The Witches of Chiswick

by Robert Rankin

  “I’ll do it,” said Will.

  Rune grinned through a face-load of ostrich a l’orange. “I knew that you would,” said he.

  At considerable length, their vast repast concluded, even down to the wallaby in wild woodbine and the zebra in a basket, Rune called for the bill. He then took issue over the cost and quality of each and every item on it. He called for the manager and took him to task about the quality of the champagne. Then he produced a small bone, which he claimed to be a rat’s pelvis, that he said had lodged in his throat during his consumption of the terrapin terrine. He issued protests and threats of litigation and eventually settled “out of court” for twenty guineas compensation up front and at once.

  “A job well done,” said Rune as he and Will left the Café Royal, never again to return.

  “Was that really necessary?” Will asked. “Mr Holmes was paying for the meal.”

  “I know,” said Rune. “But Holmes is a friend and the champagne was inferior.”

  Will and Rune walked together along the Strand. It was after midnight now. There had been rain earlier but it had since cleared up, leaving only puddles which reflected the glow of the neon lights shining from the bow-fronted windows of the exclusive shops. An electric carriage slid soundlessly past. Within the glazed dome, fashionable fellows joked with painted ladies of the night-time calling.

  At Piccadilly Rune and Will halted.

  “I am going on to my club now,” said Rune. “The Pussycat in Greek Street. Perhaps you would care to join me?”

  “I think I’ll return to our lodgings,” Will said. “Think things over. Come up with some sort of plan. I have the envelope of case notes. I have all sorts of stuff about Jack the Ripper on file in my palm-top. Most of it is probably rubbish, but you never know. I might come up with something.”

  “Good boy,” Rune patted Will upon the shoulder. “Although you do not have faith in me, I have faith in you. Together we will triumph. This is just the beginning, but it will facilitate the end.”

  Will nodded thoughtfully.

  “As surely as the errant bicycle is viewed through the veil of cucumber,” said Rune, “then so does the spotty youth of time dwell upon the doorknob of pasta. Muse upon these truths.”

  Will shook his head.

  “Good night,” said he.

  “Good night,” said Rune, “and see you on the morrow.”

  And so they parted company, Rune, chuckling to himself and steering his sizeable slippers in the direction of the Pussycat Club, and Will heading back to their present humble lodgings in Shoreditch.

  Will sat long into the night, a lighted candle as his elbow, his palm-top on his knee and many cockroaches hurrying about their business all around him. He trawled the pages of his files on Saucy Jack. He came up with the usual suspects, shook his head at the conspiracy theories, made notes of all that he considered relevant. He leafed through the case notes, deciphering with difficulty the spidery cursive penmanship of the hardly literate constables and the observational findings of the coroner. At length, when his eyelids began to droop, Will closed up his palm-top, shook vermin from his bed and tucked himself into it still fully clothed.

  He blew out the candle and lay in the darkness, wondering where all this might lead to. Concluding that he didn’t have the faintest idea, he eventually fell into a deep but troubled sleep.

  Sunlight awakened Will. He yawned and stretched and plucked away the web that a spider had woven over his face. Will smiled somewhat at this. There was no explaining Hugo Rune. The guru’s guru always demanded first-class treatment, even though he was never prepared to actually pay for it. But still he thought nothing of sleeping in the poorest of accommodation. Although similarly he thought nothing at all about actually paying for that either. The man was an enigma. Charlatan or sage? Will really didn’t know. But he certainly had charisma. And charisma is ultimately what sorts out the somebodies from the nobodies.

  “Are you awake?” Will asked and he turned to view the wretched pallet of the perfect master. The perfect master however was not to be seen. And his wretched pallet showed no signs of having been slept upon.

  “Didn’t get back,” said Will to himself. “Well, he said nothing about us doing a moonlight flit last night, so I assume he must have stayed at his club.”

  Will rose and washed his face in a bowl of cold and doubtful-looking water and then he took himself downstairs. There was always the possibility that he could charm the landlady into offering him some breakfast. Not that he felt particularly hungry. Last night’s gargantuan feast still padded his stomach. Will paid a visit to a communal toilet of terrible aspect and, once hastily done with his ablutions there, removed himself from the boarding house to stretch his limbs in the street.

