by Mark Morris
I’d turned off Old Street, close to where the railway station would open for business in a few years’ time, and was moving along yet another stinking, high-walled alleyway, when I sensed movement behind me. I turned, my fist tightening on the butt of the howdah – and saw a small, hunched, ragged figure silhouetted in the glimmer of murky light at the end of the alleyway.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out the figure more clearly. There was something wrong with the lower half of its face. It appeared almost exaggeratedly lantern-jawed, and above the filthy scarf wrapped around its neck, I detected a dull gleam of metal.
‘Well, well, look who it is,’ rasped a voice behind me. ‘You’re a bit far from ’ome, ain’tcha?’
I whirled round again. A man had appeared at the other end of the alley, more dark figures crowding behind him. In the murky December light they appeared almost simian, their hunched bodies bulked out by the layers of ragged clothing they wore to combat the winter cold.
The man who’d spoken walked forward slowly, his thick, scabby lips stretched wide in a grin that revealed a mouthful of black and rotten teeth. His face was craggy, its deep grooves ingrained with dirt, and one of his eyes was milky and bloodshot. He wore a battered bowler hat pushed back on his head and a long, grey, woollen coat that looked and smelled as if it had been trampled by pigs in a sty.
I knew this man. I’d first encountered him in my own time when he’d stepped from a newly formed cloud of yellow smog on the platform at Bank Tube Station and had cut the throat of the person I’d thought was Clover, but who’d turned out to be a shape-shifter working for the Wolves of London.
‘Mr Hulse,’ I said. ‘I was on my way to see you.’
Hulse’s grin widened. ‘Oh, I knows it. Nothing escapes my notice round these parts. Me and the boys thought we’d come and meet yer, save yer shoe leather. Save yer throat too, more than likely. These are perilous streets fer gentlemen such as yerself. There are some shocking coves about.’
I chuckled. ‘How goes it?’
‘Oh, we has had a bountiful Christmas. Bountiful indeed. Ain’t that right, boys?’
His cronies hooted and chortled.
‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, stepping forward to meet Hulse as he swaggered towards me, his hand outstretched.
The hand in question, scarred and filthy, the fingernails either black or missing entirely, was often to be seen wielding a vicious rusty-bladed knife. It was a hand which I knew had committed murder on more than one occasion – yet I grasped it now without hesitation and gave it a firm shake.
One of my first tasks after recovering from the smoke inhalation which had laid me low after arriving here had been to seek out Hulse and offer him a deal. It was a massive risk, but I’d thought about it a lot, and had spent hours talking it through with Clover and Hawkins, discussing all the angles and pitfalls.
I had a theory, you see; a theory to do with the mutability of time. As I’ve said, when I first encountered Hulse he appeared from a cloud of smog at Bank Tube Station and cut the throat of a shape-shifter which had been impersonating Clover, presumably in the hope of catching me unawares and stealing the obsidian heart. The second time I’d met him had been the first time I’d found myself in Victorian London, immediately after what I’d thought was Clover’s murder. On that occasion I’d sought Hulse out, confronted him on his own turf, and received a beating for my troubles. The third time we’d met had been back in my own time, when Hulse had appeared in a police interview room and slashed DI Jensen’s throat, minutes after I’d been forced to hand the heart over as evidence relating to the inquiry into the murder of its original owner, Barnaby McCallum…
Here was where it got complicated.
What if (I’d thought to myself) my first encounter with Hulse had not been his first encounter with me? What if his first encounter with me was my second encounter with him? I remembered how he’d denied all knowledge of Clover’s murder, how he’d responded to my accusations as though he’d never seen or heard of either of us before. He and his cronies had chased me, and when they’d caught me they’d given me a pounding, and might even have killed me if the heart hadn’t zapped me back to the twenty-first century.
But what if, on that occasion, they’d been acting on impulse rather than carrying out the orders of the Wolves of London? Hulse and his men were thieves and cut-throats, and to them my appearance would have instantly identified me as a fish out of water – and probably a rich one at that.
