Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (37 page)

As the cab lurched away, Walsingham tapped his brass-tipped cane impatiently on the wooden floor of the vehicle. “Mr. Bent, would you care to explain yourself? Charles Collier has been dead for twenty years.”

“He hasn’t, and he’s killed Edward Gaunt. I don’t know where he’s been, but he’s well and truly back.”

“Back?” said Walsingham. Was there a touch of something in his steely eyes that Bent hadn’t seen before? Fear perhaps? “But why? And why now?”

*   *   *

“That,” said Fereng, “is a very good question, Smith. Maybe you are ready for the answer.”

The young tyrannosaur growled and grumbled in the dancing shadows of the underground room, but Fereng was standing by his decree that the beast was not to have any more food. Smith still had no idea how the monster fitted into Fereng’s plans, save as some symbol of his desire for vengeance, stolen in an opportunistic moment. He had enjoyed a more restful night’s sleep, used now to the towering presence of the beast and his new companions. After breakfast and dung gathering, Phoolendu had departed on a mission of his own, followed one by one by the other Thuggees, leaving Smith alone with Fereng and affording him the opportunity to ask why he had finally returned to England.

Fereng gazed into the dinosaur dung fire. “Do you know the name Charles Collier?”

Smith shrugged. “Perhaps. I can’t say.”

Fereng smiled. “Not so long ago, I felt the same way. Charles Collier, Hero of the Empire, was like a dream to me, a story. I almost forgot I used to be him. My new identity of Fereng, harrier of the British Raj, defender of the poor and weak, avenger of the dispossessed and downtrodden … it had subsumed all else. Charles Collier was an old coat, half-remembered, that I didn’t wear any longer.

“But my new Thuggee brothers knew I had once been one of their enemies, knew I still clung, in a tiny corner of my soul, to my English roots. They used to bring me news from the Empire they picked up on their travels, and the occasional newspaper. Once, investigating an abandoned Colonial home, they found a huge stack of yellowing London newspapers, years old in some cases. They brought them back to me, and by degrees the old stories reconciled Fereng the revenge seeker with Charles Collier the hero, merging the two with each report from the London Stock Exchange, each court hearing at the assizes, each horse-racing result, each Parliamentary sketch.

“The newspapers were a disjointed collection, perhaps saved for starting fires or composting. They were dated from just a few months previously to twenty years or more before. Then, one morning just a few weeks ago, sheltering from the battering monsoon rains, I chanced upon a small piece in the
Illustrated London Argus,
from June 1880. It detailed how a young woman of just sixteen years old had died after throwing herself into the Thames. She had left a note implicating her stepfather, Edward Gaunt, in some manner of involvement in her suicide, but a resulting police investigation ruled there was no evidence. The girl’s mother, Catherine Gaunt, told the inquest that the girl was given to flights of fancy and had never truly recovered from the death of her natural father.”

Fereng locked eyes with Smith. “That was my little girl. My Jane. I was shocked back into myself, as though someone had thrown a bucket of iced water into my face. I had been snapping away at the British Empire on its fringes in India, like a small dog yapping at the heels of a giant. But now I had cause to bring the battle home to the heart of the Empire. I gathered my closest friends—Deeptendu, Naakesh, Kalanath, and dear Phoolendu—and we traveled to England. My vengeance was to be threefold, Smith, and almost as soon as we set foot on English soil we heard the rumors and whispers of the beast held captive in the laboratory of Professor Stanford Rubicon, and the key to our wrath was made clear to us.”

“Threefold?”

Fereng nodded. “My first mission was to Kennington, just Saturday night. The home of Edward Gaunt, the man who sought to step into my shoes as husband and father. He failed miserably on both counts, confining my Catherine to a sanatorium and…” Fereng’s lips drew back in a snarl. “He admitted everything, bloodied and battered, never taking his eyes from the noose I knotted there in front of him. How he abused and brutalized my darling Jane when she was little more than a child. How he drove her to take her own life. I made him pay, Smith. I restored the universal balance. A life for a life. Another thousand years’ delay to Kali’s return. He was my first vengeance.

“My second vengeance shall be Walsingham, the black heart of the British Empire, the shadowy soul of Albion, the darkness-stained core of Britannia. The man who dispatched me to my doom, and who knows how many besides.”

