My real reasons I could not confess, but a short time before, a squadron of mounted policemen had appeared at the top of Pall Mall, and backed by truncheon-wielding constables on foot, had beaten back the protesters, channelling the unruly mob towards their lawful meeting place in Trafalgar Square. After the mêlée subsided, they had left guards at the front of the club, and cleared away, among others, the man in the deerstalker hat. If there was ever a time for me to make a clean getaway, this was it.
Leaving the club, my boots crunched on the carpet of broken glass littering the front steps.
‘You’ll be going straight home, I hope, sir,’ the constable said. ‘It’s not a fit night to be out and about.’
‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘straight home.’ Then I set my course for the town house where Constance Wooldridge lived with her maiden aunt. At the corner of every major avenue, a policeman stood guard, whistle around his neck, truncheon hanging from his belt and bull’s-eye lantern in hand. My formal dress and top hat put me above suspicion, and the most I received was another warning to stay clear of the East End.
By the time I arrived at the house, all I could hear, and it depended entirely on the direction of the wind, was an occasional dull roar, like the sound of the heavy waves crashing on the rocks of the Skerryvore lighthouse. Nowhere along the way had I seen any sign of the man in the deerstalker hat. The derringer, however, was still neatly nestled in my pocket.
The fog, which had abated earlier, was now returning with a vengeance, and so I had to remain closer than I would have liked to Constance’s door if I hoped to keep watch. Lloyd, she said, had planned to come by once the demonstration was over, but was it officially done yet? It didn’t sound so. I took out my cigar case, and sheltered in the doorway of a closed tailor’s shop, struck a lucifer against the brick to light a cigar. Dr Rüedi would no doubt have had a seizure at the very sight of a pulmonary patient putting a rum-soaked crook to his lips, but regardless of his constitution, a man needs his whiskey and his cigars, or what’s the point of living at all?
The fanlight above the town house door was illuminated, as was a single window on the second storey. Once or twice, I thought I detected a silhouette moving behind it. My coat kept me reasonably warm, but with tendrils of fog creeping up the street, it wouldn’t be long before the chill had settled in my chest and set off a volley of coughs that would be sure to give me away to anyone with ears to hear.
And Lloyd had ears. It had long struck me that he had a marked propensity to peep through keyholes, listen through walls, prowl about the house at all hours, and, in general, stick his nose in where it did not belong. More than once, I’d found him in my study, ostensibly looking for a new nib for his pen, or, more recently, claiming he needed the cheval glass to assess his attire. ‘There are other mirrors in this house,’ I’d said.
‘Not so good as this one. This one provides the full effect.’
That much I could vouch for, in a way he would never understand. When I am under the influence of the elixir, it seems to be an enchanted glass, the only one in which I am able to capture a true reflection of my basest self and corrupted nature. The cheval glass does not lie, much as one might wish it to do so.
I was nearly done with the cigar when I perceived, through the growing fog, a man moving slowly, and in a rather cautious fashion, towards the town house. His back was to me, and he had a bouquet of flowers in his arms. But unless Lloyd had gained in height and trimmed his figure, this was someone else. I waited to see if he would approach a neighbouring door, but he stopped, instead, in front of the Wooldridge house, straightening his collar. Was this some new suitor, unaware of the fraught situation into which he was entering? I instantly dropped the glowing cigar behind me and crushed it underfoot.
He put one foot on the lowest step, his eyes fixed on the fanlight, then paused, looking up and down the street. Such timidity never won a lady’s heart. He went up another, adjusting the flowers he carried, his head down as if rehearsing some lines. By the time he got to the top step and raised his hand to knock on the door, I was prepared, if necessary, to intervene, even if it meant posing as some bibulous uncle paying an unexpected call.
