They reached the London Stone, whose opening was dubbed “The Raven’s Claw” because it was jagged and uneven and just wide enough for a claw or a small finger. He watched as Katie’s gloved hand closed around the spikes of the grating around the London Stone. Then she peeled off one of her kid gloves and poked her hand through the bars. A moment later she was jabbing her index finger into the Raven’s Claw fissure, and for an instant Toby’s world exploded. A kaleidoscope of colors flashed across his eyes, and he felt that all the air in his body was being sucked out of him. A deafening explosion rang out. Thunderbolts of light flashed around the Stone, then pierced his eyes. A red-hot poker of pain ran up his arm. He had no choice but to let go of Katie’s arm. Then he heard a faint whisper of a voice: Beware of what you wish for . . .
Part IV:
Katie Seeks Proof
Chapter Nineteen
Best to Come Home say the Bells of Winterloam
Katie heard the explosion and then felt it. It was so loud that when the noise finally died away, it left a ringing against her eardrums like a high-pitched tuning fork.
Her head throbbed. She yanked hard to free her arm from the grip of the iron grating surrounding the London Stone, but like a steel trap at the mouth of a cage, the wire mesh clamped painfully around her arm, digging into her flesh and cutting off her circulation. The pain was unbearable. She took a deep breath and hurled her body backward to pull free of the iron jaws. Beware of what you wish for . . . echoed in her brain.
I want to go home! I need to go home! she wished with all her might. Take me back to Madame Tussauds in the twenty-first century, she begged as if the Stone had ears and could grant her wish.
Another deafening explosion sent new shockwaves through her body. White-hot heat seared her arm. Shadows darted around the Stone, then around her head, blurring her vision. She was falling, down, down, down into the rabbit-hole abyss of blackness, and a moment later it was over.
The pain was gone. Bright light flooded the room. The room? Had she made it? Was she back in Madame Tussauds? Katie squinted her eyes and tried to peer around, but the light was blinding. And what was that smell? Peanut butter? Chocolate? And something antiseptic, like the disinfectant used in hospitals … or museums.
Wax museums.
Katie forced herself to open her eyes.
“Katie,” came Toby’s voice so close to her ear it made her jump. She glanced down. Her hand and arm were free. And the velvet jacket she’d been wearing was gone. She felt blissfully light and unencumbered by petticoats and heavy clothing. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “Katie,” Toby repeated. But which Toby was it, Katie wondered.
She heard a sound as if someone had just kicked a tin can across a tiled floor, and it rattled and thrummed somewhere near her feet. But when she looked down, there was nothing near her sneakered feet. Sneakers! The joy of wearing high-tops surged through her, almost overwhelming her with happiness. With her free hand she reached up. Gone was the cloche bonnet with the enormous satin bow tied under her chin.
“Katie!” came Toby’s voice so loudly this time she had to clamp her hands over her ears.
“Stop shouting!” she cried, feeling a wave of nausea. But she also felt light as air without the layers of bulky clothing—the overskirt, the underskirt, the petticoats, the flounced bustle.
“Not shouting, Katie.” Toby looked at her oddly, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “You crossed over, didn’t you, Katie? The Stone is a portal, and you did it, didn’t you?”
Katie swallowed hard and nodded. The boy towering over her, with his strong dimpled chin and crooked smile playing around the corners of his wide mouth, didn’t have a boxer’s broken nose or a scar slashed across his cheek. And this boy was a good deal taller than the one she’d left in the churchyard, but they looked so similar. “How . . . long . . . have . . . I . . . been . . . gone?” she managed to choke out.
“You haven’t been gone. That’s just it. That’s the way it works.”
“How do you know?” Katie asked, her voice still weak.
“Because I made it happen, too. Last year. After my father died. The Stone was being exhibited in the Victoria and Albert, not here. But there’s something you need to know, Katie. Something very important.”
Katie grabbed his arm. “Can I get back? Can I go back?”
