Ripped (3 page)

Chapter Three

Brickbats and Tiles say the Bells of St. Giles

C
o
llin leaned toward Toby
and whispered something in his ear.

Toby looked startled, then fastened his eyes on Katie. His face was flushed and grim when he turned to her. “I'm a jabbering ass, Katie,” he spoke softly, sounding sincere. “I talk a lot of rot, mostly. Can you forgive me?”

Katie stiffened. “Nothing to forgive.” She shifted on her feet and wrenched her gaze away from Toby's intense dark eyes. Collin had obviously just told Toby about her parents' accident.

At the front of the line now, they handed their tickets to an usher and moved through a mechanical turnstile. With dozens of others, they climbed a set of stairs before entering the first gallery leading to the Jack the Ripper exhibit. Several life-size Victorians who had resided in London in the year 1888, during Jack the Ripper's murderous rampage, were on display in this antechamber.

Queen Victoria stood at the entranceway as if to be first to greet visitors, but for all her real hair and soft-looking skin, this version of the queen didn't look real, not like the guard at the front door. Instead, her face appeared textbook imperious, and slightly smug as she clutched the royal scepter in her bejeweled, sausage-plump fingers. Dressed in the actual ermine-trimmed gown Queen Victoria had worn at her Diamond Jubilee, a tiara anchored on her ash-grey head, the wax figure reminded Katie of a glum troll. Same worn-eraser skin, strawlike hair, and mothball smell.

Next to the queen was her son, the Prince of Wales, dressed in striped trousers and frock coat, a monocle squeezed into the doughy folds around his marble-blue eye. Arthur Conan Doyle stood beside the future king, looking wiry and vital in deerstalker cap and plaid cape that matched the clothing of his fictional character Sherlock Holmes.

Toby strode past Katie toward a tall, motionless figure with high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and crisp, curling dark hair. He was dressed in a velvet smoking jacket, scarlet knee breeches, and flowing opera cape. A spotlight ran up his face, emphasizing glassy-brown eyes that had an odd quality of watchfulness. Katie had the distinct impression they were staring at her.

She scooted closer to read the inscription: Oscar Wilde.

“Katie?” Collin said, circling the wax figure of the famous writer. “Remember last year when I was in Oscar Wilde's play
The Importance of Being Earnest
?”

“Uh-huh,” Katie said, remembering how stiff and wooden Collin's performance had been.

“Wilde was a genius,” Collin said reverently, still circling the black-caped statue.

“Too bad he was sent to prison for being straw and hay,” Toby said, then to Katie, “Ever read Oscar Wilde?”

“A little,” Katie answered, though she'd read everything he'd written. Her favorite novel was
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, about a man who makes a deal with the devil never to grow old.

The three teenagers moved past Lillie Langtry, who looked as if she'd just stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, her beautiful gown spilling to the ground. One gloved hand clutched a lace parasol, the other a bouquet of lilies. Katie thought that of all the wax figures Lillie Langtry looked the most lifelike, as if she would gladly step into the room and escort them to the next gallery. Her skin was silken and soft-looking, her lips curved upward in a playful smile, and she smelled strongly of rosewater.

They moved past Bram Stoker, whose vacant, sightless eyes in a mild-looking face gave no hint of the famous vampire character he had created. Except for a drooping left eyelid, he appeared to be the picture of happy optimism, his lips puckered as if about to whistle a tune, one hand positioned rakishly on a hip.

They proceeded under an archway painted with winged cherubs that were being strangled by two-headed serpents, down a winding corridor sectioned off by velvet ropes, and toward a room with flashing lights and a peal of screeching, howling noises.

“
Enter if you dare
!”
blared a voice, followed by a high-pitched scream. Smoke billowed up through the floorboards. A bright light momentarily blinded Katie. She heard the sound of glass crunching and the shrill blast of an air-raid whistle. She reached out in the dark, disoriented. Toby took her hand.

