Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1) Page 36

A hand clamped her shoulder, spun her around, and in the darkness she could just make out the shape of Terence's face. His scent was warm and comforting, sweat and cinna-mon and rich earth. But she didn't want his brand of com-fort anymore.

"Let me go!" she hissed.

More voices shouting. She glanced back the way she'd come and saw a dozen points of searching, bobbing light from the torches of the Blackwood Club and their minions.

"Go where? You don't think they'll find you up there?" Terence snapped. "There's only two ways this can end. One of them is with you dead, and I won't see that."

"I'm supposed to trust you?"

"You're supposed to want to put an end to them. Take power from the people who murdered your mother. Prevent them gaining the magic that'll change them, corrupt them. Jazz, it could turn them into monsters!"

Jazz glanced into the passageway, swore, and shot him a hard look, hoping the darkness did not prevent him from seeing it.

"Deeper it is, then."

Terence sighed and took her hand, and they ran on to-gether. Their pursuers had drawn closer during the pause. Bright torchlight swept around them.

"I see them!" a voice cried.

"Shoot fucking Whitcomb!" a man ordered.

"Don't hurt the girl!" a woman said.

A woman, Jazz thought. And she knew of only one woman who could give instructions to these men.

Josephine Blackwood herself had descended into the Underground.

A gunshot echoed along the tunnel, and Jazz flinched. Terence just kept running. They darted to the left and the torch beams danced around them, trying to pinpoint them again. A short way ahead the tunnel forked, though the nar-row left fork had been closed off and bricked over a couple of generations past.

Jazz's breath hitched and she stared at the dark brick, feeling a tug on her gut and her heart. She'd felt something similar before, but never this strongly.

She started for the wall, but Terence pulled her along the open fork.

"No. We're supposed to go that way," she said.

"I'm glad you know that. Glad you feel it."

He drew her to a stop just a few yards beyond the split, and she realized there was a heavy wooden door set into the wall, separating one of the fork's tunnels from the other.

Terence turned the handle and it opened easily. He stepped through and crouched down, searching for something in the dark. Jazz heard a click, and light blossomed from a torch in Terence's hand. Just like Harry and the United Kingdom, he must have had them stored in various locations under-ground. What Jazz wanted to know was why.

"Where are you taking me?"

Terence narrowed his eyes. "Hurry."

It was good advice. The Blackwood Club was closing in. Someone called her name, as if they knew her, and it turned her stomach to realize that they probably did. Some of those men —the Uncles—had known her since she was an infant.

She started to follow Terence through the door and froze, seized by the lure of whatever lay beyond it. Jazz threw back her head, inhaling sharply as a wave of bliss passed through her. Then Terence took her by the hand, and for a moment it was as though the temptation that lay beyond the door was Terence himself.

Jazz broke the contact with him.

"Come on!" he snapped.

She glanced toward their pursuers. They were close enough that she could make out the silhouettes of the Uncles and the BMW men by the gloomy light of their torches. One figure was that of a woman.

Josephine Blackwood seemed to float along the floor of the tunnel, long hair framing her face, catching the glint of the lights as though she was more a specter than the ghosts of old London.

Someone laughed, a booming thunder that rolled across the tunnel, and her skin crawled with revulsion. Philip, the half-mad. By now perhaps entirely mad.

"Jazz!" Terence shouted.

But she was no longer paying any attention to him, or to the Blackwood Club. The wind had started blowing along the tunnel, tousling Jazz's hair, and she could hear the ban-shee cry of the city's ghosts rising.

"Again?" she whispered.

The Hour of Screams had returned once more. The in-tervals between them were growing shorter and shorter. Harry had been unnerved by them coming so close together, but Jazz breathed deeply and let the breeze wash over her, let the screams come. The ghosts of old London were cry-ing out to be heard.

Harry might have seen the phantom im-ages of the city's past, but he had never listened to their cries...

their pleas. The time had come for someone to listen.

"Oh, Christ," Terence muttered. "Cover your ears, Jasmine. Find a song!"

Jazz shook her head. "Not this time."

The Uncles and their hired thugs began to shout in alarm. Philip howled like a wolf. Josephine Blackwood snapped off orders to those who had gathered in her name.

The Hour of Screams roared in, and all around Jazz the ghosts of old London began to rise again.

