The world was full of madmen like John Lachley, killers looking for power, men like John Caddrick, her father. Jack the Ripper had built himself a hideous house beneath the streets, filling it with death. Jenna curled protectively around her abdomen, where Carl's baby was growing, and vowed that her child would never become a victim of the slaughterhouse her father had built. Jenna would see his monstrous construction torn to the ground and her father dead, first. Even if she had to pull the trigger.
Weeping softly in the blackness of a Spitalfields night, Jenna Caddrick listened helplessly to the hushed whispering from Ianira's room across the hall.
As John Lachley's cab rattled its way up the approach to Battersea Bridge, his thoughts rushed and tripped across one another like spawning fish. He was eager to reach the end of the journey and discover what really lay beyond the "gate." Despite the images in the dead woman's fantastical camera, he could not truly imagine the world which had produced such marvels. Anxious and impatient, he tried to steady his hands, but they would not remain decently calm. He gripped more tightly the case hiding Miss Nosette's severed head and craned forward to see how much farther it was to the end of the bridge. Soon...
God grant him patience, for soon could not come quickly enough.
Full dark settled inexorably across London's rooftops and chimneys as the cab jockeyed for position in the long queue of carriages and wagons crossing the river. On the far shore, Lachley could just make out Battersea Park's miniature lake where, on summer days, children chased ducks and swans or floated little armadas of handmade boats. There were no children in the park tonight, nor anyone else, for that matter, save a few modest carriages and the occasional hansom or barouche for hire. Black smoke pouring from Battersea's chimney pots snaked its way upward to merge with the ominous darkness of yet another rainstorm threatening to the east. Low clouds raced all along the southern bank of the river. From their vantage point on Battersea Bridge, lightning flared and flashed across the distant rooftops of Surrey and Bermondsey and damp wind slashed at Lachley's coat and hair through the open carriage, threatening to rip his hat loose. He secured it with an irritable jerk and checked his pocketwatch impatiently. It was now nearly eight and the journalist had guessed the "gate" would go at about eight-fifteen.
The cab finally tilted down the descent from the bridge and swung past the dark dampness of Battersea Park, cutting off in a right-hand turn which took them toward the long, lazy river bend which formed Battersea's western border. Once they reached Octavia Street, it wasn't difficult to suss out which house was Spaldergate. Carriages and hansom cabs lined the kerbs, disgorging elegantly dressed ladies and immaculate gentlemen and their servants, dozens of people arriving for what neighbors must imagine was an elegant dinner party.
He ordered the cabbie to stop well back from the line of arriving carriages and paid the man, waiting until the battered cab had rattled away down the street before moving toward Spaldergate, himself. Hidden in the shadows, he watched the arrivals through narrowed eyes. If people were still returning to the house, the gate couldn't be open yet. He settled his back against a tree trunk, biding his time, more than anxious to step through the gate but forcing himself to wait until the last possible moment. He did not want to risk being detained by the gate's operators. At length, a final carriage arrived, disgorging its passengers, a portly gentleman who was saying to the lady with him, "Hurry up, Abby, we'll miss the gate!"
At last!
Lachley stole softly down the pavement in their wake, then slipped into Spaldergate's side yard and found a wooden gate set into the high wall. Beyond, he discovered a vast and overgrown garden. Lachley eased into a clump of shaggy rhododendrons and peered into the garden, expecting he knew not quite what, a miniature version of a railway station, perhaps, with a gate leading into somewhen else, or perhaps the iron hulk of some inexplicable and infernal machine. The high stone wall ran right round the sprawling garden, its far reaches just visible in the gaslight from lamps spaced evenly along a patterned stone walkway. His brows rose at the extravagance, so many gaslights illuminating a mere garden, and one that was improperly maintained, at that. The walkway ended abruptly at the rear wall, as though some fuedal war lord had erected a fortress keep straight across an ancient Roman highway. Had that bitch Nosette lied? Was there no "gate" after all? No route into the distant future?