You are about to enter a life-size model of a condemned cell from old Newgate Prison, made from the original bars and timbers of the actual cell that held prisoners on their last night on earth.
Be advised! A true history of blood and villainy surrounds many of the exhibits you are about to see.

Katie flicked Toby's hand away, but he stayed close as they moved through a cell like the one in which Jack the Ripper would have spent the last hours of his life had he been caught.

Inside the cell, Katie was startled by how real it felt. Duskily lighted, the small room was a grim hovel, with the original door from Newgate, heavy with rusty bolts. The walls had been reconstructed from the original stones, with a small, barred window showing a shadowy glimpse of the gallows in the distance. On the side wall was a display of actual manacles, leg-irons, and instruments of torture used on the condemned, with framed broadsheets of famous executions from the nineteenth century and grisly ink drawings of the criminals walking to the gallows, below the words “God Save the Queen.”

A creak of the floorboards and a faint groan made Katie shiver. Toby took her hand again. Such a show of machismo would normally have irritated Katie, but at this moment, in this gloomy reconstructed cell, it felt reassuring. A real prison smell of dampness and decay seemed to cling to the dusty stone walls, as did a sense of the despair that must have infused it more than a century ago.

Moving quickly out of the Newgate Prison cell, Katie felt instant relief, as if she herself were escaping the gallows. They walked past shrunken-faced, wax effigies of prisoners in ragged clothes about to be executed, and farther on, those same figures lying in coffins. The bodies suddenly sat up in their caskets in a pathetic attempt to scare. Katie couldn't shake the feeling of gloom that had begun to engulf her.

A hologram of a woman's severed head turned slowly, suspended in a giant glass globe. This was a re-creation of the Demon Duchess of Devonshire, the famous Victorian ax-murderess. Strained faces appeared, then disappeared, sweeping past on a wave of grey mist. Some looked crazed, some drunk, others frightened.

A rise, stamp, and fall of organ music floated in the air.

When the next set of doors swung open, Katie, Collin, Toby, and a dozen others stepped into smoke-filled darkness. At the far end of the misty corridor they came upon a bank of elevators, where they squeezed into an already packed compartment. The uniformed operator pressed a button, and the doors rattled closed.

At first the elevator descended normally. Then it lurched and began to plummet in what felt like free fall. Katie's stomach dropped along with the elevator, followed by a rise of nausea.

The elevator shuddered to a halt. Somebody screamed. It went pitch black. A man behind Katie flipped open his cell phone and held it up for light. Several others followed.

The elevator operator turned slowly.
“
Welcome,
”
he grinned, his face transformed by a fright mask complete with blood-shot eyeballs, flubbery lips curled around massive buckteeth, and a lolling rubbery tongue. “The chamber is not for the squeamish,” he chuckled. “Enter ye brave souls into the dark crypt of Madame Tussauds. Let the living nightmare begin . . .” He laughed, a silly cackling sound, more Disney World than horror chamber.

Katie turned to Collin and rolled her eyes. The cell phone man muttered under his breath, “Bloody stupid stunt. Scared the bejesus out of me—er, my wife here.”

When the elevator doors rattled open, everyone pushed forward in a panic to get out. Katie was jostled from behind, then shoved forward. Toby took her elbow to steady her, but let go when she flicked her arm in annoyance.

After the crush of the packed elevator they stepped into more smoke-filled darkness and followed a greenish light that flickered over what looked like rough stone walls on either side of a dark passageway. Katie walked behind Collin, beside Toby, down a pebbled path that swam in greenish twilight from a source Katie couldn't see. Like a pea-soup fog, it distorted the stone walls on either side, where waxwork figures stood motionless behind iron bars, peering out. Some were cartoonish. Others were amazingly lifelike, with twisted facial features, despair etched forever on their wax faces. A London police officer, a bobby, stood stiffly to the side. Was he real? Katie wondered.

