The House That Jack Built ts-4

by Robert Robert

  Noah was frowning thoughtfully at the door. "If we annouce ourselves, it might provoke him into panic-stricken, drastic action. I don't want to give him time for that."

  The detective tested the door gently, then backed up and smashed his booted foot against the heavy panel. The lock splintered on the second try. Jenna dragged her pistol out of her pocket and rushed in on Noah's heels. Marcus brought up the rear. They found a cheerless room empty of anything save bits of refuse and appalling drifts of filth along the floor. A swift search, downstairs and up, revealed only one inhabitant: an enormous black hound chained in a room near the back of the house. The dog had been dead for a couple of days, judging from the stench. Beside the hideous, putrifying corpse lay a rug someone had turned back. And under the rug could be seen the outlines of a trap door.

  "Right," Noah said briskly, pulling up the trap.

  Marcus helped lift the planks while Jenna gulped back nausea. Stone steps, damp brick walls, the smell and splash of water... They could hear Lachley's footsteps receding quickly and Jenna caught a faint flicker of light at the bottom of the hole, which vanished a moment later. Noah glanced up into Jenna's eyes. The gun in Noah's hand looked like part of the detective's arm, an organic piece that had grown there, like the fine hairs on the back of Noah's wrist and the chipped nails that tipped short, strong fingers. "I'd feel better if you stayed here."

  "I ain't no weed," she muttered, quoting the girl who delivered their milk every morning. "And if you tell me to stay here, well, then, same t'you, wiv brass knobs on..."

  Noah frowned. "You're picking up the slang pretty well, aren't you? But that doesn't make you a match for a thing like Lachley. He's a bloody dangerous bastard. Stay behind me."

  "No argument, there," she muttered.

  Marcus found a stub of candle in a battered tin holder beside the bed and a wooden box with matches, printed with the trade name Lucifers. Marcus lit the candle and handed it to Noah, who led the way down the narrow stone steps. Marcus pocketed the matches and Jenna edged down the steps next, leaving Marcus to bring up rear guard. The stink of decay and filthy water clouted her nostrils well before her feet touched the wet floor below. There was no cellar, as Jenna had been expecting. They were standing in a brick tunnel, its arched roof clotted with cobwebs and stained with poisonous patches of mold and lichen. Water trickled and dripped in the distance.

  "What kind of place is this?" Jenna breathed.

  "Sewer tunnel, I'd guess," Noah answered, the whisper harsh and strained. "Lachley knows his way around, that's clear." They couldn't see Lachley's lantern, but his footsteps came with a faint echo from further along the sewer tunnel. Jenna stared into the pitchy darkness, then swallowed as Noah set out with soft-footed stealth. She cast a doubtful glance at Marcus, whose eyes were tortured. But they hadn't much choice. Jenna clutched her revolver, the grip solid and reassuring against her palm, and eased forward, trying to walk without her footsteps splashing. Jenna strained to catch the faintest echo of sound in the clammy darkness, but heard only the distant rush of water and Lachley's sharp, clattering footsteps far ahead. The sound ran away down the tunnels, leaving Jenna biting her lip.

  "Hsst!"

  At that sharp sound from Noah, Jenna froze. Her lungs rasped in the silence and her heart slammed against her ribs. Sweat, cold and dank as the putrid air, clung to hair and skin and eyelashes. She listened...

  "Bloody bitch!" A man's voice echoed through the sewers, fierce with some nameless rage that left the tiny hairs along Jenna's nape and arms starkly erect. Her fingers tightened of their own volition around the butt of her gun. A bloodcurdling scream, high and ragged, pierced the blackness. A woman's scream...

  The woman was sobbing out, "Don't kill me, please, I won't tell anyone you're the Ripper, please, just let me go home!" The woman's voice, clearly British, shook on a wild note of despair.

  "That is not Ianira," Marcus breathed.

  "What time does the gate go?" Lachley's voice...

  "I don't know!"

  "What time was it when you came through, then?"

  A choked-off cry of pain floated through the sewer tunnels. "About—about eight o'clock, I think... it was just dusk... oh, God, please... no!"