Perhaps, then, they’d merely seen me as easy pickings, and had acted accordingly. It was only because of ‘Clover’s’ murder that I’d assumed they were working for the Wolves of London – but what if they weren’t? What if the Hulse who had slashed the false Clover’s throat was from a later time period?
And if that was the case, then who was to say that I myself hadn’t sent him forward through time to kill the false Clover before she – or rather, it – could kill me? What if Hulse was my agent? On my payroll? His later murder of DI Jensen was harder to explain, but I had a few theories about that as well.
What if the Jensen who Hulse had killed was not the real Jensen? What if he too was a shape-shifter – or the same shape-shifter? I’d already seen evidence that the shape-shifter could survive the physical death of offshoots of itself without suffering any apparent ill effects. So what if the Jensen who had interviewed me (and the one I’d encountered in Jensen’s office stealing the obsidian heart minutes later) had been an offshoot of the shape-shifter whose task had been to procure the heart? If so, then it was possible that Hulse was following my orders. After all, without his intervention I would have been too late to catch Jensen number two in the act of stealing the heart, and therefore wouldn’t have leaped at him, grappled with him, crashed through the window, and ended up here.
The implications made my head spin, but ultimately it was all about cause and effect. It was also about making what I did know work for me as best I could.
‘So what brings a refined gent like yerself to such a lowly quarter as this?’ Hulse leered. ‘Tired of living, is yer?’
Before I could reply I felt something nudge me from behind. I turned to find the figure that had followed me into the alley had now crept forward and was standing right behind me. He was bent over like a hunchbacked old man, gently bumping his head against my thigh.
Hulse laughed. ‘Likes yer, does little Tom. One of his favourites, you are.’
I smiled and placed my hand on the boy’s shoulder. His bones were as thin as a sparrow’s beneath his ragged clothes.
‘Hello, Tom,’ I said.
Tom wasn’t the name the boy had been given at birth, but it was as good as any. In fact, the boy hadn’t been named at all – not as far as any of us knew. It was Hulse who had started calling him ‘Tom’ after Tom Thumb, on account of him being so scrawny.
Tom never spoke, but when he was happy he made a huffing noise that seemed to come from deep inside his lungs. He was making the noise now, and at the same time tilting his head up in little jerks to peer shyly at me. His eyes were a velvety black beneath his long, matted fringe, and I tried to focus my attention on them, even though my gaze, as always, was drawn to the lower half of his face.
Like Hope, Tom had been one of Tallarian’s experiments – one of only two I’d managed to release from the doctor’s laboratory before the place had gone up in smoke. Tallarian had removed Tom’s lower jaw and replaced it with a large, ugly, hinged contraption inset with jagged metal teeth, like the scoop of a digger. The flesh, where the metal had fused into it, was horribly infected, though the same doctor who I’d employed to treat Hope had done his best – and was still doing his best – to keep the infection at bay.
Personally I would have preferred Tom, like Hope, to have moved permanently into my house in Ranskill Gardens, where it was clean and warm, and where he could have received round-the-clock care. But after finding him – thanks to my watchers – living rough in the East End, we’d tried that and it
hadn’t worked. The boy had been so unsettled that he’d refused point-blank to eat and had kept running away, despite the kindness shown him by Mrs Peake and her staff. In fact, he had been so unsettled (though never violent; despite my first encounter with him, Tom was a timid soul) that eventually, reluctantly, I’d had to let him return to the filthy streets of the East End, where he seemed happiest. I couldn’t leave him to fend for himself, though, and so I’d paid Hulse to watch out for him and keep him safe. I’d also insisted he bring Tom to a pre-arranged rendezvous point for regular medical check-ups.
Hulse might not have been the ideal guardian and role model, but Tom seemed to be doing okay. He seemed to be thriving, in fact, despite his skinny frame and the infection eating away at his face. As he nuzzled into me, Hulse said, ‘Scratch him behind the ears, mister. He likes that.’
