The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  Claudio thought of blood and screams quickly silenced by the tools in his bag. “Several, actually,” he said.

  Polly. Siffey. Liz. Kate. A slash to the throat in a grimy alley, a slash to the stomach in a deserted backyard. Garroting in a stable, face pummeled in behind a warehouse. That last was quite satisfying and made Claudio wonder what this Mary Jane would look like without a face.

  “Oh, sir, that’s a right shame, ’tis.” Now Mary Jane brightened again, finger back at his lapel, sliding it up and down the tweed and sneaking a fleshy lip between her teeth. “I don’t got much but I got a stove. Bit chilly this time o’ year, innit?”

  He threaded her arm through his and allowed her to steer them to her flat. “Don’t you fear the murders nearby?” he asked.

  Mary Jane laughed. “What’s it they call ’im? The Leather Apron?” She looked Claudio up and down. “Don’t see you wearin’ such nonsense.”

  “I think he prefers other monikers, according to the papers.”

  “This is me place.” Mary Jane unwound her arm from Claudio’s in front of a tiny, whitewashed affair with a broken front window. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and covered her hand with it, then slid her hand through the shattered panes of glass and wriggled around near the lock on the front door. “Lost me key months ago. Joe’s a bloomin’ cheap bugger’n’ won’t spring for a new ’un.” She frowned in concentration as she worked the lock on the opposite side. “Ah, there we ’ave it.” The door popped open, and Mary Jane drew her hand from the window. She stopped Claudio before he entered. “You got a sovereign?”

  Claudio grinned. A single pound was going to do? If she only knew how little that was to him in his time. He handed over the coin, followed her into the room, and exited two hours later, bathed in her blood.

  Thursday, August 12, 2100, Flussville, South Carolina, RAA

  As Claudio sailed through time, returning to Ambrose and power and responsibility, he tried to think of his larger mission. Goals, procedures, plans…that was what was important. That demanded his focus.

  Plan, plan, plan. Rest up and go to Roanoke.

  He’d been on a mission for years now and made little progress because of his increasing distraction.

  Focus on your legacy.

  And yet instead he saw knives and the glittering gore of Mary Jane’s intestines slipping through his fingers. When he opened his eyes on Ambrose’s laboratory table, all he could see was the mess he’d made of those pretty lips and young white teeth, all he could hear was the “snick” and “thunk” of his knives as they’d slashed and torn through skin and muscle. When he was done, her body was in so many pieces he’d had to pile some up on her kitchen table to clear space for his exit.

  “Sir, you gonna be going back there much more?” Ambrose asked. “I worry if I’m not precise about the date, you might find you’re running into yourself or some such. ’Sides, I got some updates on Wheaton. He got the weapon taken away from him and is a babbling mess. Think you need to try Cob again.”

  Claudio didn’t even hear him. Instead he was thinking about going somewhere else, somewhen else, to continue this hobby but not cause temporal problems. Could he? Should he?

  “Not now,” Claudio replied. “Not for now, not for a while, anyway. I’ve got to work on another matter.”

  “Worried about your plan for Virginia Dare, too,” Ambrose said. “Roanoke’s such a finite period, and this would be your third time back there as well. Same problems. Got to be careful.”

  “My research there is done,” Claudio said. He hopped off the table and headed for his office, where he kept multiple sets of clothing. He gestured to Ambrose to follow him. “Next trip to Roanoke, I’m getting Virginia first thing and bringing her back with me.”

  “What about the second bit of all that? Sending her to yourself a few years back so you can raise her?”

  Claudio opened the closet in his office and surveyed his clothing options. There were several sixteenth century items, but he found each trip they were still off enough that the locals noticed him. The nineteenth century clothes sometimes stood out less, so perhaps he shouldn’t bother, should just go in his blood-stained Victorian get-up…

  Shit. There’s blood everywhere.

  He looked down at himself and noticed he’d been less fastidious in his cleanup than on previous trips to London. He’d kept the blood off his coat, but not the shirt beneath it and not his trousers, and by now Ambrose had to have seen.