But I was stunned instead at the sudden appearance of a cloaked figure in a top hat—had he materialized from the fog itself?—vaulting up the steps behind him and knocking the bouquet loose with his cane. The flowers scattered as the suitor, who could never have even seen his assailant, raised his hands to defend himself. But the cane came down relentlessly, again and again, on his head, his arms, his shoulders. The interior lamp illuminating the fanlight was abruptly extinguished. The suitor rolled to the stair railing, used it to lift himself up, and then, propelled by a swift kick to his rear, stumbled the rest of the way down the steps and ran blindly in my direction. As he came close to the tailor shop, I whispered, ‘Here, come in here!’
In his panic, he could barely see me, and I had to grab him by the elbow and pull him out of sight. His attacker was not in pursuit. He crumpled over, his shaking hands on his unsteady knees, and it was only when he caught his breath enough to say, ‘Thank you, sir. I’m in your debt,’ that I recognized his voice.
‘Desmond?’
His head snapped up, and with an equal measure of surprise, he said, ‘Stevenson?’
‘My God, are you all right?’ There was a gash over his right eye, and he would be sure to show some bruises the next day, but he seemed otherwise intact.
‘Hardly. But at least I’m alive.’
‘Who was it that attacked you?’ I asked, dreading the answer I nonetheless expected.
‘Who do you think?’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be here, would you, if you didn’t know.’
Now I did. Every word Constance had told me was true, and the proof was right there, trembling beside me in the darkened doorway.
‘I’ve got to go and find him,’ I said. ‘Will you help?’
‘Help find him? Have you lost your mind? I don’t want to clap eyes on him ever again.’
‘He has to be stopped.’
‘That’s what solicitors are for. I’ll be swearing out a complaint for assault first thing tomorrow.’
But there was no time to waste if I hoped to catch up to him, and clapping Desmond on the back, I left him cowering there in the tailor’s entryway.
Lloyd was gone, but as he had not passed us, he must have gone in the other direction. Sticking close to the shadows, I hurried along, and at the corner I looked both ways. A few doors down to my left, a pawnbroker was standing in front of his broken windows, assessing the damage.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but did you see a man run by here in the last minute or two?’
He looked me up and down, as if I were a dolt, and said, ‘I saw a lot of men tonight—louts and thieves and sons of whores.’
‘A gentleman’, I said, ‘in an opera cape and a top hat, carrying a cane?’
‘Gentlemen don’t do this,’ he said, gesturing at the ruined shop, and turning away in dismissal.
I ran the other way, holding my handkerchief to my mouth to warm the air entering my feeble lungs. I could not keep this up for very long, especially as the fog was growing thicker with every step I took towards the East End. The aura of menace was still in the air, a faint glow in the sky where a fire was raging unchecked, an angry shout carried on the vagrant wind, the shrill blast of a police whistle. When I heard the rattle of carriage wheels, I swiftly hailed the passing brougham—the faint trace of the original owner’s coat of arms still visible under a lacquer of black paint—and told the elderly coachman whom to look for as we made our way down the street.
‘Keep the horse to a slow trot,’ I said, stepping off the footplate into the compartment, and latching the door behind me.
I kept my head out the little window as we headed in the direction of Whitechapel, staring into every nook and alleyway.
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to turn around and head back towards Mayfair?’ the coachman called down fr
om his dicky box, but I instructed him to hold his course. ‘In this direction it’s going to be double the fare,’ he warned.
‘Steady on.’
But what was I going to do even if I found Lloyd? Could I persuade him to come home with me? Could he be reasoned with? Who was this creature of such unbridled malevolence?
The fog was denser than ever, and we hadn’t gone another half mile before the carriage slowed, and I heard the driver call out, ‘Make way, or you’ll be run over!’
But whomever he was addressing must not have complied, because the coachman was pulling back even harder on the reins, the carriage was grinding to a halt, and though I was craning my head out the window, I could not see past the flanks of the horse.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.
‘Let go of those!’ I heard the coachman exclaim, and then there was the sound of a scuffle. Shifting to the opposite window, I saw the back of the old man as he was hauled down from his seat and cast aside as if he were no more than a worn-out shoe.
