Ripping Time ts-3

by Robert Robert

  "You idiot! You nearly broke my foot!" She hiked up a calico skirt and peered at her shoe, a high-topped, multi-buttoned affair with a scuff visible across the top where a case had crashed down on top of it. Tears were visible on her face beneath the brim of her calico sunbonnet. "Watch what you're doing, you fumble-fingered moron!"

  The porter, mouthing abject apologies, was scrambling for the luggage while the ticket clerk, visibly appalled, was rushing around the counter to assist the injured tourist.

  "Ma'am, I'm so dreadfully sorry—"

  "You ought to be! For God's sake, can't you get him out of the way?" The unfortunate porter had lost his balance again and nearly crashed into her a second time. "I paid six thousand dollars for this ticket! And that clumsy jackass just dropped a trunk on my foot!"

  The harried ticket agent was thrusting the porter's validated ticket into the nearest pocket she could reach on his dungarees, while waving frantically for baggage assistance and apologizing profusely. "I'm terribly sorry, we'll get this taken care of immediately, ma'am, would you like for me to call a doctor to the gate to see your foot?"

  "And have them put me in a cast and miss the gate? My God, what a lot of idiots you are! I ought to hire a lawyer! I'm sorry I ever signed that stupid hold harmless waiver. Well don't just stand there, here's my ticket! I want to sit down and get off my poor foot! It's swelling up and hurts like hell!"

  Time Tours baggage handlers scrambled to the porter's assistance, hauling scattered luggage out of the way so the irate, foot-sore tourist could complete her check-in procedure and hobble over to the nearest chair. She sent endless black and glowering glares at the drunken Joey Tyrolin and his porter, who was now holding his employer's head while that worthy was thoroughly sick into a decorative planter. Another Time Tours employee, visibly horrified, was fetching a wet cloth and basin. Paula Booker and the other Denver-bound tourists crowded as far as possible from Joey Tyrolin's corner of the departures lounge. Even Skeeter Jackson was steering clear of the mess and its accompanying stench.

  "Oh, Kit," Robert Li was wiping tears, he was laughing so hard. "I feel sorry for Joey Tyrolin when he sobers up! That lady is gonna make his life one miserable, living nightmare for the next two weeks!"

  Kit chuckled. "Serves him right. But I feel sorrier for the porter, poor sap. He's going to catch it from both of ‘em."

  "Too true. I hope he's being well paid, whoever he is. Say, Kit, I haven't had a chance to ask, who do you think the Ripper's going to turn out to be?"

  "Oh, God, Robert, not you, too?" Kit rolled his eyes and downed another gulp of firewater.

  "C'mon, Kit, ‘fess up. Bets are running hot and heavy it turns out to be some up-timer. But I know you. I'm betting you won't fall for that. Who is it? A deranged American actor appearing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Mary Kelly's lesbian lover? Francis Tumblety, that American doctor who kept women's wombs pickled in jars? Aaron Kosminski or Michael Ostrog, the petty thief and con artist? Maybe Frederick Bailey Deeming, or Thomas Neil Cream, the doctor whose last words on the gallows were ‘I am Jack—‘? Or maybe a member of a Satanic cult, sacrificing victims to his Dark Lord? Like Robert Donston Stephenson or Aleister Crowley?"

  Kit held up a hand, begging for mercy. "Please, enough! I've heard all the theories! I'd as soon believe it was Lewis Carroll or the queen's personal physician. The evidence is no better for them than for anybody else you've just named. Personally? If it wasn't James Maybrick, and the case against him is a pretty good one, if you don't discount the diary as a forgery—and the forensic and psychological evidence in favor of the diary are pretty strong—then I think it was a complete stranger, someone none of our Ripperologists has identified or even suspected."

  "Or the Ripperoons who think they're Ripperologists," Li added with a mischievous glint in his eye. Every resident on station had already had a bellyful of the self-annointed "experts" who arrived on station to endlessly argue the merits of their own pet theories. "Well," Robert drawled, a smile hovering around the corners of his mouth, "you may just be right, Kit. Guess we'll find out next week, won't we?"

  "Maybe," Kit chuckled. "I'd like to see the faces of the Ripper Watch Team if it does turn out to be somebody they've never heard of."

