City of Shadows

Chapter 72

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

‘This is incredible,’ said Rashim, looking at the others. ‘We will see the wave approach, you say?’

‘Yeah, it’s like a weather front or something.’ Maddy led them outside the dungeon, through their side door to stand on the kerb of Farringdon Street. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for something that looks like a big bank of dark cloud.’

‘It’s always a spectacular sight,’ added Sal, ‘and a bit scary when it hits you.’

Rashim looked giddy with excitement. ‘You know, we argued about this, Dr Yatsushita and I, about how a universe would accommodate an alteration to its past. What form the reality shift would take?’ He gazed down Farringdon Street. Busy once again, although the usual kaleidoscope of activity was heavily punctuated with clusters of crimson tunics of soldiers and the black morning coats and tall pith helmets of bobbies stationed in protective cordons round the few shopfronts yet to have been stoved in by rioters. There’d been rumours that more riots were going to happen again later on today. But of course they weren’t going to happen. The corrective time wave was going to arrive first.

‘I thought reality would flip its state with some sort of global, instant paradigm shift.’ Rashim shook his head in awe. ‘Some sort of a… a pulse of change. Not like a tidal wave.’ He turned to them. ‘How quickly does this wave arrive?’

‘It varies,’ said Maddy. ‘Sometimes almost immediately. Sometimes hours later. It’s not predictable. It almost seems random.’

He nodded. ‘Like some kind of Schrodinger flux? As if quantum particles are deciding to flip state or not?’

‘If you ask me, more like quantum particles are having some freakin’ union meeting and they need to vote unanimously on a change before something happens,’ Maddy replied. ‘Sometimes it’s a no-brainer; sometimes I guess reality has a real struggle agreeing which way it wants to go.’

Rashim chuckled. ‘You make it sound alive.’

‘I do wonder sometimes.’

‘Liam!’ Sal called out for him. She ducked back inside and cupped her hands. ‘Liam, you coming out to watch for the wave?’ Her voice echoed inside the dark brick-built labyrinth.

He was inside, curled up on one of the bunks they’d improvised. He’d returned from the last short jump in an odd, un-Liam-like withdrawn mood.

‘Best leave him, Sal.’

He’s internalizing something, Maddy figured. Guilt? Disgust? Anger? Bob said he’d glimpsed the murder scene, the inside of Mary Kelly’s room. Maddy could only imagine what horror he must have seen through her window. It must have been the stuff of nightmares. The kind of image once seen that remains in your mind like life-long retina burn.

‘Just leave him be, Sal. The time wave isn’t anything he hasn’t already seen before.’

‘Caution,’ said Bob. He nodded down the street. ‘There is the time wave.’ He pointed.

To the east, above the tall townhouses opposite them, above roof eaves and smoking chimney pots, the afternoon sky was darkening prematurely. Soldiers and policemen, street sweepers, peddlers and traders, the man standing on the flatbed of his coffee shop on wheels… all began to look up with burgeoning curiosity as the crisp winter sky became an overcast and improbable, swirling impressionist’s oil painting.

‘My God!’ uttered Rashim. ‘It’s incredible. Quite beautiful!’

‘Won’t the wave affect our dungeon?’ asked Sal. ‘You know, not having a field up and running?’

‘It shouldn’t. Holborn Viaduct is here in either timeline. Mr Hook and his dodgy import/export business were here in either timeline too, so they won’t change. And everything Liam and Rashim have done setting this place up had happened, would happen, whether Jack the Ripper had been killed or not. Two timelines, Holborn Viaduct and everything inside the same in either one.

‘In theory we should be all right.’ Maddy looked at Rashim for confirmation as she spoke. ‘Our dungeon shouldn’t be affected by this.’

He nodded. ‘Maddy is right.’ As he spoke, his eyes remained on the sky. ‘But this street, the rest of London… all of this will change. The riots will have never happened. This damage will never have happened.’

All returns to normality once more. Maddy watched as a cloud of pigeons fluttered from a rooftop nearby, startled by the first gasp of a squalling wind.

The poor remain poor and subservient, ignorant of a gentleman psychopath whose sport was carving up the bodies of unfortunate fallen women.

It didn’t feel particularly good this time around restoring the status quo. But, as Foster had once explained, sometimes you have to allow space for a little evil in order to sidestep a much greater one. An irradiated earth, that’s what they were avoiding by allowing a murderer to escape and live the rest of his life undiscovered, perhaps even going on to murder again and again, indulging his secret, grotesque pleasure, undiscovered. Of course they were never going to find out for sure if this evil monster went on to kill again, whether ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ victims went on to secretly number far more than the commonly accepted five.

The Wikipedia article listed many more prostitutes who died grisly deaths after Mary Kelly, who might have also been Ripper victims, but somehow didn’t quite fit the same pattern of mutilations as the first five. Perhaps he was going to kill more. Perhaps his near capture and discovery frightened him off his grisly pleasure once and for all.

Maddy decided she needed to sit down with Liam and remind him that whatever that sick animal did, and possibly went on to do, once again their actions had saved this world. A fair transaction in the greater scheme of things.

A woman fifty yards down from them screamed out in alarm as a spectral tendril suddenly curled across the sky, like a negative image of forked lightning. The time wave was almost upon them. Much closer — Maddy had seen it coming from across the East River, roiling and boiling — she knew it would no longer resemble a bank of cloud, more a pulsating school of mackerel, twisting, turning, extruding tentacle-like outgrowths. As for Rashim, he’d only briefly witnessed it roar past the archway’s open entrance. This time, they were going to be standing amid the swirling mass.

‘Don’t let it freak you out, Rashim!’ cried Maddy. ‘It’s weird but it’s totally harml-’

Her voice was lost in the sudden roar of a tsunami.

Wind buffeted and rocked them on their feet. They all suddenly became enveloped in a wind tunnel of blurring reality, streaks of matter twisting, curling, changing. Fleeting visions of Hell and Heaven like an insane zoetrope.

Sal narrowed her eyes against the onslaught. She saw gargoyle faces whip past her; one or two seemed to sense her presence, wretched hands clawing towards her. She thought, in one fleeting moment, that she saw a face she recognized. A woman… dark-skinned, much older, grey-haired, with bulging cataract eyes full of raging malice. The face imploded into the snarl of some beetle-black underworld horror, claws, pincers, teeth.

Standing two feet to her right, yet entirely alone in her own wind-tunnel Hell, Maddy watched reality-soup conjure up momentary nightmares. She too thought she spotted a familiar face: pale and slim, a young man, framed by flailing hair — was laughing or was it screaming? Was that Adam? She reached out towards him, wondering if she might just be able to rescue him — pull him out of this swirling matter to have him join them once again. Her hand almost but not quite touching his slender fingers, then he was whipped away into a swirling reality tornado and became a thousand and one impossible things.

Then, as always, it was all gone in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

They were left staring at a Farringdon Street busy with the clop-clop-clop of horse-drawn hansom cabs and private carriages. Street hawkers barked the price of their wares; a knot of leering dock workers passed right in front of them, sharing a dirty laugh at some muttered punchline. One of them turned to Maddy and Sal.

‘Awl right there, me loves?’ he crowed, quite obviously drunk — swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘Come an’ join us lads, eh?’

Sal flipped a hand gesture at him that wasn’t going to have a proper meaning for another hundred years yet. The drunk shrugged it off with a grin. ‘Your loss, love!’ He tossed a good-natured laugh back at them, turned and staggered to catch up with his mates.

Maddy sighed. ‘Men, eh?’