I drew my head back just as the door was unlatched, and a devil of fury leapt inside. All I could see in the gloom of the interior was a deerstalker hat and loden coat, a thatch of blond hair, and a knife blade slashing at the air. The springs of the carriage jounced, the horse whinnied, and with no one holding the reins, it bolted down the cobblestoned street.
The German and I were rolled about like marbles in a jar, the knife tearing at the buttoned upholstery, my boots kicking out at him, as the panic-stricken horse dragged the carriage at a terrifying rate of speed, the wheels banging over every loose stone in the road, the cabin tilting wildly from one side to the other.
‘Ich bin der Sohn von Yannick!’ he hissed, and even with the rudimentary German I had picked up in Davos, I could understand that much of what he was saying. He was declaring himself the son of Yannick—I had a flash of the wolf’s head, flying through the window of the rail car—come to London, all these years later, no doubt to avenge his father’s death.
Though he was much stronger and younger than I, there is something about fighting for one’s life that provides extraordinary energy. I held tenaciously to the arm holding the knife, even as the runaway carriage teetered and rocked and threatened at any second to turn over entirely.
‘Ich bin Josef!’ he snarled, his face so close to mine that his hot spittle stained my cheeks.
With a sudden yank, he got his arm free, but as he reared back to strike the fatal blow, my fumbling fingers found the derringer in my pocket, and without so much as removing it, I fired through the fabric. The bullet struck him close to the shoulder, and I think it was the shock more than the shot that knocked him to the floor.
The horse, reacting to the explosion, tore off even faster—I could hear voices shouting at us in alarm—and then, the carriage crashed over a kerb, the axle snapping, and the whole world went topsy-turvy, end over end, before we all went sliding into the side of a building.
I was too stunned to move at first, but Josef was somehow pinned by the splintered floorboards and seat backs. I groped for a door handle before realizing that the entire door had been wrenched loose. Slithering like an eel, I extricated myself from the wreckage as several hands slipped under my arms to hoist me to my feet.
‘You’re all right now,’ someone said. ‘Can you walk?’ another asked.
When I stood, I saw that we had smashed into the brick wall of a lodging house, and two men on the other side of the carriage were dragging Yannick’s son out, while another struggled to free the rearing horse from its tangled harness.
‘Where’s the coachman?’ someone asked.
But then they saw the knife, still clutched in Josef’s hand, and backed away.
Shouting something else in German—I heard the word ‘Vater’, or father—he tried to clamber over the ruined carriage to get at me, but between the knife and the outburst in that foreign tongue, the crowd thought that they had at last brought their quarry to ground.
‘It’s Jack!’
‘It’s the Ripper!’
One of the onlookers jerked a broken spoke loose from the wheel, said ‘Now you’re done for,’ and swiped at him with the jagged tip.
Josef knocked the spar aside, but a man in a blue conductor’s uniform jumped at his back and tried to pin his arms to his sides. Even with a bullet in his shoulder, the Swiss peasant was able to shake him off. Sweeping the knife in a circle, he held the others at bay as he backed up. A woman screamed from the lodging-house window and threw a flower pot down at him, a boy hurled an empty bottle, several men tried to surround him, hunched over like wrestlers entering the ring; but he broke through and took to his heels.
‘Stop him!’ the woman cried.
‘It’s the Ripper!’ the man with the spoke hollered at some men down the street.
But they ducked out of his path, as if he were a rabid dog running their way, and the ones chasing him were soon as lost in the fog as he was.
‘You’ve had a narrow escape, you have,’ one man said, brushing at my shoulder, as another one held out my crumpled hat, salvaged from the ruins, and said, ‘He won’t get far. They’ll catch that bastard and string him up from a lamp post!” He spat on the pavement to emphasize his point.
‘There’s a bar round the corner’, the conductor said, ‘in the Aldgate Arms. I expect you’ll be wanting a glass of gin to calm your nerves.’
On that, he was correct, though it was more than a drink I wanted. I doubted a whole bottle would do the trick. I allowed him to steer me towards the bar, but it was only as I passed through its double doors that the name of the place tolled some distant bell in my head.