  Robert laughed. "Lucky Margo. Maybe she'll take pictures?"

  Kit gave his friend a scowl. "She'd better do more than take a few snapshots!"

  "Relax, Grandpa, Margo's a bright girl. She'll do you proud."

  "That," Kit sighed, "is exactly what I'm afraid of."

  Robert Li's chuckle was as unsympathetic as the wicked twinkle in his eyes.

  When, Kit wondered forlornly, did he get to start enjoying the role of grandpa? The day she gives up the notion of scouting, his inner voice said sourly. Trouble was, the day Margo gave up the dream of scouting, both their hearts would break. Sometimes—and Kit Carson was more aware of the fact than most people—life was no fair at all. And, deep down, he knew he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Neither would Margo. And that, Kit sighed, was one reason he loved her so much.

  She was too much like him.

  God help them both.

  * * *

  Ianira Cassondra did not know where she was.

  Her mind was strangely lethargic, her thoughts slow and disjointed. She lay still, head aching, and knew only cold fear and a sickening sense of dislocation behind her eyelids. The smells and distant sounds coming through the fog in her mind were strange, unfamiliar. A harsh, acrid stink, like black dust in the back of her throat... a rhythmic ticking that might have been an old-fashioned clock like the ones in Connie Logan's shop or perhaps the patter of rain against a roof... That wasn't possible, of course, they couldn't hear rain in the station.

  Memory stirred, sharp and terrible despite the lassitude holding her captive, whispered that she might not be in the station. She'd been smuggled out of TT-86 in Jenna Caddrick's steamer trunk. And something had gone terribly wrong at the hotel, men had come after them with silenced, up-time guns, forcing them to flee through the window and down the streets. She was in London, then. But where in London? Who had brought her to this place? One of the men trying to kill them? And why did she feel so very strange, unable to move or think clearly? Other memories came sluggishly through the murk. The attack in the street. Running toward the stranger in a top hat and coat, begging his help. The belch of flame and shattering roar of his pistol, shooting the assassin. The touch of his hand against her wrist—

  Ianira stiffened as shock poured through her, weak and disoriented as she was. Goddess! The images slammed again through her mind, stark and terrible, filled with blood and destruction. And with that memory came another, far more terrible: their benefactor's pistol raised straight at Jenna's face, the nightmare of the gun's discharge, Jenna's long and terrible fall to the pavement, blood gushing from her skull...

  Ianira was alone in London with a madman.

  She began to tremble and struggled to open her eyes, at least.

  Light confused her for a moment, soft and dim and strange. She cleared her vision slowly. He had brought her to an unknown house. A fire burned brightly in a polished grate across from the bed where she lay. The room spoke of wealth, at least, with tasteful furniture and expensive paper on the walls, ornate decorations carved into the woodwork in the corners of the open, arched doorway leading to another room, she had no idea what, beyond the foot of her bed. Gaslight burned low in a frosted glass globe set into a wall bracket of polished, gleaming brass. The covers pulled up across her were thick and warm, quilted and expensive with embroidery.

  The man who had brought her to this place, Ianira recalled slowly, had been dressed exceedingly well. A gentleman, then, of some means, even if a total madman. She shuddered beneath the expensive covers and struggled to sit up, discovering with the effort that she could not move her head without the room spinning dizzily. Drugged... she realized dimly. I've been drugged... . Fear tightened down another degree.

  Voices came to
her, distantly, male voices, speaking somewhere below her prettily decorated prison. What does he want of me? She struggled to recall those last, horrifying moments on the street with Jenna, recalled him snarling out something in her own native language, the ancient Greek of her childhood, realized it had been a curse of shock and rage. How did a British gentleman come to know the language of ancient Athens and Ephesus? Her mind was too slow and confused to remember what she had learned on station of Londoners beyond the Britannia Gate.

  The voices were closer, she realized with a start of terror. Climbing toward her. And heavy footfalls thudded hollowly against the sound of stairs. Then a low, grating, metallic sound came to her ears and the door swung slowly open. "—see to Mr. Maybrick, Charles. The medication I gave him will keep him quiet for the next several hours. I'll come down and tend to him again in a bit, after I've finished here."

