by Maren Smith
“You’re a dead man,” he growled, shifting his grip on both knives.
Whether the Ripper heard him or simply recognized his look, Draven didn’t care. When the other man ducked quickly out of sight, he broke into a run, wrenching the door off its hinges in his rush to get inside.
Florrie was in this building somewhere. If he hurried, he might still find her alive.
***
Flora closed every room that had a door the entire length of the floor above, before backtracking. It was like a Scooby Doo chase scene and she felt ridiculous for even attempting it, but she simply had no other choice. The stairs to the third floor had crumbled. There was no more going up, none of these buildings had fire escapes, and in order to get back down to the main floor, she was going to have to find a way to get around him.
The empty building echoed his heavy footsteps just like the rotting floorboards beneath her cracked and sagged. From the bottom of the stairs, she heard him laugh.
“Are we playing a game now?” he softly called. “Is it me favorite, luv: Squeak, piggy, squeak? Shall I come and find you, yeah?”
Bending, she wrestled off both her shoes. Moving quickly and quietly, she tied the laces together, slung them over her shoulder and slipped into the next room over. It was utterly empty. The windows here were neither shuttered nor boarded. A hole in the middle of the ceiling gave a glimpse of the sky through the third floor above her and the missing roof beyond. A door to the east and another on the west wall linked this room with the two adjacent to it. Like a giant rabbit warren, this place was a maze of small rooms connected by archways and doors. Outside in the hallway, she could hear the Ripper coming up the stairs now.
“Squeak, little piggy,” he sang. “I’m going to find you.”
Large sections of the floor looked rotted. Trying to get from here to the door linking this room to the next was all but begging fate to drop her through to ground level, but she couldn’t stay here. If he looked in this room, he’d have her, because there was no place to hide.
Staying close to the walls, testing before settling her weight into every step, she tiptoed to the door of the room he’d come to first. Somewhere further down the hall, she heard the squeak of rusty hinges.
“Is me piggy in here…?” Leaving that door open, he ventured back across the hall to check the room across from it.
She had to get around him. If she could get him to continue searching for her all the way down the hall, she might be able to sneak back down the stairs without his knowing. From there, it was a matter of getting out of this building, through the crumbling warehouse, and somehow find her way back to Butcher Row without the Ripper catching up.
It might be easier just to crawl out the window and lower herself out until she could drop into the courtyard below. That idea was dashed one nail-sealed window after another. From the look of it, she was too high up anyway. She was much more likely to break her leg than to land safe and run away.
“Now or later, luv,” she heard him mock. “I will have your pretty squeals before I’m done.”
Instead of coming down the hall, he returned to the first room. The echo of his shoes crossed to the side door, and he opened it. He was now in the room next to her, crossing the floor. An ominous splintering creak stopped his advance, and covered her retreat. She zipped across the hall into the closed room on the other side.
This was not empty. All the debris that should have been scattered across the floor on the other side of the building had been neatly stacked by the wall. At one time, someone must have been living here. Perhaps they still were. The charred remnants of a cooking fire blackened a flat stone in the middle of the floor next to what looked like two table legs, one of which was charred at the end, and a lumpy mattress stuffed with straw or rags.
The room stank of dampness and mold, and the wood planking she walked sagged under her worse than even before. Terrified that she was going to go straight through it at any step, she crept close enough to the mattress to snag one of the heavy table legs. Compared to the Ripper’s knife, she knew she was outmatched, but something would always be better than nothing at all. Just holding it in her hands gave her a chance.
“Where’s me piggy?” he sang, coming back out into the hallway.
He was trying to scare her, but the longer this went on, the more it began to piss her off. He checked the room next to her, though he didn’t venture more than a few steps inside. An ominous splintering sound sent him retreating back into the hall. He checked the other room, then ventured on toward her door, making soft oinking noises as he came.
Flora slipped into the room he’d just checked and silently closed the door behind her. It was easy to see why he’d backed quickly out of here. There was a giant hole in the floor, directly under a giant hole in the ceiling, under a collapse in the roof. Everything looked rotten. Including the door which hung crooked on rusty hinges with the interior half of the doorknob lying on the floor nearby.
She crept along the wall, her hands gripping the table leg until her knuckles whitened and ached. Every step she took was in time with his measured steps, right up until the floor beneath her creaked.
She froze, but so did he.
Her heart was a deafening drumbeat in her own ears. She held her breath, frozen where she stood, clutching her impromptu bat with all the desperation she put into her silent prayers for him to keep going. To not come back this way. To just let her get out of this.
Jack the Ripper’s unknown sixth victim…
She didn’t want to die. Not in this awful place, away from Draven. She wished she’d told him last night that she liked him. She wished she’d told him that she more than ‘liked’ him. Was this love? She didn’t know, but could it be? Oh, easily. She could easily see herself spending the rest of her life in that little flat above his butcher shop, eating the sausages that he made for breakfast and spending her days just figuring out what women of the middling sort did with their days.
In all likelihood, she’d probably end up working in the shop alongside him. She wasn’t lazy, but she also wasn’t Martha Stewart. God… life without a television, computer or cellphone was going to kill her.
