had two seconds to make his leap. It was madness. It was impossible. He would die if he jumped. The steel of the horses hooves ringing on stone below.
Daniel leapt.
He heard Tom cry, “Don’t shoot!”
He saw Bury’s glare of shock, drawing back the whip, just as he smashed into him.
Bury turned and Daniel flew over. In an instant he saw himself fly off and into the blur of wall, but he gripped Bury’s arm and felt his body slam back into the side of the trap, the wheel skimming against his leg and burning a hole through his trousers.
He screamed as it seared his skin, reached out and grabbed Bury’s shoulder. Bury flinched back and pulled Daniel with him, away from the wheel and onto the seat of the trap.
The Victoria swerved right across the path of the Clarence. Daniel caught sight of Turner’s startled face as the wheels kissed each other, locked and then exploded.
They dropped and lurched to the right and he saw they were going to roll off under the horses’ hooves. He yanked Bury over with him, the killer somersaulting above him and found himself on top of him, pinning him down on the edge of the broken Victoria, a shower of sparks blinding them both.
The smaller coach wheeled round and brought the horses down and the Clarence toppled on its side and they were suddenly a great snarl of coaches and horses sliding down the hill.
Bury flew from Daniel’s grasp, rolling out and beyond the insane tangle of screaming horses. For a few moments Daniel was lost in an explosion of wood, metal and the cries of men and horses, and he thought this is the moment of my death. I will see my whole life flash before me and finally I’ll know who I was.
But nothing flashed before his eyes.
Everything went black.
43
AN IMAGE SWAM OUT OF the blackness, faint at first, indistinct, blurred like a watercolour wash. Then he saw what it was.
It was the girl from his paintings. The girl called Rachel. He knew her. She was his friend. She was his enemy. She was a friend that had become an enemy.
She was the girl he’d tried to kill.
A blast of cold air soothed him. A white fog all around. He was at a railway station. The one in his dreams. Is this a dream?
No, he was at the station at the end of time.
His name was Danny, not Daniel, and he was on his knees, coughing up an ocean, a shipwreck survivor wanting to die on the beach.
The girl called Rachel pulled him up. He had no more strength. She had defeated him.
This was a memory, not a dream. This had happened. This had happened before he’d appeared on that lonely road leading to Moseley village in 1873. This was where he’d come from. This was his secret beyond the fog of amnesia.
Maybe he was dying. Maybe his life was flashing before his eyes.
“You did this,” Rachel said. “You created this mess from your own selfishness. I told you, right at the start, but you wouldn’t listen. You had to have her.”
“I couldn’t let her die,” he said.
Who? Whom had he saved? Arabella?
“Don’t tell me you did it for her! You did it for you. You did everything for you.”
A howl of pain came from him and he knew it all suddenly. He was Danny Pearce. He had lived in 2011 and had discovered a portal to another time — the touchstone — he had saved a girl called Amy Parker from death. It had wiped out Rachel’s life. And this was the moment where she’d punished him, made him see what he’d done, the mess he’d made of it all.
“You have to go now,” Rachel said. “You have to go to a place where you can do no more harm.”
“Just kill me,” he said. And he had meant it. He’d truly wanted to die.
“No,” she said. “You have to live with it.”
She lifted his face to her, placed her fingers to his lips. Her palm sparked with fire, a single flame glowing and growing. It bloomed into a ball of light, a shimmering sphere of fire that grew and grew, all Christmassy gold and radiant with love and it broke his heart to see it, as if it was the very heart of the world, the light of the world. It was so beautiful, so bewitching, that he could only gaze into its incandescent heart, entranced.
It grew and grew until it consumed him. He was standing in firelight that licked and danced all around him, burning, lost in flame, with no fear.
And then he was hurtling through decades of light to a place where he could do no harm.
Banished.
To open his eyes and find himself looking to his left at the mile or more of dirt road receding. A beautiful morning in the countryside, the air so clean you could drink it. He took in giddy mouthfuls and felt serenity seep through to his bones. He thought he should recognize the road, but he couldn’t.
He had woken in 1873 just outside Moseley village.
He was not Daniel Pearce, Victorian artist and teacher. He was Danny Pearce, from the 21st century, lost in time.
He had been lost for fourteen years.
He blinked his eyes open. Darkness. A wheel rolling in the air. Cold stone against his face. He couldn’t move.
I’m not from here at all, he thought. I’m from the future.
It all made sense now. The appalling void of his early years. The visions. The eerie sensations he experienced when he expected something to be there that wasn’t, and never had been there. Those things were yet to come. They had been there for him in his past, but they were now in the future.
I’m Danny Pearce, he thought. I was a spoiled rich kid at university and I discovered how to time travel. I changed the past and messed things up.
