"That's right, sir." Anxiously Snoozer put a finger to his lips. They entered the cage and were borne to the ground floor. Vine's expression of elation was still on his face but he was doing his best to hide it, to compose his features into the somewhat sterner lines of the previous night.
It was dawn outside; a grey, rainy dawn. Jherek waited near the door while another boy went to find a cab, for there were none waiting at this time in the morning. The same old man stood behind the reception desk. He was frowning slightly as he accepted the gold discs which Snoozer Vine handed to him.
"His lordship's eager to get back to the country," Vine was explaining. "Her ladyship hasn't been well. That is why we returned so suddenly from France."
"I see." The old man scribbled on a piece of paper and then handed the paper to Vine.
Jherek thought he detected a somewhat strained atmosphere in the hotel this morning. Everyone seemed to be looking at him with a slightly peculiar expression. He heard the clatter of a cab coming along the street and saw it appear with the green-suited boy clinging to the running board. The middle-aged man in the top hat opened the glass door. The boy picked up the bags as Snoozer crossed the lobby and joined Jherek.
"Good-bye, your lordship," said the man at the desk.
"Good-bye," said Jherek cheerfully. "Thank you."
"These bags are a weight, sir," said the boy.
"Don't be cheeky, Herbert," said the middle-aged man holding the door.
"Yes," said Jherek conversationally, "they're full of Snoozer's swag now."
Snoozer gasped as the mouth of the middle-aged man dropped open.
At that moment a red-faced man in a nightshirt came running down the stairs pulling on a velvet dressing gown that Jherek would have liked to have worn himself.
"I've been robbed!" shouted the red-faced man. "My wife's jewels. My cigarette case. Everything."
"Stop!" shouted the old man at the desk.
The middle-aged man let the door go and threw himself at Jherek. The boy dropped the bags.
Jherek fell over. He had never been attacked physically before. He laughed.
The middle-aged man turned on Snoozer Vine who was desperately trying to get the bags through the door and out to the cab, a look of profound agony on his thin face. He dropped the bags when the middle-aged man tackled him.
"You can't," he yelled. "Not now!" He wriggled free, tugging something from his pocket. "Stand back!"
"A snoozer!" growled the middle-aged man. "I should have known. Don't threaten me. I'm an ex-sergeant-major." And again he dived at Snoozer.
There was a fairly loud bang.
The middle-aged man fell down. Snoozer stared at him in surprise. The surprise was mirrored on the face of the middle-aged man who now had a huge red stain on the front of his green uniform. His top hat fell off. Snoozer waved something at the man in the dressing gown and the old man in the black coat.
"Pick up the bags, Jerry," he said.
Bemused, Jherek bent and lifted the two heavy bags. The boy was hovering behind one of the potted palms, his cheeks sucked in and his eyes wide. Snoozer Vine's back was to the door but Jherek noticed that the cabby had climbed down from his cab and was running down the street waving to someone whom Jherek couldn't see. He heard a whistle sound.
"Through the door," said Snoozer in a small, cold voice.
Jherek went through the door and out into the rainy street.
"Into the cab, quick," said Snoozer. Now he waved the black and silver object at the cabby and another man, dressed in a suit of dark blue and wearing a hat with a rounded crown and no brim, who were running up the street towards them. "Get back or I'll fire!"
Jherek found the whole thing extremely amusing. He had no idea what was going on but he was enjoying the drama. He looked forward to telling Mrs. Amelia Underwood about it in a few hours. He wondered why Snoozer Vine was climbing onto the box of the cab and whipping up the horse. The cab shot off down the street. Jherek heard one more bang and then they had turned a corner and were dashing along another thoroughfare which had a number of people — mainly dressed in grey overcoats and flat hats — in it. All the people turned to stare at the cab as it flew past. Jherek waved gaily to some of them.
Full of elation, for he would soon be in Bromley, he began to sing. "Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light…" he sang as he was jolted from side to side in the hurtling cab. "Like a little candle burning in the night!"