  It was a long walk to Rune’s club and Will did not have the fare for a hansom cab, let alone one of the new electric flyers. So he stood in the doorway of the rooming house, taking in the morning air and the sights and sounds and smells of Victorian London.

  “Read orl abowt it! Read orl abowt it!” A paperboy flourished papers. Will recognised the paperboy, the lad who had accosted him upon his undignified arrival in the time machine.

  “Good morning, young Winston” said Will. “We meet again.”

  “Gawd lop off me love truncheon,” said the lad. “I remember you, guv’nor. Care for a paper. It’s the Shoreditch Sun. First with the news, and the best news there is. And a lady in a corset on page three.”

  “No thanks,” said Will.

  “Please yourself then. Read orl abowt it!” he bawled once again. “Hideous murder in Whitechapel. Ripper strikes again.”

  “What?” went Will.

  “Ripper strikes again!” bawled the lad.

  “Not so loud,” said Will. “But that isn’t right. A sixth murder. That’s not right.”

  “Hideous murder,” bawled the lad. “Blood and guts all over the place. Police as ever baffled.”

  “Give me a newspaper,” said Will.

  “Halfpenny,” said Winston.

  Will dipped into his pocket and brought out a silver threepenny bit.

  Winston snatched it from his hand and trousered it with haste.

  “Sorry, no change,” he grinned, handing Will a newspaper.

  Will unrolled the broadsheet and cast his eye over the headline and the words that were printed beneath it.

  TERRIBLE MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL

  Ripper claims sixth victim

  Will read the dreadful details. A gentleman had taken his leave from a well-known house of ill repute, after a dispute with the madam of that establishment regarding her charges. He had then apparently been pursued through the night-time streets by Jack the Ripper and brutally done to death. The chase had been witnessed by several gatherers of the pure,[15] who were working the nightshift. The actual murder had not been witnessed. The body had been later found by a patrolling constable.

  “Upon the arrival of the corpse at Whitechapel Police Station, the victim had been positively identified by Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who was there playing whist with the station sergeant.

  “‘I knew the murder victim,’ he told our reporter. ‘He owed me five guineas. His name was Hugo Rune.’”

  The newspaper fell from Will’s fingers and drifted down into the gutter.

  His world was suddenly all in little pieces.

  Hugo Rune was dead.

  14

  Tim looked appalled. He was appalled.

  “Dead?” said Tim. “Murdered?”

  “Murdered,” said Will. “By Jack the Ripper.”

  “You never told me this.”

  “I’ve just told you.”

  “But you never told me this earlier. I was getting really excited about meeting him. I’m his magical heir.”

  “Sorry,” said Will. “And believe me, I was pretty sorry too. For all the chicanery and the bravado and braggadocio, I really liked him. And all the time I was with him, when I thought that he wasn’t te
aching me anything, he was, like I said, he was teaching me how to survive. I owe him a lot. A lot.”

  “But dead. I can’t believe it.”

  “Sorry,” said Will. “But he was dead. It was him. I saw the body and I went to the funeral. You wouldn’t believe how many famous folk of the day turned up to it. It was a real celebrity gathering.”

  “You’re being very off-hand about this,” said Tim.

  “It did happen a very long time ago. I’m over it now.”

  “I’m shocked,” said Tim. “I’m really shocked.”

  “So was I.” Will supped upon his pint of Large. “But like I say, his funeral. That was really something. Queen Victoria came to it.”

  “Queen Victoria came?” Tim’s eyebrows were up into his hair.

  “Close personal friend, apparently.”

  “But Rune didn’t die in Victorian times. He lived until 1947, when he died penniless in a Hastings boarding house.”

  “In our version of history.”

  “Oh,” said Tim. “I see. But weren’t you supposed to be changing history, by catching Jack the Ripper and stuff like that?”

  Will winked at Tim. “Certainly was,” he said. “I was very angry about Rune being murdered. Very angry indeed. I can’t tell you how angry. More angry than I’ve ever been about anything ever before. I was determined upon one thing and that was to bring Jack the Ripper to justice. He’d committed those other murders, which had nothing to do with me, but this time it was personal.

