The Ripper Affair

Chapter Thirty-One A Somewhat Durable Cast

A thickset man in bobby’s blue, his whistle dangling from a silver chain, put up both hands to halt the detective inspector’s headlong rush. “Whitchapel’s ablaze, sir. We’re not to go in. Orders.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Aberline looked almost ready to tear out handfuls of his own hair. “Clare?”

Clare blinked, cocked his head and sought to untangle the various cries and crashes rending the night air. “Who would order—”

“Commissioner Waring, no doubt.” Aberline all but bounced up on his toes to peer between two other broad, beefy bootleather knights, who were viewing the traceries of Scab on the cobbles with studied disinterest. “Candleson! Over here!”

The bobby who glanced up and sauntered to join them was a mutton-chopped and gin-nosed bulk with an oddly mincing gait. His knees no doubt gave him trouble, judging by how gingerly he stepped, but Clare caught a steely twinkle in the man’s deep-set eyes and the calluses on his beefy paws. Candleson carried a knotty stick, much in the manner of an Eirean shillelagh, dark with use and oil. A leather loop on his broad, creaking belt was its home on the few occasions, Clare thought, that it was not in his hands.

No doubt it had cracked many a criminal’s skull in its time, too.

“Evenin’, sir. There’s a bit of the restless tonight.” His accent was a surprise–reasonably educated, though with a lilt to the consonants that bespoke a childhood on a farm, most probably in Somerset.

“Your understatement, dear Candleson, is superb as always. Let me guess, Waring says to wait for morning?”

“Bit dark in there,” was the laconic reply. But Candleson’s mouth turned down briefly, and the crease under his chin flushed.

“Another murder.” Aberline’s eyebrows rose.

“Still bleeding when she was found. Dunfeld’s, Berner Street. There’s another of those clubs there. Workingmen, foreigners.” He looked even more sour at the notion.

“Good God.” Aberline did not pale, but it might have been close. “They will kill each other in droves over this.”

The noise intensified. Whitchapel buzzed as a poked wasps’ nest might. The entire Eastron End might well catch fire, figuratively or literally. Clare twitched at his cuffs, bringing them down, and took stock of his person. He did not even have his pepperbox pistol or its replacement, and no doubt the quality of his cloth would attract unwanted attention. He glanced at Philip Pico, who stood with his arms folded and feet braced, watching him with a peculiar expression.

“Well.” Clare drew himself up. “There is nothing for it, then.”

Aberline rounded on him. “Sir, I—”

Clare set off for the line of venom-green Scab. The onlookers did not expect trouble from his quarter, so he was through the line and marching onwards when Aberline caught at his arm. “What in God’s name—”

“I must examine the site of this new event before it is trampled by a mob, and daylight will only bring more of them. Stay here, if you—”

“You shall not go alone. I should warn you, there is tremendous risk to your person.”

“I rather think there is.” The noise had intensified, and he had to raise his voice to be heard. “I am sure you will find it reassuring that I am of a somewhat durable cast, though. Philip?”

“Oh, she’s not going to like this,” the lad said, but he seemed willing enough. High spots of colour burned in his beardless cheeks, and there was a definite hard merriment to his tone. Rather as Valentinelli had sported a fey grin, when they were about to plunge into danger.

“She has other matters to attend to,” Clare said shortly, and set out afresh. Aberline followed, with a muttered word that might have been a curse.

Behind them, the line of bobbies and a growing mass of curiosity-seekers murmured and rustled. Ahead, there was a cacophony, the fog billowing in veils as if it, too, sought to misbehave tonight.

Clare did not consult his pocket-watch, but he thought it very likely they had been in a Limhoss daze for quite some hours.

The question of just what Inspector Aberline had been saying in the midst of that daze would have to wait. For they rounded a slight bend in the cobbled road, and the fog became garishly underlit with flame. Cries and running feet, piercing screams, and a high sweet tinkle of breaking glass.

The poor, crowded together here, needed little enough reason to strain against the bonds of decency and public order.

The wonder, Clare reflected, was that they did not do so more often.

Underfoot was slick and treacherous. Clare kept to the building side, but gave alley entrances a polite amount of space nonetheless. Darker shapes began to coalesce through the fog.

Between that vapour and the choking slickness under his soles, there was precious little for his faculties to fasten on except the noise.

