by Darrell Pitt
‘And where does it come from?’ Scarlet asked.
‘From under the streets.’
Jack and Scarlet exchanged glances. Under the streets could only mean the sewer system. They had been into the sewers once before and it was a claustrophobic place. The London sewers ran for miles beneath the city, draining out into the Thames, and to the sea. They were dangerous and ancient tunnels. While most of it had been modernised in recent years, some sections had not been visited for decades. It was rumoured that people had become lost in them and were never seen again.
‘Have you seen it, Granny?’ Toby asked. ‘The monster?’
‘I have.’ She nodded sagely. ‘Old women have trouble sleeping. The ghosts of the past won’t let us be.’
‘Where was it?’ Jack asked.
Granny nodded to the window. ‘The street outside. I heard a sound near my door. I looked out. Couldn’t see nothing, at first. Then I saw the cat.’
‘The cat?’
‘It was purring in the shadows on the other side under the awning. Then the shadow moved.’ Granny swallowed. ‘It was a monster. Seven feet tall. It picked up the cat and took it away.’ She fixed them with a stare. ‘Even monsters got to eat.’
A cat-eating monster, Jack thought. Could there be truth to this story?
There was a maintenance building for the sewers about a block away, Granny explained. ‘It’s the only place big enough for a creature like that to enter the sewers,’ she said. ‘But you shouldn’t go down. It’s dangerous.’
They didn’t answer. As they stood, Scarlet stepped on her dress and slipped, her hand hitting the table and knocking the cards off. They scattered, but one flipped face up. She picked it up, examining the picture.
‘This is…’ Scarlet started.
‘Death,’ Granny said. ‘I do tarot readings. It’s how an old lady like me earns her living. You needn’t worry too much about that card, miss. The cards have many meanings.’
With that cryptic remark, Granny ushered them out. Jack and Scarlet took Toby to a nearby factory where he said his mother worked. Inside, a hundred sewing machines were operating, women at all of them, and the noise was tremendous. Small children ran from one end to the other, carrying armfuls of fabric and clothing.
A woman hurried over. It was Toby’s mother, Sally. She wore a plain grey dress and a scarf over her head.
‘Toby!’ she scolded. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried.’
‘We came here to investigate Toby’s monster,’ Jack said. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘I haven’t,’ Sally said, looking about fearfully. ‘But a few have. I don’t know what it is, but I know one thing.’
‘What’s that?’ Scarlet asked.
‘You had best be careful. Whatever it is, it’s big.’
Jack memorised their address and promised to report back. They left Toby and his mother and weaved through the narrow streets of Whitechapel. Scarlet had fallen silent. Jack asked her what was wrong.
‘I have two things on my mind,’ she said. ‘The first is this monster. And the second is that tarot card I knocked onto the floor.’
‘It’s just a card.’
‘But it was the Death card. I don’t normally place belief in such things, but there was a Brinkie Buckeridge book—’
‘Isn’t there always?’
‘—about the tarot. In The Adventure of the Hopping Tarot Cards, Brinkie and Wilbur Dusseldorf investigate a series of murders based on the tarots.’ She shivered. ‘Some of them die in quite gruesome ways.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Jack said. ‘You can’t take much stock in that sort of thing. Mrs McGregor, the fortune teller from the circus, told me she made it all up.’
Scarlet raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’
‘She used a technique called cold reading. She would take note of how people were dressed, if they had jewellery, if they seemed happy or sad, and judge their reactions to what she said. Then she would fish for information, and feed it back to them as if she’d thought of it herself!’
‘Goodness.’
‘It made some people happy,’ he said. ‘And even Granny said the death card doesn’t necessarily mean death. It can just be the ending of something, or it signals a change in the air.’
‘That makes me feel a little better.’
‘It would be different if there were a zombie card,’ Jack continued, stifling a grin. ‘It would mean you, or someone you knew, was about to become one.’
Scarlet rolled her eyes.
Off Osborn Place, they found the sewerage maintenance building. It was squat and square with metal doors and a small barred window. Cobwebs laced the glass. The roof had tiles missing and the doors were red with rust. Jack pointed at a nearby wall. The letters VC had been painted on them.
‘It looks like someone from the Valkyrie Circle has been here,’ he said.
‘They probably have members everywhere,’ Scarlet said. ‘Or people who consider themselves affiliated with the organisation.’
Jack stared doubtfully at the building. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s been in or out of there in years.’ He tugged at the door handle and it shrieked open. ‘Or maybe they have.’
The interior was gloomy, smelling of mould. A metal spiral staircase disappeared into the ground. A bird chirped in a nest in the corner of the roof. A starling.
