The House That Jack Built

by Robert Asprin

  "My camera. Digital videocamera, best in the business . . ."

  Videocamera? Latin for I see?

  "Show me how it operates!" He loosened the ropes on her wrists, braced her in a sitting position and leaned her against him. She fumbled the camera into her lap and fiddled with controls. "See? This is what I recorded tonight." She tried to hold the camera up, but couldn't lift her arms. He took it from her—and let out a yell. The strangely textured surface along one side was moving. Pictures flickered across it, in color, showing Maybrick bent over Catharine Eddowes, hacking her to pieces . . .

  Dear God! How the devil could such a tiny little box have captured them in pictures like this, color pictures, moving pictures? He pressed the controls she had manipulated and the box whirred softly, the pictures flashing with such speed he couldn't follow the motion. People racing backwards, colors flashing and rippling across the surface, a blur of sight and confusion. When he fumbled at the controls again, hands shaking, the motion slowed abruptly. He found himself staring at a place straight out of nightmare. Vast open rooms, with whole buildings inside, hundreds of tiny people moving about the floor and climbing staircases made of metal, insanely colored lights glowing in strange shapes. "What is this place?" he demanded, voice shaking.

  She blinked slowly and focused on the camera he held. "Shangri-La Station," she murmured. "The time terminal . . ."

  Lachley drew a whole series of deep breaths, gulping down the damp air, gradually steadied his shaking nerves. "You," he said slowly, enunciating each word with care, "are from my future?"

  "Had to come down time, through the gate, to catch the Ripper, to photograph him . . ."

  He didn't really believe it, didn't want to believe it, such things were fantasy, the maunderings of popular authors like that Frenchman Jules Verne. Yet he was holding a camera that no craftsman in the British Empire could possibly have constructed, made of things Lachley had never seen or heard of, and the bitch was drugged, couldn't be lying, not with what he'd given her. Excitement stirred to life, with tantalizing glimpses of a world which could offer him more power than anything he'd dreamed possible. "Eddy," he whispered, "tell me about Eddy. Prince Albert Victor. When does he become king?"

  "Poor Prince Eddy," she sighed, eyes closing again. "Only four more years . . . so young . . . 1892 . . ."

  Lachley began to tremble in a wild excitement. Four years? Eddy would be crowned king in only four more years? Dear God, what was going to happen, that would kill both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales? Bertie was healthy as an ox and Victoria, herself, likely to live for another decade. "What happens?" he demanded, breathless now, "What happens in 1892?"

  "Influenza. Epidemic of '91-'92. Poor Eddy, he'd just been engaged to be married, named Duke of Clarence, whole life ahead of him, and he's killed by influenza. Victoria was heartbroken, his parents inconsolable . . ."

  The room lurched under his feet, swaying and whirling in mad circles. Dead of influenza? Never crowned? It couldn't be, he'd worked too hard, invested everything, spent five weeks in hell, tracking down Eddy's God-cursed letters to protect him, to ensure the ascension to the throne. Had done murder after stinking murder to keep Eddy safe, so he could become king, to ensure himself the power Lachley craved, the safety of wealth and control over the political future of an empire . . .

  And Eddy was to be killed by a stupid influenza epidemic?

  Lachley began to laugh, the sound wild and high, echoing off the bricks of the vaulted ceiling. He gripped the impossible camera in both hands and laughed until the sound choked him, until he could gasp out, "How do you get back? To your own time?"

  "Through the gate," his drugged victim answered in a sleepy, reasonable tone.

  "Gate? What gate? Where?" He was still laughing, the sound of it edged with mania, a mind giving way under the stresses.

  "The Britannia Gate. In Battersea, Spaldergate House. But it doesn't open for days, not until the second of October, only opens every eight days . . ." Her head was lolling. "Won't go through it, though, not 'til Mary Kelly's murdered on November ninth. . . I'll take my videotapes back, then, I'm sure to win the Kit Carson Prize . . ."