  She screamed again, high, ragged. The sound cut off hideously. Jenna stood trembling, torn between the need to stay hidden and the need to rush forward, to stop whatever ghastly torture was underway. A moment later another sound drifted through the sewers, a sound Jenna couldn't identify at first. Heavy, rhythmic thumps, a grating, scraping sound, like someone hacking apart a cow's carcass. Jenna covered her mouth with the back of one shaking hand. Then they heard footfalls and a heavy thump that echoed like a door closing.

  Someone was moving through the sewers toward them, splashing quickly through the water. For a long, horrible moment, Jenna thought he was coming back toward them. Noah blew out the candle, plunging them into a terrifying darkness. Lachley's footsteps approached to within a frightful distance, accompanied by a lantern's dim glow, then faded once more, moving away down another route and disappearing back into the maze of sewer tunnels.

  Jenna discovered that she was shaking violently. Minutes crawled past in the utter blackness of the stinking sewer while doubt and fear banged around the inside of her skull like screaming, imprisoned monkeys. The echoes of Lachley's footsteps had long since faded, but still they didn't move, scarcely daring to breathe. At last, Noah shifted. The detective whispered, "Marcus, let's have a lucifer, please." A match flared and Marcus relit the candle.

  Light sprang up, yellow and warm and glorious, revealing ashen faces. Jenna swallowed hard, hands trembling visibly. "Wherever he was torturing that poor woman, it's not far."

  "He closed a door of some kind," Noah mused. "Perhaps another trap door. We'll try to find it and see if he's hidden Ianira down here with his other captive."

  A cross-tunnel intersected their own. Noah turned left, opposite the direction Lachley had taken. Jenna cast worried glances back over her shoulder every few seconds, terrified the monstrous killer behind them would turn and come back, having heard their footsteps. Her hand sweat on the grip of her pistol despite the chill in the foetid air. Jenna knew her gun was useless against Jack the Ripper. He couldn't be killed tonight, not before Mary Kelly died, more than a month in the future. But it was all she had and just holding it made her feel slightly less panic-stricken.

  "Well, blow me for a game of soldiers..." Noah muttered.

  The low-voiced exclamation brought Jenna around. "What is it?"

  "An iron door! Locked tight as a drum."

  The low door had been set back into an alcove. Clearly, John Lachley had come from behind that door. Jenna tested it, searched for a lock, realized that without a key, they would never get in. The hinge-pins were on the inside, so they couldn't even lift the door off. "What we need is a key."

  "We'll have to make do with a lockpick," Noah muttered. "I've cultivated the habit of carrying a set, during the past three years. With your father's killers on our trail, we've occasionally needed a fast entrance into a hiding place. Fortunately," the detective fished into a coat pocket, coming out with a set of burglar's tools and crouching before the door, slipping them expertly into the keyhole, "Victorian locks are generally large, clumsy, and easy to open." Marcus held the candle close to the lock, giving Noah the best light available. The lockpicks scraped and scratched inside the iron door, then something grated and clicked.

  "Got it!"

  The sudden silence was thick with tension.

  The heavy door swung noiselessly open, which spoke of constant oiling and maintenance in this damp environment. Surprisingly, the room beyond was not dark. Gas jets in the floor lit a scene from someone's private version of hell. Jenna's skin crawled as she stepped across the threshold, following Noah. She choked the instant she was inside. The sickly odor of rotting meat struck her like a physical blow. The stench permeated the air, foul and thick. When she saw what lay on the floor, Jenna r
ealized with a shock of horror what the stink actually was.

  "Oh, my God!"

  Somebody had spilled a great deal of blood in this room. And pieces of at least two fresh corpses had been stacked up beside the door like cordwood. Arms, legs, gobbets she couldn't readily identify. And two severed heads, a dark-haired man's and a blonde-haired woman's. They rested on a work bench which stretched beneath cupboards along one long wall, sightless eyes staring at the door, faces set in ghastly expressions of terror and agony. White robes hung from a hook set into the bricks. Dark brown stains were visible across the sleeves and front. A stone pedestal that looked very much like an altar stood in the middle of the room. On top was another severed head, its flesh and hair still rotting off the bones. From what little remained, it looked like it had once belonged to a young boy, a teenager. An enormous tree trunk, with many of its major branches intact, took up at least half the space. Iron brackets and bands held the tree together where it had been sawn apart to get it into the room. Ianira, hands bound above her head, hung naked from an iron hook set into one enormous branch, limp and unconscious, her ribcage barely lifting with her shallow breaths. Gas jets at the base of the tree shone across her skin.