Scarlet pointed at their feet. There were footprints in the dirt. ‘Looks like someone’s been here before us,’ she said. ‘Whoever they are, they’ve got big feet.’
Jack placed his own foot next to the print. It was tiny by comparison.
Peering into the darkened stairwell, he said, ‘I suppose we should go down.’
‘Mr Doyle would advise caution.’
‘I’m sure he would, but we won’t find out anything by staying here.’ Jack produced a candle from his green coat and lit it. ‘Let’s take a look.’
But the flickering light barely banished the gloom. A worse smell, like something dead, wafted up. Jack heard the distant splash of running water.
The room at the bottom opened out onto four tunnels, each large enough for a man to stand upright.
‘Where do we begin?’ Scarlet asked.
‘I have no idea.’
None of these tunnels appeared to have been built to transport water. Jack suspected they were designed to lead to places that did. On the ground he spotted a piece of cloth. It looked like a patch from the shoulder of a shirt, and on it was printed a picture of a lightning bolt.
Jack shone the candle into the nearest tunnel. It stretched out for another fifty feet before veering to the right. Moving to the next tunnel, the candlelight painted the far end, catching a glimpse of a huge misshapen form.
It moved.
Blimey!
Something slammed into Jack’s chest. He dropped the candle, drowning them in darkness.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘You should not have been there in the first place,’ Mr Doyle thundered. ‘You know how dangerous the sewers are.’
; Jack and Scarlet were back at Bee Street. Gloria had been sitting across the table, silent, but now she leant forward in anticipation. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘what happened?’
‘There was a scream,’ Scarlet said. ‘So terrifying it would wake the dead.’
‘Was it the monster?’
‘No, it was Jack.’
Jack shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I wouldn’t call it a scream,’ he said. ‘More of a warning.’
‘In that case it was a very strange warning because you were completely unintelligible.’
‘A cat leapt onto my chest,’ Jack explained. ‘And I dropped the candle.’
‘And then?’ Mr Doyle asked.
‘We ran up the stairs and back to the street,’ Scarlet said.
‘And you both saw this…thing?’
‘Well…’
‘What exactly did you see, Scarlet?’
‘To be precise, nothing. Jack was standing in the way.’
Mr Doyle harrumphed.
‘It was a monster,’ Jack confirmed. ‘Or something very much like one. But it was real.’ Jack felt himself turning red. ‘It was big and, er, bulky with things that looked like arms…and there might have been a head.’
Even Scarlet was trying to hide a smile. ‘So it could have been a monster, or it may have been a mattress or—’
Jack raised a hand. ‘I get the idea. No-one believes me.’
‘I do not believe in monsters,’ Mr Doyle said. ‘They belong in the same category as ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night.’
‘Then why send us to Whitechapel?’ Scarlet asked.
‘Because it will do you good to see for yourself that there is a logical explanation for Toby’s creature.’
‘As logical as there being no Atlantis?’ Jack teased.
In their previous adventure, they had discovered the mythological city to be real.
Now it was Mr Doyle’s turn to go red. ‘Anyway, there will be time to follow up on your monster later. For now we will go to Lansmark Jail. I was successful in obtaining photographs of the timer from Scotland Yard. We will pay Bruiser Sykes a visit, and see if he recognises the maker.’
They had afternoon tea before heading to the balcony. On the way, they passed Isaac Newton, Mr Doyle’s echidna, and a new addition to the menagerie, Julius Caesar, a green parrot from South America. It was a present from Gabrielle Smith, a friend of theirs from the United States.
The parrot was not confined to a cage. Instead it had free rein of the apartment, settling where it wished and turning up in the most inopportune places—it had landed on Jack’s head the previous day while he was in the bath.
Mr Doyle’s airship, the Lion’s Mane, was parked on the roof, its engine already stoked. The airship was a thirty-foot craft made of timber and brass, with the emblem of a lion and a number—1887—decorating the balloon.
The detective disengaged the docking clamps and they sailed high over London, joining a line of airships, heading North.
The city is changing all the time, Jack mused. As are our lives.
For many years, Mr Doyle had believed his son, Phillip, had been killed in the war, but during their previous adventure, Phillip had been found alive—though much affected by his terrible experience. He was now recovering with his wife and son at their home in Harwich, and Mr Doyle went to visit them regularly.
It’s not an easy world, Jack thought.
He was remembering the streets of Whitechapel. It was so easy to forget that people lived in such appalling conditions.
‘Everyone must do what they can,’ Mr Doyle said. ‘But we are living in modern times. I expect the next few years will see great advances in living conditions.’
‘I want to help those people,’ Jack said. ‘But I don’t know where to start.’
