by April White
“Right! You can tell me I’m a time traveler and you claim there’s such a thing as Immortals, but you can’t tell me how you know any of it?”
“Everything I’ve said is true.” He sounded frustrated. Well, too bad. I was way worse than frustrated.
“I need to get back home.” It was a statement with so many possible meanings; I wasn’t totally sure which ‘home’ I meant. I started to walk away but Archer’s voice stopped me.
“Miss Elian?”
I spun angrily. “What.”
“I’d like to help you.”
That simple sentence rocked me back like a blast of wind. Other people didn’t do things for me. I took care of myself. Even my mother hadn’t been able to do more than make sure we had a roof and food since I got old enough to realize no one else we knew moved every two years. And then it was easier to just stop knowing people. My eyes filled with tears and it appalled me. I bent to re-tie my boot laces until I could get myself back under control.
“Where did you come through?”
“Come through?” I stalled with the laces until my traitorous emotions were in check.
“As I understand it, Clockers come through portals. I’m not entirely sure how it works as the families are very close-mouthed about their particular gifts, but apparently there are physical places that Clockers can open in order to move through time.”
“Open? How?” Since when was I not completely denying the possibility of time travel?
Archer shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it done.”
My brain was going a mile a minute about everything that had gone down in the last four days. I felt like the answers were there, I just needed to sift through the madness to find them. I sat on a low wall and Archer dropped down next to me.
“Saira?” His eyes were full of concern.
“I’m fine. I just need to think.” And distract myself from the intensity of Archer’s gaze. He was looking at me in a way that made my heart pound. Something nobody had ever done to me before. I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.
‘Okay, Saira, focus,’ I scolded myself. I closed my eyes, aware that Archer was still on his knees, still staring at me, still way too close. I took a deep breath. Break in at the loft. Elian Manor. Millicent locks me in. Escape and run from Slick and his goon. Archer. Upminster station. The spiral at Whitechapel. The spiral…
My eyes popped open. Archer was still there, still too close, but his expression had shifted from concern to something… speculative. I stood up abruptly, almost knocking him off balance. Served him right for doing it to me. “If I believe you about the time travel thing, and that’s a very big ‘if,’ I might have come through a spiral at Whitechapel station.”
“A spiral?”
“I think so.” I explained. “I was tracing a design that was etched into the wall, and it started glowing and… humming. And then my whole body was being stretched and pulled, like I was a giant rubber band. And there was a sound that vibrated through my skin and into my guts. I think the sound is what made me want to puke— er, vomit.”
Archer smiled wryly. “They don’t make it easy on you, do they?”
We started walking down the avenue in the direction of Whitechapel. “They as in the Immortals?”
He nodded. Our stride was almost exactly the same as we walked and I noticed I was almost his equal in height. I guessed he was probably tall for the times because I’m about 5’10”, tall for a modern teenager but positively gargantuan for one in 1888.
“Have you ever met one – an Immortal, I mean?”
Archer shook his head. “Apparently no one sees them anymore. And there’s even question if some of them still exist.”
“Just some of them? Call me a skeptic, but unless I’ve seen something with my own eyes I have a hard time believing in it.”
“How do you reconcile the idea of something like God then?”
“I’m not really the church-going type.” I looked closely at him. “Are you?”
We turned down a smaller side street, out of the flow of foot traffic that was beginning to pick up as early morning vendors went about their business. “I’m in the AKC program at King’s College, getting a special degree in ethics and theology.”
“Sounds like you go to church then.”
Archer smiled. “My tutor is a bishop in the Church of England, so I suppose that counts.”
“And what about someone like Jack the Ripper? Does God love him too?”
Archer stopped and held my gaze. “A man chooses what he becomes, and he must accept responsibility for his choices.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know how to.”
We started walking again, down Brady Street. Across the way was a cemetery with massive gates and Archer abruptly turned and entered it. I had to run to catch up with him as he moved easily among the old headstones.
I looked around at the very deserted place. “A cemetery? After the night we’ve had?”
Archer finally stopped walking and looked around as if seeing the place through my eyes. “It’s been closed for thirty years. If no one else is buried here in the next seventy years it’ll probably become row houses. I like it because it’s quiet.”
The place definitely had the feeling of abandonment. There were Stars of David carved onto the headstones and names like Hannah Hyams and Nathaniel Rothschild written in English and Hebrew. “Is this the Rothschild? The wine guy or the bank guy?”
Archer looked at the headstone I was reading in surprise. “The bank chap I believe. You know about him?”
I shrugged. “Lots of useless facts get stored away in my brain. One of the pitfalls of being on my own so much.” I stepped carefully around Mr. Rothschild’s headstone and squatted down to brush some dirt away from his wife’s.
Archer knelt next to me. “It’s just you and your mother then?” I nodded. He was quiet for a moment, and his voice was distant when he spoke. “I didn’t know my mother. She died when I was born.”
“I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged slightly and carefully avoided my eyes. “I’m told I favor her. Perhaps it’s why my father sent me to the University rather than let me help my older brother run his estates.”