They reached the entrance to Jones's Kitchen some time later, for Snoozer Vine had decided to leave the cab a good mile or so away. Jherek, who was carrying the bags, was quite tired when they got to the house and he wondered why Snoozer's manner had changed so markedly. The man kept snarling at him and saying things like "You certainly turned good luck into bad in a hurry. I hope to Christ that feller didn't die. If he did it's as much your fault as mine."
"Die?" Jherek had said innocently. "But can't he be resurrected? Or is this too early?"
"Shut yer mouth!" Snoozer had told him. "Well, if I swing so will you. I'd 'ave left yer behind if I
'adn't known you'd blab it all out in two minutes. I ought ter do you in, too." He laughed bitterly. "Don't forget yore an accomplice, that's all."
"You said you'd get me to Bromley," Jherek reminded him gently as they went up the steps to Jones's Kitchen.
"Bromley?" Snoozer Vine sneered. "Ha! You'll be lucky if you don't wind up in Hell now!"
During the next few days Jherek began to understand, even more profoundly than before, what misery was. He found that he was growing a beard quite involuntarily and it itched terribly. He became infested with tiny insects of three or four different varieties and they bit him all over. The clothes which Snoozer Vine had originally given him were taken from him and he was given a few thin rags to wear instead. Snoozer occasionally left the room they both shared and went down to the ground floor, always returning very surly and unsteady and smelling of the stuff which the woman had offered Jherek on his first night in Jones's Kitchen. And it grew very cold. Snoozer would not allow Jherek to go downstairs and warm himself at the fire so Jherek, as he came to understand the nature of cold, came also to understand the nature of hunger and thirst. Initially he made the most if it, savouring every experience, but slowly it began to depress him. And slowly he found himself unable to respond to the novelty of it all.
Slowly he was learning to know what fear was. Snoozer was teaching him that. Snoozer would hiss at him sometimes, making incomprehensible threats. Snoozer would growl and snap and strike Jherek who still had no instinct to defend himself. Indeed, the very idea of defence was alien to him. And all the people who had been so friendly when he had first arrived now either ignored him or, like Snoozer, snarled at him if he ventured out of the room. He became thin and mean and dirty. He ceased to despair and began to forget Bromley and even Mrs. Amelia Underwood. He began to forget that he had ever known any existence but the squalid, trunk-filled room above Jones's Kitchen.
And then, one morning, there came a great commotion below. Snoozer was still snoring on the bed, having come back in his usual unsteady, argumentative mood, and Jherek was sleeping in his usual place under the table. Jherek woke first, but his senses were too dulled by hunger, fatigue and misery for him to make any reaction to the noise. He heard yells, smashing sounds. Snoozer began to stir and open bleary eyes.
"What is it?" Snoozer said thickly. "If only that bloody fence would turn up. All that stuff and nobody ter touch it 'cause o' that feller dying." He swung his legs off the bed and swung a kick, automatically, at Jherek. "Christ, I wish that bloody 'ansom 'ad killed yer that first bloody night."
This was almost invariably his waking ritual. But this morning he cocked his head as it dawned on him that something was going on downstairs. He reached under his pillow and brought out his pistol. He got off the bed and went to the door. Cautiously, he opened the door, the pistol in his hand. Again he paused to listen. Loud voices. Oaths. Screams. Women's voices shou
ting in offended tones. A boy wailing. The deep, aggressive voices of men.
Snoozer Vine, looking little healthier than Jherek, began to pad along the passage. Jherek got up and watched from the doorway. He saw Snoozer reach the gallery just as two men, in the blue clothes he had seen on the other man as they left the hotel, rushed at him from both sides, as if they had been waiting for him. There was another shot. One of the men in blue staggered back. Snoozer broke free of the other's grasp, reached the rail of the gallery, hesitated and then leapt over it to vanish from Jherek's sight.
Jherek began to shuffle along the passage to where one of the men in blue was helping the other get to his feet.
