Krishnamurthy clutched Sergeant Slaughter's arm and looked at him with an expression of shock.
They ran to the wreckage. Constables joined them. The flying machine had turned upside down before hitting the ground. Milligan lay beneath it, mangled and dead.
Wordlessly, Krishnamurthy squatted and closed the man's eyes.
“What happened?” Slaughter asked.
“It seems our enemy has expanded the no-flying zone.”
“By the Lord Harry,” the sergeant muttered. “They must realise we're here.”
Krishnamurthy glanced back toward the Strand. “Damnation!” he said under his breath. “Come on, Swinburne! Hurry up!”
Charles Doyle was dead and he knew it.
Only the Russian bitch's force of will was keeping his carcass moving, his spirit self-aware.
Her words vibrated and throbbed in his mind: “Break free! Cast off your chains! Rise up and overthrow!”
They cut into him, were magnified through him as if he were a lens, then radiated outward, receding into the far distance, where they touched other astral bodies and were bounced farther on.
If only he could press his hands over his ears, block out that voice!
A tiny man with moth wings fluttered in front of his face and sang: “Prepare thyself!”
He tried to bat the fairy away but his hands were either without substance or too heavy and slow, it wasn't clear to him which.
A part of him coiled and writhed through the atmosphere near the Fleet Street end of the Strand, while the other part dragged itself along the pavement of Kingsway.
He was overwhelmed by a voracious hunger. It was not for food, nor even for alcohol. No. This rapacious craving was for the fulfillment of life!
For how long had he been tormented by this lack? His entire existence, it seemed. The opportunities he'd missed or wasted! He'd been so cautious, so afraid of making a mistake, that he hadn't done anything-instead, he'd escaped into the bottle, and now it was too late!
“I had life but I didn't live it!” he wept. “I want it back! Please, don't let me die like this!”
Something registered in his consciousness. There was a figure ahead, moving in the thickening fog. He could sense its warmth, its vitality. There were others beyond it, but this one was close.
A beating heart! Pulsating blood! Life!
He must have it! He must have it!
His corpse lurched forward, the arms reached out, the fingers curled into claws.
There came a distant shout: “Constable Tamworth! Come back! Don't wander from the group, man!”
Detective Inspector Honesty looked at his pocket watch. It was ten to three in the morning.
He felt weary.
He loved police work, mainly because he was very good at it, but at times like this his mind tended to drift to what he considered his true vocation: gardening. In his youth, he'd dreamed of becoming a landscape gardener, but his father, one of the original Peelers, had insisted that his boy follow him into the force and wouldn't hear otherwise. Honesty didn't begrudge the old man's stubbornness; policing had, after all, gained him respect, a secure job with prospects, and a loving young wife whom he'd met while on a murder case. He'd been able to buy a house with a large garden, too, and it was the envy of the neighbourhood, with its bright displays of flowers and finely trimmed lawn.
What, though, would his life have been like had he defied his father?
He remembered something Sir Richard Francis Burton had told him: that when Edward Oxford, the man they called Spring Heeled Jack, had altered time, original future history had become disconnected. It still existed-in the same way that, if you find yourself at a junction, taking road A won't cause road B to vanish-but it was inaccessible; there was no way back to the junction without a time-travelling device.
Did that mean that somewhere, some when, there was a Thomas Manfred Honesty, Landscape Gardener?
He hoped so. It was a strangely comforting thought.
It was ten to three.
His watch had stopped.
He shook it and tut-tutted.
Only a couple of minutes had passed, he was sure. The signal wouldn't come for at least another hour.
His men were restless and he was feeling the same way.
In front of the police cordon, Kingsway had faded from sight, obscured by the fog, which was obviously returning to London with a vengeance. The shambling figures, visible earlier, were now hidden, which made them seem even more uncanny and threatening.
“Dead Rakes,” he muttered, for the umpteenth time. “Damned peculiar.”
A constable approached and pointed wordlessly back at the men. Honesty looked and saw three wraiths swirling among them. The policemen were swiping at the ghosts with their truncheons, to no effect.
“Stop that!” he ordered. “Waste of time! Save your strength!”
They desisted, but one of the men looked at him, his face suddenly contorting with fury, and screamed: “Don't bloody well tell me what to do!”
“Constable Tamworth! At ease!”
“At ease yourself, you little jumped-up poseur! Who are you to give me orders?”
“Your commanding officer!”
“No, mate. I'll follow no one but Tichborne!”
Honesty sighed and turned to another man. “Sergeant Piper,” he ordered. “Your truncheon. Back of Tamworth's head. Now!”
Piper nodded and unhooked his truncheon from his belt.
“Not bloody likely!” Tamworth said. He took to his heels and vanished into the fog.
The detective inspector yelled after him: “Constable Tamworth! Don't wander from the group, man!”
A bubbling wail of terror answered him.
Three policemen broke away from the cordon and ran toward the sound.
“No! Menders! Carlyle! Patterson! Come back!”
“He's in trouble, sir!” Carlyle protested before plunging into the pall.
Honesty turned to the main group and bellowed: “Stay here! Move and I'll have your guts for garters! Come with me, Piper.”
He gritted his teeth and, with the sergeant, hurried after his men.
As they came into view, he saw Menders raise his arm, point his pistol at something, pull the trigger, and curse: “Jammed, damn the thing!”
He looked to where the constable had aimed and saw Tamworth sprawled on the ground. The man's jacket and shirt had been ripped aside and his stomach torn open. Squatting over him, hands buried in the policeman's intestines, was a thin, bearded, bespectacled dead man. The corpse looked up, moaned, and stood. Entrails oozed from his hands and fell to the cobbles. “My apologies,” he said. “I need life.”
“Mary, mother of God!” exclaimed Menders. He threw his pistol and it bounced off the bearded man's forehead.
Sergeant Piper whispered, “Useless. You can't kill a bloody stiff!”
“Piper, stay with me,” Honesty commanded. “The rest of you, behind the cordon, now. That's an order.”
Menders swallowed, gave a hesitant nod, and started to back away from the bearded man, who stood swaying, as if uncertain whether or not to collapse to the ground and admit his demise.
“A bloody stiff,” Piper repeated. “But still bleedin’ well movin’.”
A top-hatted, well-dressed cadaver suddenly emerged from the cloud beside them, grabbed Menders by the shoulders, and sank his teeth into the constable's throat before dragging him out of sight.
Constable Carlyle saw his colleague die, let loose a high-pitched scream, panicked, fumbled for his police whistle, raised it to his lips, and started blowing long, loud, repetitive blasts.
“That's the signal!” a constable named Lampwick announced.
“Impossible!” Trounce snapped. “It's too early.”
He and his men were close to the smoldering skeleton of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which had burned to the ground the day before. The rioters enjoyed setting fire to taverns as much as they enjoyed drinking in them. Judging by the stench, on this occasion they'd made the fatal misjudgement of combining the two activities.