Sloppy handling, broken contents, and lost luggage had resulted in the firing of many a baggage handler, not to mention four baggage managers in just the past few months. And Celosia Enyo, the latest in that dismal line of unhappy managers, was not the kind of woman to tolerate mistakes by anyone, not on this gate’s cycle, anyway. After all, this wasn’t just any gate opening. This was a Shangri-La Event: Ripper Season’s official kickoff. And true to ‘eighty-sixer predictions, the social gala on the other side of the departures-lounge barricades had roared to boisterous, ghoulish life.
“I don’t care what those experts say,” a severely dressed woman was saying as she passed through the check-in procedures, “I think it was that barber-surgeon, the bigamist. George Chapman.”
Her companion, an equally severe woman with upswept, greying hair, said, “Chapman? His real name was Severin Klosowski, wasn’t it? I don’t think he was a very likely suspect.”
“Well, Inspector Abberline named him as a leading candidate! Klosowski killed lots of women. Wives, mistresses, girlfriends—“
“Yes, but he didn’t use a knife, my dear, he poisoned them. The Ripper wasn’t that devious. Klosowski killed his women when they got too inconvenient. Or too expensive to keep. Jack the Ripper killed for the pleasure of it.”
And behind those two, a professorial-looking little man in a seedy suit was holding forth at length to a drab little woman with a dumpy build and a rabbitty, frightened look in her eyes: “A serial killer needs to punish the woman or women he hated in his own life. He acts out the violence he wished he’d had the nerve to commit against the women who injured him. Jack the Ripper simply transferred that violence to the prostitutes of London’s East End. That’s why it can’t be Klosowski,” he added, nodding at the two severely dressed women in line ahead of him. “Personally, I favor the Mysterious Lodger, that Canadian chap, G. Wentworth Bell Smith. He went about in rubberized boots, changing clothes at all hours, railing against loose women. I’d stake my reputation on it, Bell Smith’s the man . . .”
The nearest of the ladies championing Chapman rounded on the Bell-Smith supporter. “A killer proven is a killer proven!” she insisted, refusing to be swayed in her convictions by any amount of evidence or reason. “Mark my words, Claudia,” she turned back to her friend, “Chapman or Klosowski, whichever name you prefer, he’ll turn out to be the Ripper! I’m sure of it . . .”
While overhead, on the immense SLUR television screen, the scholarly debate raged on. “—a very common pattern,” Scotland Yard Inspector Conroy Melvyn was saying in a taped interview with fellow Ripper Watch Team member Pavel Kostenka, “for a male serial killer to attack and kill prostitutes. Bloke sees ‘em as a substitute for the powerful woman in ‘is life, the one ‘e feels powerless to strike at, instead.”
“Indeed,” Dr. Koskenka was nodding. “Not only this, but a prostitute represents a morally fallen woman. And prostitutes,” Dr. Kostenka added heavily, “were and still are the most easily available women to such killers. Add to that the historical tendency of police to dismiss a prostitute’s murder as less important than the murder of a ‘respectable’ woman and streetwalkers surge into prominence as victims of mass murderers—“
Skeeter tuned out the debate as best he could and grunted under the weight of massive steamer trunks, portmanteaus, carpet bags, leather cases, smaller trunks and satchels until his back ached. The arriving luggage was transferred case by case to a growing pile at the base of a newly installed, massive conveyor system which Time Tours’ new baggage manager had finally had the good sense to install. Skeeter glanced up to the gate platform, five stories overhead. Thank God for the conveyer. Some of those steamer trunks weighed more than Skeeter did. Considerably more. He eyed the gridwork stairs he’d be climbing soon and blessed that conveyer system fervently.
Geographically speaking, the Britannia was the highest of Shangri-La’s active tour gates. When it opened, tourists climbed up to an immense metal gridwork platform which hovered near the steel beams and girders of the ceiling. Until the advent of that conveyer, sweating baggage handlers and porters had climbed that same ramp, gasping and hurrying to make it through before the gate disappeared into thin air once more.
“Sheesh,” Skeeter muttered, grabbing another trunk by its leather handles and hauling it over to the conveyer, “what’s in some of these monsters? Uranium bricks?” One of the other baggage handlers, a down-timer who worked most gate openings as a porter, grunted sympathetically as Skeeter groused, “They’re only staying in London eight days, for Chrissake. And they’ll be bringing back more than they left with!”
