Whitechapel Gods

by S. M. Peters

  In the mirror, he saw sweat glistening all over her face. He saw tears bead in the corners of her eyes. “Missy…”

  Her fingers locked around his jaw and pulled his chin upwards.

  “Stay still! There was a man. He told me…He trained me to…”

  The razor finished its last upward stroke. The shave was done.

  “I’m sorry.”

  A sting in his neck. His hands shot up to her arm.

  A pull, cold inside the skin. Yellow and black spraying on the mirror. Fingers around her arm, clutching, pulling, without enough strength.

  The razor bit in, slid, parted skin and flesh and windpipe. A gurgle as his lungs emptied. A warm splash down his shirt. His hands left her arm, wrapped around his own throat. Close it up. Stop it from spilling out.

  A woman screamed. He felt a sudden burning flash behind his eyes and a sudden chill flood from his toes up through his gut. His gasp brought fire into his lungs.

  I had so much left to do.

  He fell forward and spilled his life onto the blankets.

  Chapter 17

  I have scribbled these pages in desperation, as a warning to those who would follow or as a vain grasping for absolution or for a thousand other reasons. I want others to know my truth, and to hear these alien thoughts that encroach upon my mind. I want the world to hear my confession, to know my crime and hate me for it, and condemn me to a right and proper hell.

  I am Faust. So I name myself, and so will I inherit his doom.

  —I. vii

  John Scared was in such a good mood that he poured himself some wine.

  It was a fine rice wine of the Orient, flavoured with peach and aged several decades, though the Siamese who’d sold it to him had been unable to give an exact date. Scared had never intended to drink it, but had brought it back in case it might be useful in wooing an informant. Men of power, after all, appreciated fine things. He’d won Moran over with a bottle of Scottish brandy from ’54.

  Well, perhaps it had been the six thousand pounds, but the brandy had oiled the wheels, certainly.

  He poured the wine into a shimmering crystal goblet of French design and settled into his chair. The familiar curves and upholstery nestled against him. He looked once around his bedroom, bidding adieu to the sanctum that had served him so many years. The traps at the door had been set. If anyone ventured down to find his body, they and any with them would suffer a dozen painful deaths.

  He let the bouquet tickle his nose.

  You’ll never know the pleasure of earthly senses, my dear. A terrible pity.

  Scared had always placed little value in ritual. The repetition of things not only made one vulnerable to prediction, but also dulled the mind into ignoring recurrences in the environment.

  Nothing repeats endlessly, my love. You expect your new husband to be the same as the last. Oh my dearest, I pity you your ignorance.

  But he could not help feeling that some observance was in order. The ending of things needed to be acknowledged, and the beginnings of other things celebrated.

  He sipped the wine, letting the delicate flavour swirl like vapour atop his tongue before opening his throat and letting gravity draw the liquid down. Heavenly. Would that it could be the last thing I taste.

  Of course, the last would be the mei kuan. He eyed the clear bottle where it sat exposed on his closet shelf. Four drops of it, and no more, to swell his consciousness larger than the forces he faced, without killing him outright. He’d calculated it all precisely while in trance that morning.

  The fire in the back of his mind flared and whirled, stinging his old thoughts with its agitation.

  Patience, my love. All was ready: Gisella’s little girl would rid him of his rival; Moran would rid him of the city’s master; his German would release his bride from her vows, and then Penny would do his duty. With a palpable regret, he set the wine aside and took up the liquid gates of heaven.

  Scared uncorked the bottle. Keeping it far from his nose, he dipped an eyedropper inside and filled it to the black mark he had made earlier. Mama Engine’s fire skipped and jolted.

  Ah, the city will shake and crumble to our nuptials, my darling.

  He opened his mouth and squeezed the dropper. Clear liquid splashed over his tongue as the vapours shot into his nose. The world dissolved into a string of equations and fled to the four winds.

  Scared’s body slumped in his chair, and did not breathe.

