Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  Imp’s knowledge of London in the 1880s came from a vacation project Dad had inflicted on him one year around the time he was also studying magecraft. And his father’s presentation came to him pre-tested on his elder sister, who had taken a keen interest in the social history of the period.

  Eve had studied the map, questioned the wisdom of walking ley lines between plague pits, and googled the tariff of fares for a London hansom cab. It would be about five shillings for a two-person cab, each way.

  A sane cabbie probably wouldn’t enter Whitechapel at all, and she’d need to switch to a new one after six miles—the mandatory maximum distance for a cab ride, to rest the horses. But she’d paid more attention than Imp to their father’s admonitions about the unwisdom of traversing the roads of the dead. Imp was bold, Imp was daring, Imp was (in someone else’s frame of reference) reckless. Well, he might get to the library before her, but she had every intention of arriving alive, even at night in the year of Leather Apron.

  It took no time at all to traverse the maze of corridors and staircases that lurked inside the top-floor closet. Presently Eve found herself facing an unremarkable exterior door. Someone had already come this way: the bolts were drawn back and the lock opened. Glancing around, she saw an arrow chalked on the wall beside the staircase. Good: her brother—or someone in his crew—wasn’t completely daft.

  “Ma’am?” the Gammon asked uncertainly.

  “They came this way and so will we. Come on, there’s no time to lose if we’re to hail a cab.”

  They stepped out into night and mist, in an alleyway around the side of the town house. The sickly sweet stench of rotting compost and road apples hung over the damp-slicked flagstones, but it was well swept and clear of obstructions. “With me.” She threaded her hand through her escort’s elbow and pushed him along the alley. “This could be sticky if we’re seen exiting,” she murmured. “If we run into a constable—”

  “Do you want me to…?”

  “No need for that: I’m a scullery maid and you’re my beau, we’re just stepping out for the evening.” She paused just inside the shadowy mouth of the alley. The street outside was brightly illuminated after the darkness of the final maze of rooms in the dream house, and actinic gaslight shimmered in the misty air. At this end of the alley there was a sharp tang of sulfur and wood smoke. “It’s not respectable, but a sixpence should suffice.” The language of bribery was a universal tongue.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He glanced either way, then stepped out of the alleyway, adjusting his coat.

  A second later Eve followed him. She took his arm again, leaning just inside his personal space: it was a very muscular arm, attached to an absolutely ripped body. ’Tis a pity he’s a hunk, she thought, briefly entertained. She could appreciate a good piece of male ass in the abstract, but she doubted he’d enjoy the kind of games she preferred. “Anyone about?” she murmured. “Left.”

  “No, ma’am.” He turned left and they proceeded along the street. The fog swirled around them, dampening sound and shrouding the buildings to either side in mystery. “What am I looking for?”

  “Hazards: drunks, muggers, constables. There may be some overlap. Avoid shooting if possible, it only attracts trouble. What we want—” She glanced both ways—“is a cab! Hail it quick!”

  The hansom was already occupied and as it passed them she heard a titter of laughter from the passengers crammed on the bench seat, but now the Gammon knew what to look for. “It’s tiny,” he observed, sounding surprised. “More like a rickshaw than a taxi.”

  Eve felt a momentary flash of irritation, but let it go. She needed him around for now, and his culture shock was only to be expected. “Horses aren’t magic carpets,” she pointed out. “It’s easier than walking.”

  “Yes—” He stuck his arm out for another cab, and this time the driver reined in his horse and touched his brim. His face was sallow and lined and the horse was alarmingly bony, but his hansom appeared to be in reasonable condition.

  “Where to?”

  “Leman Street,” Eve announced, and recoiled at the very old-fashioned look the cabbie sent her.

  “Oh aye?” He thought for a moment: “That’ll be six shillings up front, right enough. And I’m not stoppin’ fer anything.”

  “Six—” Eve suppressed the impulse to sneer at the man. “Very well. Help me up, Peter?”

  The Gammon handed her up, then climbed in behind her while she counted out the coins. “Here,” she said tartly.

  “Let’s just see…” The driver squinted at his palm. The coins passed muster, for they disappeared immediately. He cracked his whip past the nag’s shoulder. “Trot on!”

