“And . . . this . . . is relevant . . . because . . . ?” she managed to squeak out, though her head was throbbing now, her ears ringing.
“When m’dad died, I used to pray for some kind of über miracle that would bring ’im back. But then I’d reread ‘The Raven’s Claw’ and realized that even if I could change the past, I shouldn’t. I’d only be messing with the balance of the cosmos. What’s meant to be is meant to be.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Katie whacked the prickly wire surrounding the London Stone. It thrummed like a giant gerbil cage. “I wouldn’t care if I messed up the fate of the whole world, the entire cosmos. I’d give anything to have my parents back. Anything! I’d sell my soul to the devil—” But in truth, Katie knew she wasn’t going to wish for her parents to be alive again. She merely wanted to—
“Beware of what you wish for, Katie, it might come—”
“Oh shut up. Just shut up!” Katie flew round to the back of the stone again, and without thinking, began wriggling her fingers through a small hole, the size of a Milk Dud, in the wire mesh. How dare he tell me what to do! What a stupid jerk.
Katie hadn’t come here to wish for the impossible. If she could have one wish, just one, it wouldn’t be something metaphysically impossible. She’d never intended to hope for anything totally unobtainable. All Katie wanted to ask for was one simple little thing. To have my sister in my life again.
She tugged angrily at the tear in the wire mesh, widening it. I don’t just want to see my sister for a week or two every summer. I want her in my life!
Katie squeezed her eyes shut trying to picture her sister, but only managed to conjure up a shapeless image without a face. Last year Grandma Cleaves had argued with Courtney about the “lewd” lyrics in her songs, the “unwholesome” metal studs in her body, and the “ridiculous” tattoos snaking up and down her arms. Now they weren’t speaking. I just want Courtney back in my life. I want Grandma Cleaves and Courtney and me to be a family. I lost my parents. I want my sister back! Is that too much to ask?
Wriggling and poking at the hole, Katie thought about the waxwork girl downstairs who resembled Courtney, the black velvet ribbon fastened round her neck, the delicate cameo hanging in the hollow of her throat.
Katie glanced down at the widening hole, large enough now to plunge several fingers into. She wriggled them around until her knuckles poked through the hole, and a moment later she plunged her entire hand in.
The tangled wire gave a little at first, then clamped shut around her wrist, like a prickly metal bracelet. Now I’ve done it, Katie thought, trying to wrench her hand free. But it stuck fast. Making a tight fist, she drove her arm in further, then tried to yank it back out again. But each time she swung back, the surrounding mesh circled her arm more tightly, pulling her in.
Frustrated, she hurled her full weight against the cage. Instead of loosening her arm, she managed only to plaster her cheek against the upper portion of the chicken wire, with her hip and thigh pressed tight to the rough side stones of the well.
If she had a little Vaseline, she could slide her arm out.
Behind her she heard Collin wheezing. The air had a different odor now, like the damp smell of wet stones. With her cheek pressed against the tangle of mesh wires, she tried to call out to her cousin but stopped when she noticed that the rocks surrounding the lip of the well were crusted in green slime, sticky against her hip and thigh.
Okay, this is crazy, Katie thought, opening and shutting her fingers on the inside of the wire cage. She tugged her neck back like a turtle, trying to peer around. Where were Collin and Toby?
The London Stone had a barely visible crack just beyond the wire casing. Katie wriggled her fingers until her index finger was touching the small, smooth fissure. When she poked her finger into it, she was reminded of that finger-plunger game she used to play with Courtney when they were kids. At the thought of her sister, laughter bubbled up from her throat with an hysterical edge. Her mind flashed to Beatrix Twyford, who had died such a horrible death. If only I could go back in time, I’d solve the Jack the Ripper mystery and save Lady Beatrix Twyford!
A deafening explosion sent shockwaves through her body. A fierce white heat seared through her, as if she were on fire. She tried with all her might to wrench her hand back. Shadows darted around the Stone, then around her head. She rattled the cage with her free hand. She was in agony. Someone must have set off a bomb . . . and she was trapped!
Her grandmother’s words came to her, reverberating in her mind with a melodic cadence. “Beware of what you wish for . . .”