Just nowhere near as horribly as this man.
“You know,” the Ripper said, his footsteps creaking into the room she’d just slipped out of. “They say murder is difficult to commit, yeah? I never found it so. I spent three years in Burma, doing me best for Queen and Country.” He snorted, and she could all but hear him looking at the door she’d just left through. The trajectory of his footsteps changed and he headed toward it.
Her heart was in her throat. She had to move. The floor here was so rotten. Terrified to move, more afraid of what would happen if she didn’t, she picked her way across the crumbling boards, closing those last few precious steps between her and her nearest escape.
“Actually, I didn’t mind much of it,” the Ripper said mildly. “You know the hardest part about going to war? It’s not the guns, cannon fire, explosions, or knowing at any moment yours might be the next body lobbing back into the dirt. It’s coming back home to a world full of quiet. Quiet’s where the danger hides.” The door rattled faintly as he took hold of it. “Isn’t that right, luv?”
Grabbing the doorknob off the floor, Flora slipped out through the partially open door even as she heard the Ripper open the other. In the silence that followed, she tiptoed directly across the hall.
“All in, all in,” the Ripper mockingly called.
She slipped into the room through the door he’d left open. The door between this room and one to its immediate right, that door stood open now too, showing exactly where he’d checked.
“You know, it’s funny. The ones they say I did and the ones they say I didn’t.” He was moving, the sound of his voice growing louder as he ventured back out into the hall.
Propping her table leg against the wall, Flora lined up with that open door. Narrow as the room was, only twelve feet or so separated her fr
om it, with another ten or so feet to the windows overlooking the bricked-in courtyard.
“I promise you one thing, luv…”
The heavy doorknob clutched in both hands, she wound up for the pitch.
“The ones I took the most time with”—he chuckled, and she could hear the irritation in his voice as he said—“they’re the ones what made me work for it. You’ve made me work the most of all. Just think what I’m going to do to you.”
With all the strength of her arm, she threw the metal knob. She hadn’t played softball since she was seven and hadn’t been particularly good at it then, but all she had to do was get it through the open door and hit the window. The glass shattered, the doorknob taking out the entire pane. Sharp shards went everywhere, all over the floor of that room as well as raining down into the courtyard below.
The need to run ripped up her legs when the Ripper did. She grabbed her table leg, holding it like a bat as she followed the path of his footsteps, terrified that he would come straight to her. But he didn’t. He ran toward the broken window, but all too soon his footsteps stopped. The absolute silence was every bit as deafening as her pounding heart. She listened intently. Where was he? In the room next to her, or the middle of the hall? If she bolted now, how far would she get before he caught her?
On unexpectedly silent feet, he suddenly stepped into view through that open doorway. He peeked out the broken window and, every anxious nerve inside her sparking for her to move, she tried to slip out of the room. She didn’t think she’d made a sound, but his head suddenly snapped around and the Ripper looked right at her.
“Squeal, piggy, squeal,” he said, pulling his knife out from under his coat.
Forget quiet. Flora bolted for the stairs. She’d been a runner for years, and though she did reach it first, it was shocking how fast the man behind her moved. A scream was nothing more than a waste of breath, and yet she couldn’t stop herself. The horror of hearing his shoes hit the stairs before she reached the bottom ripped that first terrified shriek from her throat. She screamed when he leapt over the rail too, dropping straight in front of her.
She whipped her bat back just as the floor gave a mighty crack, dropping several inches under them.
Flora almost fell.
Grapping the front of her dress, the Ripper yanked her to him.
“I will fucking kill you!” Draven bellowed, appearing as if by magic at the far end of the hall.
Spinning, the Ripper flung Flora around, pinning her to his chest with his knife at her throat in Draven’s full view. “Stay back,” he warned. “I’ll do it, mate. Don’t think for a second I won’t!”
“Do it,” Draven dared, cleaver in one hand, a long boning blade in his other. He came striding down the hall toward them, head lowered, eyes fixed on the man at her back. “Let her go, or see what happens.”
Lunging half a step forward, the tip of the blade nicking into her neck, he spat, “You think I won’t? I’ve got naught but the hangman’s jig to look forward to. How fast do you want to see her die on my knife?”
Draven kept coming, snarling, “How slow do you want to die on mine? Let her go, fucking now.”
The floor cracked again.
He was going to kill her. The certainty of it built along with the tension in his arm and the quiver of the blade now digging into her flesh.
She wasn’t a wilting flower. It was now or it was never, and if she was going to die either way, Flora absolutely refused to die without fighting back. She had one chance, one hit before he retaliated. Tightening her grip on the table leg, she had no room to swing it.
“You fucking stop right where you are,” the Ripper warned.
“Naw, mate.” Draven kept coming, gripping and re-gripping his knives as he shortened the distance now to less than twenty feet. “You and me, we’ll be as close as any two blokes can be. Practically lovers. I’m going to know you inside and out. Last chance. Let. Her. Go.”