And she punished me for it. Rachel. The girl whose life I stole away. I tried to kill her because I’d gone quite mad and she punished me for it.
She sent me here, to this time, with no memory of who I was. It was a punishment, but it was also a kindness. She made me forget that I was bad. She gave me a chance to be someone good.
Rachel was so much more powerful than him. This was why she had haunted his dreams.
She was the touchstone.
He didn’t want to be bad. He didn’t feel evil. He wasn’t. He felt his own goodness. It was the core of him. He felt it deep in his heart, in his marrow. He had turned bad, but that wasn’t him. He wasn’t a killer, like Bury. He wasn’t a monster.
Above all, he thought, almost weeping with relief. He wasn�
�t Jack the Ripper.
He blinked again. Something was running into his eyes. Water? No, blood. Every muscle ached. He was lying in the street. The coaches. They had crashed.
He was still alive.
A smudge of a man blurred towards him, coalescing into a solid, standing over him, slowly coming into focus. It was William Bury.
Jack the Ripper.
Bury looked down on him, swaying like a pendulum, his face bloody too, one arm limp at his side, a knife hanging from his red right hand.
I had the power to control the wind, Danny remembered. I summoned up a hurricane. He remembered how he’d terrorised innocents, a tempest spurting from his fingers.
He raised an arm and pointed at Bury, his finger shaking in the air.
Bury stopped, scared, sensing danger. A gust of wind howled down Pinfold Street. Here it was. A mighty hurricane. Danny could kill a man with it. He could kill Jack the Ripper with it.
The breeze blew Bury back on his feet. He tottered for a moment but held his stance, puzzled, then it died out and all was still again.
Danny pointed again. Please, just this once. I know I can do this.
Bury inched towards him again, the knife glinting in his hand.
Something fell on Danny’s eye and he blinked it away. Then again. Cold. Wet. What was it?
Bury stood still and stared up at the black sky in wonder.
Snow. The summer night’s air over Birmingham was suddenly alive and teeming with millions, billions of snow flakes, whirling, eddying, swirling, falling all around. It was snowing. In July.
Bury stared aghast at the flurry and at Danny, his finger still pointed at him.
Snow, thought Danny. What bloody use is that to anyone?
But it had stopped Bury in his tracks. It had spooked him at least.
“Who are you?” Bury spat. “What are you?”
“You’re Jack,” said Danny. “You’re Jack the Ripper.”
“What’s that?”
This was how it was going to end. He was going to be gutted by Jack the Ripper, a hundred years before he was even born, a month or two before the world learned the name Jack the Ripper, and all he had to defend himself with was snow. He laughed and thought of the phrase a snowball in Hell’s chance. You had to laugh, or you’d cry.
Bury scowled and lurched forward and his grip hardened on his knife, which he drew back, ready to stick it into Danny’s abdomen.
A gunshot.
Bury cowered and ducked away. Danny blinked blood and snowflakes from his eyes.
Had Arthur shot him? Good old Arthur.
He lifted his head, pain shooting through his spine, and saw Bury stumbling away down the street. He hadn’t been shot.
He looked back for Arthur but could only see the cabman, Turner, standing with the revolver in his hand, staring down at a dead horse. He collapsed down beside it, weeping.
With all his might, Danny lifted himself to his feet and stood swaying, dizzy, wiping blood from his eyes, the snow on his face waking him.
Arthur and Tom picked themselves up from the wreckage and surveyed the horror all around, and the astounding, surreal addition of snowfall. In July. Tom could barely stand. Arthur held him up.
Bury was escaping. There was no time to waste. Danny marched over to the kneeling cabman, snatched the revolver from his hand, and set off running down the dark street.
“Daniel! Wait!” Arthur shouted behind him.
Danny didn’t look back. He kept his eyes on the shadow running fifty yards ahead, afraid to look away for even a moment in case he lost him.
Jack the Ripper was heading for New Street Station.
44
THE SHADOW DUCKED LEFT into Stephenson Street and Danny quickened his pace, his breath burning like hot coals in his chest, terrified that when he turned the corner Bury would be nowhere in sight, or might be waiting ready to plunge his knife into Danny the moment he appeared.
He widened the arc at which he took the corner to give himself a better sight, the space opening out on the triangular patch of waste ground that offered a vista of New Street Station ahead.
Bury wasn’t waiting on the corner with his knife drawn.
Stephenson Street shot like a straight arrow across to the station entrance and the grand facade of the Queen’s Hotel. There, forty yards ahead. A shadow stumbling on through the snow, limping slightly. As it passed under a gas lamp he saw it unmistakably as Bury.
He ran on. Chest burning, knees aching. There wasn’t much more of this he could take. His body was beginning to give out, creaking under the strain.