He nodded. “But only three times. Then it’s over. You can’t do it again. But it’s more complicated than just going back and forth . . . it’s about changing the past and—”
“Stop!” Katie put up her hand. She felt another overwhelming sensation of queasiness rising from the pit of her stomach and up her throat. “Wait,” she managed to gasp out. She took several deep breaths until the room around her, with its disinfectant smell, stopped spinning.
“I-I wondered about changing the past,” she managed to pant out, still doubled over and breathing in great gulps of air.
“You’ll be okay, Katie. Just breathe slowly. I know you’re reeling. I’ve been there. It’s awful. Just give yourself a minute.” Toby—the twenty-first century Toby—did something that made her straighten slowly back up. He began rubbing her back in small circles the way her mom did when Katie was little and had the wind knocked out of her.
Breathing in odd, heavy bursts now, Katie told him she’d traveled back to Victorian England during the time of Jack the Ripper.
“But I have so many questions,” she said. “What I need to know is . . . can I . . . change the past?” Painfully, Katie pulled her arm out of the wire-mesh cage surrounding the Stone.
“Okay. Here’s the deal—” the other Toby said.
“Don’t you mean, jellied eel?” Katie shot back under her breath, trying for levity. If she didn’t make a joke, she’d start to cry.
As it was, she had to blink back tears.
“Exactly,” Toby said. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling panels illuminated his wide grin as he loomed over her. “But it’s not a jellied eel you’re going to like—”
“Try me. I need to know everything. I need to know why this happened. How this happened. And . . . can I change the past?” She asked plaintively, running a hand over the top of her hatless head, feeling normal hair—not woven with strands of pearls, or twisted into a high knot, or braided so tightly to her skull as to cause migraines.
“Can I change the past?” Katie repeated.
She felt a cold tremble running through her body when Toby said simply, “You can change small things, inconsequential things. But you can’t alter history. At least I couldn’t. And I tried. But there’s something you have to know,” he continued in a distressed voice. “Something crucial.”
“I’m all ears,” Katie told him, but turned her back on him as she scooped up her backpack in the corner where she’d left it. I’ve got to get back to Grandma Cleaves’s house! “You can tell me everything on our way to my grandmother’s. There’s something I’ve got to do. Where’s Collin?”
“Last I saw him he was heading for the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. He wanted to get a picture of himself standing next to Neil Diamond.”
“Neil Diamond! Puh-leeze!”
“What?”
“Neil Diamond? He’s ancient.”
“Collin said it’s for his mother. Neil Diamond’s her favorite singer.”
Katie nodded and smiled. “I forgot. Aunt Pru loves all those old-fogey singers.”
“Hey. You’re from Boston. I thought ‘Sweet Caroline’ was the Red Sox anthem?”
Katie grinned. She threw her arms around Toby’s neck and squeezed so hard she almost couldn’t breathe herself. “I’m home, I’m home, I’m home! And I love ‘Sweet Caroline.’”
“Yeah. And my favorite group, Courtney and the Metro Chicks, does a wicked spoof on that song.”
I know, Katie thought. I helped write it! “Let’s go,” she whispered, starting to get all choked up again.
“What about Collin?”
“No time. We’ve got to get back
to my grandmother’s house. I’ll explain on the way. And you can fill me in on everything you know about the London Stone. And, by the way, where did you go when you traveled back in time?”
“Scotland. Eighteen fifty-five.”
“How come? I mean, why then?”
“I went back to the time of Madeleine Smith. She killed her lover with arsenic . . . or was accused of killing her lover. I thought I knew how she did it. I’d been doing research on the case. It’s a sort of unsolved murder. Famous case. I thought I had it all figured out. But I didn’t. I was way off base.”
“Did you meet any of your ancestors?”
“Yup. Madeleine Smith’s doomed lover for one.”
Katie met his gaze. “So does the London Stone just take people back to famous murder mysteries?”
“No. It does more than that. It grants your innermost wish. That’s why I told you beware of what you wish for, because it might—”
“Come true. I remember. But the wish I wished for can’t come true.” I want to say goodbye to my parents! “So no worries.”
