The Whitechapel Demon

by Josh Reynolds

  Gallowglass set down her coffee cup with a clatter, startling him, and sat back. “So what do we do now?”

  St. Cyprian opened his eyes and frowned. He drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. He suddenly smiled. “Still fancy a trip to Dartmoor?” he asked.

  An Excerpt from

  The Adventures Of The

  Royal Occultist

  Book II

  THE

  JADE SUIT

  OF DEATH

  COMING 2014

  PROLOGUE

  Dartmoor, South Devon, England, 1920

  “This is the third time tonight we’ve driven down this road,” Ebe Gallowglass said. Her petite, lean frame was shoved back as far as it could go in the Crossley’s passenger seat, and her feet were pressed against the windscreen. Gallowglass was dark and slightly feral looking, with black hair cut in a razor-edged bob and a battered man’s flat cap resting high on her head. She wore a man’s clothes, hemmed for a woman of her small stature, beneath a heavy convoy coat. Cairo street-charms and Celtic rune-stones hung from a twine bracelet on her wrist.

  “It was your idea to come to Dartmoor in the first place,” Charles St. Cyprian said as he guided the automobile around a curve in the road for the third time in as many hours. “Hairy Hands, you said. It’ll be a public service, you said.”

  “I never said that!”

  “Something like that, at any rate,” St. Cyprian said. In contrast to Gallowglass, he was tall and rangy with an olive cast to his features and hair just a touch too long to be properly fashionable. He wore a battered ‘British Warm’—an officer’s greatcoat—over a well-tailored suit straight from Gieves and Hawkes, in Savile Row. He leaned forward over the Crossley’s wheel, trying to see through the thick evening fog that obscured the road. The Crossley’s headlamps were more hindrance than help, given the viscosity of the weather. The light didn’t pierce the fog so much as splash across it. “It’s hardly my fault the local bogey has gone to ground.” He glanced at her. “It probably heard we were coming and hopped the Channel, what?”

  Gallowglass rolled her eyes. “How can a pair of bloody hands hear anything?”

  “Well they certainly know when people are driving along this road, according to the stories. Maybe they hear vibrations in the aether. Theories, Ms. Gallowglass, abound.”

  “Theories,” Gallowglass said. She snorted. “You didn’t even know about this one until I told you.”

  “No, but I am the Royal Occultist, and as such, capable of formulating theories at the first whisper of a ghost’s shroud across a paving stone,” St. Cyprian said. “I—AH!” He yelped and twisted the wheel, nearly taking the Crossley off the road and into a tree in his effort to swerve around a sudden dark shape that had scampered across the road. “What the devil was that? A pixie? A headless horseman? Dear God, was it a black dog?”

  “Badger, innit,” Gallowglass said, unperturbed by the near-calamity.

  “A black badger?”

  “No,” Gallowglass said.

  “Well, that’s rather disappointing,” St. Cyprian said. He sat back in his seat and sighed. They had been in Dartmoor for more days than he liked to count, investigating a local apparition with the blunt, if unimaginative, sobriquet of ‘the Hairy Hands’. The entity, which took the form of a pair of disembodied hands, was said to appear on the stretch of road between the hamlet of Postbridge and Two Bridges. The hands were said to appear suddenly, snatch the steering wheel or handlebars out of the hands of the unfortunate motorist or bicyclist, and cause them to crash.

  Hairy Hands was only one of Dartmoor’s substantial population of bogeys, bogles, black dogs and beasts unknown to science. Every tor, bog and river had its own cast of diabolical characters attached to it. Most weren’t real. Of the rest, a majority kept to out of the way spots or lonely, unused stretches of ancient road where the average Briton would never run afoul of them. Some, however, were a clear and present threat to public safety, and had to be dealt with as soon as they stuck their knobbly heads over the parapet.

  Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. The Hairy Hands were proving to be fairly elusive beggars. They had driven back and forth from Postbridge several times a night, for several nights. During the day, St. Cyprian had consulted every source of information on the apparition, and on Dartmoor itself, trying to find some thread that would lead to an explanation or understanding of what they sought. Dartmoor was dotted with sites of ancient meaning. None of them seemed to have anything to do with the Hairy Hands. There were stories about ghostly escapees from Dartmoor Prison and devils imprisoned in the stones of the clapper bridge that Postbridge took its name from, but the Dartmoor ghosts were bound to the moors, and the only thing in the clapper bridge was a family of river voles.