  Now, it seems to me that while I made you into a whore…

  Missy looked down at the gun hanging limp in her fingers: shining, dull, beautiful, terrifying, ugly.

  …you became a murderess all on your own.

  “It was the hobgoblin man,” she whispered. The words vanished into the smoke around her. The wind blew down from the Stack, stinging her eyes and burning her lungs and she could not care. She had run for hours, blindly, through the Dunbridge maze, to arrive here, at the edge of the tower, with the abyss beneath her and the twinkling lights of Shoreditch taunting her from afar.

  Oh? Then I suppose you went after that handsome German fellow at his beck as well? And what about that perfectly respectable accountant?

  Gisella’s stern face in the haze: her sharp nose and bladed cheeks shimmers of bone white in the shifting ashfall.

  Do you remember how you would wish a man dead when you led him through the bedroom door? Do you remember that silent prayer to God to strike him down?

  Missy looked off the edge of Dunbridge at the factories on the slopes of the Stack. Lights winked out, one by one, at the approach of night.

  Do you remember when you wondered how it would feel to commit the deed yourself?

  Oliver’s face in the mirror: eyes wide, hands grasping, before his spraying blood obscured it all.

  How did it feel, dirty little dog?

  “It was the hobgoblin man,” she said again.

  Was it any hand but yours upon the blade, my child?

  She couldn’t feel this. Couldn’t feel…

  She heard a clattering, and looked down to see her hands shaking, to see the gun bouncing back and forth in her grip. The threat of pure realisation pressed against the cushioning wall of shock. In an instant she would feel it all, and it would destroy her.

  The gun stopped shaking, and rose. Gisella gasped and fixed her with a reproachful scowl.

  What impropriety. Wipe the thought from your mind, child. I’ll have no lady of mine contemplating such nonsense.

  “But…I can put it to an end.”

  You are an arrogant and presumptuous child, to think such a thing.

  The gun retreated and hung loose from her fingers.

  Did running away help, child? Did defying my lessons? Did wishing men dead?

  She could run to the end of the Earth and Gisella’s voice would always be with her. That, and the memory of whom she’d just killed.

  This was your fault she raged, always talking to me inside my head. You drove me to all of this by never giving me a moment’s peace.

  Preposterous. There is only one person in your head, my dear.

  Silence, and Gisella’s face was just a pattern in the ash.

  The memory pressed in, the vast, crushing horror of what she had done. It loomed like a phantasm in the smog, whispering to her.

  She lifted the gun again and drew strength from the steel, until she was hard, cold, unfeeling.

  A dog, then a whore, then a villain.

  Fine.

  Yes, she’d murdered Oliver. She’d cut his throat open like a pig on Sunday. And she’d murdered that other man, stuck him through the chest like a slab of beef. She was a killer. The proof was drying under her fingernails at that moment.

  Then I’ll do as killers do, she thought.

  Because there was someone who needed to be killed.

  And after her, someone else.

  “He will not let you go.”

  It’s my time.

  “They’ve robbed us of that time, Oliver. The child
-god keeps your body for you. He’s not done with either of us.”

  I’m done.

  “You’ve nowhere to go, Oliver. Like me, they deny you your rest.”

  It’s too late.

  “You came to me once, when I thought it was too late. When I was lost, and didn’t know what to do…Do you remember the oath we both took?”

  “Until me meet at St. Peter’s gates, or we drive them from the face of God’s green Earth.” Bailey’s melodramatic drivel. I never really believed in Bailey or this British Empire of his.

  “But you still took the oath.”

  I took the oath so I could join Bailey’s crew, to get access to his funding and resources. I don’t care for England. I don’t care for her queen.

  “You didn’t take the oath for England, Oliver, but you took it with sincerity. I can see that love and loyalty whenever I look at you. Why did you take it?”

  …I took it for Whitechapel.

  “And we’re not at St. Peter’s gates yet, are we?”