Perhaps it was the way the men behind Hulse snickered that made me feel a sudden stab of anger. Looking at Hulse, I said coldly, ‘He’s a human being, not a dog.’
Instantly Hulse stiffened and his grin disappeared. Suddenly I was reminded that for all his rough-hewn amiability, this man could be volatile, unpredictable. I might be his current meal ticket, but I always got the impression that I had to tread carefully around him, that he was capable of lashing out on impulse if someone rubbed him up the wrong way.
‘I knows that,’ he said, his voice flat, ‘and we treats him like one. Young Tom does well by us. Don’t you worry yourself about that, mister.’
I raised a hand in apology. ‘I know he does, Mr Hulse. And I’m grateful to you for taking care of him. I worry about him, that’s all. I worry about…’ I briefly patted my own jaw, not wanting Tom to see; I was never sure how much he understood of his condition.
Hulse gave a brief nod, but said. ‘He does very well – don’t you, Tom, my boy?’
Tom huffed happily in response.
Hulse’s one good eye flickered from the boy and fixed its beady attention on me. ‘Now, mister, what say you tells us why you’re wandering these streets like a spring lamb in search of the butcher? Or is you just here to take tea and buttered muffins with your dearest chums?’
EIGHT
FINGERPRINTS
I went to bed shattered that night, but I couldn’t sleep. My brain was like a nest full of angry wasps. After weeks of inactivity, during which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’d begun to worry I might never find the obsidian heart, suddenly things had started to move.
What was ironic was that it had come at a time when I’d least expected it. I’d more or less given up on Christmas week, had resigned myself to the fact that many of my watchers would be too preoccupied with the obligations of the season between Christmas and New Year, and that my best bet would be to start the search again, with a new impetus, at the start of January. But in the course of a breathtaking twenty-four hours we’d had the odd footprints outside the house, and the even odder murder behind the Maybury Theatre. And now our prime suspect for that murder had led us, unbelievably, to Kate’s abductors.
Wheels within wheels. Cause and effect. I couldn’t help but think it was because of my imminent contact with them that the Sherwoods had become (or were about to become) involved in the topsy-turvy craziness of my life. But how and why? And more importantly, was there any way of dissuading or preventing them from taking my daughter?
If I did dissuade or prevent them, though, how would that affect what, as far as I was concerned, had already happened? How much of my past would alter accordingly – or would it unravel altogether? Because if Kate had never been abducted, there would never have been a reason for me to get involved in any of this. I would never have had to steal the heart, which meant I would never have had to kill McCallum, which meant I would never have ended up being pursued by the Wolves of London and living in a time that wasn’t my own…
Which meant I would never have been in the position to dissuade or prevent the Sherwoods from abducting Kate.
As ever, the knot of complexities just seemed to get tighter the more I thought about them, to the point at which it became impossible to unpick the different strands. After giving up and going to bed, my limbs aching with tiredness, I lay sleepless for what seemed an eternity, my thoughts multiplying exponentially, questions branching into yet further questions, until eventually it seemed they were overflowing my head and filling the darkness around me, stifling and souring the air.
In the end, gasping for breath, I lit a candle and threw back my eiderdown. At first I was sweating, but then the sweat turned cold and I started to shake. Out of habit I got dressed – when I was awake I liked to be ready for immediate action – and then, holding the candle to light my way, I went downstairs.
Although the stairs creaked seemingly at every step, no one woke up. And that was fine, because I wanted to be alone. In the drawing room I stoked up the fire, lit a couple of lamps and sat in one of the leather armchairs, breathing in the calming Christmas scents of pine and orange and cloves. I realised there was a part of me that was almost afraid of going to sleep; afraid of losing the momentum gained over the past twenty-four hours; afraid of waking up to find that the previous day’s promise had eluded me again, dissipated like a phantom.