  St. Cyprian wondered if the apparition were bound to whatever path had existed before the road, maybe some old guardian spirit that had grown confused or irritable by the onset of the motorcar. Or perhaps it was a forgotten god, worn down to a miniscule nub of hostility, that lashed out at travellers who were centuries removed from the folk who had once paid it homage. Then, it could also be nothing more than a mass hallucination or a convenient excuse for irresponsible motorists.

  The latter didn’t cause him much concern. Dartmoor had been an excuse, more than anything else, to get out of London, and a long overdue one at that. It had been almost two months since he and Gallowglass had put paid to a monstrous doppelganger of Jack the Ripper, and almost died in the process. There had been other cases in the meantime, one after another, all of which had prevented he and Gallowglass from leaving the city. The Order of the Cosmic Ram had attempted to awaken the ghost of the Great Fire of London for reasons that were still a mystery; a step up from using mummies to murder toffs, but an annoyance nonetheless. Then there had been the incident at the Voyagers Club, of which the less said, the better.

  “Think that box of yours will do the job?” Gallowglass said, prodding him from his reverie. She gestured at the back seat, and the square box that occupied it. The box had been crafted from bronze plates that had been decorated with a strange cuneiform script and a profusion of sigils that had gone out of fashion before Atlantis had taken the big dip. It had been made by priests and artisans in ancient Babylon for the express purpose of confining devils, or so St. Cyprian’s predecessor had sworn.

  “I should hope so. If we’re to have any hope of corralling our phantasmal phalanges, that devil-box is our best bet.” She looked doubtful, so he went on. “Carnacki used it once or twice, during my tenure as his apprentice.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Yes,” he said. He hesitated, and added, “Well…maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Gallowglass repeated darkly.

  “Technically, it did something.” He sucked on his bottom lip and said, reluctantly, “Possibly nothing; this ain’t exactly an exact science, what?”

  Gallowglass made to reply, but was interrupted as something dark and hunched was caught by the Crossley’s headlights. “Badger!” she yelled.

  St. Cyprian twisted the wheel. The dark shape moved, bounding forward. There was a sound like a weight striking the hood of the motor car and then something wet and foul struck the windshield. A moment later, two impossibly strong, hideously contorted hairy hands fell upon St. Cyprian’s own, like cats pouncing upon mice. They wrenched at the wheel, as if seeking to pull it out of his grip.

  “It’s not a badger! Get the box,” St. Cyprian shouted as he fought for control of the wheel. The phantom hands tore at his own with cracked nails and impossibly strong fingers, but he ignored the pain and held tight to the Crossley’s steering wheel. He felt a weight on his shoulders, as if something were straddling the steering wheel and shoving its feet against him to push him away, and he thought he could hear soft gibbering snatches of what might have been words or curses, though they were in no language he recognized.

  Gallowglass had squirmed into the backseat and retrieved the devil-box. She flipped it
open and jabbed it towards St. Cyprian. However, nothing happened. No sudden cessation of the inexorable pressure on his shoulders, no vanishing hands, and the Crossley was still weaving drunkenly back and forth across the road. “It’s not working,” he barked.

  “Color me shocked,” Gallowglass snapped. She banged on the box.

  “Why isn’t it working?” St. Cyprian shouted.

  “How the bloody hell should I know? It’s not my box, is it? Is there a magic word or something?” Gallowglass shrilled, still pounding on the box. Something tittered in St. Cyprian’s ear, and the Hairy Hands grasped his wrists. The sharp, ragged fingernails dug into his flesh and he let go of the wheel instinctively. Just as instinctively, he grabbed the rear brake lever and stamped on the pedal that controlled the front. The Crossley juddered to an abrupt halt as it slewed slightly sideways across the muddy road.

