The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure)

by Mark Hodder

  “Shouted like a madman. Bradlaugh practically fainted with the shock of it.”

  “Why did Bartolini think it was me?”

  “Tom Bendyshe’s fault. You know how he enjoys a good jape. His first assumption was that you’d decided to put the wind up us, and Bartolini cottoned onto it. He can’t decide whether it was you dressed up or a ghost.”

  Burton gazed into the gradually thinning snow, his thoughts turning over, searching for a workable theory to explain the bizarre visitation. He couldn’t find one.

  He briefly gripped Monckton Milnes by the elbow before striding back to Bartolini. “Signor, please accept that this was none of my doing nor, I am sure, that of anyone with whom I’m acquainted.”

  The Italian gave a wide, exaggerated shrug. “If you say it, I believe it. But what was it? Why have the neve rossa bring it here?”

  “The red snow?”

  “Sì! It start to fall and, immediatamente, il fantasma come crash crash crash into my ristorante!”

  “Wait. What? The snow and the intruder arrived simultaneously?”

  “Sì! Sì!”

  “I’m at a loss, but I shall endeavour to get to the bottom of it.” Burton touched two fingers to his hat and returned to where Monckton Milnes had joined Swinburne and Trounce. “Both at nine o’clock! Scarlet snow and Spring Heeled Jack.”

  The detective inspector cupped his hands and blew into them to warm his fingers. “Lord help me, are we faced with another of your damnable affairs?”

  “My affairs, Trounce?”

  “More king’s agent ballyhoo.”

  “Ah, I see. I don’t know, but if Bartolini’s was really invaded by Spring Heeled Jack, then I fear we might be.”

  They joined the other Cannibals.

  “The devil himself was among us!” Bendyshe trumpeted. His voice was never less than stentorian. “Gad, what a horror!”

  “You should have seen it, Richard,” Henry Murray said. “A ghost? A mechanism? I’m utterly flummoxed.”

  “I thought it was a man in a costume,” Sir Charles Bradlaugh added. He put a finger to his right cheek, which was darkly bruised. “But when the thing shoved me aside—the feel of it!”

  “What do you mean?” Burton asked.

  “Like fish skin but solid and waxy.” Bradlaugh shuddered. “Hard. Not clothing at all.”

  And calling for me. Why?

  As if reading his thoughts, Bendyshe cried out, “I say, old horse, we all know you’ve been up to your devilish eyebrows in some bizarre business recently, but this takes the biscuit! Care to explain?”

  “I can’t, Tom,” Burton responded. “I have no notion what the apparition was or why it was searching for me. Would you excuse me for a moment?” He addressed Trounce. “I need to know where it went.”

  Trounce pointed to a constable who was moving among the gathered crowd. “There’s Honesty. He was with the men who chased after it.”

  Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce strode over to P. C. Thomas Honesty, a wiry and dapper man with immaculately trimmed eyebrows and an extravagantly curled moustache. Only a few months previously, he’d been the groundsman at New Wardour Castle, the seat of Isabel Arundell’s family. After the events that led to her death, he’d joined the Police Force and, on government orders, had been rushed through training.

  Burton hailed him. “Hallo, Tom!”

  Honesty saluted. “Sir! Strange night. Snow. Stilt man.”

  “Strange is the word. It’s been a while since I saw you, old fellow. Has your wife joined you in London? Are you settled?”

  “We are. Nice little place in Hammersmith. Baby on the way.”

  “My good man! Congratulations!”

  Honesty accepted a handshake then pointed to the side of the square opposite Bartolini’s. “Consensus is, the phantom jumped down from the rooftops over there.”

  “Phantom?” Swinburne queried.

  “Or whatever it was.”

  Burton said, “Judging by the mark on Bradlaugh’s cheek, it was rather too substantial to qualify as a spook.”

  As if it had been adjusted via a control, the snowfall suddenly slowed and thinned until only a few stray flakes were left drifting down.

  The men surveyed the square.

  “Looks like an iced cake,” Trounce murmured.

  Honesty nodded his helmeted head in the direction of Charing Cross Road. “Made off in that direction. We chased. Too fast. Lost it.” His eyes widened. He gave out a strangled yelp and pointed. “There! It’s back!”