At first, the parade of echoes seemed familiar. There were visions from the days when bombs rained down over London, images of chaos and heartbreak, but the stream of ghosts soon produced more-mundane memories, which vividly revealed the life and laughter of the city, along with its tragedies.

There were music halls and couples dancing, actors on a stage, streets filled with early-model cars giving way to brougham carriages. The ghosts of London swept around her like a rushing river, and Jazz stood in the midst of the current and let it wash over her.

She looked up, and the magician was there in his top hat and tails. From one sleeve he produced a bouquet of flowers, and from within his jacket a white dove. The dove took wing.

And it changed.

The Hour of Screams roared around her, and in the midst of that mournful wailing, the dove transformed into another sort of ghost. The entire spectral flow shuddered and rippled and changed.

"What is this?" Jazz whispered. Or perhaps she only thought the words, for the wind would have torn them from her lips.

They overwhelmed her, rushing around her and into her, all of the secrets of old London. She knew not only the pain and the grief but the magic that the city had once contained.

Terence was down on his knees just inside the door into the other tunnel, hands clamped over his ears. Somewhere farther along the ghostly torrent, the members of the Blackwood Club and their bone-breakers would be doing the same, or be tearing at their ears and eyes the way that Philip had.

But Jazz only stared in wonder.

The spectral flow coalesced, shaping itself into a vast chamber whose every wall was covered with bookshelves, a massive library of arcana. There were tables strewn with tools and metalwork, pipes and bolts, along with talismans and still more volumes of lore and magic.

But the heart of the room comprised an enormous con-fusion of pipes and gauges, gears and levers.

It clanked and hissed with steam that emerged in clouds from small valves. The pipes and gauges were ordinary enough, but many other parts were oddly shaped and roughly crafted, obvi-ously made specifically for this machine. They were like nothing she'd ever seen before. Except that wasn't true. One of the gears looked precisely like the blade she had stolen from Mortimer Keating's house.

The steaming structure could only be Alan Whitcomb's apparatus.

And the bespectacled man who stood before it, inspect-ing a gauge, could only be Whitcomb himself.

The resem-blance to Terence was not exact —perhaps because of his father's mustache—but it was there.

The Hour of Screams cried in the hiss of the steam from the apparatus. The ghosts of old London shrieked.

Alan Whitcomb stepped into the heart of his machine. He locked a metal arm across his chest and slid his arms into iron cuffs. He positioned his feet so that the sole of each shoe sat atop a different lever.

Jazz saw the fear on his face —fear of the unknown—and she understood then that Terence's father had made the apparatus to function with himself as the battery.

In that fog of ghosts, she watched as the man withdrew from the machine. At first she thought he had lost his nerve, but when he sat down at a table with a sheet of calculations and a heavy, dusty grimoire, she realized that some essential element had not yet been completed.

The spectral image flowed and changed, and now she saw him seated in a meditative pose amid a circle of candles, letting his own blood flow with a sharp blade, spattering crimson droplets onto long metal gears inscribed with strange runes and a quartet of crystal spheres that seemed to absorb the blood.

This is for me, Jazz thought. Aside from the visits of that Victorian magician, all of her previous experiences with the ghosts of old London had seemed random, but there was nothing random about this.

The Hour of Screams was the cries of those ancient echoes, the restless, anguished spirits of the city, and they had chosen to replay these events for her.

"Show me," Jazz said.

A figure manifested and she knew him immediately, though only from photographs.

"Dad," she whispered.

The ghost made no sign that he had heard her or even recognized her presence. With the exception of the magi-cian, that was always the way. The shades of the past acted out some bit of ghostly theater, but that did not mean they were the wandering spirits of the actual people whose faces were revealed to her.

The fading magic of London itself might have manifested those images or the collective yearn-ing of those whose ghosts did still linger in the city.

This specter was not her father.

Yet Jazz's heart ached terribly as she watched him. The shouts and singing of the members of the Blackwood Club —themselves trying to survive the Hour of Screams— retreated beyond her awareness.

Though Terence knelt quite nearby, he seemed a world away. In those moments, Jazz felt as though she had been swept into the substance of the spectral, becoming a ghost herself.