"Stand back!" shouted the one who was not wounded. But Jherek hardly heard him. He shuffled to the rail of the gallery and looked down. He saw Snoozer on the dirty flagstones of the ground floor. His head was bleeding. His whole face seemed covered in blood. He was spread-eagled at an awkward angle and he kept trying to raise himself on his hands and knees and failing. Slowly he was being surrounded by many other men, all dressed in the same blue suits with the same blue hats on their heads.
They stood and looked at him, not trying to help him as he made effort after effort to raise himself up.
And then he was still.
A fat man — one of the men who served behind the bar in Jones's Kitchen — appeared at the edge of the circle of men in blue. He looked down at Snoozer. He looked up at the gallery and saw Jherek.
He pointed. "That's 'im," he said. "That's the other one."
Jherek felt a strong hand grip his thin shoulder. He was sensitive to pain, for Snoozer had raised a bruise on the same shoulder the night before. But the pain seemed to stimulate his memory. He turned to look up at the grim-faced man who held him.
"Mrs. Amelia Underwood," said Jherek in a small, pleading voice, "23 Collins Avenue, Bromley, Kent, England."
He repeated the phrase over and over again as he was led down the steps of the gallery, through the deserted main room, out of the door into the morning light where a black waggon drawn by four black horses awaited him. Free from Snoozer, free from Jones's Kitchen, Jherek felt a mindless surge of relief.
"Thank you," he told one of the men who had climbed into the waggon with him. "Thank you."
The man gave a thin smile. "Don't thank me, lad. They'll 'ang you fer this one, certain."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Road to the Gallows: Old Friends in New Guises
Better fed, better clothed, and better treated in prison than in Jones's Kitchen, Jherek Carnelian began to recover something of his previous state of mind. He particularly liked the grey baggy suit with the broad arrows stitched all over it and he determined, if he ever got back to his own age, to make himself one rather in the same fashion (though probably with orange arrows). The world of the prison did not have very much colour in it. It was mainly bleak greens and greys and blacks. Even the flesh of the other inmates was somewhat grey. And the sounds, too, had a certain monotony — clangs, cries and curses, for the most part. But the daily ritual of rising, eating, exercising, retiring had a healing effect on Jherek's mind. He had been accused of various crimes in the opening ritual and save for an occasional visitor who seemed sympathetic, had been left pretty much to himself. He began to think clearly of Bromley again and Mrs. Amelia Underwood. He hoped that they would let him out soon, or complete the ritual in whatever way they saw fit. Then he could continue his quest.
Every few days a man in a black suit with a white collar at his throat, carrying a black book, would visit Jherek's white-tiled cell and talk to Jherek about a friend of his who died and another friend of his who was invisible. Jherek found that listening to the man, whose name was Reverend Lowndes, had a pleasant soporific effect and he would smile and nod and agree whenever it seemed tactful to agree or shake his head whenever it seemed that Reverend Lowndes wanted him to disagree. This caused Reverend Lowndes to express great pleasure and smile a great deal and talk in his rather high pitched and monotonous voice even more about his dead friend and the invisible friend who, it emerged, was the dead friend's father.
And once, upon leaving, Reverend Lowndes patted Jherek's shoulder and said to him:
"There is no question in my mind that your salvation is at hand."
This cheered Jherek up and he looked forward to his release. The air outside the prison grew warmer, too, which was pleasant.
Jherek's other visitor was dressed in a black coat and had a silk hat, wing collar and black cravat.
His waistcoat was also black, but his trousers were made up of thin grey stripes. He had introduced himself as Mr. Griffiths, Defence Counsel. He had a large, dark head and huge, bushy black eyebrows which met near the bridge of his nose. His hands, too, were large and they were clumsy as they handled the documents which he removed from his small leather case. He sat on the edge of Jherek's hard bunk and leafed through the papers, puffing out his cheeks every so often and letting a loud sigh escape his lips from time to time. Then, at last, he turned to Jherek and pursed his lips again before speaking.
"We are going to have to plead insanity, my friend," he said.
"Ah," said Jherek uncomprehendingly.