They would, too. Right down to the last yammering, whining kid in line. Parents had to pay a hefty amount of extra cash demanded by Time Tours, Inc. for children’s tickets, a policy put into place after a couple of kids had managed to get themselves fatally separated from tours out of other stations. Children on a time tour were like gasoline on an open campfire. But parents still brought their brats with them in droves, and a surprising number paid the extra fees for kids’ tickets. Others simply dropped the kids off at the station school to “have fun” in the zany world of the station while Mommy and Daddy went time hopping.
Skeeter dragged over another portmanteau. Why anybody would take a child into something like the Ripper terror . . . He could see it now. My summer vacation: how a serial killer cut up women who make their living sleeping with strangers for money. And kids had grown up fast in his day.
“C’mon, Jackson,” an angry voice snapped practically in his ear, “enough goofing off! Put your back into it! Those baggage carts are piling up fast. And more are coming in from the hotels every minute!”
Skeeter found the baggage manager right behind him, glaring at him through narrowed, suspicious eyes. He resisted the urge to flip her a bird and said, “Yes, ma’am!” Just exactly how he was supposed to work faster than top speed, Skeeter wasn’t quite sure, but he made a valiant effort. He cleared the cart in front of him and shoved it out of the way so another could take its place. Celosia Enyo watched him sharply for the next couple of minutes, then stalked further down the line, browbeating some other unfortunate. At least she was impartially horrible to everyone. Of course, after the miserable track record her four immediate predecessors had compiled between them, Enyo doubtless sweat bullets every time a gate opened, hoping she’d still have a job when it closed again. Skeeter could sympathize. Not much, maybe—anybody that universally rude deserved a dose of unpleasantness right back, again. But he could sympathize some.
Of course, Skeeter grunted sharply and dropped another case onto the stack, by that same logic, he’d still be working off his own karma when he was four-hundred ninety. Yeah, well, at least I was never obnoxious to anybody I ripped off. . . . A polite thief, that’s what he’d been, by God. But no longer a thief, thanks to Marcus and Ianira.
Skeeter blinked sweat out of his eyes, fighting a sudden tightness in his chest as he emptied yet another baggage cart. Surely Marcus realized he could trust Skeeter? After what Skeeter’d gone through in Rome, damn near dying in that gladiatorial combat in the Circus Maximus before wrenching Marcus out of slavery again, surely Marcus could’ve trusted him enough to let him know they were alive, at least? Whoever was trying to kill them, he had to realize that Skeeter, of all people, wouldn’t betray him and his daughters?
He ground his teeth in silent misery. If somebody had tried to shoot his wife, if he’d walked into his daughters’ daycare center to find two armed thugs trying to drag off his kids, would he have risked contacting anybody? Just on the remote chance they might be followed, trying to bring help? Skeeter knew he wouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have dared risk his loved ones, no matter what risks he, himself, might have been willing to run. The realization hurt, even as he was forced to admit he understood the silence. But the girls were just babies, Artemisia not yet four, Gelasia barely turned one. Marcus couldn’t stay in hiding with them, not for long. Which was doubtless what the faceless ba
stards trying to kill them were counting on. If Skeeter were Marcus, he’d seriously consider trying to jump station. Through any gate that opened.
Skeeter closed his hands around the stout handles of yet another steamer trunk and heaved it into place, wishing bitterly he could get his hands on whoever had dragged Ianira away through that riot. It must have been staged. Create a perfect diversion, shoot her down in the midst of the chaos . . . Only somebody had interrupted the attempt. Had the shooter dragged her off? To finish the job at his leisure? Or someone else? Skeeter couldn’t bear to keep thinking in ragged circles like this, but he couldn’t not think about her, either, not considering what he owed her.
Skeeter wiped sweat from his forehead. Just another few minutes, he told himself fiercely. Another few minutes and the gate would have cycled, all this ridiculous luggage would be on the other side of the Britannia, and he could get back to combing the station with the finest-toothed comb ever invented by humanity.
Meanwhile . . .