“There’s one other thing you need to know, Katie. It took me a long time to figure it out. The short story, ‘The Raven’s Claw,’ is what made me realize—”
Toby stopped midstride and took a deep breath. “The most important thing you need to know is that your last wish will be to undo the others.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Whoever wrote ‘The Raven’s Claw’ must have gone back in time himself using the London Stone. The short story is a parable, a warning. The protagonist in the story strokes the Raven’s Claw, and is granted three wishes. But what happens is so horrific that he uses his last wish to undo the others.”
Chapter Twenty
Do Not Tarry say the Bells of St. Garrily
“But, Toby!” Katie cried. “The past has already happened. It’s part of the stream of history. What I need to know is, can I stop Jack the Ripper? Can I save any of his victims?”
Toby had accelerated his stride, fairly pulling her along behind him down the Plexiglas staircase and through a crowd of tourists to the ticket window. He inquired as to the policy for reentry once they’d left the museum. A woman behind the counter wearing cat’s-eye reading glasses nodded and told them to hold out the backs of their hands, which she marked with a rubber stamp. “And keep your ticket stubs, just in case. Museum closes at five sharp tonight.”
Toby hustled Katie toward the entrance doors. “You can change small things, but not big things. That’s my best guess.” They were passing the lavatories.
“Wait! Omigod, a real bathroom!”
Toby chuckled. “I know, I know. I had the same reaction. Chamber pots and outhouses are the pits.”
And they stink, Katie was about to say. She looked longingly at the “Women” sign over the restroom door. She thought about hot water. Hot running water. She shook her head. “It’s okay. I’ll wait till I get home.” The thought of a real bathroom brought a shudder of unexpected pleasure. She turned to Toby, who was grinning ear to ear.
“The first time I came back,” he said, his eyes sparkling, “I took the longest hot shower on record. I just stood forever under the spigots relishing the jets of water. Who would have thought?” He laughed. “Some of the things we take totally for granted are the greatest gifts on earth, like showers—and flush toilets!”
Now it was Katie who was tugging Toby along with her through the revolving doors, and a moment later, they were headed down Marylebone Road to the Baker Street tube station.
“We don’t have much time.” He grew serious.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to start to feel as if you’re fading in and out,” he said, glancing at his watch, “in a little over an hour. Then you either go back to Victorian England, or you stay here. The museum closes at five. It’s now three-thirty.”
“And if I choose . . . to stay?” Katie felt her mouth go dry.
“Then it’s over. You can never go back in time to the same place again. You only have a two-hour window . . . give or take. I’m betting you’ll go back. Actually, I know you will.”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“Because that’s what I did.”
When they were outside the museum, Katie glanced back over her shoulder. It was so different here. Space-age street lamps soared overhead like giant propellers, and the asphalt streets, gummed with grime, held no hint of nineteenth-century cobblestones.
As they loped off down the street, crossing walkways painted Day-Glo orange, Katie was struck by the deafening noise and sputtering rumble of modern trucks and cars sweeping past, the belching gas fumes, and most striking of all, the dull cinderblock buildings on every corner. Gone were the stone gargoyles on overhanging ledges, intricately carved woodwork, and cobbled walkways; gone, too, the profusion of scrolled ironwork gates and the flower sellers on every corner.
Katie sighed. There was a roundness to the nineteenth century that the twenty-first lacked. Arched doorways, oval windows, circular pillars were all missing here. And the balloon-like dome over Madame Tussauds with its “JUMP THE Q” sign in bold mustard yellow against a lipstick-red background, looked like an inflated, fake planetarium crayoned against the sky by a five-year-old.
Though this century is modern, Katie thought, with sophisticated technology, the architecture looks so . . . chunky . . . and heavy . . . as if someone threw cement blocks together and piled them high.
“Okay,” Toby said. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.” Katie nodded, and as they hurried to her grandmother’s home, she told Toby all that had happened to her, ending with Toby—the other Toby—hiding a message in the stuffed vulture.