  Gallowglass was catapulted forward by the sudden stop, the box still in her grip. St. Cyprian caught a final glimpse of the Hairy Hands, rising from the wheel like startled, incredibly ugly doves, before they were swallowed up by the devil-box, which snapped shut as it crashed through the windshield, bounced across the hood and fell into the road with a heavy thump. St. Cyprian blinked and exhaled shakily. He looked at Gallowglass, who hung across the back of his seat in an undignified fashion. Her legs began to flail as she tried to push herself up, using his head and shoulder for leverage. “Ow, stop, stop it!” he said, batting at her.

  She ignored him, and propelled herself onto the backseat, where she let out a breath of her own. “Think we got him?” she asked, reaching over his shoulder to snatch her cap up from where it had fallen.

  Before he could answer, they heard a thump from outside the Crossley. The devil-box bounced and shuffled across the road in front of them, as if whatever were inside were trying to claw its way out. St. Cyprian looked at his assistant. “Yes, I’d say so,” he said. “The only question now is…what the devil are we going to do with it?”

  1.

  Limehouse, the East End, London

  Ganju Ghale sat on a barrel in the dark and watched the dockworkers unload his employer’s crates from the ship. The Gurkha was short, and built much like the barrel he sat on, with long arms and thick hands. The latter were engaged in a display of surprising dexterity, shuffling, cutting, and re-cutting a deck of cards, all without benefit of Ghale’s eyes, which never left the men unloading the crates.

  The dockworkers were a mix of cultures and races—Chinese, Lascar, English and Tcho-Tcho. Ghale trusted none of them. They were all thieves, drunks or worse; this lack of moral scruple was precisely why they had been hired. They would not talk about this after-hours delivery, at least not to anyone who mattered. And if they did, well…Ghale patted the surreptitious shape of the khukuri in its tooled leather sheath beneath his coat. The coat had been tailored especially so that he might carry the knife unnoticed.

  The khukuri was designed primarily for chopping, but Ghale was assiduous in making sure that the tip and edge was sharp enough to slice, if necessary. Besides his shoes, and the dice he had crafted from the toe bones of an old acquaintance, the knife was the Gurkha’s most prized possession. It had seen him out of trouble on more than one occasion. And, he ruminated, into it, at least once. The latter was how he had found himself in his current situation—beholden to a man he would have otherwise killed.

  William Melion had almost died with Ghale’s khukuri in his heart, in a nasty little tavern in Nepal. Ghale had been hired by another Englishman, one who wanted Melion removed from the wheel of life. He had never learned the former’s name. After he and Melion had almost gone over the edge of a cliff during their fight, and Melion had saved him, Ghale had sworn to serve him for ten years.

  A decade of service had seemed fair at the time. Unfortunately, Ghale had a taste for gambling; a habit his employer surreptitiously encouraged. As a servant, Ghale had nothing to wager save years of service. Ten years had become fifteen, then twenty. By his estimate, he now owed Melion almost a century of loyal service. Despite this, Ghale wasn’t particularly upset. Every man had his master, and as masters went, Melion wasn’t a bad sort, despite his peculiarities. He was a sorcerer, though he referred to himself as an occultist. Ghale saw little difference. Melion might not suck the blood from goats or place curses on his enemies, but he consorted with things best left in the dark and the quiet all the same.

  Things like whatever was in the biggest of the boxes now being loaded into the small lorry Ghale had rented for the evening. The Gurkha could feel the malevolence radiating from the thing in the crate. It felt like spiders on his skin, and he was tempted to have it dumped into the water. But Melion would know. And he had made the importance of the crate and its unpleasant contents no secret to Ghale. He wanted—no, he needed whatever it was, and he was willing to do whatever was required to get it.

  The crate was covered in Chinese characters. It had been purchased through one of Melion’s agents in Hong Kong. Where it had come from, and who had owned it previously, Melion had not said. Ghale found his silence telling. Blood had likely been included in the price. Ghale wasn’t squeamish. He had killed more men than he had fingers in the course of his duties, and their ghosts were no more bothersome than moths to him. But he wanted no part of whatever was in that box.