Chapter Seven
Maids in White Aprons say the Bells of St. Katherine’s
Minutes later, with the palm of her right hand still pressed firmly against the London Stone, and her index finger embedded in the pitted hole, the gut-wrenching feeling of something exploding inside Katie was gone, along with the painful fire-hot sensation.
Taking a deep breath, she glanced around. Something wasn’t right. The light was peculiar. And what was that brick wall doing in front of her? She blinked. The London Stone was protruding from a wall. A brick wall. Some sort of curved, iron grate surrounded it instead of wire mesh, and it was sticking out of a brick wall!
Hand still firmly on the stone, Katie craned her neck and looked up. A church spire soared high into the sky. A church? Where was she?
She shook her head. This multimedia stuff was so real! Must be another hologram. But the air smelled like outdoors. And the fast-moving clouds scudding overhead looked real. And what was that brick-dust smell?
The gravestones in the courtyard were a nice touch, Katie thought. Just the sort of background scenery Madame Tussauds would go in for. She twisted and tugged her finger until she was able to wriggle it out of the pitted indentation, then slid her arm out of the metal grating and reached her hand up to her throat. Something was choking her. A satiny ribbon of some sort was tied under her chin. What the . . . ?
She touched her head. A pinwheel of a hat sat balanced on her head. Katie took a giant step backward, and the heel of her boot caught in the velvety material swirling round her ankles.
Really, this is too weird, Katie thought. Then the toe of her boot—her boot—caught in the hem of her dress . . . her dress? What dress? She hadn’t been wearing a dress. The only long dress Katie owned was her mother’s old prom dress. And she definitely hadn’t been wearing the prom dress.
“Okay,” she said aloud. “What’s going on?” She took another step, got tangled in the flounces of the skirt, and fell backward “ass over teakettle,” as the English liked to say. From the ground she looked up to see Collin looming over her. Relief surged through her at the sight of his flame-red hair and freckled cheeks, replaced instantly by a seething anger.
“What’s going on, Collin?! Is this some kind of a stupid joke?”
“T’ain’t no rum ’n’ coke, Miss Katherine.” It was Toby peering down at her, sunlight splashing across his handsome features. But what was wrong with his nose? Had he broken it? It was crooked, and there was a slight bump in the middle, as if he’d been in a fight. Toby reached down and offered Katie his hand. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes.
“Ha ha. Very funny. How’d you do it?” Katie demanded. “How’d you pull it off?”
“Pull what off, miss?” Toby gently gripped her wrists and tugged her to her feet. But when his dark eyes met hers, they weren’t sparkling with amusement. No glimmer of a smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Instead, his face was full of worried concern.
“Okay, guys. Cut it out. Enough already. This isn’t funny anymore. It’s mean. A stupid, mean, dumb joke. And you gave yourself away, Toby, when you said ‘rum and coke.’ There was no such thing as Coca-Cola in the olden days. So cut it out. I assume you want me to believe we are actually back in Victorian England? Ha ha, double-ha.”
“What’s co-ca-co-la?” Toby asked, a curious inflection in his voice. He threw Collin a quizzical loo
k, then said to Katie, “Rum and coke, miss. Rum as in the stuff you drink, and coke as in a coal fire.” He turned to Collin. “Your cousin must have gotten a walloping crack on the noggin when she fell arse over teakettle. It’s addled her wits.”
“Where are we?” Katie demanded.
Collin, his red hair parted with razor precision and slicked flat across his forehead, stared at her, mouth open. “The steps of St. Swithin’s church, where else? I think Toby’s right, Katherine. When you fell, you hit your head and—”
“What year is this?” Katie glared at him.
A splotch of color rose up Collin’s neck above his stiff winged collar. “Why, it’s the year of our lord eighteen-hundred and eighty-eight. God’s eyeballs, Katherine. What’s gotten into you?”
“And we’re in London?” Katie asked. “Queen Victoria’s London?”