The gray shadow of Alan Whitcomb's occult laboratory still existed around her, the bulky apparatus with all of its odd juttings still in the center of the room, yet the image of her father existed in the same space, a ghost of her own past layered on top of one from Terence's. The phantom of the elder Whitcomb stood by the apparatus, fixing a bloodied — perhaps bewitched—gear into place.

Her father's ghost stood among the burning candles and the spatters of Whitcomb's blood, and he drew a curved dagger from his coat, moving within the shifting shadows toward the other man.

Jazz stared, eyes wide.

The specters weren't layered. The vision unfolding be-fore her was not some odd combination of events but a sin-gle moment from London's past.

Her father spoke, though she couldn't hear his voice. Whitcomb spun, hands up instantly, ready to defend his infer-nal machine. James Towne gestured with the blade, which Jazz now saw had been marked with strange symbols not unlike those on the apparatus itself. He tried to force Alan Whitcomb away from his invention, but the man's face contorted with ha-tred and fury. Her father brandished the blade, a warning, a threat, and the two men began to shout at each other.

All Jazz heard was the wailing of the Hour of Screams, but she didn't need to hear the words spoken.

She saw the story playing out on their faces. Her father wanted Whitcomb to back away from the apparatus, intending to either destroy it or use it somehow. Whitcomb had a zealot's eyes.

When her father made a move toward the apparatus, Whitcomb lunged at him, yet it seemed to Jazz very little like an attack. The inventor leaped upon her father, who tried to back away, tried to pull back his blade. The curved tip of that wicked dagger punctured Whitcomb's abdomen. Her father tried to push the man away, and then Whitcomb did something entirely mad. He wrapped his hands around her father's throat and began to throttle him, pushing him backward and down even as he dropped himself down onto that blade.

Blood flowed from his belly, soaking her father's shirt.

Her father pushed Whitcomb off. He clamped his hands on the sides of his head, staring at the inventor in an-guish. He shook his head and began to shout. Jazz could read the cursing on his lips. The gruesome pantomime be-came even more bizarre as her father, panicking, raced to the apparatus and studied it for a moment before rushing to the table Jazz had seen Whitcomb seated at before.

He was frantic. Though that ritual dagger still jutted from Whitcomb's belly, it seemed obvious he hadn't meant to kill the man. In a frenzy, her father began to gather items from the laboratory, lining them up just outside the circle of candles Whitcomb had left on the floor. Then he grabbed hold of the bleeding, barely conscious inventor and dragged him in a swath of blood across the floor into the midst of those candles, leaving a crimson streak behind.

Alan Whitcomb's mouth opened, half a sneer and half a smile. He laughed and blood bubbled on his lips. When he spoke, even with the Hour of Screams around her, she un-derstood every word. In that moment it seemed almost as though all the ghosts of old London were speaking with him, whispering the words into her ears.

Without a battery, it's just rubbish. Damn fool. Without me, it's useless.

The inventor laughed again, choking on his own blood. Jazz's father ignored him, relighting extinguished candles and unrolling a scroll that seemed ancient at first glance, un-til the designs and writing were revealed. These were plans for the apparatus. Her father tossed the scroll aside and grabbed another, and another still, until finally he had be-fore him a pattern of symbols.

He had piled small dishes of dye or paint nearby, and now he plunged his fingers into one filled with ochre and daubed it at his temples, then inscribed circles upon his cheeks. Tearing off his shirt, he painted his chest with the symbols on Whitcomb's scroll, flecks of ochre flying like spittle. Even as he did this, his mouth was moving and his body rocked to some repetition of words, some spell or chant.

Then he knocked the ink pots aside and slid over beside the dying Whitcomb. He tore open the man's shirt and there, laid bare, were the same symbols he had just painted upon himself. His eyes were filled with regret and he hesi-tated, shaking his head in frustration.

Jazz watched her father place both hands onto the han-dle of the dagger.

"No," she said, the word both a plea and a denial.

Chanting, he withdrew the curved dagger from Whitcomb's abdomen, raised it, and drove the blade into the man's chest, stabbing him in the heart. Jagged lances of bright silver light crackled around the blade and raced up James Towne's arms. His hair stood on end, and the sigils he'd daubed on his flesh with ochre ink flashed with a bril-liant light. As though electrified, her father shook, hands still locked on the dagger, a circuit of power traveling from his fingers down through the blade and into Alan Whitcomb's heart.