  He turned and faced the younger man, not waiting to find out if Ambrose noticed yet. “I’ve been working back there,” he said. Something deep inside Claudio felt like it was shutting down, a light switch flipping from on to off. His voice sounded robotic to his own ears. “I had work to do, getting rid of them.”

  Ambrose drew his head back. “What’re you on about, sir?”

  Ambrose must be lying. He’d noticed. How could he not? Claudio, his clothes for Roanoke forgotten, grabbed Ambrose by the front of his shirt and shook him. Ambrose struggled to get away, but Claudio was faster, his hands strong and trained these past few months on throat slashings and strangulations and the fastidious art of leaving bloody faces to molder atop limp and dirty pillows.

  “There are five fewer of your countrywomen back there, you idiot.” Claudio let go of Ambrose, tossing him hard enough as he did so to cause Ambrose to hit the opposite wall.

  He cried out, a mewling sound that set Claudio’s teeth on edge. “You child. You weak child.” He felt the rage stir and boil in him and leapt upon his employee, taking the younger man’s neck in his hands and squeezing.

  But it wasn’t the same satisfaction, and Ambrose struggled far more than a disease-weakened whore half out of her wits with drink. Ambrose gagged beneath Claudio’s grip and pulled hard at his arms.

  Claudio envisioned Ambrose’s dead body, saw rooms of technological devices he couldn’t operate, and he saw a future without the daughter he wanted to acquire.

  Sinéad burst in. Simple as she was, she was still possessed of ears to hear the skirmish. She stormed through the door at the sound of the screams, screams not coming from Claudio’s victim but Claudio himself, screams that grew to a keening whine that was no longer human but sounded more and more like a desperate animal caught in a trap.

  Sinéad shouted at Claudio, but Claudio couldn’t understand her. He dragged himself off Ambrose and huddled in the corner as Sinéad knelt by Ambrose and began first aid.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Get out of here.”

  Claudio couldn’t move. Ambrose and Sinéad were just a blur to him, just a nebulous pile of colors all swirled together, meaningless.

  “Get out,” Sinéad repeated.

  This time Claudio crawled. He scuttled along on bony hands and knobby knees, getting carpet burns on his palms and beneath his trousers, until he made his way back to the lab. With a groan, he pulled himself up to standing. The machinery was before him, whirring and glowing. In a silver surface he caught sight of his cadaverous and sunken face, his pupils blown out so wide there was no iris visible, only blackness.

  “Let me go,” he whispered. “Release me.”

  He pushed a button on the machine at random and let the sweet smell of ozone remove him from the century.

  Thursday, August 12, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

  Ben poked his head around the archway between the parlor and the kitchen, where Vere was consumed with calling the toaster names. “Blast you, incompetent thing.”

  “You have to activate the battery,” Ben said. He took up the duct-taped pack of nine volts from the table and handed it to Vere.

  “You’re saying I forgot to plug it in,” Vere said.

  “Essentially.”

  Vere wagged a finger at Ben. “Watch it, young man. I remember when we could get small things to still run from alternating current coursing through the walls.” He busied himself with plugging the toaster into the battery and turning it on. “If you’re inter
ested in seeing that sort of thing firsthand—”

  “I don’t think anyone, least of all me, should be going anywhere just now,” Ben interrupted. “I had a little conversation with Kris. She tested the gun for us.”

  Vere raised the arm of the toaster, re-secured his bread, and depressed it again. “Ah-ha! There you go, you rogue sourdough.” He pointed to the now-glowing coils. “If we had AC over here, we’d see a much brighter, faster toasting, Benoy. Now what’s this about Miss Moto?” Bodhi jumped up onto the counter, and Vere shooed him away from the toaster.

  “She went a little rogue herself and got the gun. The one from Woolpit. And…” Ben rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “She, uh, engaged in a little target practice with it.”

  Vere leaned against the cabinet and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “I see. I’m assuming, since I know the young lady in question, that the results were disastrous.”

  “Nothing damaged of any value,” Ben said, “but we’re lucky there was no organic matter in the room.” He described the gun’s effects.

