Authors: Paul Finch
Charles shook his head. “To Annabelle, all Africans are the same.
A primitive but fine people.”
“Well unfortunately, so long as the Queen remains dedicated to her Empire, these primitive but fine people must be subjugated.”
A faint sound interrupted them. Both men froze.
For a moment they weren’t sure what they were listening to, but then
realised
it was a murmur of voices, apparently from several streets away.
“Our friend has attracted attention tonight,” the colonel mumbled. “Get ready.”
And in that same instant, something leapt clean over their heads – not only over their heads, but over the willow tree as well. It happened in a flash; a dark shape hurtled through the fog maybe thirty feet above, so fast they didn’t even see where it had come from, nor at first where it landed.
The colonel grabbed Charles’s arm and pointed. Charles glanced up, and instantly his skin began to crawl. Wreathed in fog but just about visible, a figure was clamped to the side of the house’s rearmost chimney stack. As the two men watched, it turned sharply about so that its head was upside-down, and then, with a faint scraping noise, it crept down the brickwork, easing itself over the parapet of the gutter and onto the side of the house proper. Charles had seen this before, but he could never contain the revulsion he always felt. Though the figure clearly wore clothing, or at least a piece of clothing – possibly a large coat – it was too misshapen to be mistaken for a real man: its body was unnaturally stiff and elongated. Its back legs had extended to at least three or four times those of a normal human being.
“Great scot,” Colonel Thorpe breathed.
Charles glanced sidelong at him. The older man was looking up with fascination, his mouth agape. Charles looked back to the house. The figure was now edging sideways, still upside-down, having no trouble finding hand or footholds. The voices in the near distance sounded closer.
“He’s been chased home early tonight,” the colonel said. “We couldn’t have asked for more. Are you ready?”
Charles nodded, tightening his grip on the rope.
The figure had now reached the attic window. This of course would be a test. If there was any vestige of mammalian brain still at work inside that hybrid thing, it would notice that the grille had been removed.
And indeed, it suddenly appeared to. It worked its way down onto the sill of the window, where it inexplicably halted. It was now hunched on all floors, almost frog-like. It leaned forward to gaze into the darkened room, but it made no effort to enter.
Perhaps sensing the imminent escape of their prey, the colonel barked: “
Now! Now, Charles, now!
”
Both men lugged down on their ropes, giving it everything they had, using their strength, their full body weight. But for all their speed, their target was quicker. With a reaction so swift it surely verged on precognition, the locust-thing bounded away from the window just in time for the black shape of the net to flower outwards, then rapidly close on itself and fall half way down the exterior wall, where it snagged on something. Even so, the trap had been partially successful. The creature had been taken by surprise. It had only leapt ten or twelve feet and was still on the side of the house, albeit on the edge of the gable-wall.
“Damn and blast!” The colonel grabbed his elephant-gun and dashed out from under the tree.
“Colonel!”
Charles shouted.
But the colonel wasn’t listening. He halted in the middle of the lawn and put the weapon to his shoulder. There was a thunderous boom and a blinding flash. The locust-thing leaped high and wide, just as the portion of wall where it had been perched exploded in plaster and brick-dust. Again, the thing arched high over their heads, but it was disoriented, flying blind. The colonel tracked it with his gun, pivoting slowly around. There was at least forty feet between them, and though it was a moving target, Colonel Thorpe was a marksman who’d once potted a running cheetah at eighty paces. He’d certainly have potted this animal, had Charles not rushed up and knocked the weapon down. It discharged into the grass, blowing out a great divot of smoking turf.
The colonel rounded on him. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
“What the devil do you think
you’re
doing?” Charles retorted.
“You still think you can catch this creature alive?”
“That’s what we’re here for.
Nothing else.”
The colonel smiled, showing once again the feline face of a ruthless predator. “That’s what you may be here for, Captain. I, however, have taken a liking to this chap. I’ve got just the space on my trophy room wall for his monstrous head.”
And he set off across the garden. On the far side, he unbolted a gate and slipped out into the tradesman’s alley running behind the row of houses. When Charles caught up with him, the colonel had broken his elephant-gun again, and was thumbing two more bullets into its breach. The hubbub of voices, which now included angry shouts and the shrill screech of a police whistle, sounded nearby.
“Blasted idiots,” the colonel muttered. “They’ll frighten him off for sure ...”
“You’ve been planning this all along, haven’t
you!
” Charles said. “You’re not trying to help Sebastian, you want to murder him!”
The colonel snorted. “He’s a freak, an aberration of nature. There’s no court in the land that would convict me of murder.
There – see him!
”
And sure enough, the hunter had spotted his prey again. Charles turned as the colonel took aim. Sebastian was maybe forty yards down the alleyway. Even as they watched, he sprang up from among a stand of dustbins and alighted on the roof of a coal-bunker. A moment later he had jumped again, back across the alley in the opposite direction.
The colonel fired, and struck the flying figure in mid-air.
It continued on its way, but now out of control. It slammed into the wall of a house, and slithered heavily down it.