  "Oh, sweet Mother Mary..." Noah whispered, voice harsh.

  Marcus had already whipped off his coat, was lifting Ianira down and wrapping her nude body gently in its folds. Jenna, keeping her jaw tightly clenched, found a knife on the work table and used it to slice through the ropes on Ianira's wrists. Marcus was smoothing hair back from his wife's brow, trying to rouse her.

  "She's been drugged," Noah said tersely. "I can smell the chloroform."

  "Bastard!" Marcus snarled. "I will put a bullet through him!"

  Noah said tersely, "Just now, our business is getting the hell out of here before the maniac who owns this place comes back."

  The detective stepped to the door and peered into the darkness while Jenna pressed one hand against her mouth, struggling desperately not to throw up. The blonde woman must have been the one who'd screamed. And they'd just stood there, listening, while he hacked her apart... She bolted past Noah into the darkness of the sewer tunnel and threw up in the murky water against the far wall. The slight current washed the mess away, even as she shuddered and choked again. Noah bent over her shoulder. "You all right?" the detective asked worriedly.

  She nodded, and finally managed to straighten up. "Sorry," she whispered, wiping her mouth. "Couldn't help it."

  "God, no," the detective managed through clenched teeth. Noah looked very near to being ill, as well. Marcus carried his wife out of the stinking chamber. Noah closed the door and fiddled with the lock again. "Think I'll leave it the way we found it. Let him sweat, wondering how a drugged victim got out of a locked room. Ought to bother the hell out of him."

  "If it's all the same to you," Jenna said through chattering teeth, "I'd just as soon not go back through his house in Wapping. I don't want to meet him coming back, not for anything in this world."

  Noah's glance was keen. "I couldn't agree more." The detective peered both ways down the tunnel through narrowed eyes. "We must be near the river. We weren't all that far from London Docks when we climbed down those steps. With the distance and direction we came, the Thames must be close by, off that way." Noah pointed at the wall behind them. "Western Basin's probably off that direction, so I'd say we need to go that way." Noah nodded down the tunnel opposite the direction they'd come.

  "Let's go, then," Marcus said quietly. "We need to get Ianira to safety and have Doctor Mindel look at her."

  It was a silent and tense group that set out through the maze of sewer tunnels beneath the East End's filthy streets, searching for a way out.

  Chapter Eleven

  John Lachley carried Dominica Nosette's hacked up torso a long way through the sewer tunnels. The bundle he'd slung over one shoulder was heavy and he paused frequently to shift it, but Lachley never considered simply dumping it and turning back. He wanted to leave her somewhere appropriate and had tumbled to just the perfect spot. When he finally reached the place, he paused, listening to the rumble of carriage traffic through a grating overhead, then smiled and turned off into a freshly-broken opening in the sewer. The vaulted space in which he found himself was destined to become part of the cellar of New Scotland Yard. The police headquarters, still under construction, was directly overhead.

  Lachley smiled to himself and dumped the butchered remains of his pathetic little journalist where workmen would find her, then tipped his cloth hat. "Ta, luv." He grinned, using the voice of his childhood. "I'm obliged, Miss Nosette, that I am."

  Then he set out the way he'd come, whistling jauntily to himself. The tunnels he followed to reach Tibor snaked and twisted in multiple directions, following gas mains and sewage flows and underground streams bricked over, odd corners and chambers formed out of the remnant cellars of sixteenth and seventeenth, even eighteenth century warehouses and wharfside pubs, all connected like gladiator tunnels beneath an ancient fighting arena. As he walked, he planned exactly what he would do when he carried Ianira to Spaldergate House.