When Collin nodded, Katie froze. For a terrifying moment she thought she might actually be in the nineteenth century. But the very next instant she knew it was impossible. This was all a hoax, another hologram or three-dimensional projection, all part of the multimedia Chamber of Horrors exhibit at Madame Tussauds. Katie laughed as she remembered the sign:
Come see the psychopathic mass murderer Jack the Ripper and the disemboweled bodies of his victims. The most terrifying sights and sounds in human history are ready to haunt your steps and reach out cold, dead hands toward your flesh as you move through the Chamber . . .
The sign had also said that real actors would “come alive” during the presentation.
Okay. So Collin and Toby were part of the Jack the Ripper exhibit and hadn’t told her. They were being paid as actors during their school break. But enough was enough.
Katie turned back to the stone anchored waist high in the outside wall of the church. There must have been some sort of spring-loaded button in the Stone that transported her to a different exhibit room, like one of those rides into the future at Disneyland.
Just then she caught sight of a daisy in a grassy patch below, and bending over, yanked it from the ground. It was obviously fake, but a bit of earth clung to the root stem, and the petals frittered away when she plucked at them. So they planted some real flowers. Big deal. Anyone can plant—
At the sound of someone calling her name, Katie glanced up and stared in amazement at the sight of two people trotting down the wide steps of the stone church. It was a young woman and a young man—both in their twenties, Katie guessed. The man wore one of those white dog collars, so he must be acting the part of a minister.
But it was the young woman who caught Katie’s attention. With features similar to Courtney’s, she looked strikingly like the wax figure positioned at the end of the row of Ripper victims. Lady Beatrix Twyford. And the dress she was wearing was an exact duplicate of the one in the portrait hanging over Katie’s mantelpiece! Pale blue with embroidered rosebuds, a pink sash at the waist. And there was the same black velvet ribbon circling her neck, pinned dead center with an oval cameo! The only difference here was that this young woman striding toward Katie was alive!
Her hair wasn’t the faded, pale-straw color as in the portrait, but a vibrant coppery yellow, with glints of auburn. And her face was just as striking, but without the arrogance. The same beauty mark, like a painted dot, glimmered above her upper lip.
The young woman with the coppery hair was almost level with Katie, a shimmering vision of rippling skirts and ribbons, and as she glided closer, Katie could see clearly that there was no anger or accusation in her dark eyes—so dark a blue they were almost black.
“Lady Beatrix—” Toby glanced over his shoulder. “Your cousin took a right nasty tumble.”
“Bea!” Collin sputtered. “Katherine’s talking nonsense.”
Katie swiveled around to face the London Stone, her back to the others. Her pulse was racing. She wedged her hand back through the metal bars and jammed her finger into the pitted hole. Instantly, her head felt like it was exploding. She felt as if she were falling . . . down . . . down . . . down into a black, swirling hole that choked the air out of her lungs, suffocating her as if she were being buried alive!
Gasping and gulping great, heaping lungfuls of air, Katie opened her eyes to bright, fluorescent lights. In front of her was the London Stone, encased in wire mesh and balanced atop the crumbling stone well. The rocks at the base of the well were the same blackish-brown color, set in concrete. And the same broad, squishy line of footprints was tracked across the mat leading up to the London Stone.
Katie glanced across the room. Just outside the door was the sign pointing the way to the Beatlemania gallery, and another directing visitors to the Princess Diana room.
She closed her eyes and for a dizzying moment relief pulsed through her veins as palpable as the feeling of falling had been moments before. She was back! She looked over her shoulder and saw Toby standing stiffly, awkwardly, inertly.
Inertly?
“Toby?” she called out tentatively, leaving her finger embedded in the stone. Some instinct warned her that if she removed her finger she might never return to that other place . . . that other world!
Toby gave a slight movement, as if he heard her but was powerless to speak. His expression didn’t change—he looked puzzled, bewildered, almost frightened.
“Collin . . . ?” Katie whispered. Collin was standing just behind Toby.
In the silence, both boys appeared frozen, molded in wax like the figures in the Chamber of Horrors, eyes curiously blank.
The realization hit home. The significance of what had just happened struck Katie like a physical blow. She felt her balance begin to give and her feet stagger out from under her. She let out a gasp and held on to the Stone, gripping it with her fingertips, trying to keep her index finger firmly planted in the hole.
