The Ripper Affair

Chapter Forty-Seven An Echo Within Himself

A snowdrift of pale, emaciated bodies falling through the opening overhead, making very little sound as they dropped upon the Coachman’s convulsing form. The starvelings’ jaws worked restlessly, clicking and grinding small, discoloured teeth together as they smothered the creature.

It was deadly, and it ripped at their frail forms, but it could find nothing in them to eat. Rancid green dust slid from the rents torn in their stretched-tight flesh, the Coachman’s slaver turning vilely luminescent as it mixed with that granular decay.

Clare kept the pistol trained. The scene before him was revolting, but even worse, it was irrational, and the throbbing in his temples was his faculties straining to make what he saw obey the dictates of Logic and Reason.

Do not look away.

The hissing became the soap-slathered gurgle of wash-water sliding down a pipe. The thing’s struggles were weakening, and its whip was lost under an undulating mass of starvelings. Its long, spidery fingers kept seeking for the handle, blindly, but even had it found the braided leather it could not possibly have untangled it from the writhing.

Keep looking. The Bulldog’s nose trembled. Behind him, Aberline was violently sick; he muttered something about the sorcery, and then wet, crunching noises began.

The Coachman screamed, a miserable baby-cry. It squirmed, and cloth ripped. The starvelings’ clever, bony, insistent fingers peeled away scraps of muffler, of a different frock coat than the one the creature had worn before, of shirt. A button shone, describing an arc and catching a gleam from somewhere–where, Clare never discerned, for it was dark as sin, and his night-adapted eyes could only see suggestions lit by the Coachman’s glowing slaver as the starvelings commenced their meal.

“Climb,” Pico said, his voice breaking boyishly. “Come on, Clare!”

He kept the gun’s snout level and steady. “Go on,” he heard himself say, as if in a terrible dream. Was this, indeed, what dreaming felt like? “I shall hold them back.”

For some of the starvelings had noticed, in their wandering, lethargic way, the living meat upon the pile of coal. They dragged each other upright with terrible blind insistence, shuffling across the cellar floor. Closer, and closer, and he had five bullets. They would have to count. He could perhaps empty the chambers and reload as they retreated up the coal-hill, but there was the blockage in the chute to consider.

I believe we are all going to die here, even Mikal. I wonder, will they chew me to pieces? Am I proof against that? Or smothering?

And… Emma. They had brought the beast to bay, but what of the sorcerer?

A second faint green radiance bloomed, in the opposite corner. Clare kept the pistol trained. “Aberline?”

A retching cough, before the inspector’s calm, hopeless voice. “Yes, Mr Clare?”

“I am sorry to have brought you here.” I am sorry for more, did you but know.

At least the inspector was a gentleman in extremis. “Quite all right, old boy. Couldn’t be helped.” The words trembled, firmed. “We shan’t get out this way, you know. It’s blocked.”

A series of alternatives clicked through Clare’s faculties, discarded as they arose. A means could be found to ignite the coal, but the fumes and smoke would asphyxiate them before doing any good.

He was savagely weary, even though physically unharmed. Apparently, there were limits to even Miss Bannon’s gifts.

Emma. Are you alive?

The Bulldog barked, and the flash destroyed his vision for a moment. The nearest starveling folded down, its head a battered mess, that green dust sliding out with its terrible, soft hissing sound.

The Coachman screamed again, a wailing infant under a steadily growing pile.

A woman’s voice, freighted with terrible power. “K—g’z’t!”

Slow grinding, the noise of mountains rubbing together.

Clare surfaced with a jolt. He found himself sprawled on coal, Pico’s boot in his back, as starvelings cowered at the end of the cellar. The leprous-green radiance at the opposite end of the cellar had intensified, and under it, he could see a thin shape.

It was Miss Bannon, in the rags of her mourning dress and petticoats. The shadow behind her was Mikal, propping her up as her knees buckled. Clare squinted, and saw a glaring scar on her white throat, under a layer of filth. She had clapped one naked hand to her equally naked neck–her jewellery was gone, and it was queerly indecent to see her so. The pale glow, a different green than the starvelings’ dust, but equally irrational, issued from about her, a corona of illogical illumination.

“Back,” she husked, a dry croaking word. “Back, Marimat. They are mine, they are not for you.”

The starvelings writhed. One final, weak little cry from the Coachman-creature, silenced with a last nasty crunching. A sigh rippled through the starvelings, a wet wind on dry grass.

“Sssssparrow-witch.” A thick, burping chuckle; it was one of the starvelings, but some other dark intelligence showed in its empty, rolling eyes. “Did you enjoy your ssssssojourn?”

“Quite diverting, twice-treacherous one.” Miss Bannon’s expression was just as empty, a terrible blank look upon her childlike features. “But I am at home again, Maharimat of the Third Host, and they are not for you.”

“Little sssssparrow.” The starveling twitched forward. “You are flessssh, and you are weak. How will you ssssstop my children?”

“How indeed.” The sorceress’s chin lifted. “I am Prime.” Her tone had lost none of its terrible, queer atonality. “Set yourself against me, creature of filth, and find out.”

The hush that descended seemed to last a very long while. But the starvelings, cloaked in their mumbling hiss, drew back in a wave. The ones that could not climb the lath-ladder fell and split open, the green dust spreading and rising in oddly angular curls on a breeze from nowhere.

He wondered what might grow from that dust. Was that how the Scab spread?

The starvelings left behind a curled, battered, unspeakably chewed and quickly rotting body curled in the ruins of a coachman’s cloth, and a tangled whip shredding itself as it jerked and flopped, the bright metal at its ravelled end chiming before it blackened and twisted like paper in a fire. There was a creaking and a crack, a final obscene wet chuckle, and the lath-ladder plunged down, shivering into sticks.

The Coachman was indisputably dead. Its ruin fell apart with a wet sliding, and green smoke rose. It shredded, making for a moment the likeness of an anguished face, and the soughing that slid through the cellar lifted sweat-drenched hair and a pall of coal-dust.

Coughing, Clare lowered the pistol. Behind him, Aberline retched again, deeply and hopelessly. Pico breathed a term that was an anatomical impossibility, but nevertheless managed to express his profound, unbelieving relief at this turn of events.

Miss Bannon stayed upright for a long moment before crumpling, and Mikal caught her. His expression, before the green flame winked out, was full of the same devouring intensity Clare had witnessed only once before, in front of his mistress’s bedroom door, in the dark, after he had worked a miracle to save her from the Red Plague.

What would he call such a twisting of a man’s features? Was there a word for it? Did it matter?

It did not. For he found, to his dismay, that he recognised the look, though he could not name and quantify it. It found an echo within himself, one which could not be spoken of or even thought too deeply upon lest it break his overstrained faculties.

So Archibald Clare sagged back against the coal and closed his eyes. In a moment he would set his wits to the matter of bringing them out of this awful place.

For now, though, he simply lay there, and felt the breath moving in, and out, of his thankful, whole, undamaged, and quite possibly immortal frame.