‘Everyone can do their bit,’ Mr Doyle said. ‘Donate money to charities or books to libraries. Even visiting an elderly neighbour can make a world of difference.
‘We can only help as far as we can reach. There are many social reformers trying to bring about change.’ He paused, bringing the Lion’s Mane about to join another line of airships. ‘I contribute quite a bit of money to an orphanage,’ he said, conversationally. ‘It makes life better for the children there.’
It took a moment for Mr Doyle’s words to sink in. ‘You don’t mean…?’
‘Sunnyside Orphanage.’
Jack had been living in that gloomy place when Mr Doyle took him in as his apprentice. Jack had not been back since, but he’d often wondered about the other orphans.
‘I didn’t realise how bad conditions were,’ Mr Doyle continued. ‘It was only after I visited that I knew I had to help. You’ll be pleased to hear that things have improved. The children are better dressed and now enjoy three square meals a day.’
He gave Jack a wink. Good old Mr Doyle, Jack thought.
The airship coasted past the London Metrotower. Every major city on Earth had a metrotower, stretching to the edge of space. From there, steam-powered spaceships facilitated trade and transported people around the globe.
Scarlet had been combing her hair, but now she joined Jack at the window. ‘You know, Jack, there was a Brinkie Buckeridge book, The Adventure of the Running Table, where she went undercover in an orphanage.’
‘Really?’
‘It was a terrible place,’ she said. ‘The children were made to eat rats for dinner.’ She looked concerned. ‘Did you have to eat rats? I’ll completely understand if you did.’
‘No! Not at all.’
‘You may have eaten one or two and not noticed.’
‘Scarlet, how would I not notice?’
‘Well, once you remove the tail, the hair and the claws, they probably look a bit like a chicken.’
Jack groaned. ‘I don’t know what chickens you’ve been eating,’ he said, ‘but mine usually have wings.’
‘It turned out the orphanage was actually a cover for child slavery,’ Scarlet continued. ‘The children were being forced to work twenty-three hours a day with only an hour for sleep.’
‘Only an… Scarlet, how on earth could anyone survive on only one hour’s sleep a night?’
Nodding sadly, Scarlet said, ‘They were very tired.’ But then she brightened. ‘At least the story ended well. The children now live on level twenty-three of Brinkie’s home, above the zoo and below the shooting range.’
The Lion’s Mane coasted over the countryside until the prison, near the coast, came into view.
Mr Doyle brought them down in a parking lot on the east side.
‘That’s a nice view of the ocean,’ Scarlet said.
‘I don’t think the prisoners get to enjoy it,’ Jack said. ‘They probably don’t see much at all.’
Heading to the front gate, Mr Doyle stopped. ‘I should give you some idea as to what to expect. Lansmark Jail is a medium-security facility. More than a thousand inmates are housed here, their convictions ranging from theft to murder. We will be meeting Bruiser Sykes in the visitor
’s centre. You mustn’t come into physical contact with him, or any of the inmates, at any time.’
They entered the main gate. Mr Doyle was made to surrender his gun, Clarabelle, to one of the desk clerks. After passing into another area, they joined with another group of visitors. There were mothers and fathers, wives and children. A woman nursed a baby. An elderly man, holding a Bible, prayed silently to himself.
‘It’s a tragedy,’ Mr Doyle sighed. ‘Even for the men who are incarcerated. A child has so much potential ahead of them. It doesn’t take too many wrong turns to lead them here.’
A guard came out and explained the rules. No physical contact with the prisoners. No shouting. No arguments. Anyone found breaking the rules would be ejected immediately.
The guard led the group to a metal door. The visitors trooped down a hallway as the door behind them locked.
They keep all the areas contained, Jack thought. In case of an incident, they can localise it.
When the next door opened, the group trailed into the visitors’ room. Here, the tables and chairs were bolted to the floor. Barred windows were set high up on the wall.
Jack, Scarlet and Mr Doyle each took a seat. It may have been sunny outside, but it was cold in the jail. Jack shivered. Even Mr Doyle looked apprehensive as he took out a piece of cheese, picked off the fluff and chewed it.
A distant bell rang three times. Then a barred door opened and the prisoners trooped in. They all wore white overalls decorated with black arrowheads. While most men went to their families, one lingered in the doorway, his eyes searching the room. He was slim, with grey hair, and he reminded Jack of a hawk. Finally he spotted their table and casually made his way over.
‘Ignatius Doyle,’ Bruiser Sykes said, sitting opposite. ‘It’s been a long time. And these are your young assistants.’
Mr Doyle introduced them.
‘It’s nice to see you’re not alone in your old age,’ Sykes said. ‘Getting older, you need family.’ He motioned to the prison. ‘This is my family home for the time being. Until I get out.’