  “Yes,” Vere said. “It would indeed be a boon for nefarious forces to gain such an implement.”

  Vere looked across the room, but the less focused his eyes grew, the more Ben could tell the older man wasn’t seeing wallpaper and dark-stained wood—he was seeing into the past.

  “Back in the war, that goddamned little punk Florence would have given his scrawny left arm for something like that gun,” Vere remarked. “He could’ve wiped us all off the fields at Smith County with that thing.” He looked at Ben. “How much power does it have? How many shots did she get off before it ran out?”

  Ben didn’t answer at once. Vere was right—it wasn’t tested. “I have no idea,” Ben finally said.

  “Testing!” Vere laughed. “Testing must be done, my boy.” Behind him, his toast sprang up. “But first, sustenance.”

  Tuesday, January 14, 1947, Los Angeles, California, USA

  Claudio came to his senses in a hospital bed, but it was simple enough to leave when the nurse was out of the room. His clothes were still bloodstained, and when he caught sight of the date on a newspaper masthead he marveled at how many decades back and forth poor trusting Mary Jane Kelly’s bits of dried DNA had traveled.

  Two hundred twelve years forward, one hundred fifty-three years backward. And yet I was elbow-deep in her intestines less than twenty-four hours ago, by my mind’s clock…

  He knew he looked a wreck as he stepped out into the California sunshine, but all his money was in coins, old and suspect. And yet it wasn’t as if he were somewhere respectable. This was a hedonistic place at a hedonistic time, full of celluloid and immorality. No one would question a rusty shirtfront or a coin collection too much, not if threats and bribery were involved.

  Sure enough, by evening Claudio’s pockets were full of crisp, era-appropriate cash. A dapper wool suit with wide lapels and a slim necktie hung from his slender frame. His hair was too long, and it was causing people to gape, but the addition of his dark-lensed spectacles made him—if not less conspicuous—less apt to notice the stares. As evening faded to pink dusk, Claudio ducked into a nightclub.

  At the bar, a woman with a cloud of coal-black hair and skin glowing moon-white sat knee-to-knee with a familiar man. Claudio gaped at Rupert Cob, the man looking every inch the same as he did in the wild grasslands of the West Virginia field, some thirty years ago from his own perspective but perhaps not even part of Cob’s past yet. Why travel here? What was special about this place, this woman, this—

  Kill her.

  A waitress hovered over Claudio’s table. “Cigar? Cigarettes? Cocktail? What’s your poison, mister?” Her lips were painted cherry red, and a tiny smear of it marred one yellowed front tooth as she smiled. “Maybe all three, huh? What’ll it be?”

  The voice inside Claudio’s head, the one that sang with joy and revelry when he hacked and slashed, spoke again, a guttural growl similar to his own voice but oh, so much darker, feral, needful.

  Kill her!

  The waitress? The expectant woman in the pillbox cap and fishnet stockings?

  “Uh, cognac. And a packet of…” Claudio gestured at a tobacco ad on the wall. “Those will do. Matches, please.”

  Not the waitress, you idiot, Cob’s girl.

  Young, slender, clean, nothing at all like the women on the soot-covered streets of London. This girl—and that was the other difference, her age, so young!—wasn’t out whoring herself, wasn’t rheumy-eyed and sore-riddled, wasn’t half-full of gin on the inside. She was laughing and talking and had tidily painted fingernails, carefully curled hair.

  Cob paid the club’s flower-peddler a few cents for a dark blossom, which he helped the girl tuck up into her hair. Then they danced and twirled across the room to the brassy rhythms of the house band, returning to their stools sweaty and hysterical. Cob steered her out after another drink, and Claudio stared at them all the while.

  He dropped too much cash on the table and snuck after them. The girl was too tipsy to navigate well in her stilettoes, but Cob kept a firm arm tucked around her waist. Their heads tipped toward each other several times in giddy, first-date conversation, and the sight sickened Claudio.

  No woman has ever…his thoughts swirled, but the animal voice, the cruel and deadly voice, cut in.

  Kill her! it chanted. Kill her! Kill her! The words came more and more rapidly until they blended together.