“And your third vengeance?” asked Smith.

Fereng smiled. “One thing at a time, Smith.”

The dinosaur growled, and there were echoing footsteps from the tunnel, Deeptendu leading the other Thuggees into the brick cavern. Fereng rose to meet them. “You have news?”

Phoolendu stepped forward. “Tsk, you let the fire burn low.” He placed three bricks of dried tyrannosaur dung on the flames and turned back to Fereng. “But yes. News. I stationed myself outside the Old Bailey, and not long ago I saw him. Walsingham.”

Fereng’s eyes shone in the newly raging fire. “At last. You followed him?”

“He was in the company of a fat man, a journalist as far as I can understand, and a policeman, one of the kinds who does not wear a uniform. They took a horse-drawn cab outside the courts.”

“You heard to where?”

Phoolendu nodded. “Grosvenor Square. Number 23.”

Smith blinked and tried to speak, his mouth suddenly too dry to make sounds. Grosvenor Square? Number 23? Why that was … that was …

“A very exclusive address,” said Fereng, suddenly dropping low and in one fluid movement whipping a knife from where it was tucked into his boot, flipping it into a whirling arc, and plucking it blade-first from the air, presenting it to Smith. “A very nice place to die.”

26

G
HOSTS

Don Sergio de la Garcia had lived, for two and a half years, in a dark and cloying room on the third floor of a crammed tenement that straddled the border between Lambeth and Stockwell. He had seen three summers in this hellhole, the heat and stench from the streets rising to fill his dingy room, and was facing his third Christmas, the howling, icy winds rattling the windowpanes, the snow piling up on the sills. He had chosen the area because it was the haunt of many Portuguese immigrants, close enough in appearance to him that he could hide among them, but different enough in culture that he could live unbothered by attempts at friendship or conversation. He had never divulged his address to his masters, some nameless fear encouraging him to fog and blur his location, even from those who held all the cards. He had hinted at rooms in more salubrious locations on the rare occasions that they had sent envoys—Markus Mesmer chief among them—to check on his progress.

He had never felt so alone in his entire life. The summers in London were typified by thick, hot smog, through which the blue sky could be glimpsed only occasionally. He dreamed of the big country he had left behind, the far horizons, the endless skies, the air you could breathe deeply. The friends and family he had once had. There was none of that here, and he was alone.

Almost. For his dark and tiny room, paid for monthly with the bag of gold coins he had brought with him from New Spain—where he used to have coffers filled with such riches!—and which now lived beneath a loose floorboard under his bed, this room was never empty. It was always filled with young women.

Or, at any rate, their ghosts. The quiet ghosts of the women he had systematically murdered over the course of his two-and-a-half-year exile in London. They stood in pale battalions in the shadows of the room, crowding out the air, suffocating him, never speaking but always watching, each one with an accusing gash across her forehead, long-dried rivulets of black blood running into her eyes, her dead eyes that stripped away his soul, paper-thin layer by paper-thin layer.

His soul, and his sanity, too. Among the jostling ghosts he could swear he saw a more substantial spirit, a beautiful young woman with cascading blond hair, a rope wound tightly about her arms and torso, a filthy rag gagging her mouth. She had no telltale cut above her eyes, which implored him, tearful, beseeching. Then he remembered, half-giggling to himself. She wasn’t a ghost at all. She was the mechanical girl, the automaton with treasure in her head.

Finally, Don Sergio de la Garcia could go home.

He looked again at the notice in the newspaper.

Congratulations, Man in Black! Meet us at the place that bears the family name of the girl you left behind! Eight o’clock tonight! It is almost over! Mr. Brain.

Garcia had puzzled over that for a good while. “What do you think this means?” he had asked the gagged automaton, who watched him with wild, tear-stained eyes. He paused to wonder at the workmanship that had gone into the mechanism, that it could weep so convincingly, then stalked up and down the tiny room. He still wore his black outfit, the cowl pulled back onto his shoulders, revealing his face with its high cheekbones and pencil-thin mustache. He had always been considered handsome back in New Spain, but now he knew he had acquired a sickly pallor beneath the London smog, and his once-black hair was going gray, as if each murder he committed somehow drained a measure of color and vitality from him. He was generally careful about hiding the El Chupacabras costume away in the daylight hours, but he felt so close to the end of it all that he allowed himself a little recklessness.