Watching the freakshow beyond the barricades helped keep his mind off it and watching the tourists inside the barricades occupied the rest of his mind, searching faces for clues, for any similarity to the face in his memory, that wild-eyed kid with the black-powder pistol. Gawkers formed an impenetrable barrier around the edges of the departures lounge, so thick, security had formed cordons to permit ticketed tourists, uniformed Time Tours employees, freelance guides, baggage handlers, and supply couriers to reach the roped-off lounge. The noise was appalling. Troops of howler monkeys had nothing on the mob of humanity packed into the confined spaces of Victoria Station. And every man-jack one of ‘em wanted to be able to tell his grandchildren some day, “I was there, kids, I was there when the first Ripper tour went through, let me tell you, it was something . . .”
It was something, all right.
There weren’t words disgusting enough to describe it, that electric air of anticipation, of excitement that left the air supercharged with the feeling that a major event is happening right before your eyes, an excitement sensed in the nerve endings of skin and hair, completely independent of sight and sound and smell. Skeeter was the kind of soul who loved excitement, thrived on it, in fact. But this . . . this kind of excitement was a perversion, even Skeeter could sense that, and Skeeter Jackson’s moral code, formed during his years with the Yakka Mongols, didn’t exactly mesh with most of up-time humanity’s. What was it going to be like when next week’s gate opened? When all these people and probably a couple hundred more, besides, newly arrived through Primary, jammed in to learn who the ghoul really was?
Maybe after he dragged all this luggage through the Britannia and came back to look for Ianira some more, he’d volunteer to haul baggage to Denver for a couple of weeks, just to miss out on the whole sordid thing? The Wild West Gate opened tomorrow, after all, and Time Tours was perennially short of baggage handlers. If only they’d found Ianira by then, and Marcus, and little Artemisia and bright-eyed, laughing Gelasia.
If, if, IF!
It was the not knowing that was intolerable, the not knowing or being able to find out. He wanted this job over with, so he could get back to searching. Skeeter stared intently through the crowd, trying to spot anybody he might recognize from The Found Ones. Any news was better than none. But he couldn’t see a single down-timer in that crowd who wasn’t already busy to distraction hauling luggage. Which meant they wouldn’t know spit about the search underway, either.
God, how much longer until this blasted gate cycled?
He peered up at the huge chronometer boards suspended from the distant ceiling, picking out the countdown for Gate Two: five minutes. At the rate time was creeping past, it might as well be five years.
“Jackson! Do you really like scrubbing toilets that much?”
He started so violently he nearly dropped the carpet bag dangling from his hands. Celosia Enyo was glaring at him, lips thinned to a murderous white line.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he muttered. “I was hoping I might see someone who’d heard about Ianira—“
“We’re all worried! But that gate doesn’t give a damn who’s missing or found. We get that—“ she jabbed a finger toward the small mountain of luggage “—through the gate on time or some millionaire will have your head on his dinner platter for having to buy a new wardrobe in London. Worry about your friends on your own time. Or by God, your own time is all you’ll have!”
She was absolutely right, in a cold-blooded, mercenary sense. The moment she turned away to snarl at someone else, Skeeter gave her a flying eagle salute and dragged another portmanteau off a groaning luggage cart. He scowled at the enormous stack of luggage on the conveyer already, mentally damning Time Tours for insane greed. No wonder the last four baggage managers had failed disastrously with gate logistics. Time Tours was sending through too many blistering tourists at once.
Never mind way too many trunks per tourist.
If he’d kept accurate count, the last five steamer trunks and three portmanteaus alone had belonged to the same guy. Benny Catlin, whoever the hell he was. Rich as sin, if he could cart that much luggage through in just one direction. The big conveyer rumbled to life with one jolting squeal and a grating of metal gears. Then the rubberized surface began moving upward, ready to carry all that luggage to the platform overhead. Skeeter glanced around to look for the boss. Enyo wasn’t in sight, but the shift supervisor was busy sending handlers aloft. He caught Skeeter’s eye and said, “Get up top, Jackson. Start hauling that stuff off the conveyer as it arrives.”
“Yessir!”
The climb up to the Britannia platform was a long one, particularly after all the hauling he’d done in the past few minutes, but the view was spectacular. Commons spread out beneath his feet, a full five stories deep, riotous with color and sound. Costumed tourists scurried like rainbow-hued bugs whipped around in the currents and eddies of a slow-motion river. Great banners—bright holiday-colored ribbons curling and floating through a hundred-foot depth of open air from balconies and catwalks—proclaimed to the world that Ripper Season had begun, and advertised other not-to-be-missed down-time events. A cat’s-cradle tangle of meshwork bridges stretched right across Commons from one side to the other, supported from below by steel struts or suspended from above by steel cables disappearing into the ceiling. The noise from hundreds of human throats lapped at the edges of the high platform like crashing surf against jagged rocks, leaping and splashing back again, indistinct and unintelligible from sheer distance.