  Another spate of laughter broke loose. Mary Kelly? She must be the bitch in Miller's Court. What the bloody hell did he care about a scheming little whore with a letter written by a dullard who wouldn't even survive to wear the crown? Oh, God, it was too funny, here he stood in a satanic sanctuary devoted to the accrual of political and psychic power, with a dead time traveller on the floor, a drugged maniac on his work bench, and a babbling journalist planning to photograph a murder he no longer had any earthly reason to commit, with a total of four whores dead and cut to pieces for no reason whatever, and the decaying head of an adolescent Nancy-boy glaring at him from across the room and laughing at his shattered dreams . . .

  Only this woman had brought him a glimpse of something new, something which fired his imagination even more passionately than Eddy's prospects had done. A whole, immense new world to explore, in which to control little minds and live as a king, himself. He laughed again and stroked the woman's hair. Thoughts of Eddy fell away like flakes of rust from fine Damascus steel. Dominica, the self-important photojournalist, had done him a greater favor than she dreamed, tracking him through London's sewers.

  He left her tied to the great iron hook on his sacred oak tree, drugged into a stupor, and deposited the equally stupified James Maybrick on the floor of the sewer outside, then locked the door to Lower Tibor and began walking through the dark tunnels beneath London, laughing softly and wondering what he ought to wear when he carried Dominica through the Britannia Gate two days from now, dying of the wounds he would inflict shortly before arriving in Battersea?

  * * *

  Sometime early in the morning hours, Ianira Cassondra woke to gibbering terror. Dr. John Lachley had crashed into her bedroom, rousing her from drugged sleep with slaps, bruising her arms and shaking her. "Tell me about the gate!" he demanded, cracking his hand across her face. "Wake up, girl, and tell me about the gate! And the station! Where are you from?"

  Ianira shrank away from him, weeping and trembling. "I came through the Britannia Gate! From the station! Please . . ."

  "What station? What's it called?"

  "Shangri-La," she whispered, her bruised face aching where he'd struck her. Her wrists, crushed in his hard hands, were slowly purpling under his grip. "Time Terminal Eighty-Six—"

  "Eighty-Six? My God, are there so many of them? Tell me about your world, woman!"

  She shook her head, desperate and confused. "I live on the station. I am not permitted to leave, for I am a down-timer—"

  "A what?" His face, looming so close above her own, had twisted into an unholy mask of madness. She shrank back into the pillows, but he jerked her up again, roughly. "Explain!"

  "I was born in Ephesus!" she cried. "Came to the station through the Philospher's Gate! From Athens . . ."

  He went very still, staring down at her. Voice quiet, now, he said, "Tell me again where you were born. And when."

  "In Ephesus," she whispered. "We did not reckon the years in the same way, but the Philosopher's Gate opens into what the up-time world calls 448 B.C., in the time of Pericles . . ." She trailed off at the look of naked shock in his eyes.

  "My God," he whispered. "It's true, then. Of course you kept saying you were born in Ephesus, when the city doesn't exist any longer."

  Ianira blinked up at him, terrified and confused. Clearly, he believed her. Why, she couldn't imagine. Something had obviously happened tonight . . . Ianira's eyes widened. The Ripper Watch! He must have encountered someone from the Ripper Watch tonight, must've seen something that had left him convinced of the reality of time travel. John Lachley's wild eyes focused slowly on her bruised face. He smiled, stroking her hair possessively. "My dear, tell me about the people trying to kill you."

  She tried to explain about the up-time world's Lady of Heaven Temples, the Ansar Majlis terrorists
who had sworn to destroy the Templars and her family, about Jenna's murderous father and the men he'd sent to butcher his own daughter.

  "Then you are quite important," Lachley mused. "Far more important than that brainless bitch I left in Lower Tibor. A woman journalist, whoever heard of such a thing?" Ianira closed her eyes to shut out horror. He'd not only encountered members of the Ripper Watch Team, he'd kidnapped them. "Yes," he was murmuring, "I do believe you're far more important than Miss Nosette. Very well, my course is clear. I'd better do that bloody lecture tomorrow night, curse it, to lull suspicion. I shan't risk drawing attention to myself over those wretched murders on the eve of stepping into the future!" He shook her again. "Tell me about the gate. What time it opens. That Nosette woman said something about Spaldergate House, in Battersea."

  "I don't know what it looks like," Ianira quavered, straining away from him. "They smuggled me out of the station in a steamer trunk. I know the gate opens in the garden behind the house, but I don't know what time. It is in the evening, always, every eight days."