Garcia fell to his knees before the terrified-looking automaton. “I was a hero, back in New Spain. I fought for the poor and the weak. I was a champion. Then they came for me. I thought they were taking us to Madrid, at first: my wife, Julia, my beautiful daughters Sophia and Eloise, and I. Important business, they said. But it was not the Spanish Government. It was … they took us to New Orleans. I had no idea those stories were true. I was given a mission.” Garcia reached up and stroked the hair of the flinching woman. “Find you. Find what is in your head. They have your creator, you know. Professor Einstein. They know that you escaped him in London, that you have the brain of a whore in your head as well as the ancient treasure. Thus they sent me here, two years ago, more, to begin slicing open the heads of whores, to find the treasure.”

Garcia stood quickly and whirled around, hefting an imaginary rapier and dancing across the bare floorboards. “Jack the Ripper they called me! Mary Ann Nichols!” He swiped his invisible sword. “Annie Chapman!” Parry. “Elizabeth Stride!” Lunge. “Catherine Eddowes! Mary Jane Kelly!” He began to slash and swipe furiously and wildly, falling to his knees once again. He peered into the shadows, at the milling ghosts. “All here. And more. I am sorry, I am so very sorry.
Lo siento
. But now it is over. And I can finally see my beloved Julia and the girls again.”

He retrieved the newspaper from where he had tossed it. “But … the girl I left behind? The family name? My Julia’s family name is Marcos, but I have scoured the maps and gazetteers and cannot…” He paused, squinting at the ghosts. “You think? Teresa? But how could Mesmer know of that? We were always so careful, and then she married Juan Batiste and had her baby girl, Inez.…” He frowned. “Teresa died seven years ago. Her name? Palomo.” He scurried back to the maps, peering at them in the dull light. Then he straightened and turned back to the automaton. “The Dove.”

*   *   *

In the suite of hotel rooms in Soho the party had commandeered, Markus Mesmer was sitting in the bay window, watching the gloom already gathering over London. He’d had the mechanical girl right in the palm of his hand, and she had escaped.

Thank God for El Chupacabras. Had he not captured the automaton, Mesmer would not have dared return to New Orleans. The swordsman might be half-mad, but he had finally come good. And that evening Mesmer would finally have Maria back in his custody, and he could take her to his paymaster.

Louis XVI, the Witch-King of New Orleans.

Markus Mesmer’s long and varied career had led him to work for many masters, but he could safely say that his current one was the strangest by far. Still, Mesmer was a free agent, and while there was still much in New Orleans to interest him, when he had assuaged the hungers that the Witch-King’s court fed so well, then the world in all its richness was still his oyster. There was a knock at the door of his room and the burly Spaniard, Alfonso, peered around it, bearing a folded newspaper.

“The notice is in?” said Mesmer.

Alfonso crossed the room to Mesmer’s desk and handed over the newspaper. “
Sí, señor,
however…”

Mesmer snatched it from him and took a moment to decipher the advertisement in Spanish. He frowned at Alfonso. “I thought I said to have Garcia bring the automaton here. What is this
girl you left behind
nonsense?”

Sweat beaded on Alfonso’s vast, shaved head. “I do not know. This is not the notice we placed at the newspaper office.”

Mesmer screwed the paper up in his hands. “Someone is playing us for fools. Either Garcia has switched allegiances and is in league with our enemies, or someone has intercepted our notice and means to divert Garcia and the mechanical girl to a meeting point of their choosing.”

He tossed the newspaper back at Alfonso. “Try to find out what this means.”

He did not have much faith in the ability of the motley gang of Frenchmen and Spaniards he had been saddled with to solve the riddle, though, and when Alfonso had left and closed the door behind him, Mesmer sat thoughtfully for a moment then took up his Hypno-Array and considered the framework of wires, lenses, and cogs, the one that he had used to convince that innocent shopkeeper that he was, in fact, Jack the Ripper. The man’s confession—though delivered, no doubt, to the police with utter conviction—would not stand up to much scrutiny, but it would distract the constabulary sufficiently and buy Mesmer enough time to get away from London with Garcia and Maria. Or so he had supposed until this latest turn of events.