“Do you miss him? Your dad?”
Archer’s expression was unreadable. “There was a time, when I was young, that I believed he cared for me. When he spent time teaching me things that mattered to him. That time is past.” He stood and brushed himself off, then held his hand out to help me up. “Come. It’s almost dawn. The station will open soon.”
I pulled my black marker out of the side pocket of my backpack and reached up to a protected spot under the eaves of the arched gate to the Houle Family garden.
“What are you doing?”
“Making my mark.” I quickly drew my standard tag, the one I’d invented for myself when I knew my mom and I were about to leave a place. It was sort of a spiral question mark and it made me feel like my presence would be noted even if my identity was a mystery.
Archer watched me cap my pen and shove it into my backpack. His eyes traveled back up to the mark I’d tucked away out of sight under the roof overhang. “Is that like the spiral you came through?”
I shook my head as I shouldered my pack. “It’s my own invention, but now I wonder where I got it.”
At the hospital we stayed on the opposite side of Whitechapel Road to avoid the people dumping bedpans and dustbins. A very pale light was beginning to brighten the sky. “We’re here. Whitechapel station.” Archer looked at his pocket watch, a gesture that reminded me it was 1888. “It opens in five minutes.”
I nodded and looked for someplace to wait. There was a staircase leading to a basement apartment. “Can you wait with me or do you have to go?”
“I can wait.”
We sat on the lower steps, away from any prying eyes at the street level. The flickering gaslight dimmed, then went out, and we whispered so we didn�
��t wake any tenants in the nearby flat. Archer looked tired in the dusty light of dawn. I was probably tripping over the bags under my own eyes but that was the least of my worries at the moment.
“Archer? How did you know to find me outside Elian Manor?”
“I have no idea, Saira. But maybe if you tell me exactly what happened, I’ll remember to do it then.”
That sounded about as insane as anything else he’d said all night, so I told him the story of how we met on the road outside Elian Manor. He let me speak without interruption, even though his expression showed everything from disbelief, to shock, to outrage and finally anger.
“And what of your family? Is anyone searching for your mother?” Interesting that of all the things he could have asked it was my family Archer wanted to know about – the thing I knew the least.
“My grandmonster seemed confident my mom would be back in a couple of days.”
Archer smirked. “Grandmonster? I assume you don’t hold her in high regard?”
“You assume correctly.”
“And your father?”
“I never knew him.”
Archer was silent at that. I guessed that in this time not knowing your father was about the same as admitting your mother had questionable morals. But I wasn’t up to explanations.
There was a box of produce stashed behind the stairs, maybe a fruit-seller’s wares. Archer dropped a coin into the box and picked out an apple. “It’s his loss, then.” He brushed the apple off with his sleeve and handed it to me. I accepted it gratefully.
“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure if I was thanking him for the apple or the fact that he didn’t judge me for my parents’ choices. I bit into the fruit and Archer smirked.
“I’m sure there’s symbolism in offering an innocent an apple.”
“That’s a pretty big assumption.” I tried to sound haughty but probably failed miserably.
“That you’re innocent? I don’t think I’m assuming anything.” He smiled and my stomach flip-flopped in a way that smiles from strange, good-looking guys don’t generally bring on in my world.
“What makes you think so?” I’m pretty sure I wasn’t flirting, but thought I might be dangerously close, which was a very strange feeling for me.
“You lack the artifice of someone practiced in social graces, which, in itself, is a form of seduction.” Archer was enjoying the outrage on my face.
“So basically I have no manners, is that what you’re saying?”
He laughed and I tried hard not to stare at his mouth. “Not at all. If anything, there’s more truth to you than most women I’ve known. Only little girls are as honest and straightforward, thus my assessment of your innocence.”
“And now you’re saying I’m a child. You know, if you’re trying to be charming you suck at it.”
It was Archer’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I… suck? That hardly seems an appropriate thing to say.” I tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t, and I burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh, like a lightness in my lungs that hadn’t been there since the cops busted me in Venice. A lifetime ago. Archer cracked a grin that made him look like a teenager and I realized that somewhere behind the proper Victorian gentleman was a mischievous kid. I thought that kid and I could be friends.
The way he was watching me made me flush with heat. His eyes wouldn’t let go of mine and it almost felt like he was trying to memorize my face. Then his gaze moved to my mouth and I covered my embarrassment with a last bite of my apple.
“Saira—“
I interrupted him. I didn’t know what he was about to say and didn’t want to know. Everything about Archer had put me off balance and I tried to find my footing again, even with the question I’d been dreading.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
He knew exactly what I was talking about. “You came here, didn’t you?”
“Did I? I’m still wrestling with that one.”
Archer thought for a moment, then reached into his pocket and pulled out the silver coin he’d shown me earlier. “Take this with you. It was minted last year in my time. See if it’s really worth something in yours.”
He put the coin in my palm and then closed my hand around it. His skin was warm and his eyes danced as he smiled at me. “Or keep it as a memory of a strange night with an odd young man who told you unbelievable stories.”