  The hansom rattled through the streets of poshville—gated Mayfair, tidy Marylebone—before moving into the crowded theaterland between the British Museum and Covent Garden. The streets were busier here, and they got stuck a couple of times between logjams of cabs and throngs of tipsy revellers spilling into the streets. They continued east, the streets gradually becoming cramped and the buildings drabber (aside from a memorable stretch of ostentatious medievalism around St. Paul’s Cathedral). They proceeded down Cheapside. The pavements were still crowded but the menfolk were increasingly ragged, and the few loitering women who were visible showed a considerable amount of skin. The still-noisome stench of the Thames merged with the miasma drifting from Spitalfields Market to the north. And now they were clopping and jingling through unlit streets where the foot traffic was fast and furtive, the drunk and homeless lay in the gutter, and occasional wails of pain or pleasure split the thickening fog.

  “I’ll take ye this far and no further,” the cabbie told them, reining in his horse. “Just keep goin’ another hundred yards or so, and may God have mercy on your soul,” he added pointedly to the Gammon, who he evidently held to be a blameless victim of Eve’s sinful scheming.

  “Thank you very much,” the Gammon told him, very formal and sincere. He scanned the street, then stepped down and offered Eve his hand. “If you’d care to come with me, my dear…”

  Eve waited for the hansom to rattle away then took his arm. With her free hand she reached into her pocket for a bunch of glass marbles. She held them loosely in her cupped palm, but grasped them tightly with her mind’s fist. “Next right,” she said quietly. “We’re entering bandit country. Look sharp.”

  An eerie howl split the night: perhaps a dog’s dying agony or a woman in childbirth. Or maybe it was one of the johns who visited this part of town to slake his carnal appetites, appetites unacceptable in polite society but tolerated in the lawless warrens of London’s underbelly.

  They passed a pub. The door was crudely hammered together, lacking window panes. It hung ajar and as they passed Eve saw an interior scene lit by flickering candlelight that would have given Hieronymus Bosch nightmares. Bodies with legs outstretched on the bare floor, their backs propped up against the wall as they suckled on bottles of gin. The bar was a couple of planks propped atop damaged beer casks, the proprietor a brawny thug pouring pints into battered tin cups. In the refuse-littered alleyway outside a woman hitched her skirts up beneath a drunk, while an infant crawled in the slops by their ankles.

  The Gammon’s head was swiveling in all directions. “What are you thinking?” Eve demanded.

  “I’m thinking I haven’t seen anything this lively since that one time I was on close protection duty and my principal’s girlfriend insisted on going clubbing in Pattaya right after the USS Nimitz came into port.” He moved his right hand closer to his machine pistol. “It took four of us to get her to safety, and the master chief needed rabies shots.” His shoulders tensed as footsteps approached. “Let me handle this, ma’am.”

  A shadowy figure emerged from the mist. “’Ello there,” he said, touching a fine-gloved finger to his hat. “What ’ave we here?” The accent was fake (he dropped his h’s inconsistently), his boots were finely polished, and his coat unpatched. “That’s a fine bit of totty you’ve got there, sir! ’Ow much
do you want for ’er?”

  Eve froze her face to hold back her killing smile. The marbles in her left hand vibrated, growing warm with anticipation. But curiosity stilled her lethal impulse: How would her escort handle things?

  “She’s not for sale,” the Gammon said tersely.

  “Aw, say it’s not so? I’ve got half a guinea to change your mind! You could go ’ome and enjoy yourself an’ leave the business end to me.”

  Half a guinea? That’s far too much. Eve twitched. Her marbles grew almost too hot to hold.

  “No.” The Gammon’s head turned almost imperceptibly, checking to confirm that the importunate pimp wasn’t the distraction in an ambush. “Go away.”

  “Nah, I don’t fink that’s gonna happen—”

  He was wrong. Things happened extremely fast:

  Eve’s would-be purchaser brought his left hand out from behind his back and stabbed at the Gammon. He was holding a folding Parisian Apache gun—one-third revolver and one-third stiletto, with a knuckle-duster for a grip.