Slip-sliding footsteps, scurrying tip-taps. Excited babble, and rougher exclamations as some took advantage of the confusion to perform a deed or two best attempted in such circumstances. A seashore muttering, another crack of breaking glass. The fogbound shadows became more distinct, and a clockhorse’s excited neigh cut through the cacophony. A hansom drawn by a weary roan nag lumbered past, its driver perhaps thinking to escape the unpleasantness brewing behind him as metal-shod hooves struck the Scab with muffled splorching sounds. To be plying his custom so early, the driver was probably a gin-headed muddle, desperate for—

“Watch yourself, squire.” Pico jostled him, not roughly. Clare returned to himself with a jolt, and found that they were now in the fringes of a crowd. Hike-skirted slatterns with frowsty hair, gin-breathing flashboys with their Alterations gleaming dully, barely respectable workingmen in braces and heavy boots, a kaleidoscope of sensation and deduction pouring into his hungry faculties.

The entire population of Whitchapel seemed to be awake and moving. Rumour and catcall bounced through the mass of people, and the going quickly became difficult.

Aberline shouldered through, brushing off no few enticing offers from the ladies–if one could call them such–and rough Watch yerselfs from flashboy and workingman alike. Clare followed in his wake, more than once pushing away fingers questing for his pocket-valuables. Pico shoved through after him, and it was probably the lad’s care and quickness that kept Clare from being more troubled by said pickpockets and thieves.

If Miss Bannon were present, she would no doubt find some more efficient way of working through the crowd. Clare winced inwardly. Could he not keep the damn woman out of his head for more than an hour?

“Leather Apron!” someone bawled, and the crowd stilled for a breath before…

Chaos, screams, Clare was lifted bodily as the mass surged forward. Pico’s fingers dug into his shoulder once, painfully, before being ripped away, and Aberline vanished.

Oh, dear.

His jacket was torn and his foot throbbed where a heavy hobnail boot had done its best to break every bone in said appendage. Somewhere in the distance a clockhorse was screaming, equine fear and pain grating across the rolling roar. Clare slid along the wall, a splatter of warm blood already traced with thin green tendrils of Scab splashed high against the rotting bricks.

He coughed at the reek, consulted a mental map, and edged forward. Cast at the edges of the crowd like flotsam, Pico and Aberline nowhere in sight, he found the Scab underfoot thinning and eyed the buildings about him once again.

Logic informed him that he was near the ancient boundaries of the City, its oldest municipal heart. Under the Pax Latium, Londinium had been merely a trading village burned to the ground by one of Britannia’s early incarnations.

The spirit of the Isle’s rule had not looked kindly upon the Latiums. Still, the legions of the Pax could not be denied, and they rebuilt the town to make a replacement for Colchestre. Londinium’s sprawl since then had been sometimes slow–and at other times marked by fire, not to mention rapine and plunder–but, on the whole, inexorable.

One could call the green filth that hugged Whitchapel’s cobbles a similar inexorable creeping. For it seemed to be spreading, thin curling threads digging into the valleys between the stones, hauling hoods of slippery green film over the tiny hills. He followed in its wake, leaving the noise and crush behind, meaning to skirt its edges. Between here and Berner Street lay the bulk of the crowd. There was no penetrating its raging at the moment, but perhaps he could hurry along and come at the site from another angle.

As Clare was comparing his internal map and compass to the fogbound glimpses he could gather, he found that he had come too far, though there was a passage likely to take him in the direction he needed to—

A wet, scraping sound intruded upon his ruminations. He turned, peering through the damp blanket of Londinium’s yellow exhalation, a raw green edge to its scent that reminded him of mossy sewage, if such a thing were possible. He supposed it was, in a dark place–what botanical wonder might grow from such rich, if foul, nutrition?

Crunch. Slurp. A humming, married to a crackling Clare had heard many times before, during his acquaintance with Emma Bannon.

Live sorcery.

The fog drew back, for he was approaching, impelled by curiosity and a nasty, dark suspicion. There was another edge to the fog-vapour now, brass-copper and hot, that Clare recognised as well.

Blood.

He realised he was moving as silently as Valentinelli had taught him to, a flood of bright bitterness threatened to overwhelm him. The poppy, lingering false friend, opened a gallery of Memory and Recollection he could not afford to pay attention to, for a shape crouched before him, in a darkened corner of a square.

The gaslamp overhead was dark, burnt out or simply cloaked by the shame of witnessing what Clare now viewed.

A small, dirty, blood-freckled woman’s hand, cupped but empty, fallen at her side. The rest of her was an empty sack, her head tipped away and a black bonnet tangled in its greying mass. Dead-white thighs, spattered with dark feculence, flung wide. A section of greyish intestine, poked by long thin spidery fingers. Those fingers returned to the abdominal cavity, plunged and wrenched, and brought a dripping handful up.