The colonel laughed as he raced in pursuit. “I knew those fools who’d shot him before hadn’t used the right ammunition.
Bullet-proof, my eye!”
He slapped his elephant-gun. “To get through a shell like that you need heavy
calibre
.”
However, they’d no sooner reached the gate to the garden into which the creature had fallen, than it appeared overhead and leaped again. The colonel was taken by surprise. He spun around and put his gun back to his shoulder, but this time he was too late. The locust-thing reached a roof opposite, even though one of its hind-legs was now hanging limp, twisting in the breeze, then scrambled out of sight around a corner. A split-second after that, it leaped again, reaching the next roof, and then the next one, vanishing into the
vapour
and now making an eerie, insect-like
chittering
sound, which for all the world was like manic laughter.
The colonel cursed. Charles’s response was to draw the pistol from his pocket, aim it at the sky and pump the trigger three times. He also shouted at the top of his voice: “Help! It’s Spring-Heeled Jack! He’s over here!”
“You wretch,” the colonel said, as a hullabaloo of voices sounded in the next passage. He cradled his firearm and stood back.
Charles fired another two shots. “I misjudged you, Colonel,” he said accusingly. “I knew you were an enthusiast for the hunt, but I thought you a spiritual man too. I thought you trod the great solitudes of the world because you were an admirer of God’s creations, not because you cold-bloodedly sought to slaughter every one of them.”
“And I misjudged you,” the colonel replied. “I thought you a soldier of the Empire. Not some effete dreamer still wet-lipped from his mother’s tit.”
“Everything you told me was a lie.”
“Nothing I told you was a lie. If you chose to interpret it incorrectly, that’s your affair. You’re a fool and a coward, Captain
Brabinger
. Only a handful of men survived
Isandlwana
. Now I know why you were one of them.”
A short while later, people thronged into the alley, mostly men: some were in work-clothes, but many were in their shirt-sleeves clearly having been disturbed at their supper. Quite a few carried clubs or burning torches, the firelight of which writhed on the icy cobblestones. A tall, heavily
moustached
constable was with them.
“Which way, gentlemen?” the constable asked. “The bugger’s just attacked a girl near the Chelsea Hospital.”
Charles pointed north. It was the exact direction the creature had taken, but he knew they wouldn’t have a chance of catching it. The main thing was to keep it on the move and well away from Colonel Thorpe. “He was headed towards Hyde Park. Go now, and you’ll be right behind him.”
The mob needed no second telling. With wild shouts, they stampeded away, the policeman at their head, constantly warning them to “stay back”, not to “get excited”.
“Attacked a young girl at Chelsea Hospital,” the colonel said when he and Charles were alone again. “And this is the abhorrence you’re seeking to protect.”
“Sebastian isn’t responsible. He needs to be cured.”
“He does indeed,” the colonel agreed. “Like the plague that he is.”
And he strode away – but not in pursuit of the mob, in the opposite direction.
Charles watched him, puzzled. Surely the old fellow wasn’t giving up the chase already? Even with fifty riotous hooligans competing for the prize, Colonel Thorpe held all the aces. As Charles watched, the colonel vanished into the fog. It looked for
all the
world like he’d had enough, but Charles wouldn’t believe that. What could Thorpe know that ordinary men didn’t? And then the truth struck: often in South Africa, Charles had accompanied hunting-parties searching for antelope or buffalo. More than once, he’d seen the animals wounded rather than killed. The next step had been to stalk them, and invariably it had led to water. Wounded animals almost always went to water.
Charles hurried south, towards the Thames.
*
Though he lacked Colonel Thorpe’s experience, it wasn’t long before Charles picked up a trail that he thought might be Sebastian’s.
In
Lyall
Street, which was the next road along, he noticed spatters of a dark, oily substance on the pavement. In the gas-lit gloom it was difficult to tell their
colour
, but they were so fresh that they smoked in the chill. Sixty yards further on, he found another spattering of the same liquid, this time trickling down a wall. There was similar evidence at the junction with Elizabeth Street, and on Commercial Road. As Charles had suspected, the blood eventually led him all the way to the river’s edge at Chelsea Reach.
Further downstream from here there’d be forests of masts and sails, the sound of accordion music and wild shouts from the wharf-side taverns. However, this stretch of the Thames was quiet. It rippled silent and sluggish under its shroud of ebbing mist. On the far side of it, new building work was under way on Battersea Fields, but none of it was yet complete and at this late hour there was neither light nor sound from the various construction sites.
Charles crouched at the edge of the dock. There was no telltale film of blood on the water; no stains streaked down the granite stanchions. He hadn’t expected the injured creature to simply throw itself into the Reach and vanish, of course. But it had definitely come this way. The last splotch of its fluids was still visible only twenty yards behind him. Charles wondered what Colonel Thorpe would do.
And then he saw the leg.
He only caught it in the corner of his eye and at first took it for a piece of bent driftwood. But he looked again, and this time there was no mistake. Below him, about thirty yards to his left, shingle had banked up against the dock wall, forming a small beach. The leg lay on top of this.