  Why are you doing this to me, Aaron? Let me rest.

  “Because I’ve found a way, Oliver. All three of them in one stroke.”

  I don’t believe you.

  “It is you, Oliver. You and only you can bring them low. They’ve each of them sunk their hooks into you and tried to claim you for their own. They’re in you, now. They’re vulnerable.”

  …Are you trying to cheer me up?

  “Am I succeeding?”

  Bastard.

  The instant the door swung open, Bergen’s jungle senses flared and the Gasser leapt into his hands.

  “What is it?” Hews asked from behind.

  Bergen motioned him silent and slunk into the opium den. The first sign that something was wrong was that the den was empty. Every last opium sot had vanished, leaving behind stained blankets, coats, hats, and the foul reek of their presence.

  The second sign was Moore. He sat slumped against the wall, a dark, shivering lump. The Chinese woman stood beside him, arms crossed, ringed fingers flexing. She turned her slanted eyes on Hews as he blundered through the door.

  “My lady,” Hews began in his most congenial tone. The words shrivelled up in the palpable fear of the room. The Chinese woman snapped a few syllables at him in her native tongue.

  Bergen crept up to Thomas. The big man had his knees drawn up to his chest and his face buried in them.

  “What did she say, English?”

  “She’s upset at us.”

  “That much is beyond debate.”

  The Chinese woman yammered some more. Bergen knelt in front of Thomas Moore, pistol ready.

  “She says…” Hews said, the struggle to understand rattling his voice, “that we’ve brought a jiangshi into her house.”

  “What does that mean, Lewis?”

  Bergen tapped Thomas lightly on the shoulder. The man’s block head lifted just enough for him to stare at Bergen with the torn eye, white, drooling fluids.

  “It shouldn’t have been him,” he said.

  One of the partitioned areas at the back of the room moved. Bergen’s eyes snapped up.

  Hews called again over the assault of that woman’s words: “I’m afraid I can’t make out everything she’s…”

  Bergen blocked him out and crept up to the partitioned area. Clear sounds of life slipped past the hanging blanket: a gurgling and wheezing, as of someone drowning in pneumonia. As he pressed up close, the rank stench of vomit struck him.

  Bergen grasped the blanket and flung it aside, jabbing the pistol into the space. A sudden wave of heat forced him back.

  What turned from the mirror to regard him was barely human. Its skin was putrid yellow with green blotches. Its right hand hung pulsing and swollen and leaking pus. A bubbling, crusted wound bisected the neck side to side. The watery red glow of its eyes regarded him.

  The voice had the frailty of a dying man’s and all the ferocity of a demon’s: “About bloody time you got back. We have work to do.”

  The Final Night

  I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

  —Robert Frost

  Chapter 18

  My people will call me a great man, will call me a High Priest and revere me above all others. They will not call me coward. They will not call me failure. They will not even whisper against me in secret. To them, I will always be First Among the Chosen.

  I. xvii

  The clocks had ticked for ages beyond counting. They had ticked in the aether between worlds. They had ticked in the minds of the dull and pedant creatures of the primeval swamps. They had ticked in the tortured brain of a young architect, crippled by drink and shame and guilt. And finally he had built them of wood and metal and they ticked for the hearing of all men.

  Atlas Hume stood in the Church of Measured Time and listened to the last hours of Grandfather Clock’s life.

  The rhythm had already begun to break. Five of a thousand coordinated sounds had fallen a fraction of a second behind. Pendulums swung out of phase, their arcs getting farther and farther apart. It was harmony seeping away from the Great Machine, as it turned its attention to the assault of its accursed child.

  He spoke, to the clocks or to his lost soul: “The wind blows on the flowers at their edges, and they bow to its beck and smile no more at the sun.”