  But if it holds the cure for Mr. Melion’s illness, then it is worth putting up with, he thought, shuffling the cards with a flicker of his stubby fingers. Ghale had not been aware of the nature of Melion’s illness when he had first entered his service. Now that he had dealt with it for the better part of five years, he felt the need to investigate even the hint of a cure almost as strongly as Melion himself.

  Something crunched behind him. It was not an out of place sound, not for Limehouse, but Ghale was cautious. He jerked forward, dropped from his seat, and spun, spraying his deck of cards at the dark shape that had risen up behind him, cosh in hand. His attacker stepped back with a curse and Ghale kicked the crate over, onto his foot. The man howled and bent forward. The Gurkha drove his fist into his opponent’s face, crushing his nose and sending him reeling backwards.

  A bullet plucked Ghale’s hat from his head and he cursed and bounded for the cover of another crate. More shots punched into the crate and Ghale peered around the edge of it. The newcomers wouldn’t have been out of place in any East End drinking establishment. They could have been laborers or bashers. They moved quickly, though without precision, heading for the lorry. Ghale spat another curse as he saw that the last of Melion’s acquisitions had been loaded. If the thieves nabbed the lorry, that’d be that.

  Ghale vaulted from behind the crate as the first of them reached him, and swept his khukuri from its sheath, cutting the unlucky would-be thief’s throat from Adam’s apple to neck-bone. Ghale pivoted as a pistol shot tore at the hem of his coat, and his blade gave the gunman a second, crimson mouth. The man fell, a hand clamped to his gushing throat. Ghale scooped up the dying man’s revolver and scampered towards the edge of the quay, firing as he went.

  Thieves ducked, or returned fire. Thankfully, only one or two of them appeared to have firearms. Ghale rolled behind a crate, rammed his blade into the wood and bounced to his feet, ready to fire. The dockworkers had scattered as soon as the thieves had appeared, leaving the quay to the combatants. Ghale could hear police whistles in the distance, and he gave an annoyed grunt. The police would ask questions, questions his employer would not wish to answer.

  A head popped up over a coil of rigging rope. Ghale turned and fired, narrowly missing his intended target. The revolver gave a click and he tossed it aside with a disgusted sigh. He wrenched his knife free of the crate as he heard the lorry start up. Cursing steadily, Ghale ran for the lorry as it began to pull away from the quay. He leapt for the back and crashed down amidst the crates. Men moved towards him. Ghale clambered up onto a crate and tossed his blade from one hand to the other. “Come then, gentlemen. One at a time or all at once, it makes no difference
to me,” he said.

  A club struck at him, and he bobbed to the side, catching the man’s arm. His khukuri ripped through the man’s belly, and the fellow fell screaming. Ghale twisted, and drove his knee into his next opponent’s belly. Without pausing, he flipped him over and out of the lorry. Another came at him from the side, a knife in his hand. Ghale met him blade to blade and they dueled for a moment, before the Gurkha’s greater skill prevailed. He left the man draped over the crate and clambered towards the driver’s compartment. If he could stop the lorry, he could fulfill his task, interruption or no.

  But before he could reach the driver, a foul stink filled the back of the lorry. It dripped down from the underside of the tarp that had been stretched across the back, and rose from the wood planking beneath his feet. For a moment, Ghale couldn’t place the odor, then he realized, with a chill, that it was sulfur.

  The tarpaulin over his head bulged downwards, and ten ragged strips were torn out of it. The strips were widened with a single convulsive motion as something stinking of the pit dropped down into the back of the lorry with Ghale. He saw curling horns and heard the clop of cloven hooves on the wood as the air was choked with heat and stink. Goat-eyes as red as blood met his horrified gaze and a monstrous bleat assaulted his ears. Clawed hands reached for him, and the Gurkha swiped his knife at the approaching apparition with a bellowed oath.

  Where it had come from, and what it was, he did not know. He had seen many terrifying things in Melion’s service, but nothing like the apparition that now confronted him. Its greasy flesh was covered in matted, bristly hair and it squatted between him and the driver’s compartment on goat-feet. A bloated belly rested beneath a sunken chest, and it had a roughly simian shape, despite its bandy, joined legs and its goatish head. Whatever hell this beast had been conjured from, Ghale was determined that it would not find him easy prey.