Bury dashed across the central reservation and ran along the face of the Queen’s Hotel.
Danny realized with a disembodied sense of perspective he had been here only yesterday. No, this very morning, walking to work, when all was normal. Before his universe had fallen apart. All in a single day!
Bury ducked right and disappeared into one of the arches into New Street Station. More and more people crowded here all looking out at the freak snowstorm, pointing at the sky and wondering aloud. Danny had to duck and weave and dodge past them.
He came to the arch where Bury had disappeared. The same arch he’d walked right out of this morning. Bury was dashing along the concourse.
Standing on a train platform, pointing a pistol at a clock, fading from sight.
The pistol in his hand.
His dream had brought him to this moment. This was where he would face his destiny. This was the end of it all. He heard a disembodied groan and felt his heart thumping in his throat.
Bury was escaping.
He could let him go. He could walk right back and go live his life with Arabella, if she would still have him, if she would still marry him in the morning. He could stay here and be Daniel Pearce, the artist and teacher. He didn’t have to go to that station platform and face that thing that terrified him. He could choose.
Bury was almost out of sight.
His fingers tightened around the pistol, a moan of animal pain spewed from his throat, he fell forward. And he was running. Under the arch, through the grand concourse and into the station.
The wooden gates of the station barriers ahead. Bury did not slow but jumped over. A guard shouted out in protest. A gentleman pulled his lady closer to him as she cried out in alarm, a gloved hand to her mouth.
Danny came running up behind. The outraged guard stepped forward to meet him, waving his hands. He wondered for an instant whether to punch him. But his fist was wrapped around the pistol. He held it up and the guard’s eyes widened in horror.
“Police!” he shouted.
The guard shrank back and Danny flashed past him, vaulting the barrier like a champion hurdler, and he was running along the wooden footbridge, crowded with passengers, the rows and rows of platforms and hissing trains below, belching out their steam and smoke. Giant adverts for Holbrooks Sauce and Bovril. Above them the gigantic glass vault of the arched roof. He was inside the whale.
No sign of Bury.
A porter pushed past, wheeling a giant packing case. A throng of people emerging from Platform 2, climbing the wooden stairs to the footbridge and pushing past him, a tidal wave repelling him.
He craned to see above the flood of people, looking for the tell tale sign of Bury’s deerstalker hat bobbing along ahead. If Bury was clever he might stop running and simply walk on calmly, camouflaged in the general hubbub of human traffic.
A giant cloud of steam rose from below, obscuring everything. It was no use. He’d lost him.
Flapping his hand and peering desperately through the smog, he scanned the throng.
There. Running down the stairs to Platform 2, a lone figure fighting against the tide, it was Bury, pushing, shoving, causing a commotion. Danny checked the waiting train. Manchester-bound. Surely he would head for London? Or was this now blind panic and he’d take any escape route available?
He pushed through shouting, “Police! Make way!” and it parted the waves.
As he skipped down the steps he saw Bury surging through the sea of passengers crowding the platform. Further and further down the platform he went.
Danny pushed through and ran the length of the platform calling out, “Police! Get out of the way!”
The crowd parted and he saw a clear run at Bury, who was reaching the end of the platform.
A train ahead, pulling in at the speed of an average horse-drawn cart, but fast enough to kill a man.
Bury looked back, saw Danny pursuing. He jumped onto the track.
A woman screamed.
The train rolled through and an angry cloud of steam bloomed all around. He waited, cursing, for the last carriage to pass, but could see nothing through the steam.
He put his lips together and blew. A gust of wind tore across the track and the steam parted, harried, dispersing in a flash.
Bury wasn’t on the tracks or on the next platform. Had the train taken him with it? He looked up the track for a moment. He was gone.
“Daniel!”
Arthur, up there on the footbridge. Arthur and Tom.
“There!” Arthur cried.
He followed the direction to where Arthur pointed across the vast span of the station. Several platforms ahead Bury was running, crossing each track, jumping onto each platform, sprinting across the entire station.
Danny jumped down onto the track, his knees spasming, and tore after him.
A shout of encouragement behind and to his left told him Arthur and Tom were following on the footbridge.
Bury was well ahead of them. Five platforms ahead. Danny kept his eye on him, barely glancing to the side to see if any trains were riding in.
The train to London, Euston, he thought. That’s what he wants. He tried to remember which platform it left from. Had they passed it already?
Bury ran on. No, he wasn’t after the Euston train at all. Where was he heading?
Bury reached the far end of the station, the final platform a dead end. He could run nowhere but along the platform, towards the footbridge. He was slowing now, jogging along with a pathetic jiggling walk, clouds of hot breath coming off his face, like he was a human steam engine struggling up a very steep hill.