  Kill her kill her kill her killher killher killher!

  Killer!

  KILLER!

  By the time Cob and the woman reached her boarding house, the voice screamed so loudly Claudio clapped his hands over his ears and retreated to a nearby alley. He couldn’t think, couldn’t see, and couldn’t hear.

  STOP!

  At once, his murderous mind retreated, leaving Claudio alone with his saner thoughts. For the first time in hours, he felt clear-headed and in control, and yet he was grateful for the moment of peace so he could better concentrate on carrying out his intended crime.

  For he would kill her, all right. Before going back to his own time and place, he would indeed calm himself by slicing up this young woman’s body. And then, after he was steady and free and once again himself, he could work on saving Virginia.

  The life of one girl for the life of another. It was simple and fair.

  Cob gave the girl a tender kiss and walked across the street. Once the other man was out of sight, Claudio went to work.

  But wait, who was that? Claudio squinted at a shape moving behind the shrubbery next to the building. A heavyset man with a bag. He took off his hat and licked his lips.

  This wouldn’t do. Claudio emerged from the alley only a few inches, just far enough to catch the man’s attention.

  “Hey, buddy,” he whispered. “There’s a cop across the street.”

  The heavy man turned his head and peered into the shadows. “What’s that?”

  Claudio’s knife was already out. It slid easily into the man’s gut. Only a little effort was required to drag him into the alley, just far enough to stay out of sight.

  No glory for you, old chum. This one’s all mine.

  ~

  Cob didn’t leave Elizabeth on her doorstep alone. He circled around the other side of the park so he could watch. He knew tonight was the night and wanted to spend it with her, to prevent it, but that wasn’t allowed.

  “You can’t change history,” Jonson said in the training session, “only observe it. You can know it, but you can’t stop it.”

  But Elizabeth Short wound up being so much more than a snapshot in an old newspaper when he met her. History can make things seem flat and inhuman, unrelatable in their staleness. Facts and figures, dead people doing dead things that were no longer fresh and new and alive. Sure, he’d craved the knowing and the mystery solving, but she was still just The Black Dahlia to him, a nickname, a victim. All her photographs were of an unsmiling, pale woman with a dated hairstyle and col
d eyes.

  That wasn’t the woman he took to the club, however. The woman he danced with and kissed and petted in the coatroom. This woman, this real flesh and blood creature, laughed and glided and spoke in a throaty, hearty voice full of smoke and joy. She wanted to be an actress, wanted to be a model, wanted to have a better relationship with her father, wanted to find the perfect sweater to wear for auditions. But most of all she wanted to move to her own place and fall in love, in that order.

  “I can’t let you in, Bobby.” She’d given him a pouty little smile that spoke of promises and things she wanted but didn’t dare ask for. “Not when I’m a little in the glass and we only just met.”

  “Promise me you won’t let that creep touch you.” The club owner. The boardinghouse owner. The man Cob figured would probably cut her in two tonight.

  “You can’t change history,” Ben warned. “You can see what happened, but you can’t stop it from happening.”

  “Promise me, Lizzie,” Cob repeated. “Please.”

  Her eyes were so big, so blue, a deep blue that matched her scarf and looked stark and beautiful in the moonlight against her pitch-black hair. She smiled wider, the big eyes crinkling up in merriment. “You’re worried about me.”

  Cob didn’t remember what his training told him about slang, not in the cool moonlight next to a beautiful woman, so he just went with what he felt. “I want you, if you’d have me.”

  She looked away, just a little, but kept smiling.

  “And I’d protect you from him,” he continued.

  She giggled and patted his shoulder; standing on the stoop, she was up higher than Cob, gazing down at him like a statue, like a Madonna blessing a child.

  “Take me out tomorrow night, Bobby.” She waved and was gone.

  And now Cob would wait, would sit on the park bench and stare up at her windows until the gold light behind the shades winked out.

  That was when the shadow from the alley moved. At first it looked as if there were two shadows, but then Cob blinked and it was only one. There was a grunting sound, and then a man emerged, a slender man in a too-big suit. He didn’t enter the building as if he belonged there.