Yet something was clearly afoot, for milling about in a state of high agitation were more people than Lachley—in his own state of high-strung, sweating eagerness—could readily count. Upwards of seventy-five, at least, plus piles and haphazard stacks of luggage and porters swarming like angry mosquitoes, as though this garden were St. Pancras Station, that fantastical castle of brick and iron and glass with its bustling thousands. Most of the strange guests in Spaldergate's garden carried parcels or ladies' toiletry and jewel cases, bulging valises, carpet satchels with ironwood grips, all in a colorful and meaningless jumble of haste and nameless excitement.
Lachley felt the sting and ache of jaw muscles rigidly clenched, of teeth too tightly ground together. The confusion of voices scraped against his very nerves, until he had to close his fists to stop himself taking the nearest chattering bitch by the throat and squeezing until his knuckles collided in the center. The need to move, to do something besides huddle in the shrubbery, clawed at him, shrieked until the very substance of his skull vibrated with an agony like broken bones grating together. He reached for his throbbing temples, wanting to clutch at his head and hold the fury forcibly inside the cage of his fingers.
The vibrating pain had become a shriek when he noticed with a distant surprise that others in the garden were doing exactly the same thing. Some actually clapped hands across their ears, as though to shut out an inaudible noise. The unnerving sensation was not his imagination, then, nor the manifestation of multiple stresses on his overwrought nerves. He frowned, trying to comprehend what it might be—
—and a hole of utter, midnight blackness opened in the center of the stone wall, right above the flagstone path. Lachley sucked air down, a sharp gasp. The hair on his arms came straight up and his back muscles tried to shudder and crawl away down his spine, intent on running as far and as fast as possible, with or without the rest of him.
The gate...
It pulsed open with a silent thunder, gaping wider, swallowing up more of the garden wall, which simply ceased to exist where that blackness touched it. The edges scintillated in the glow from the gas lamps, shot through with irridescent color, like a film of oil spilled from steamship bilges across Tobacco Basin's darkened waters. The fascination of it drew him, repulsed him, left him trembling violently. What power did these people possess, to open such a thing out of sheer air and solid stone?
Ancient names and half-recalled incantations stumbled through his broken, sliding thoughts, names of power and terror: Anubis, destroyer of souls, guardian of the underworld's pitchy gates... Heimdall of the shattering horn, watching for any who dared to cross the glinting rainbow bridge... Kur, the coiled serpent of the fathomless abyss, destroyer of the world in flood and thunder...
The outward shudder of the gate's receding edges finally came to a halt and it hung there, silent and terrible, beckoning him forward while his senses screamed to run in the opposite direction and never glance back. Then, as though such a thing were the most ordinary occurance in the world, the men and women in the garden stepped calmly through it, vanishing from sight like a cricket ball whacked solidly with the bat, rushing away to dwindle down to nothing. They were rushing through, hurrying, crowding on one another's heels. How long would the monstrous thing remain open? He took one step toward it, then another and a third, then rushed forward, impatient with his own gibbering terror, determined to step through, to discover for himself what horrors and delights might lie beyond.
Working himself into a state of frenzy, electrically aware of the risk, Lachley pulled Nosette's dismembered head from its carrying case and rushed forward into the puddle
of light from the nearest gas lamp. A well-dressed lady in watered silk saw him first. She let go a high, piercing scream. Lachley was abruptly engulfed by a stinging cloud of liveried servants and distraught gentlemen. "I tried to stop her..." Lachley gasped out, waving Miss Nosette's ghastly head about, her streaming blonde tresses clotted with blood. Summoning tears, Lachley gripped a white-faced gentleman by the arm. "She wanted to follow that madman in the East End, to photograph him! By the time I got to her it was too late, he'd cut her to pieces, oh, God, all I could bring away was this... this little bit of her. Poor, stupid Dominica! I just want to go home, please..."
People were shouting, calling for someone. Lachley started toward the gate, not caring to wait. Just behind him, a woman's voice shrilled out, "My God! It's John Lachley!" He jerked around and focused on a woman who stood not ten paces away, a dark-haired woman of extraordinary beauty, who looked vaguely familiar to him. She was staring straight at him, eyes wide in recognition. Scalding hatred rose in his gorge, threatened to peel back his skin and burst out through his fingertips. She knows me! By God, she'll not stop me! Lachley whirled and plunged toward the gaping black hole. Behind him, the woman shouted, "Stop him! That's Jack the Ripper!"