  "Very good, sir."

  Their voices sounded like the Time Tours Britannia guides, like the movies she and Marcus had watched about London. About—and her mind whirled, recalling the name this man had spoken, the name of Maybrick, a name she recognized with a chill of terror—about Jack the Ripper...

  Then the door finished opening and he was there in the doorway, the man who had shot Jenna Caddrick and brought Ianira to this place. He stood unsmiling in the doorway for a long moment, just looking down into her open eyes, then entered her bedroom quietly and closed the door with a soft click. He turned an iron key in the lock and pocketed it. She watched him come with a welling sense of slow horror, could see the terrible blackness which hovered about him like a bottomless hunger...

  "Well, then, my dear," he spoke softly, and pulled a chair close to sit down at her side. "I really didn't expect you to awaken so soon."

  She would have cowered from the hand he rested against her temple, had she been able to move. The rage surrounding this man slammed into her senses. She cried aloud, as though from a physical blow.

  "No need to be afraid, my dear. I certainly won't be harming you." He laughed softly, at some joke she could not fathom. "Tell me your name."

  Her tongue moved with a will of its own. "Ianira..." The drugs in her veins roared through her mind, implacable and terrifying.

  "Ianira? Where are you from? What last name have you?"

  They called her Cassondra, after her title as priestess of Artemis. She whispered it out, felt as well as saw the surprise that rippled through him. "Cassondra? Deuced odd surname. Where the devil did you come from?"

  Confusion tore through her. "The station—" she began.

  "No, not the bloody train station, woman! Where were you born?"

  "Ephesus..."

  "Ephesus?" Shock tore through his eyes again. "You mean from the region of Turkey where that ancient place used to be? But why, then, do you speak Greek, when Turkestani is the language of that part of the world? And how is it you speak the Greek of Pericles and Homer?"

  Too many questions, blurring together too quickly... He leaned across, seizing her wrist in a brutal grip. "Answer me!"

  She cried out in mortal terror, struggled to pull away from the swamping horror of what she sensed in his soul. "Artemis, help me..." The plea was instinctive, choked out through the blackness flooding across her mind. His face swam into focus, very close to hers.

  "Artemis?" he whispered, shock blazing through his eyes once more. "What do you know of Artemis, the Many-Breasted Goddess of Ephesus?"

  The pain of his nearness was unendurable. She lapsed into the language of her childhood, pled with him not to hurt her, so...

  He left her side, allowing relief to flood into her senses, but was gone only for a moment. He returned with a leather case, which he opened, removing a heavy, metal tube with a needle protruding from one end. "If you are unable to speak with what I've given you already," he muttered, "no power of hell itself will keep you silent with this in your veins."

  He injected something into her arm, tore the sleeve of her dress to expose the crook of her elbow and slid the needle in. New dizziness flared as the drug went in, hurting with a burning pain. The room swooped and swung in agonizing circles.

  "Now then, Miss Cassondra," the voice of her jailor came through a blur, "you will please tell me who you are and where you come from and who the man was with you..."

  Ianira plunged into a spinning well of horror from which there was no possible escape. She heard her voice answer questions as though in a dream, repeated answers even she could not make sense of, found herself slipping deep into prophetic trance as the images streamed into her mind, a boy hanging naked from a tree, dying slowly under this man's knife, and a pitiful young man with royal blood in his veins, whose need for love was the most tragic thing about him, a need which had propelled him into the clutches of the man crouched above her now. Time reeled and spun inside her mind and she saw the terrified face of a woman, held struggling against a wooden fence, and other women, hacked to pieces under a madman's knife...

  She discovered she was screaming only when he slapped her hard enough to jolt her from the trance. She lay trembling, dizzy and ill, and focused slowly on his eyes. He sat staring down at her, eyes wide and shocked and blazing with an unholy sort of triumph. "By God," he whispered, "what else can you do?"

  When she was unable to speak, he leaned close. "Concentrate! Tell me where Eddy is now!"

  The tragic, lonely young man flashed into her mind, surrounded by splendour such as Ianira had never dreamed might exist. He was seated at a long table, covered with gleaming silver and crystal and china edged in gold. An elderly woman in black Ianira recognized from photographs presided over the head of the table, her severe gaze directed toward the frightened young man.