  The Gammon stepped into the blow, embraced his assailant, and held him tightly against the anti-stab vest he wore under his waistcoat while he brought the muzzle of his UMP9 up under the pimp’s chin.

  Eve had other worries. She whirled and opened her left hand, huffing with effort as she flung her will at the marbles. There was no betraying bang of gunpowder and no whip-crack as they broke the sound barrier—she wasn’t that strong—but a rippling hiss as the glass bullets drilled holes in the mist, and, almost simultaneously, thudded into flesh.

  Eve was reaching for another handful of glass beads even as she heard a bubbling moan and a body falling; footsteps fading into the mist told her that their third assailant was out of the picture. She finished her pirouette, to see the Gammon had marched their attacker back against the wall and pinned his wrists to the crumbling brickwork.

  “What part of no didn’t you understand?” the Gammon asked mildly. The pimp gobbled incoherently. He sighed. “Never mind.” He pulled the trigger and Eve winced at the bang. Contrary to movie folklore, suppressors didn’t actually silence guns—they just rendered them less deafening. At least he had the sense to select single-shot, she thought. “We should get a move on,” he commented as if nothing untoward had happened. His gaze tracked past her and came to rest on the other body in the alley. “Looks like you didn’t need me after all.” He sounded affronted.

  “Nonsense, a lone woman on her own in a place like this would just attract more trouble.” Eve kicked the Apache aside, then checked her bodyguard for damage. “Button your coat, he slashed your stabby to ribbons and I left my sewing kit a hundred and thirty years in the future.” She took his arm. “Now let’s be off before their friends come to steal their clothes.”

  The Gammon shook his head as they hurried deeper into the byways of Whitechapel. “Just as long as you pay for my rabies shots when we get home, ma’am.”

  * * *

  They were halfway to Whitechapel when Doc started on the Ripper lore; to everyone’s surprise it was Game Boy, not Wendy or Rebecca, who punched him first.

  But before that happened they found their way onto the ghost roads.

  The graveyard was tiny and ancient, tucked behind a church near Pembroke Square. Nobody had been buried in it since the eighteenth century. By their own time it had long since been redeveloped and turned into a commercial property let.

  The mist swirled thick behind the lich-gate and the air tasted of muddy river silt, of things left buried and now long forgotten, so ancient that even the ghosts of the mourners’ grandchildren had faded. Imp led them between headstones and family memorials to a grove of beech trees that clustered like stately pallbearers around a forbiddingly gated crypt. He checked his papers in the glow of a cheap penlight: “It’s here but we need to spring the lock—” He frowned. “Shit. Can anybody pick—”

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “Leave it to me.” She crouched. “Torch.” She held out her hand for his penlight, then shone it in the keyhole. “Hah.” She touched the lock, and an age-blackened key shimmered into existence. It turned easily, then vanished as she pulled the gate open: dust to dust, ashes to ashes. “What now?”

  “Eh, well.” Imp looked abashed, as if he’d just been caught with his fly at half-mast. “Follow me? Oh, remember not to eat or drink anything you find in here or you won’t be able to leave. And the natives aren’t friendly.”

  Doc said, “Crosscheck your buddies?” Then he nudged Imp. “Is the eating or drinking thing for real?”

  “I don’t know, Dad might have been gaslighting me—I was only fourteen—but do you really want to find out? Are you feeling lucky?”

  “Babes in the fucking woods,” Wendy murmured disgustedly.

  Rebecca looked at her sharply, then took her hand. “Stick with me, I can always find my way to wherever I’m going.”

  Wendy gently tugged her hand free. “Where we’re going I might need both hands for fighting.”

  “Stop it stop it stop it!” Game Boy quietly shouted, his voice breaking in a quiet shriek: “I can’t stand this shit!” He darted ahead and ran down the steps leading into the crypt before anyone could stop him.

  “Welp,” said Doc, diving after him: and that was that.

  Lit by smartphone flashlights, the crypt was a disappointment. Stone walls, stone floors, thick stone shelves fifty centimeters apart. Some of them bore crumbling wooden boxes, while others were covered in leaf mold and rat droppings. But as they moved deeper, the shelves disappeared, the walls narrowing to a stone tunnel that forced Doc and Imp to lower their heads. Then the tunnel roof disappeared, leaving lichen-crusted flagstones underfoot that formed the paving of a sunken lane surrounded by mossy hedge-topped banks that rose out of sight.