And booming above it all came the voice of the public address system, echoing down the vast length of Commons: “Your attention, please. Gate Two is due to open in two minutes . . .”
The first luggage on the conveyor belt arrived with a jolt and scrape against the gridwork platform. Skeeter joined a human-chain effort, hauling luggage clear of the moving conveyor and piling it on the platform. Railings ran all the way around, with a wide metal gate set into one side. Until the Britannia actually opened, that wide metal gate led to a sheer, hundred-foot drop to the cobblestones of Victoria Station. Despite the railing, Skeeter stayed well away from the edge as he hauled, piled, and stacked a steadily increasing jumble of trunks, cases, and soft-sided carpet bags across the broad stretch of platform.
At the far corner, a second conveyor system rumbled to life, moving downward rather than up. Celosia Enyo was testing the system, making sure everything was ready for the returning tour and all of its luggage. So engrossed was Skeeter in the monumental task of shifting the arriving baggage, the gate’s opening took him by surprise. A skull-shaking backlash of subharmonics rattled his very bones. Skeeter jumped, wanting instinctively to cover his ears, although that wouldn’t have done any good. The gate’s frequency was too low for actual human hearing. He glanced around—and gasped.
A kaleidoscope of shimmering color, dopplering through the entire rainbow spectrum, had appeared in the middle of empty air right at the edge of the platform. The colors scintillated like a she
en of oil on water, sunlight on a raven’s glossy feathers. The hair on Skeeter’s arms stood starkly erect. He’d seen gates open hundreds of times, had stepped through a number of them, when he’d had the money for a tour or had conned someone else into paying for it. But he’d never been this close to the massive Britannia as it began its awe-striking cycle a hundred feet above the Commons floor.
From below, a wall of noise came surging up to the platform, gasps and cries of astonishment from hundreds of spectators. A point of absolute darkness appeared dead center in the wild flashes of color. The blackness expanded rapidly, a hole through time, through the very fabric of reality . . . Something hard banged into Skeeter’s elbow. He yelped, jumped guiltily, then grabbed the steamer trunk thrust at him. It went awkwardly onto the top of the stack, canted at an angle, too unstable for anything else to go on top. The next portmanteau to arrive thudded against the steel gridwork, starting a new pile.
Skeeter rearranged wetness on his brow with a limp, soaked sleeve, then straightened his aching back and started piling up the next stack, all while keeping one eye on the massive gate rumbling open behind him. The blackness widened steadily until it stretched the full width of the platform. A Time Tours guide climbed up from the Commons floor and opened the broad metal gate at the edge of the platform to its full extent, as well.
A blur of motion caught his eye and the first returnee arrived, rushing at them with the speed of a runaway bullet train. Skeeter resisted the urge to jump out of the way. Then the apparent motion slowed and a gentleman in fancy evening clothes, protected by a wet India-rubber rain slicker, stepped calmly onto the platform and turned to assist the returning tourists through. Men and women in silks and expensively cut garb, most of them holding 1880’s style umbrellas and brushing water off their heavy cloaks, jostled their way through, many chattering excitedly. Quite a few others had gone slightly greenish and stumbled every few steps. Guides in servants’ uniforms and working men’s rougher clothes helped those who seemed worst off to stagger through the open gate. Porters rushed through on their heels, tracking mud onto the platform, then a mad scramble ensued to get all the arriving luggage—every bit of it slick with what must be a drenching downpour on the other side of the gate—onto the downward-rumbling conveyer. Below, tourists raced up the five flights of stairs to hurry through in the other direction. Skeeter worked fiendishly. He hauled trunks which arrived from down time onto the downward-rumbling conveyer, in an effort to clear the jam at the gate. Then the Britannia was finally clear and outbound tourists rushed past, laughing excitedly and squealing as they stepped off the edge of the platform into what their hindbrains insisted was a hundred-foot sheer drop to the floor below.
Ripping Time Page 16