They continued along the corridor, the slow green tentacles of light picking out iridescent slime and moss on the rock formations. Grim pools of light punctuated the darkness ahead, illuminating a tall waxwork man in a red opera cape and glossy stovepipe hat. As the three teenagers approached, the man's robotic lips began to open and shut above a grey, rat-tail beard.

His voice, a kettledrum baritone, boomed forth like a circus ringmaster's. His wax fingers beckoned.

“Enter, ye who dare, into a bygone era where you will come face to face with the verisimilitude of evil. Each waxwork victim you are about to encounter is an exact replica of the actual young woman, painstakingly assembled by Madame Tussauds' team of forensic artists using death masks, old photographs, and cutting-edge digital technology.”

The mechanical man gave a hinged bow and pointed the way into a dark passageway whose walls swelled in and out. Katie felt the pinch of claustrophobia. Just the effect the museum wanted, she reminded herself.

“Like being in a bleedin' Edgar Allan Poe story,” Toby whispered, as they moved through a foggy sort of mist until they came to a giant hologram of a woman floating in a halo of silvery light. Her grey hair was tucked under a lace cap, her soft-looking skin wrinkled like an overripe apple's.

“Come. Follow me,” came the hologram's disembodied voice, high and raspy like an old church organ.

Katie, Collin, and Toby followed as the holographic woman floated backward.

“Imagine if you will,” quavered her shrill voice, “that you are entering the Victorian world of horse-drawn carriages, flickering gaslights, cobblestone streets, and steam-engine locomotives.”

A black-and-white projection of a fast-moving train tore toward them, making Katie and Collin duck as the three-dimensional optical illusion howled past, puffing great, billowing clouds of black smoke.

“The industrial age is reaching its zenith,” the apple-skinned woman continued, her face floating overhead. “Queen Victoria has just celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Hot air balloons, bear baiting, and Punch and Judy shows are all the rage. Young men in shiny top hats saunter down the boulevards of Mayfair and the Strand, accompanied by fashionable young ladies wearing the latest Parisian bonnets and bustled skirts.”

In the distance the train whistle shrilled, echoed, and died away. An odor of boiled potatoes wafted through the air.

The hologram woman continued. “Steam-powered technology has brought progress and prosperity to the middle class, making for an attitude of self-satisfaction and smug complacency. Londoners, from the most regal duke to the humblest chimney sweep, feel that, in the British Empire where the sun never sets, ‘God is an Englishman.'

“But all this is about to change, isn't it, Doctor Llewellyn?” twinkled the hologram woman.

“Yes, Mrs. Llewellyn,” boomed the rat-bearded man, popping out from a blanket of darkness to their left, his mechanical arms moving jerkily up and down. “Yes, indeed. On the last day of August, in the year 1888, under a bright, treacherous, full moon, Jack the Ripper began his one-man reign of terror, murdering and disemboweling girls in the Whitechapel district of London.”

“Starting with poor, dear Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was discovered in the gutter of Buck's Row, isn't that right, Doctor Llewellyn?” asked Doctor Llewellyn's holographic counterpart.

“Indeed, Mrs. Llewellyn.” Again, the hinged fingers unfurled to point the way.

The teenagers walked toward a glint of fake moonlight that spilled over the hunched shoulders of a large, hooded man who stood in the doorframe of what looked like a narrow little house. Dead vines clung to the brickwork around the door. A crooked window sagged overhead.

As they approached, the cloaked figure's snakish, beady eyes peered out at them through the slits of his black mask. His arms were wrapped around the wax figure of a girl in a low-cut velvet gown.

Wavering lamplight glinted across the rise and fall of the girl's pale breasts. The visitors inhaled a puff-cloud of cloying perfume.

In the brief flicker of hissing gaslight, Katie could just make out the silky gleam of the girl's black hair. Again, the man's bloodshot eyes fixed on her, glared, and turned away.