  The lane was almost as dark as the tomb itself. Moonlight wasn’t filtering this far down. It felt as ancient as the first stone-age settlements up the river on whose banks the Romans would later build the trading camp of Londinium. A couple of times Wendy thought she saw a faint flicker like swamp light; and her ears kept straining to catch a faint, malignant titter that seemed to hover just beneath the threshold of hearing, masked by the clatter of five pairs of boots beating on stone.

  After thirty seconds or twenty minutes (it was hard to tell) Del complained: “This is creeping me out. Does anyone else feel like you’re taking seven steps forward every time you lift your feet?”

  “That’s a feature, not a bug,” said Imp. “We’re on a ley line, remember?”

  “Just stick close and we’ll be fine,” Wendy reassured her.

  “Not necessarily.” Doc sounded indecently smug about something.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We’re doing okay for now,” he said, “but wait until we get to Whitechapel.”

  “Don’t wanna know,” said Game Boy. He sounded tense but Doc missed the warning signs and mansplained regardless:

  “The year is 1888. Whitechapel hasn’t been cleared yet: in fact, it’s one of the last remaining rookeries, ancient slums that grew up after the great fire of 1666. Originally they were properly built houses but there were no planning regulations back then. Slumlords built in the backyards and gardens and added stories until the buildings were close to collapse, roofed over alleyways and turned it into an impenetrable maze. There were no police in the modern sense of the word until the 1820s—”

  “—Until the twenty-ninth of September 1829, to be precise,” Wendy interrupted.

  Doc continued, oblivious: “So the rookeries were lawless and dangerous. By 1888 Whitechapel had survived mid-Victorian attempts to clean up and redevelop the other rookeries, and it was notorious for prostitution and drink. Also illegal gambling clubs and opium dens, but the prostitution was out in the open. About six percent of the women of late Victorian London worked as prostitutes—80,000 of them at any time—many of them in brothels, but a lot of streetwalkers, too, some as young as thirteen, the age of consent in those days. Which means—”r />
  Rebecca cleared her throat. “Anyone tries to lay a hand on me, he’s going to suffer,” she announced.

  “You’ll get us all in trouble if you start a fight,” Doc blundered on. “Just keep close and most of the low life will avoid us, is what I’m saying—if we look like a mixed group who know where we’re going—”

  “Crapsack London is crap, sucks to be female.” Wendy put a warning edge in her voice. Game Boy’s shoulders were as tense as clocksprings. “We got the message, wise guy.”

  “—But really, you don’t want to wander off. Because it’s 1888, and Jack’s on the prowl—”

  That was as far as he got when Game Boy spun round and punched him.

  Game Boy wasn’t aiming to hurt, but a fist in Doc’s stomach when he wasn’t expecting it shoved all the air out of his lungs and left him doubled over. “Stop it!” Game Boy shouted. He stopped dead, looking at Doc and Imp with wide eyes. “I can’t stand this shit. I just want it to be over.”

  “What did I say?” Doc whimpered.

  Imp took him by the shoulders and led him gently aside. “I think you just triggered the person who was forced to spend his first fourteen years as a girl.” Imp glanced at the others, taking in Rebecca’s furious scowl and Wendy’s impassive face, which might as well have had keep digging, son tattooed on it. “Count yourself lucky Boy snapped first: Del and her friend aren’t far behind.”

  “But what did I—”

  “Listen.” Imp leaned his forehead against Doc’s and stared into his eyes. “Everybody knows, Doc. Everybody knows as much as they can stomach about Jack the Ripper, and they won’t thank you for telling them anything they don’t already know, because they don’t want to know the stomach-churning details. They especially don’t want to know the unvarnished truth. They know where we’re going, son, and they’re scared and angry and handling it really well. Now take a deep breath and apologize. And you stick close to them. Got it?”

  Wendy and Del and Game Boy were pretending not to listen. Now Game Boy nodded at Imp, a silent thank you.