Screams erupted on his heels...
Then he was inside. Falling, rushing foward with dizzy speed. He yelled. Then staggered across a metal grating, into a railing at waist height. He looked up—
John Lachley screamed.
It was a world inverted. Stone for sky, pendulous glowing lights hanging from iron beams and girders, booming voices that echoed and rolled, more terrifying than any thunder, speaking out of the air itself, a maze of twisting confusion that fell away at his feet, at least five full stories below, as though he stood at the top of Big Ben's clock tower or the highest point of St. Paul's arching dome. Wild displays of light in alien colors hurt his eyes.
People moved in crowds far below, like flotsam caught in the eddy of the docklands' swirling waters. Down a rampway, down endless metal steps, down and further down still, the people who had come through the gate ahead of him wound their way toward the distant floor, while a few yards away, suspended on ramps and metal stairs in a mirror image, crowds of nattily dressed men and women pressed their way upwards, toward the very platform where Lachley stood.
At the base of the metal stairs, confusion reigned. A screaming mob shouted questions, inchoate with distance. Men dressed as guards shoved and pressed the crowd back. Lachley realized with a start that a number of those guards were women, women wearing trousers as though they had renounced their sex and thought themselves the equal of any man. Eddies moved sharply through the crowd as a fight broke out, unmistakably riot, brutal as any mob of drunken dock hands demanding pay higher than the handful of shillings a week they deserved...
Someone lunged through the gate behind him, shouting his name.
He whirled. The vaguely familiar woman had rushed through with two men, who dove straight at him across the platform. Lachley hurled aside Dominica Nosette's head and drove an elbow into an unprotected gut, then slammed the heel of his hand against a nose, felt bone crunch. Both men went sharply down, barely stirring. The woman's eyes widened as she realized her abrupt danger. She opened her mouth to scream and tried to lunge away from him. Lachley snatched her back by the hair. She fought him with unexpected ferocity. Her nails caught his face and her knee slammed into his thigh with a sharp flare of pain, narrowly missing his groin.
"Bitch!" He slugged her, putting his entire body into the blow. It caught her brutally across the temple. She collapsed, a boneless weight in his grasp. Someone was shouting from the stairs, where several shrieking women stood in ashen shock and one narrow-eyed, dangerous-looking man was rushing right toward him. Lachley couldn't fight the whole bloody station!
He snatched up the unconscious woman as a hostage, heaving her across his shoulder, and plunged down the steps toward the distant floor. He skidded down flight after flight, one hand balancing the inert burden on his shoulder, the other gripping the railing as he slung himself around corners at each landing. A glance below revealed several uniformed men charging up from the floor, trying to cut him off. He snarled aloud, but Lachley was only a flight-and-a-half up, so he vaulted across the rail, dropping a full ten feet into the middle of the rioting crowd. He landed on someone's back and felt bone crunch under his feet as the man went brutally down. Lachley stumbled to hands and knees, dropping his hostage in the melee. Someone kicked him aside, sent him spinning and rolling under running feet. Bruised and shaken, Lachley finally skidded into a momentary pocket of clear space and shoved his way to his feet. He thrust himself past intervening bodies, reeled from a punch against his unprotected side, turned with a snarl and broke the bastard's neck with a wrenching heave and twist—
Then he was clear of the riot. Lachley found himself staring at cobblestoned walkways and park benches and wrought iron lamps, even a pub that reminded him incongruously of Chelsea. The riot surged behind him, shoving Lachley straight past a line of stunned security guards, who were busy to distraction searching the rioting mob for him. He bolted, determined to discover some way out of this madhouse. He needed to find a quiet place to think, to sort out what to do next. He was very nearly clear of the chaos when a group of wild-eyed men brandishing placards rushed at him.
"Lord Jack!"
"Lead us, holiest one!"
"Command us! We are your servants!"