Wet slurping sounds underscored by a hum of contentment, like a child or a dog face-deep in melon on a scorching summer day. The figure–a coachman’s cap tilted back at a jaunty angle on its blurred head, a red and yellow muffler wound around its throat more than once–bent over again, the mending on its coat small, skilled needle-charmer’s stitches. Its arm came up again, there was the bright flash of a knife, and the blade cut deep into soft flesh. It wrenched the resultant mass free as well and gobbled it.

A rushing filled Clare’s ears.

The fingers were gloved, but no trace of blood or matter seemed to adhere to the material. They unravelled at each fingertip, for the thing had extra joints on each phalange. It rooted in the mass of the woman’s belly again, and found what it sought. Still smacking its unseen lips, it lifted a clot-like handful–rubbery, pear-shaped, Clare knew there was no way he should be able to discern such a thing, but he knew what it was.

It is eating her womb. Dear God.

The crackling of sorcery intensified. The thing hunched, and its figure blurred more. Cloth rippled as the shape underneath it swelled in impossible ways.

Observe, Clare. Observe. Miss Bannon must know of this. You must give her every particular.

Blackness rippled at the edges of his vision. He was holding his breath, he realised, for the figure’s head had come up, a quick enquiring movement. He was just barely in the range of its peripheral vision–assuming it had human eyes, which, he realised, was not at all a supportable assumption.

It was dark, and he was utterly still, hoping such immobility would hide his presence. Yellow fog swirled uneasily, a tendril sliding between Clare and the… creature–for nothing human could crouch like that, its knees obscenely high and its head drooping so low, its spidery extra-jointed fingers spasming as it twirled the knife in a brief flashing circle.

The Scab had arrived behind Clare, its wet greenness creeping forward. Tiny tendrils, their sliding almost inaudible under the wet smacking sounds of enjoyment. The quite illogical idea that perhaps some feral, inhuman intelligence was guiding the nasty green sludge occurred to Clare, the poppy still blurring the edges of rationality.

Now, when he needed sharp clarity most, it had deserted him.

Fascinating that the drug would linger, even in the face of whatever miracle Miss Bannon had performed upon him.

A rasping, as of a scabrous tongue over chapped, scraped lips. The creature’s head made another quick, enquiring movement. The woman–the corpse–had worn, sprung-sided boots, and her stockings were soaked with foul matter. Her petticoats were mismatched, and torn to bits. Those white, white thighs, spattered, and the smell, dear God.

Had she suffered?

Does it matter at this particular moment? Stay still, Clare.

Valentinelli’s sneer, echoing through dim memory. Stay where Ludo put you, mentale, and watch.

His lungs cried for air, even though the soup around the creature became foul enough to see. Or perhaps it was the blackness crowding his vision as his flesh, even if functionally immortal, reminded him that it did still require respiration and all its attendant processes.

A wet sliding. The Scab darted forward, and the creature tumbled aside, fluidly. Steam rose, and Clare caught a glimpse of the thing under its clothes. Cracked hide runnelled with scars, terribly burnt as if acid had been flung upon it, and two glowing coals for eyes.

One pale hand came up, the knife blade a star in the dimness, and Clare stumbled back. He felt the slight whoosh as the sharp metal cleaved air an inch from his face, fell with a tooth-rattling jolt on a thick carpet of oozing green. A hiss, a whipcrack, Clare’s arm instinctively flung up to shield his eyes and suddenly a stinging, a patter of warm blood.

The thing fled, light unnatural footsteps tapping on cobbles, a grating sound, roof tiles shattering as they were dislodged and hit the ground.

Clare scrabbled for purchase, thick resilient slime dragging him as it retreated. It carried him a good ten feet before reluctantly releasing him, his jacket smoking against its caustic kiss and the wound along his forearm smarting as it sealed itself.

The gaslamp above the body burst afresh into feeble flame, and when he gained his feet, Archibald Clare bolted for its circle of glow, telling himself it was merely so he could examine the body in its uncertain light. Certainly not because he felt anything irrational, though his mouth tasted of copper and his sorcerously repaired heart laboured in his chest. It was merely the sudden activity, he told himself, not anything so illogical as fear.

And certainly not because as the Scab retreated, it made a low, thick noise, somewhat like a chuckle from a sharp-toothed mouth.