  “And when I say, personal, I mean personal”

  The personal effects of Hugo Rune, the guru’s guru, Logos of the Aeon, The Lad Himself and now, in death, the stuff of future legend, were contained within a steamer trunk which stood within the rat-infested hovel that was William Starling’s not so home from home.

  The reading of Rune’s will had been an event that Will would long remember and cherish. Will had returned from it with tears in his eyes, but they were not of sorrow. Rather were they of laughter.

  The reading had been held in public. So many were there, in fact, who wished to be present at the reading of this will, that the Royal Albert Hall had been loaned for the occasion by Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Gawd bless Her), who sat in state in her royal box to witness the proceedings.

  Rune had left elaborate instructions, which were published in The Times newspaper, regarding the reading of his will, and the manner of his interment. The latter was to be a time of celebration, he stated, the celebration of a life well lived in the service of others. His body was to be embalmed in the manner favoured by the pharaohs, dressed in his magical robes, his ring of power upon his nose-picking finger, and seated upon a Persian pouffe within a pyramidal coffin of gopher wood, embellished with topaz and lapis lazuli. This was to be set upon a gun carriage, swathed by the flag of his former regiment, then drawn by six white horses to Westminster Abbey, where a selection of his poetry, including “Hymn to Frying Pan” was to be read by the poet laureate whilst a choir of virgins sang lamentful anthems to his praise.

  Will had been rather looking forward to that, once the reading of the will was out of the way.

  And Will was much impressed by the interior of the Royal Albert Hall, with its terracotta reliefs depicting the arts and sciences of all ages. He looked with appreciation upon the tiers of boxes and galleries, which allowed the seating of some seven thousand individuals around the central arena. And he gazed up in some awe at the great dome of wrought iron and glass. He had visited it before with Rune to attend a gala ball and hear Dame Celia Asquith sing an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, which had also impressed him considerably.

  There had been so much of old London that Will had wished to see: the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum. Rune had taken him to each in turn and spent much time explaining to Will the whys and wherewithals and what-abouts of classical architecture, sculpture, fabric, fashion, and art, art, art. Rune’s knowledge of all the arts was indeed profound, and whilst he had stoically refused to offer Will any insights to the magic he claimed to possess, he was always vociferous in expounding upon what he knew of other matters. And Will had taken in the knowledge he had been offered, gratefully. “Education,” Rune had told him, “is what remains after you have forgotten everything that you have been taught.”

  Will considered this an erudite statement.

  Will was certainly fond of the Royal Albert Hall, and certainly amazed by the folk who filled it to hear the reading of Rune’s will. They were not the cultured folk who attended the opera, the top-hatted dandies and gorgeously attired ladies. These people were strictly of the lower orders. Tradespeople.

  Will, who could by now identify a tradesman by the manner of his garb, spied hat-makers, silversmiths, manufacturers of occult paraphernalia, vintners, brewers, book-binders, milliners, cobblers, hoteliers, inn-keepers, boarding-house proprietors, travel agents, shipping clerks, and sundry others. Many sundry others. There was not a free seat in the house.

  There was an air of expectancy in that great domed room, an atmosphere that could have been cut with a cheese knife, all of which would have no doubt tickled Mr Rune.

  And there was no doubt at all, that for this moment, and this moment alone, all of Rune’s creditors were assembled in the selfsame place.

  Mr Richard Whittington, the Lord Mayor of London, had been given the unenviable job of reading the will. He wore his robes of office and after ringing his big hand-bell in the fashion of a town crier and calling for order, broke the seal upon the envelope that had been lodged with Coutts’ bank, withdrew the parchment contained within and read aloud the words printed there upon.

  “This is the last will and testament of I, Hugo Artemis Solon Saturnicus Reginald Arthur Rune, Magus to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Sprout, Twelfth Dan Grand Master of the deadly art of Dimac, Logos of the Aeon, Lord of the Dance, King of the Jungle, snake-charmer, unicyclist, three-way cross-channel swimmer, Mr Lover Lover, Wild Colonial Boy, and one Hell of a Holy Guru, being of the soundest mind ever lodged within the human form and signed in my own hand in the presence of His Royal Highness, Prince Albert Saxe Coburg Gothe, and our most Regal Majesty Victoria. May the Gods bless Her.” At the mention of the monarch’s name, the crowd removed its collective headwear and bowed its collective head.