  Burton whirled in time to see a figure apparently falling from the sky. Its stilts hit the ground and slipped from beneath it. The apparition crashed down onto its side, scrabbling wildly in the snow, limbs flailing. It howled—its voice filled with despair.

  Someone shouted, “Bloody hell! What is it?”

  The creature gained its feet, shrieked wordlessly, then cried out, “Prime Minister, where are you? Please! Where are you? Guide me! Guide me!”

  The crowd outside Bartolini’s screamed and scattered.

  Shaking its head as if to clear it, the stilted man raised its featureless face to the sky and yelled, “Burton! Burton!”

  “Here!” the king’s agent called, striding forward. He drew the rapier from his silver-handled swordstick.

  Spring Heeled Jack—Burton couldn’t think of it as anything else—crouched and turned toward him. “Sir Richard Francis bloody Burton.”

  “You’ve inserted one name too many, my friend, but I shall overlook that. Now be so kind as to introduce yourself and explain what you want with me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Burton stopped in front of the creature and examined it. The description given by Monckton Milnes was accurate; it was totally lacking in any human detail.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Perhaps—”

  “Perhaps what?”

  “Perhaps I have to—”

  Without warning, it pounced.

  “Kill you!”

  A swinging fist knocked the point of Burton’s blade aside. He felt himself grabbed by the upper arms, solid fingers gouging into his biceps, and was lifted high into the air as if he weighed nothing at all. With tremendous strength, Spring Heeled Jack dashed him viciously to the ground. Even through the padding of snow, Burton’s head cracked with such force against the paving that his senses reeled.

  “Got you!” his assailant shouted. “Stop interfering! Leave me alone! Tell me why I’m here!”

  A shrill scream of outrage echoed through the square, and Swinburne came racing to his fallen friend’s assistance. The poet swiped at Spring Heeled Jack with his cane. It impacted against a broad shoulder and snapped in half, its lower end spinning away. “Get off him, you brute! Scat! Scat!”

  The stilted figure turned and swatted the poet. Swinburne cartwheeled and landed in a tangled heap.

  Tom Honesty put his whistle to his mouth and blew.

  Jack squatted over Burton. “What am I supposed to do? Where is the prime minister? What is your significance? What happened at nine o’clock?”

  Flat on his back, the king’s agent looked up at the blank countenance.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  His attacker reached down, clasped the front of his coat, yanked him upright, and threw him. Burton saw the black night sky and the pink ground of Leicester Square alternating around him as—with shock slowing everything to a crawl and causing him to feel like a dispassionate observer—he pirouetted through the air. He passed over Trounce and the members of the Cannibal Club and glimpsed them looking up at him with expressions of sheer horror. Then he impacted against a plate glass window. Fragments exploded around him. They glinted and flashed. They rained like a thousand jewels.

  This surely hurts, yet I don’t feel a thing.

  He crashed down onto a table. It collapsed beneath him. Cutlery and broken crockery danced up, colliding with the showering glass. A symphony of clatters and smashes and ban
gs and clangs sounded from afar. Distant voices ululated. Everything was dreamlike.

  Of its own accord, his right hand rose into his line of sight, and he was fascinated to find that it still held his rapier. He watched as the weapon’s point lowered toward his feet until it was directed at the jagged rectangular hole where the window had been.

  Poor Bartolini. He’s having a bad evening. His restaurant is wrecked.

  Spring Heeled Jack bounded in and dived forward. Burton’s sword adjusted itself and struck the apparition in the middle of its chest. The blade bent, scraped across to the left, gouged a scratch in the hard white skin, but didn’t penetrate it.

  Jack snatched the weapon, wrenched it from Burton’s hand, and cast it aside. Planting a stilt to either side of the fallen man, it looked down and gave vent to an agonised whine.

  Burton whispered, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I must serve Queen Victoria,” it responded. “But I’ve forgotten how.”

  Trounce came pounding into the restaurant. Bellowing, he thudded into the creature, wrapped his arms around it, and declared, “You’re bloody well nicked, old son!”