  "You are not to go wandering about in the East End again, Eddy, is that understood? It is a disgrace, shameful, such conduct. I'm sending you to Sandringham soon, I won't stand for such behavior..."

  "Yes, Grandmama," he whispered, confused and miserable and frightened to be the object of her displeasure.

  Ianira did not realize she had spoken aloud, describing what she saw until her jailor's voice shocked her back into the little room with the expensive coverlets and the gas lights and the drugs in her veins. "Sandringham?" he gasped. "The queen is sending him to Scotland? Bloody hell..." Then the look in his eyes changed. "Might be just as well. Get the boy out of the road for a bit, until this miserable business is finished. God knows, I won't risk having him connected with it."

  Ianira lay trembling, too exhausted and overwhelmed by horror to guess at her fate, trapped in this madman's hands. He actually smiled down at her, brushing the hair back from her brow. "Your friends," he whispered intimately. "Will they search for you?"

  Terror exploded. She flinched back, gabbled out the fear of pursuit, the gunmen in the hotel, the threat to her life from faceless men she had never met... Fear drained away at the sound breaking from him. Laughter. He was staring down into her eyes and laughing with sheer, unadulterated delight. "Dear God," he wheezed, leaning back in his chair, "they daren't search for you! Such a bloody piece of luck! No doubt," he smiled, "someone influential was disquieted by what you can do, my dear lady. Never fear, I shall protect you from all harm. You are much too precious, too valuable a creature to allow anyone to find you and bring you to grief." He leaned close and stroked the back of her hand. "Mayhap," he chuckled, "I'll even take you to wife, as an added precaution."

  She closed her eyes against horror at such a fate.

  He leaned down and brushed his lips to hers, then murmured, "I've work to do, this evening, my lovely pet, very serious work, which must take me from your side. And you must rest, recover from the shocks to your system. Tomorrow, however..." He chuckled then stroked her brow, the chill of her wet cheek. "Tomorrow should prove most entertaining, indeed."

  He left her, drugged and helpless, in the center of the bed and carefully locked the door behind him. Ianira lay weeping silently until the medication he had given her dragged her down into darkne
ss.

  * * *

  They didn't intend to stay long.

  In fact, they hadn't intended to take the train to Colorado Springs with the rest of the tour group, or ride all the way out to the derelict mining camp in the mountains far to the west of the train station, not at all. Not with Artemisia and Gelasia asleep in a big, awkward trunk, sedated and breathing bottled oxygen from the same type of canisters they'd sent with Ianira into London. Marcus, terrified for his children's safety, had packed away a spare oxygen bottle for each of the girls, just in case something went wrong. And it had. Badly wrong.

  They'd been followed through the Wild West Gate.

  Just as Noah had predicted.

  "His name's Sarnoff," Noah Armstrong muttered, pointing him out with a slight nod of the head. "Chief of security for a real bad sort named Gideon Guthrie. And Guthrie's specialty is making people disappear when they're too much of a threat. Real sweet company, Jenna's Daddy keeps. We can't do a damned thing yet. If we bolt now, he's just going to follow us. Then he'll choose the time and place, when there aren't a truckful of witnesses nearby. But if we head for that mining camp with the rest of the shooting competition tour, he'll have to follow us, with all those up-time witnesses lurking everywhere. Then we can choose the time and place, jump him when he's not expecting it."

  "I can stick a knife through his ribs," Julius offered, glaring out from under the calico bonnet he'd donned in his role doubling for Jenna.

  The detective said sharply, "No, not here!" When Julius looked like arguing, Noah shot a quelling look at the down-time teenager. "Too many witnesses. If we have to explain why murder is really self-defense, it'll just give the next death squad they send after us the chance they need to hit us while we're cooling our heels in the station's jail. So we wait until we're up in the mountains. Marcus, you'll be riding with the baggage mules when we leave the train station. Keep the trunk with the girls at the very back of the mule train. It's a long ride out there, so we'll have to switch out the oxygen canisters partway. Tell the other porters the mule's thrown a shoe or something, just get that trunk open and switch out the bottles. They'll both sleep until sometime tonight, but they'll need air in a few hours."