  The Lord Mayor of London read aloud the will of Hugo Rune.

  “I have nothing.

  “I owe much.

  “The rest I leave to the poor.”

  Will, who had learned from Rune always to take the seat nearest to the door, “in case some unforeseen unpleasantness might occur”, was the first out of the door and so not only avoided potential injury during the ensuing riot, but also potential immolation during the conflagration which followed, and which indeed consumed the Royal Albert Hall. Will had glimpsed, upon his departure, Her Majesty making her own departure from the Royal Box. To Will’s great amusement, he noted that Her Majesty was also, upon this occasion, amused.

  Rune did not get the funeral he’d been hoping for. He was cremated at the expense of Hastings Borough Council. Although many close personal friends, the Queen included, did attend the funeral. The general public, in particular members of the trading class, were excluded.

  And now it was all done and Will was alone, alone in the hovel with Rune’s steamer trunk. And Will was wondering what he should do about it and its contents. Whose were they now? Were they his? He was after all, Rune’s heir. But here was an anomaly. Rune had apparently died wifeless and heirless. No one had come forward and none had been mentioned in Rune’s will. Perhaps the answers to the many questions Will had, might be found within the steamer trunk.

  There was no doubt in Will’s mind that Rune had possessed wealth. He was born of noble stock, a member of the landed gentry. He was not the son of a brewer, as he had originally told Will. His entry in Who’s Who filled three whole pages. Will had always considered Rune’s refusal to pay for anything an amusing, if somewhat dis
honest, affectation, curiously typical of the very rich, who have been notorious throughout history for failing to pay their bills.

  The chances that the trunk was crammed not only with Rune’s clothes but indeed with countless stocks and shares bonds, jewels of high value and large denomination money notes seemed most probable to Will.

  And as Will was a stranger in a strange land and presently without funds, hungry and awaiting the knock upon the door that presaged eviction into the street, now would be as good a time as ever to open up the trunk and take a look inside.

  And after all, Will had dragged that trunk across five continents and never been granted a peep within. Rune had kept the key upon a chain around his neck. Will had not been able to gain possession of this key.

  Will sighed, rose from his verminous pallet, took up the crowbar he had “acquired” and gazed down at the trunk.

  “Mr Rune,” he said, “I am going to open your trunk. You will pardon me for this, I trust. I swear that I will avenge your death and bring your murderer to justice. But in order to do this, I require funds. If, to this end, I am forced to sell your clothes and whatever magical accoutrements are held within this trunk, so be it. I am hoping, however, that this trunk contains treasure. And that’s all I have to say really.” Will might well have crossed himself after this brief speech, but instead he made the sign of the pentagram as he had seen Rune do upon many occasions, mostly before a moonlight flit.

  And then Will put his crowbar to the lock of the steamer trunk and forced it open. He put the crowbar aside, applied his hands to the lid, and lifted it.

  A curious fragrance breathed out from the open trunk, as of lilacs; the “odour of sanctity” that issues from the incorruptible bodies of the saints. Will sniffed this fragrance. “It pongs of his aftershave,” said Will.

  And then Will delved into the trunk. He heaved out Rune’s clothes: the hand-made shirts, and vests, (no underpants, for Rune had always gone “commando”), socks, garter-straps and spats. And suits: the Boleskine tweed six-piece suit, the linen tropical number, Rune’s pink chiffon evening dress. There were papers, many papers, but most of these were unpaid bills. And then there were books. Will did what you did with books, Will pored over them. Tomes they were, books of magical lore. Here was Joseph Glanvil’s Saducismus Triumphatus and also the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, the 1595 Lyons edition; and The Book of Rune, and inevitably The Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Will knew of The Necronomicon, because, let’s face it, everyone knows of The Necronomicon. He set it aside for a later bedtime read and proceeded with his search for Rune’s hidden wealth.