"Yes, indeed. It appears you have admitted everything to the police. Several witnesses have positively identified you. You, indeed, recognised the witnesses before other witnesses. You have claimed no mitigating circumstances save that "you were not sure what was going on." That, in itself, is scarcely credible, from the rest of your statement. You saw the dead man, Vine, bringing in his "swag".
You help him carry it about. You escaped with him after he had shot the porter. When questioned as to your name and origins you concocted some wild story about coming from the future in some sort of machine and you gave a name that was evidently invented but which you have insisted upon retaining.
That is where I intend to begin my case — and that is what might well save your life. Now, you had best tell me, in your own opinion, what happened from the night that you met Alfred Vine until the morning when the police traced you both to Jones's Kitchen and Vine was killed while trying to escape…"
Jherek happily told his story to Mr. Griffiths, since it passed the time. But Mr. Griffiths blew out his cheeks a lot and rolled his eyes once or twice beneath his black eyebrows and once he clapped his hand to his forehead and let forth an oath.
"The only problem I have," Mr. Griffiths said, when he left the first time, "is in convincing the Jury that a man as apparently sane as yourself in one way is without question a raving lunatic in another. Well, at least I am convinced of the truth of my case. Good-bye, Mr. — um … good-bye."
"I hope to see you again soon," said Jherek politely as the guard let Mr. Griffiths out of the cell.
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Griffiths hastily. "Yes, yes."
Mr. Griffiths made a number of other visits, as did Reverend Lowndes. But whereas Reverend Lowndes always seemed to depart in an even happier mood than formerly, Mr. Griffiths usually left with a wild, unhappy look upon his dark face and his manner was always flustered.
The Trial of Jherek Carnelian for his part in the murder of Edward Frank Morris, porter employed by the Imperial Hotel, Piccadilly, in the Borough of Westminister, London, on the morning of April 5th Eighteen Hundred and Ninety Six at approximately Six o'Clock, took place at the Old Bailey Number One Court at 10 A.M. on the 30th May. Nobody, including the Defendant, expected the trial to be a long one. The only speculation concerned the sentence and the sentence, even, did not seem to concern Jherek Carnelian, who had insisted on retaining the made up name in spite of all warnings that refusal to give his own name would go against him. Before the trial began Jherek was escorted to a wooden box in which he had to stand for the duration of the proceedings. He was rather amused by the box, which commanded a view of the rest of a comparatively large room. Mr. Griffiths approached the box and spoke to Jherek urgently for a moment.
"This Mrs. Underwood. Have you known her for l
ong?"
"A fairly long time," said Jherek. "Strictly speaking of course — I will know her for a long time." He laughed. "I love these paradoxes, don't you?"
"I do not," said Mr. Griffiths, feelingly. "Would she be a respectable woman? I mean, would you say that she was — well — sane, for instance?"
"Eminently."
"Hmph. Well, I intend to call her, if possible. Have her vouch for your peculiarities — your delusions and so on."
"Call her? Bring her here, you mean?"
"Exactly."
"That would be splendid, Mr. Griffiths!" Jherek clapped his hands with pleasure. "You are very kind, sir."
"Hmph," said Griffiths, turning away and going back to the table at which he sat with a number of other men all dressed like himself in black gowns and odd-looking false hair which was white and tightly curled with a little tuft hanging down behind. Further back were rows of seats in which sat a number of men in a variety of clothes, with no false hair on their heads. And above and behind Jherek was a gallery containing more people in their ordinary clothes. To his left was another series of tiered benches on which, as he watched, twelve people arranged themselves. All showed a marked interest in him. He was flattered to be the centre of attention. He waved and smiled but, oddly enough, nobody smiled back at him.
And then someone shouted something Jherek didn't catch and everyone suddenly began getting to their feet as another group of men in long robes and false hair filed into the room and sat down behind a series of desks immediately opposite Jherek on the far side of the chamber. It was then that Jherek gasped in astonishment as he recognised the man who seemed to take pride of place, after himself, in the court.
"Lord Jagged of Canaria!" he cried. "Have you followed me through time? What a friend you are, indeed!"
One of the men in blue who stood behind Jherek leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder.
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