Flora swung the leg up and over her shoulder, jabbing past her head to hit him in the nose.
Dropping his knife, the Ripper jerked back, letting her go as, with a groaning collapse, the floor at last gave way.
Chapter 14
Draven felt it in his chest when the floor gave way. He felt the warbling panic in her scream as the Ripper pulled her down into the jagged wooden maw that opened to swallow them whole. His shout was no less frantic as he threw his knives in his haste to get to her.
She tried to grab the stair rail, but the Ripper pulled her down with him. It was the table leg, hitting the floor and bridging the rotted gap, with her death’s grip locked on it with both hands, that arrested her fall into the basement.
Dropping to his belly those last few feet, Draven spread his heavier weight over as many boards as possible in his scramble to reach her. He grabbed her wrist and then the opposite edge of the hole right before her grip slipped. “I’ve got you, dovey.”
“Pull me up!” Kicking and flailing, she flinched from the rain of rotten wood particles that fell over her face as he searched the floor for leverage that wouldn’t crumble the minute he leaned on it.
“Hold still,” he grunted, and she reluctantly went limp. He couldn’t pull her up. He had no leverage. Everything he touched crumbled, particularly under his chest and his bracing hand. Jagged splinters and exposed nails bit at him, scratching the backs of his arms and sinking into his palm when he finally did find a board that felt more solid than the rest.
“Please,” she begged.
“I’ll not drop you, luv. Look at me, there’s a good girl,” he praised when she obeyed. Her eyes were huge; her face, pale. Somewhere in the dark below her, the Ripper gasped. She tried to look down, but he commanded her, “No, look at me.”
She locked her gaze on him once more, and the surge of protectiveness that swept him renewed his determination. The strain of holding her pulled at his whole body, but if she fell, it would be because he did too.
“I’m going to pull you up,” he told her.
A rattling rasp from the dark of the basement had her panicking and trying to see around the bell of her skirts all over again.
“I will bust your bustle, woman,” he commanded, forcing his voice to harshen even as his arm began to tremble from the strain of all her weight dangling from it.
He could lift her. Under any other circumstance, he could lift her easily, but the whole of her weight hanging from his arm felt the equivalent of trying to lift half a cow with one hand. Beneath his chest, the rotting floorboards were sagging.
“You look only at me,” he ordered. “When I lift you, you grab onto me as soon as you can and you don’t let go, yeah?”
“Yes,” she gasped, nodding.
Spreading his weight over as much of the ominously creaking floor as possible, he pulled her up. It took all the strength of his arm and yet he was holding her wrong. There was no way to pull her up high enough for her to grab onto anything solid unless he changed his grip on her wrist, and there was no way to do that without dropping her.
“Change of plans, dovey.”
Loose rock shifted somewhere below her, sending a light rain of pebbles tumbling and sparking absolute panic in Florrie.
“He’s got my leg!” she shrieked, kicking wildly. “Pull me up, Draven! Pull me up!”
Her sudden burst of movement ripped the strength right out of his already shaking arm. He almost dropped her.
“My leg!” she screamed.
Draven heaved with everything he had. Between the unlit dark down there and the flow of Florrie’s skirts kicking out around her legs, he couldn’t see the Ripper, but he felt the resistance of someone pulling back. For only a few seconds, Florrie became the panicky rope through which he and the Ripper were tied. He didn’t notice Sergeant Hatman scrambling on his belly up beside him, not until the officer circled the hole in search of solid floor to lay on and then all but dove into the darkness to seize Florrie’s arm.
“Pull, man!”
The
resistance broke as they threw their strength into yanking her up. When she was high enough, she latched onto Draven, first his arm, and then his shoulders, and as soon as he had her by the waist, he rolled over. Kicking, he scooted them both back to firm floor once more.
Her hair was full of wood flecks and splinters. She had a cut on her cheek and a bloody tear around the ribs of her dress where a nail must have ripped both it and her as she’d gone through the floor. Four angry red weals around her shin oozed crimson drops of blood. They were ragged, the rake of fingernails rather than the Ripper’s knife, but it didn’t matter. The minute the wall was at his back, Draven had her in his lap.
He cradled her, holding her fiercely close. Once upon a time, he’d been a soldier in Her Majesty’s army and he’d been through more than his share of dissident battles in India. He still remembered that tickling chill the first time he and what few patriotic ideals he’d harbored confronted an opposing army. Both the men standing at his immediate right and his left were killed in that initial exchange of gunfire, and yet Draven had stood in formation, loading shot after shot in a skirmish that lasted barely half an hour.
When it was over, he’d helped the others clear the battlefield and then, in the quiet that had followed, he’d dealt with the rawness of his masculine emotions. Like everyone else in his regiment, he’d got drunk. Every scrap of fear was stuffed down into the bottom of bottle after bottle, and resolutely drowned. Because that was what real men did. No matter how bad things got, they didn’t cry, or break down shaking, or let themselves fall apart.
But he was shaking now. His back to the wall, he held as much of her as he could get into his lap, as close as he could pull her. It wasn’t manly. He wasn’t strong.