  He'd kept the identification papers and cards he'd found in Miss Nosette's possession, as well as those from the recently deceased Mr. Pendergast's pockets. Lachley was quite confident that no one would notice the switch in a dark garden. He would rush in, carrying Ianira, claim to be Pendergast and babble out some story about being attacked by the Ripper, then simply carry her through into the station. He could hardly wait to see what the station was really like. With Ianira in his power, there was no limit to what he could do in such a place.

  When he reached Lower Tibor, John Lachley was in exceedingly high spirits.

  He set his lantern down with a faint splash. The iron key from his pocket grated in the lock, which clicked open. He slid the key back into his coat, then stooped to retrieve his lantern. The door opened silently at his touch, swinging back on its well-oiled hinges. Light from the perpetual flames burning in the gas jets at the altar welcomed him home again...

  And John Lachley froze halfway through the door.

  She was gone.

  He literally could not take it in, could not comprehend the emptiness his senses told him existed in the room. He had left her hanging from the iron hook in the great branch above the altar, the hook he'd dangled Morgan from, the night that miserable little sod had died, had left her hanging as naked as he'd left the boy, bound and drugged senseless. There was no humanly possible way she could have freed herself from the ropes and the iron hook, much less escape from a brick vault with only one door in or out. And that iron door had been firmly locked, the lock not forced in any way he could see. Yet she was undeniably gone.

  Nothing in this chamber could have provided hiding space for a child, let alone a full-grown woman. He stood there with his hand uplifted against the cold iron of the open door, gaze jerking from shelf to cabinet to altar and up to the massive tree trunk and back to the shelves again. How had she gotten out? The key in his pocket was not a standard iron skeleton key. It would've taken a master locksmith to slip this lock. Or a duplicate key. Or an extremely talented thief. Had someone broken in here, then, and carried her off? Who?

  He could not conceive of a master locksmith having sufficient motive to pick his way through a maze of sewer tunnels until stumbling across this one particular alcove, to open a locked iron door. It simply wasn't reasonable. Common locksmiths didn't have the imagination to attempt such a thing! And why would a thief have ventured here? There'd been nothing in that entire house in Wapping worth stealing, if a thief had come down that way. A duplicate key, then? That was even more absurd than the other possible explanations. Take a wax impression, create a mould, cast a key, all in a single hour's time, with the owner of this door likely to return at any moment, irate and possibly murderous?

  The longer he pursued a sane explanation, the faster sanity ran through his fingers like the dirty water under his feet. Lachley's drugged captive simply c
ould not have gotten out. But she had. And Lachley's greatest refuge, the result of years of labour and intensive study—his very life if this place were connected with the deaths of the whores—everything he had built was now threatened, because the bitch had gotten out!

  The explosion jolted the very bedrock of his sanity.

  Fury was an expanding fireball inside him, an anarchist's bomb, a Fenian detonation that sent him plunging across the room, hands so violently unsteady he dropped the lantern with a crash of broken glass and spreading lamp oil. He searched places too small for a mouse to hide, but found no trace of her. A knife had been moved from his workbench and used by someone to cut through the ropes on her wrists, ropes he found abandoned on the floor. Someone must have followed him down, picked the lock while he was out.

  Lachley swore savagely. He had been so careful, confound it, so bloody careful... Had someone recognized him, after all? Recognized the heavily moustachioed man in seedy clothes as the thin and seething boy he'd once been in these streets? Lachley had barely gone twenty when he'd last walked Wapping and Whitechapel, passing himself off as parlour mediumist Johnny Anubis. But who else could it have been, if not some god-cursed tea leaf who'd grass on his own loving wife, if a reward might be involved?

  He halfway expected to find all of Scotland Yard crouched in the tunnel beyond the open door to Tibor, billycocks at the ready. What he found was a black expanse of dripping brick tunnel, silent and cold as a tomb, just as he'd left it. Lachley stood motionless, gazing at the ruin of his sanctuary, breathing hard and trying to think what he should do. Going home might be fatal. Whether an East Ender had recognized him as Jack the Ripper or the girl's husband had trailed him down here, whoever had taken Ianira had discovered enough to hang Lachley from the nearest gallows. He had to get out of London. Before the police did trace him. Well, the gate into the future would open near dusk tomorrow evening, which meant he had to elude capture for only twenty-four hours.