It was a daft idea, but the early hours of the morning are a haven for daft ideas. The reason it was daft was because this afternoon Clover had returned to the house, arriving an hour or so after me, smiling like the cat that got the cream. She told me the Sherwoods were charming, that they were struggling to make ends meet, and that their son was three years old, which meant that – as she’d suggested – they were yet to travel into the future and move into the flat opposite mine. She also told me she’d used her ‘womanly wiles’, as she grinningly called them, to wangle us a dinner invitation for the following evening – which meant, as it was now something like 3:30 a.m., this evening.
It was all a bit surreal. I’d always got on well with Adam and Paula Sherwood – right up until the morning they’d kidnapped my youngest daughter. How I’d respond to them when I spoke to them again I couldn’t say. Would the fact they weren’t yet Kate’s abductors make me feel differently towards them? As Victorians, would they even seem like the same people I’d known? Perhaps I’d feel guilty for imposing myself on their world – and possibly, therefore, drawing them into mine; perhaps I’d feel responsible for them in some way. All I knew for sure was that I’d prefer to meet them with my wits about me, but that the way things were going it was more likely that by this evening my brain would be like cement and I’d be all but dead on my feet.
Not even the thought I was potentially letting Kate down by not getting a proper night’s sleep could make a difference. Maybe a whisky in front of the fire would relax me enough to allow me to slip into a state of unconsciousness? With a groan I hauled myself to my feet, crossed the room to the decanter and poured myself a healthy measure. I was raising the tumbler to my lips when I heard a soft pattering sound, like someone lightly drumming their fingers on the window.
I froze, then turned my head slowly to the left. The sound had come from behind the heavy damask drapes that covered the window closest to me. But had the noise been inside the room or outside? Having faced Tallarian’s army of clockwork horrors and seen what the shape-shifter was capable of, I was primed to expect almost anything. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find a spider the size of a cat perched on the windowsill behind the curtains. Or a squatting, red-eyed goblin. Or even a bubbling tide of green slime oozing its way through the hair-thin gaps around the frame.
I swallowed the whisky in one gulp, blinking at the alcohol burn in my belly. Grateful I was never complacent when it came to carrying my howdah, I put the tumbler down on the velvet cloth draped across the top of the piano and moved as silently as I could to the window. I stood beside the drapes for a moment, alert for the slightest sign of movement. Then, drawing my gun, I stretched out a hand and whipped the drape aside.
Instinctively I stepped to one side, my heart
drumming. If this had been a horror movie a cat would have darted out from behind the curtain and gone yowling across the room – but there was nothing. Nothing on the windowsill; nothing attached to the inside of the tall sash window. But as I looked out at the snow-coated ground and the dark white-topped mass of trees and bushes beyond it, I suddenly realised that dotted and daubed on the lacy coating of frost on the outside of the glass were dozens of fingerprints.
I re-focused, staring at them. They reached from the bottom of the window to face height, and covered the area in a haphazard pattern, as if a child had dabbled its fingers over the frosty surface. In daylight such marks would simply have been curious, but now, in a silent house in the dead of night, they were eerie, and I felt a cold shudder ripple through me, negating the heat of the whisky.
What did the fingerprints mean? Were they a message? Or had something been trying – albeit feebly – to get into the house?
Before I had time to think I heard the same soft, rapid patter I’d heard moments earlier – only this time the sounds came from behind the drapes covering the next window.
Something was circling the house, tapping on the windows as it went. My already drumming heart leaped as a thrill of fear gripped me. But that didn’t stop me from darting to the next window and yanking the drape back.
Nothing here either, except for more fingerprints. Whatever was making the marks had already moved on. I wondered what had happened to the men watching the house. Had this thing, whatever it was, slipped through their cordon unnoticed? Was it invisible? Insubstantial like a ghost?
The now-familiar tapping started at the next window. A rapid, flickering sound like a flurry of raindrops. This time I ran not to that window, but to the one beyond it. With a sense of triumph, mingled with a cold, sharp spasm of fear, I wrenched the drape back and stepped forward, raising my pistol.