  Jack staggered. Burton quickly pushed himself out from between its legs and dragged himself backward through splintered wood and glass.

  Trounce’s grip broke as his captive flung out its arms. A solid elbow smacked into the detective’s face, sending him tottering backward with blood spurting from his nose. His legs hit the ledge of the window, and he toppled out into the snow.

  Burton heaved himself to his feet. He lunged at his opponent. They locked arms and grappled, twisting this way and that, thudding into tables, knocking them flying.

  The king’s agent was no match for the other. Sent reeling, he plummeted out through the doorway and went slipping and sliding outside, somehow maintaining his footing, though he possessed hardly any sense of what he was doing.

  Spring Heeled Jack followed and laid into him with its fists. It wailed, “Where am I? What must I do, Prime Minister? I’m alone! I’m alone!”

  Blood spattered the snow. Burton fell and was hauled up again. He became vaguely aware that constables were running toward him.

  “Please!” his opponent screamed. “Help me!”

  Swinburne suddenly came cannoning from one side and dived at its ankles, locking his arms around them. Caught off balance, Spring Heeled Jack pitched face-first into the snow. Immediately, Burton delivered a vicious kick to the side of its head before he, too, lost his footing and fell.

  Trounce blundered back into the melee. He stepped over the king’s agent and thudded down knees first onto Jack’s back. Honesty and three other constables swooped in and grabbed at the creature’s arms. The detective inspector had a pistol in his hand. He raised it and cracked it down onto Jack’s head. The white cranium split, and a bolt of blue electrical energy sizzled across its surface. A transparent skin detached itself from the prone figure and began to expand outward.

  Burton knew what would happen next. “Get away from it!” he roared, as the world snapped back to normal speed. “Move! Move!”

  He scrambled across the ground on all fours, grabbed Trounce by the back of his coat and heaved him aside, then gripped Swinburne’s ankle and, dragging the poet with him, slithered backward. The constables rolled aside just as the transparency swelled into a bubble and popped with a thunderously echoing retort.

  Spring Heeled Jack vanished, taking with it a bowl-shaped section of Leicester Square’s paving.

  Trounce sat up, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and applied it to his bleeding nose. “By Jobe! Whad a monstrosidy!”

  Flat on his back, with cold moisture soaking into his clothes, Burton lay panting, his mind awhirl, his body finally starting to register the pain.

  Beside him, Swinburne said, “Is it as bad as it looks?”

  Burton moved his tongue around, feeling his teeth to check they were all present. They were. After a few moments’ preparation, he managed to croak, “What?”

  “Your condition.”

  As reality continued to reestablish itself, the king’s agent struggled to his feet and stood swaying. His clothes were hanging in tatters. Blood dribbled inside his ragged sleeves and slowly dripped from his fingertips.

  After a little exploration, he discovered that the left side of his chin bore the most serious of his many lacerations—it was small but through to the bone—and there was another, longer and more painful cut at the side of his left elbow. None were incapacitating.

  “I’m an atheist, Algy,” he murmured, “but I must confess, the fact that I went through a window and can still stand strikes me as somewhat miraculous.”

  “You must have hit it head first. Broke it with solid bone before the rest of you passed through.”

  The poet rose from the ground and helped Trounce up. The detective inspector drew a second handkerchief—clean—from his pocket and passed it to Burton, who uttered a grunt of thanks, wiped his hands on it, then pressed it to his chin.

  The king’s agent said, “For certain, that was not a man in a suit.”

  “A clockwork device, then?” Trounce asked.

  “More sophisticated.”

  Thomas Honesty and his fellow constables had risen and brushed themselves down. Honesty looked at Burton, who, seeing that Monckton Milnes and the Cannibals were poised to rush over, said to him, “Would you hold everyone back for a minute, Tom? Just while I gather my wits.”

  Honesty nodded and got to work.

  Burton put his left hand to the back of his head. His scalp was ridged with scars—gained last year when he’d narrowly missed being killed by an explosion—and had now acquired an egg-sized bump.

  Pain was beginning to overtake him. His legs were shaking.