‘That’s a story to tell your grandchildren,” the conductor said, settling me onto a stool, “how you took a ride with the Ripper and lived to tell the tale.’
But the Aldgate Arms – why was it familiar to me?
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA
Present Day
As if walking through the woods in boots wasn’t bad enough, walking in bare burned feet was agony. Every time Laszlo took a step, something stung his soles. When the Potheads’ place showed up, he saw his salvation on their clothesline: an old blue work shirt, and just under them a pair of neon-green Crocs. He was putting them on when Mr. Pothead crept out of the hovel, like a mole, and without commenting on the clothes heist, said, “I smell smoke.”
“Yeah, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Laszlo said.
Mrs. Pothead emerged—pulling on a blouse, thank God—and carrying a plastic crate containing a yowling cat.
“What happened?” Mr. Pothead asked, his eyes anxiously scanning the horizon.
“An accident. I’d get out of here fast if I were you.”
Three squirrels went scampering past, and a flock of crows overhead flew toward the other side of the canyon.
Laszlo was searching for buttons on the shirt—it appeared to have only one left—when there was a loud explosion, and a plume of noxious black smoke suddenly shot up into the sky like a geyser. A few seconds later, it was followed by a second explosion. Both carts now accounted for.
Laszlo wasn’t about to wait for the wildfire to go out of control. He scampered across the open chaparral, the rubber Crocs slapping the bottom of his feet, the open shirt flapping. He just hoped he could follow the path back out of there. It wasn’t like he was some woodsman, like that asshole Rafe. But he figured if he just kept going over one slope, then down the next, he’d eventually come out at the main road. With any luck, he’d be close to the spot where he’d parked Jake’s motorcycle.
As he ran, the image of Roy, roasting like a pig on an upright spit, kept popping into his mind. Was he alive while on fire? He had the discomfiting idea that he had been. True, he’d never liked the guy, but the look on his face, even after the flames had enveloped it, was one of shock. Not so much pain. Shock. Like he was stuck behind a waterfall of fire and didn’t know how he’d wound up there.
It was a miracle that
Laszlo had been thrown clear. Eyebrows would grow back. The only pain he was feeling now was in his gut—a slow, but growing, wrenching sensation. He put it down to being winded, from running so hard, for so long, and he slackened his pace to let it pass—but it didn’t let up. He felt like the pain was bending him over. His shoulders were drooping, his arms swinging at his sides like he was some monkey in the zoo. He couldn’t keep the shoes on at all anymore, and when they fell off, he finally didn’t care. It actually felt better to be moving along without them. He didn’t even feel like he was running anymore—he was loping like a wolf. He was half-inclined to drop to all fours.
A helicopter swooped by, so close to the ground that he could see the wraparound shades on the pilot as he looked for the source of the smoke. You could say one thing for a meth lab explosion—it sure as hell wouldn’t leave much evidence behind. Roy was no more than a bunch of charred bones by now, and even his teeth had probably been reduced to cinders and ash.
Panting like a dog, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, Laszlo eventually broke free of the scraggly brush and trees and saw a slice of the Topanga blacktop. He ran down to the edge of the road, and already cars were zipping by on their way out of the canyon. Locals, who knew what might be coming, had piled their kids and pets into their cars and split before the fire engines came and the road closings and detours began.
But he couldn’t see the truck or the motorcycle and he couldn’t tell if he was too far up the road or down it. He tried to flag a passing dune buggy down, but the girl in the passenger seat looked at him like he was something from a freak show. The hell with her, he thought. Just because he was missing some facial hair and wearing rags, that was no reason to cop such an attitude. He felt his hands, still in the tattered remnants of the gloves, clench as if they were around her throat, and he flashed on an image of her terrified open mouth, silently screaming.
His hand fumbled at the back pocket of his jeans, and, unscrewing the flask, he took another swig. The stuff was kind of foul, all in all, but it was wet, he’d say that much for it, and damn if it didn’t pack a wallop! It was like getting a punch in the stomach and a jolt of electricity all at one time.
The Jekyll Revelation Page 31