  "Ah. Miss Nosette can tell me precisely when, before I dispose of her. Very well, my dear," he pressed a kiss to her brow. "I do believe," he said quietly, "you had best be moved for safekeeping. I don't wish to risk having you escape, my pet. Eddy has proven himself worthless as dross, but you, my dear, will take me into a place of power beyond anything I imagined."

  She gasped, staring up into his mad grey eyes. "You can't go to the station!"

  He laughed softly. "Nonsense. I'm John Lachley, I can do anything. The police haven't a clue that I've helped butcher four destitute whores in the East End, controlling Maybrick's pathetic little mind. Miss Nosette tells me your world has puzzled over my identity for a century and a half. If I can accomplish that in London, with no more than I've had to work with, I will become a god on your station!" He smiled at her through dark, insane eyes. "And you, my pet, will be my goddess . . ."

  She fought him when he drugged her again.

  And wept hopelessly when he carried her down the stairs, wrapped in a cloak, carrying her toward the nightmarish room she had seen in visions, the brick room beneath the streets where he had carried out at least one murder and had planned so many others. Somehow, she must find a way to stop this madman before he reached the station. Down-time men whose minds were sound and whole sometimes went mad when they first entered a time terminal and confronted the shocking realities of the up-time world. What John Lachley would do, once he reached TT-86 . . .

  She faded into unconsciousness, still trying to discover some way to stop him.

  * * *

  Jenna tried to ignore the ugly roar of voices in the street just outside their little house, but there was no escaping the angry sound of brawling out there. The bells of Christ Church, Spitalfields, sounded bleak and hopeless this morning, calling worshippers to a rainy Sunday service, while the grim news flashed like wildfire from house to house: two women butchered within half an hour of one another, confounding the police of two separate jurisdictions and shocking the entire city of London, this time, not just the East End. And that at a time when most residents here had believed themselves beyond further shock.

  Noah had gone out to buy fresh-caught herrings for their breakfast, refusing to let Jenna set foot into the angry mob outside. Jenna was determined to cook breakfast today, however, so she bent over the monstrous, coal-fired stove in the kitchen, trying to take in Marcus' instructions on how to operate it, when Noah Armstrong rocketed into the house.

  "I've got a lead," the detective said without preamble, dumping a wrapped packet of fish onto the kitchen table with a thump.

  Jenna and Marcus jerked around. "What lead?" Jenna demanded breathlessly.

  "There's to be a lecture tomorrow night at the Egyptian Hall, on Theosophy and the occult sciences. The speaker's a doctor, claims to be a mesmeric physician. I ran across a man talking about him when I was coming back from the costermonger's. It seems the doctor who's giving the lecture came up from Whitechapel, was born in Middlesex Street, turned to mediumism and the occult. I don't know if this is our man, but the doctor who attacked you, Jenna, reacted violently to whatever Ianira said in trance. So maybe he had occult connections. We're certainly running out of leads, trying to trace ordinary doctors. And with the Ripper terror coming to a boil out there, I'm not sure it's entirely safe just now, asking about physicians and surgeons. The police are looking for a doctor connected to the Ripper, after all, and poor Dr. Mindel has barricaded himself into the house, terrified of the mobs. Frankly, I think it's worth a shot, going to see this Lachley fellow."

  Jenna's mouth had dried out like thistle-down, all the liquid in her body rushing to her palms, which she wiped unsteadily on her trousers. "Yes. I agree. I'm coming with you, Noah." The detective started to protest. "No, hear me out! I can identify him faster than you can. If he's giving a lecture, there'll be a crowd, which means I can watch without him noticing me. If he's the right man, we can trace him to where he lives, maybe even find Ianira there."

  Noah's lips thinned. Clearly the detective wanted to argue. Then a sigh broke loose. "You're right, dammit. But I don't like putting you in harm's way for any reason."

  "I'll go armed," Jenna muttered. "For bear."

  "I, too, will go," Marcus interjected. "Mrs. Mindel has offered to watch the girls if I ever need to leave them alone. Ianira is my wife. I will go to search for her."