“Are you an odd young man?”
Archer shrugged. “People who think they know me would say yes.”
“And what about those who really do know you?”
He held my gaze for a long moment with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I’ve never met one.”
There was something very sad about the way he said it and I realized he really believed he was alone. I didn’t have friends, but at least I had my mother. And even though her version of parenting was moving us from place to place, and teaching me art and Victorian history while letting me take care of myself, she still knew me all the way to my soul. I reached out for Archer’s hand and he smiled.
“Well, isn’t this the perfect picture of young love? Too bad it has to end so soon.” A graveled English voice above us spoke. Archer leapt to his feet while I stared in horror and a deep, primal fear twisted my guts.
A powerful, stocky man with a pockmarked face and a sneering smile stood at the top of the stairs. I knew that face. Even though I’d only caught a glimpse of him in the darkness of Mitre Square and on the rooftop above it, I knew him from Berner Street. From passing him on the road as his lady-friend took a drink from his flask and laughed too loudly at his stupid joke.
It was Jack the Ripper.
I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as Archer did up the stairs as he lunged at the Ripper. It must have been smallpox that put the deep marks in that face, just like killing was putting marks on his soul.
I stared at the two men, just as shocked by Archer’s speed as his willingness to jump into danger. His yell broke my paralysis. “Go home, Saira!”
Fueled by pure adrenaline I leapt on top of a garbage can, grabbed the lower rails of the street-level guard, and hoisted myself up away from Archer and the Ripper. They were boxing, and Archer’s blows were surprisingly accurate and ferocious. The Ripper was just a dirty fighter and the sound of fists hitting flesh made my stomach hurt. I couldn’t watch.
A guy in a uniform was just unlocking the gates to Whitechapel station and I flew through them before he even had one all the way open. “Oy!” was all I heard as I raced down the passageway. My feet sounded like hammers on the rickety metal stairs and I sprinted across the bridge just as a steam engine train pulled into the station below me.
I raced down the steps on the other side of the tracks, barely conscious of the people swarming toward the train. I scanned the passage for the service alcove. There! About halfway down toward the tracks, on the left side of the corridor. I bumped into a lady in a green dress as I ran for the alcove, but was past her so fast I didn’t see her face.
Voices shouted from the tracks over the steam hiss of the engine and I slipped into the alcove and started tracing the design with my fingers. Almost immediately the cold porcelain warmed beneath my fingertips and the wall began to hum.
The shouting voices grew louder and more insistent. “Oy! Stop there! Ye can’t do that!” My fingers shook as I traced the spirals faster. The tile was practically hot and a white light seeped around the edges of the design.
A thud of fists and flesh, and a groan of pain. The sound of running feet, then Archer’s voice gasped. “Go, Saira! Go!” The design was almost totally lit. Just one last spiral to trace.
A hand grabbed my backpack and I screamed. It was the Ripper. The blood from Archer’s punches made the leer on his face look like horrific clown make-up. “You’re not going anywhere!” He jerked me backwards by my backpack and my fingers lost contact with the wall as my head cracked against the tile behind me.
“No!” I was desperate to get back to the spirals. Then suddenly
Archer was there and the pressure slackened on my pack. The Ripper growled and drew a knife, his eyes locked on Archer. I whipped my backpack at the Ripper just as he lunged. The wicked-looking blade struck through my pack and suddenly a fine red mist sprayed the white tiles.
Oh God! Archer?
No. Red spray paint. Archer and the Ripper seemed mesmerized by the hiss and spray coming from my slashed pack. I leapt forward to finish tracing the design. The humming filled my ears and my body was beginning to feel the stretch like a giant rubber band was pulling me apart.
The sharp blast of steam and the peel of the train whistle signaled the departure of the iron beast as it pushed forward. Passengers raced to board and others began to surround the fighting men.
My vision was blurring and my body felt disconnected from the tile under my feet and the sounds of Archer and The Ripper grappling with each other. There was a flash of green at the corner of my vision. My fingers grasped to finish tracing the design.
“Saira!”
I turned in horror at the sound of my name. Just as I slipped through the spiral portal I managed to scream one word to the person in green who appeared across the track as the steam train pulled out of the station.
“Mom!”
Going Back
This time I did puke. At least I had the presence of mind to bend over into a corner so I didn’t cover myself in foamy slime. My head was pounding and I slid down the wall to sit for a minute. Or maybe an hour. Had last night happened, or did I have a concussion that gave me delusions of dead bodies and crazed killers? And my mom! Had that really been Claire Elian, looking like a proper Victorian lady in a long green dress, screaming my name from across the tracks? I cranked my head around to look at the platform where she’d stood just moments before.
A train rushed into the station in a blur of silver, then slowed to a stop, disgorging early morning commuters. She wasn’t there and an electronic voice announced the train to Upminster station. That, more than anything else, convinced me I was back. Back in 21st century London. Which meant Jack the Ripper wouldn’t be waiting to grab me? Maybe.
Or maybe I was just losing my mind.