When they arrived at Twyford House Condominiums, Grandma Cleaves wasn’t home. Because it was Wednesday, her grandmother would be at the Charity Mission in the East End doing volunteer work.
Moving quickly through the front vestibule, Katie pressed the code and turned the key in the lock of number 211 and motioned Toby to follow.
Inside her grandmother’s place, they hurried past the coat closet (a “cloak closet” in the olden days) and descended several steps into the oak-paneled foyer. Katie stopped and blinked around. Down the hall, spanning out to the left, was an octagonal room called the “morning room” at Twyford Manor, but here it was used as a sort of den and dining room combination. The library, opening down the hall to Katie’s right, was part of the original library. The other half would be part of Mrs. Drumlin’s studio apartment.
Glancing through the mullioned windows at the rear of the foyer, Katie caught sight of the car park. There were no remnants of the old carriage house or portico.
Taking a deep breath, Katie led the way up the baronial staircase, past the stained glass window at the landing, and on up into the attic. Just a fraction of the original attic, it smelled strongly of mothballs and dust.
Weaving past boxes of Christmas ornaments, broken toys, trunks full of clothing used for dress-up, and shelves packed with cardboard boxes, Katie brushed past ancient furniture draped in old sheets, giving the cluttered attic a haunted appearance. With Toby following on her heels, Katie deftly picked her way through the clutter. But even with Toby close behind, Katie couldn’t help the jumpy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
A dim hanging bulb cast a shadowy glow from the raftered ceiling. This portion of the attic smelled like heat, old paint, wood, glue, and dust. At the far end stretched stacks of chipped teacups and broken pottery. A pile of canvases lay stacked against a workbench. Lining a shelf in the corner under the eaves was a collection of old-fashioned hats, and next to the hats, on either end of the book shelf, perched the moth-eaten eagle and vulture. Bald in patches, the vulture peered down at them with lifeless marble eyes. The eagle’s eyes were missing, and most of its feathers, giving it the appearance of a worn and much-loved teddy bear.
Katie reached for the vulture. Mounted on a wooden base carved t
o resemble a tree branch, the stuffed bird made a clunking sound as it scraped across the metal shelf. It was heavier and more bulky than Katie remembered. She turned to Toby when she finally got it down.
“Got a Swiss Army knife or something?”
“Will a box-cutter do?”
“You carry around a box-cutter?” Katie’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of the blade Toby wrenched from the pocket of his duster coat.
He shrugged, looking sheepish. “Never know when it might come in handy.”
“Remind me to keep you close whenever I’m in a dark alley.” Katie turned back and stuck the box-cutter into the seam at the base of the bird, below the wings. She didn’t gingerly pick at the worn thread. She gouged and stabbed at it.
When she’d made a hole the size of a small plum, she wiggled two fingers inside and eased a compression of gauze out, then several wads of stuffing, until her fingers touched something crinkly. She grappled with the bunting, then managed to grab a small, yellowish piece of rolled-up parchment, the outer layer as thin as onionskin, from the bowels of the bird.
Katie scooted to the workbench, sat down, and gingerly smoothed out the small piece of parchment. It had been rolled up like a small scroll, the size of a narrow cigarette. Katie feared it might crumble in her hands, but instead it was so stiff she couldn’t manage to uncurl it without tearing it.
There was a canvas apron hanging from a peg on the wall. Toby unhooked it and strode over to the bench. “Here.” He spread the canvas apron on the workbench. Toby took the rolled parchment from Katie’s trembling hands.
Taking great care, Toby smoothed out the tightly wound parchment. Watching him, Katie had a momentary vision of the other Toby with his silky black hair, fathomless dark eyes, and inscrutable smile. The two boys were different. Yet there were striking similarities. They both had dark complexions, angled jaws, and smooth-as-silk black hair.
“Can you make out the words?” Toby asked, peering down at the ancient writing.
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 15