  Again, the detective clearly considered arguing, then gave in. "All right," Noah groused. "If things do get sticky, another gun hand will be welcome. God knows, you learned quickly enough when I gave you those shooting lessons after that mess in Colorado."

  "You taught me well," Marcus said quietly. "I have not forgotten how to use the revolver I bought in Chicago."

  Noah nodded. "We'll all go armed. And we'll need better clothes than these. The Egyptian Hall is a respectable place. If we show up in East End castoffs, they might not even let us through the door."

  Jenna frowned. "The only good suit I've got is what I was wearing the night the gate opened. It's got bloodstains all over it. The last thing I want to do is show my face in public with blood on my clothes. Somebody'll take me for Jack the Ripper. I had decent stuff in my luggage, but I had to abandon all my baggage at the Picadilly Hotel."

  "The lecture's not until tomorrow night, so there's plenty of time to pick up new clothes. For all of us, if it comes to that. Fortunately, it's market day in Petticoat Lane, so there'll be plenty of new suits to pick and choose from."

  Jenna nodded. "Good. I'll get my money belt out. I changed a lot of currency at the station. We can use that to pay for everything."

  "Very well. Let's get over to Petticoat Lane, before the best bargains are gone."

  Wordlessly, they set out to buy yet another set of disguises.

  Chapter Ten

  Margo had never placed a wire tap before.

  Watching Inspector Conroy Melvyn work that morning in near darkness, her admiration for the up-time Scotland Yard detective's skill soared. He placed the tap into the telephone lines leading into the Home Office in a very short time, then rejoined her on the pavement. "Got it," he grinned. "Now when the queen telephones the Home Office this afternoon from Scotland, expressing shock over the double murders, we'll get a recording of it."

  "That's great!" Margo grinned, wondering how much money the residuals for up-time broadcast of the historic phone call might land in her bank account. "What's next?" Whatever it was, it wouldn't be nearly as hair-raising as recovering their hidden equipment from the murder sites had been. Thank God the Victorian police hadn't yet carried the forensic science of crime-scene evidence very far. Not only had they failed to put a quarantine on the murder scenes, they'd allowed surgeons and coroners to disturb the bodies, wash away the blood, and Sir Charles Warren had even erased the chalked graffiti over on Goulston Street after Maybrick had slashed it across a stairwell landing. Margo could almost understand the reasoning behind the erasure, given t
he anti-Semitic slur Maybrick had written and the already explosive mood of the East End. To their credit, the City police had argued about it, hotly, finally forced to give in to the Metropolitan police decision to erase it before it could be seen or even photographed, since Goulston Street lay in Metropolitan Police jurisdiction.

  "What next, indeed?" Inspector Melvyn mused scratching his chin thoughtfully. "I think, my dear, I'd like to be on hand at the Central News Agency when the Saucy Jack postcard arrives."

  "Do you want to try videotaping Michael Kidney when he shows up at the Leman Police Station, accusing the PC on duty for his lover's murder?" Margo sympathized with the man. Poor Michael Kidney. He really had loved Elizabeth Stride, despite their stormy relationship.

  "Might be a bit of a risk," the inspector frowned.

  "More risky than recovering that equipment from Mitre Square?" Margo laughed nervously. "Or tapping the Home Office telephone lines?"

  The inspector grinned. "Well, now you mention it . . ."

  "All right, we'll try to get a video of Mr. Kidney. I'll change into East End togs before we go."

  "Right."

  They set out at a brisk walk for Spaldergate House. Malcolm was already in the East End, with Pavel Kostenka and Shahdi Feroz and Doug Tanglewood, studying the crowd dynamics on the streets. Margo shivered, remembering the explosive riot the day Polly Nichols' mutilations had been discovered, and was selfishly glad Malcolm had assigned her to Conroy Melvyn, rather than the Whitechapel group.

  The sun rose while they walked westward down Whitehall where, tomorrow morning, a decapitated, legless, armless woman's torso would be discovered in a vaulted cellar beneath the New Scotland Yard building, still under construction. Tonight, Malcolm and Conroy Melvyn would try to place miniaturized camera equipment in the cellar to see if they could catch the perpetrator of the so-called Whitehall torso mystery and settle once and for all whether that anonymous victim had also fallen prey to the Ripper's knife.