Lachley opened his mouth, not entirely sure what might emerge. Behind him, someone shouted, "There he is!" He glanced wildly back toward the platform, where the two men who'd rushed through the gate on his heels were stumbling down the stairs under escort, pointing right at him. Lachley whirled on the placard-carrying lunatics, who were plucking at his very coat sleeves in fawning, worshipful attitudes.
"You want to help me? I need shelter, curse it!"
"At once, Lord Jack!" the nearest cried eagerly, tugging at his arm. "Anything you desire! We have awaited your coming..."
They surrounded him, rushed him away from the shouting guards who were shoving rioters aside, trying to reach him. Lachley ran with the madmen, insane sycophants who gibbered at him from all sides and hid his face with their hand-scrawled signs. Am I doomed to rely on madmen all my days? He'd traded Maybrick's lunacy for a whole crowd of insanity. But sheltering with madmen was preferable to hanging, should the wardens of the gate catch up to him.
His unanticipated escorts brought Lachley eventually to a place that—despite its overwhelming strangeness—appeared to be a hotel of some kind. The men who'd appointed themselves his adoring acolytes rushed Lachley across a brightly lit lobby, where a desk clerk glanced up only briefly, then ushered him straight into what proved to be a lift. They rose with startling speed and quite delightfully, the controls were automated, eliminating the need for a lift operator who would have to be eliminated for witnessing his flight. The lights overhead were strange, far too bright, and he couldn't determine what the translucent panels covering them were fashioned from. Then the doors slipped quietly open with a soft bell chime and he found himself in a luxuriously carpeted corridor. One of the madmen produced a small, stiff card, which he inserted into a metal box on one of the numbered doors. The panel opened to his touch.
Lachley stepped warily inside, finding two neatly made beds, a strange box with a flat glass front perched on a low table, several odd lamps, ugly artwork framed on white-painted walls, and just to the left of the door, a lavatory fitted with a large mirror and the strangest water closet he'd ever seen.
"Christ, but I need a drink..." he muttered, scrubbing at his face with unsteady hands.
"At once, Lord!" The man who had unlocked the room hurried across to a small cabinet, procuring a bottle of amber-colored liquor which he opened and poured while the other madmen crowded inside. Lachley knocked back a surprisingly good whiskey, then considered the men who stood in a huddle near the door, gazing at him with the intensity of utter reverence.
"Who are you?" Lachley demanded.
"Your Sons, Lord Jack. We have long awaited your coming. Command us. We are your chosen."
He narrowed his eyes as he considered the implications of that patently absurd answer. Were all the inhabitants of this world completely insane? No, not all, he frowned, thinking back to those guards at the gate. Lachley wondered what to ask first and finally decided on the simplest question in his mind. "What year is it?"
None of the madmen seemed at all surprised by such a question. The one who'd given him the whiskey said, "By station time, Lord, it is 1910. Beyond Primary..."
"Station time?" he echoed, startled.
"Yes, Lord. The station exists well over a century in our past and some thirty years in your future."
Lachley's mind reeled. Sanity slipped and lurched beneath his feet. He groped for it, finding, instead, the bed, which he sank onto simply to prevent a nasty fall. "Do you know the bitch who followed me through the gate?" he asked harshly. "The one I lost in the crowd?"
"Yes, Lord. She's a Ripperologist, one of the Ripper Watch Team, Dr. Shahdi Feroz. She went to study your great works in London."
Ripperologist? Lachley narrowed his eyes. She'd come to London to study him? The journalist had said as much, but he hadn't believed her. The unlamented Miss Nosette would have said anything to persuade Lachley to release her unharmed. Lachley shut his eyes for long moments, trying to place where he'd seen that Feroz woman's face before. The familiar features finally clicked in his mind. The lecture. She'd attended the lecture at the Egyptian Hall. Had spoken with him briefly, afterwards. Lachley frowned. Had she known all along, then? Known that he was responsible for the deaths of the whores in the East End? She must have. Hadn't she cried out that he was Jack the Ripper, back in the garden behind Spaldergate? Lachley narrowed his eyes coldly. That woman's testimony could see him hanged.
The House That Jack Built ts-4 Page 25