  The snow all around was gouged with broad furrows, cutting through to the bright red beneath. Leicester Square—flesh-coloured and mutilated—appeared to reflect his own injuries, as if he and the world he perceived were a single, wounded being.

  He shivered, fumbled for—and failed to locate—a cigar, and said, “I want to find my topper and swordstick, Algy. We should then make our way to Battersea Power Station. We need to consult with Brunel and Babbage. They know all there is to know about mechanical men.”

  Swinburne gave a small and reluctant grunt of agreement.

  Burton’s fingers, still absently in search of a cheroot, encountered a solid object and withdrew it from his coat pocket. It was a small, ornately labelled bottle. Saltzmann’s Tincture. Incredulous, he whispered, “Good Lord! It didn’t break.”

  “I wish it had,” Swinburne grumbled. “Put it away.”

  “My head is thumping. It’ll help.”

  “So will Sadhvi Raghavendra. We’ll send a lad to summon her to the station. She’ll treat your wounds better than that stuff can.”

  Burton hesitated, nodded, and slipped the bottle back into his pocket.

  “Humph!” Trounce muttered. “I’d better get to work. There’s a crowd that requires dispersing. I’ll post a guard outside the restaurant. See you later. Keep me informed, will you?”

  He stamped away.

  Limping slightly, Burton started off toward the Cannibals. They hurried forward to meet him.

  “God in Heaven!” Monckton Milnes exclaimed. “Are you all right? I’ve never seen such a scrap! How can you even walk?”

  “I hurt all over,” Burton said. “But I’ll survive.”

  “He wants to gulp down a bottle of Saltzmann’s,” Swinburne revealed. “So obviously his brain has been bruised, despite its small size and the thick layers that surround it.”

  For an instant, Monckton Milnes locked eyes with the king’s agent. Both men knew that Swinburne operated in a very peculiar manner, often experiencing and expressing the opposite of what would be expected from any normal individual. When the poet felt pain, he considered it pleasure. When he was deeply concerned, he most often articulated it as humour or sarcasm.

  “Lay off th
e confounded mixture, Richard,” Monckton Milnes advised. “I’ve told you before.”

  “Enough! Enough!” Burton protested. “Will you both please give it a rest? I shan’t touch the stuff, I give you my word.”

  Monckton Milnes responded with a brusque nod. He stepped aside as the other Cannibals crowded forward to voice their consternation and amazement. Burton endured their attentions. He was aware that Monckton Milnes and Swinburne were both watching and assessing him, and it irritated him that they considered themselves better judges of his condition than he. At the same time, he was touched, and cursed himself for a fool that he harboured such an idiotic spark of resentment.

  Too much self-sufficiency. Why be so contained? Few men have such loyal friends. Swinburne, Monckton Milnes, Bendyshe, Bradlaugh—all of them. They are not attached to you. They are integral.

  He felt the void that marked Isabel’s absence.

  Bendyshe was hollering, “Bartolini will never forgive you, old thing! You went straight through his bloomin’ window! The restaurant is wrecked! Why aren’t you dead?”

  Burton thought, I might as well be.

  Swinburne grabbed at a hand strap as the landau in which he and Burton were riding bounced over the kerb while rounding a corner. He coughed and muttered, “Drat the thing!” He was referring to the carriage’s side window, which was jammed half open, allowing smoke from the vehicle’s steam engine to coil in to assault their eyes and noses.

  “Spring Heeled Jack!” he exclaimed. “How is it possible? I thought Edward Oxford was dead.”

  Burton, grimacing with the pain caused by the jolt, had finally located a Manila cheroot in his waistcoat pocket, and now shakily held a lucifer to it. He set about adding to the abrasive atmosphere. Blood was congealing on his chin and neck, and his tattered left sleeve was wet with it.

  He gathered his thoughts for a moment then said, “Let’s consider what we already know. Oxford was from the future. In the year 2202—”

  “Inconceivably distant!”

  “—he created a wearable machine, comprised of a one-piece skintight suit with a flat disk on its chest, a black helmet that encased his head fully but for the face, a cloak, and boots to which powerfully sprung stilts were attached. These latter were necessary to propel him into the air, so that nothing touched him, there to be thrown backward or forward through history by the microscopic components of his device.”