Her mind flashed on an image of Lady Beatrix, and a wave of vertigo shook her. She thought about Jack the Ripper’s mutilated victims and about her parents. “I couldn’t save my mother and father . . .” she said softly. But if this is real, and I can go back to the nineteenth century, maybe . . . just maybe . . . I can save Lady Beatrix Twyford!
If she waited another minute, Katie knew she would lose her nerve. Before she could change her mind, she thrust her index finger deeper into the stone, jabbing her fingernail painfully against something hard at the back of the indented fissure. Then she twisted and turned her finger, rubbing her knuckles almost raw against the outer portion of the stone, until finally she felt the fire-hot searing sensation tingle through her finger and shoot up her arm, pulsing and throbbing as if with its own heartbeat.
She was falling again, unable to breathe, down a dark, swirling shaft. Down, down, down as nausea rose up her throat, tasting of rust and lemon juice.
As suddenly as it began, the falling sensation ceased, and she felt the pinwheel hat squashed on top of her head, its satiny bow pinching the skin under her chin.
She yanked her finger out of the hole, held her breath, and made herself count slowly to ten. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . When she got to ten Mississippi, she lost her nerve. She opened her eyes and blinked around. She was once again outside, and the London Stone was protruding from a wall. A brick wall! She’d done it. She’d traveled back in time! And now she was going to save Lady Beatrix Twyford from Jack the Ripper. How difficult could it be, after all? With her superior twenty-first–century knowledge of science and crime scene investigation, learned from CSI reruns, how hard could this be?
Katie craned her neck and looked up. The spire of St. Swithin’s soared high into the sky. It was a glorious sight. She was in another century. Another world! Queen Victoria’s London! And I’m going to catch Jack the Ripper!
Chapter Eight
Pokers and Tongs say the Bells of St. John’s
Ten minutes later, Lady Beatrix and the Reverend H. P. Pinker were sitting with Collin, Toby, and Katie in a horse-drawn carriage that rattled through the misty streets of London. When they left St. Swithin’s and the Londo
n Stone, Katie had watched in astonishment as the coachman—a bone-thin man dressed head to toe in yellow livery—brought the carriage with its gold emblem to the curbstone. She had gawked, speechless, as he thrust his whip into the whip-socket, dropped his reins, and jumped down from the carriage to open the door for them.
Even now, as the four-wheel carriage clip-clopped toward the West End, Katie felt dazed and in awe. Like the proverbial kid in a candy store, she couldn’t stop blinking around, trying to take it all in. Arching her neck out the carriage window she could see the needle-thin spires of Parliament peeking up over the dusky outline of chimneys. On every corner, vendors hawked their wares. To the east, an omnibus crowded with passengers sailed past, drawn by a team of six horses gleaming with sweat.
Katie felt butterflies rise and fall and rise again in her stomach. She sank back into the soft, tufted leather of the jumpseat, taking in great gulps of air that smelled oddly of low tide—like mud and worms and snails and jellyfish, a briny, sulfurous odor.
Can I do this? Can I actually pull this off? Katie wondered. These people sitting next to her in the jiggling carriage thought Katie was their American cousin, newly arrived three days ago from Boston! Katie was from Boston, all right, but a Boston so far into the future it would probably not be recognizable. Except for Beacon Hill. Her home on Beacon Hill was in the historic district. A beautiful, narrow, red-brick townhouse built during the Civil War. But that house was no longer her house. She lived with Grandma Cleaves in London. If only her parents were still alive, if only—
No! I can’t think about that. I have to concentrate!
Katie took another deep breath and studied Lady Beatrix. Beatrix looked happy and carefree and so strikingly similar to Courtney, it made Katie’s insides tighten. Lady Beatrix didn’t have Courtney’s exact face, but it was eerily similar, especially the eyes: a dark, penetrating blue against luminous whites.
Shifting in her seat, Lady Beatrix smoothed out the folds of her sealskin cloak, and Katie noticed that her neck, above the collar of the fur cloak, seemed almost too slender for the weight of her blonde hair, piled high in back and falling in heavy ringlets to her shoulders.
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 6