  Perhaps he should have been afraid, but like those souls he’d condemned to the empty iron suits of the Boiler Men, he had been carved hollow. He, like those others, was denied the serenity of eternal repose, and likewise the restless clamouring of the unruly ghost. There was nothing in him—not heat or cold, not silence or noise, not motion or stillness. He was a great void infinite in measure and bounded only by the iron strips of his own skull.

  Yet in that void, tears fell.

  The British were coming. Beyond the walls, the English army loaded their guns, having seen the trembling sky above Whitechapel, and felt the change in the wind. And inside the walls, the servants of the crown approached, bearing death for the immortal.

  The tears were for Grandfather Clock. The tears were for himself.

  “God creates only the day, and the grasses wither in the heat, and the beasts never know rest. God creates only the night, and the grasses never grow, and the beasts stumble about in blindness.”

  He’d known it would be his decision, when he had agreed to take them into his mind. It was his price for the gift of void they had given him. They had carved his pain and sorrows away and left nothing behind. And now no true man remained to choose between life and death.

  Yet a decision must be made.

  Scared had spoken the only truth he could now believe: it was all madness.

  With measured movements, he opened a leather folder that lay on the featureless marble altar. He ran his white gloves over well-used loose sheets, with strange symbols scrawled in a messy and desperate hand. These were his words, a record of the nightmare visions suffered by a lone man sixty-six years ago.

  It was a man he had once been, but had chosen not to be.

  Since that day he had been a vessel for forces beyond his ken, acting as an extension of two conflicting wills. He had been a tool since that long-ago day, and had never had to choose.

  He chose now.

  The call went out through the void. His soundless thoughts traveled to all those other empty spaces that touched his own emptiness, stirring them to life. Metal feet thundered as they stepped down from their pedestals, row upon endless row. Iron fingers grasped rifles, flashers, and steam guns, readying and loading in perfect unison. Those thousands of feet began to march—left, right, left, right—up secret stairs no human eye had ever seen, rising from where the supports of the Stack ground into foundations of the Earth.

  His soldiers, giving their allegiance to the only creature emptier than themselves.

  Atlas Hume closed the folder. He decided he must be a man again.

  Oliver’s body didn’t hurt anymore; the pair of gods that i
nhabited him had made certain of that. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t in pain.

  He played that last vision over and over, scrutinizing Missy’s expression. The memory was frantic, and difficult to look at, but he recalled her terror as strongly as his own. Was it hope distorting truth? Did he remember it that way because he couldn’t bear to think she could actually…

  “Sumner. Stay with us.”

  The German.

  “I’m fine,” Oliver said. His throat stretched as he pushed air through it. Moments after the cut, white ichor had rushed into the wound from some unknown part of his body. It had saved his life, but had congealed in thick welts that restricted his throat and windpipe. His voice echoed in his own ears as if off metal plates.

  “We’re returning with you to Shadwell. Chestle will treat you.”

  Oliver shook his head.

  Hews, standing over the German’s shoulder: “None of that, lad. You need attention.”

  “We can’t go back,” Oliver said. “Heckler destroyed the lift.”

  Bergen and Hews both gaped.

  “It was my order; to slow the Boiler Men down.”

  Hews rubbed his muttonchops. “You weren’t planning on going back, then?”

  “I reasoned,” Oliver said, “that either we would finish what we came to do and could take our time returning, or we wouldn’t return.”

  Hews nodded sagely. So did Bergen.

  Really, I thought we might all die.

  The memory of a stinging line crossing his throat burned into him, blotting out his senses.

  Maybe one of us did.

  Missy smiling, Missy chewing, the razor, the shave. He’d been a fool. He’d felt it coming, and he hadn’t trusted himself to act on that feeling. He’d known Missy wasn’t right at that moment. Maybe it wasn’t her doing.

  Or maybe she played me just as well as she played everyone else.

  “Sumner!”

  Oliver snapped back—the den, the crew, the mission.

  “Sorry,” he said. He tried to rise from the bed of blankets, but strength had left him. “What about your mechanic?”