Mind the Gap (30 page)

She looked at Harry, his wide watery eyes, the long coat, and she tried to imagine him walking past the mayor’s house and sensing nothing. Standing at the gates and chanting abuse. Knowing that Stevie, Terence, and she were breaking into the wolves’ den, and however much he told her now, he would have known there was a good chance one of them would get hurt or killed. A very good chance.

And Jazz realized that, yes, she absolutely did have that right. Because the United Kingdom needed to know who Harry really was.

“You sent him to kill the mayor. You sent him to murder.”

Harry stepped back, looking for a moment like a startled dog. He looked around the big room at the other kids and shook his head.

“Yes, Harry,” she said sadly. “Yes.”

“For Cadge,” he said. “Poor little Cadge—now, don’t you think he deserved something, Jazz girl?”

Jazz could not answer. Tears were threatening again, burning behind her face and filling her throat. Hattie came to her and stood by her side.

“It was for him,” Harry said.

“And what of Terence?”

Harry scoffed. “Him and his precious battery? Fool! He thinks he can do what his father before him couldn’t, and I’ve no time for such daftness, Jazz girl. Now listen—Leela will fetch the first-aid kit and have a look at your legs,” he said, gesturing toward her bloodied trousers, though Jazz could have told him the bleeding had stopped. “And then we’ll talk, you and I. Have a real good adult chat about—”

“Adult,” Jazz said, laughing softly. “Stevie was barely that, Harry. I saw his head burst open when he hit the ground.” She stared at the tall figure of Harry Fowler and tried to see something in his eyes when she said that, something that would give her a shred of hope for his soul. Perhaps it was the poor light in that place, or a blurring from her tears, but she saw nothing.

“Hour of Screams!” Faith said, dashing in from one of the other rooms. Her blue eyes were wide with fear, and she knelt down, covered her ears, and started singing a song.

Harry glanced at Jazz. “Second time today,” he said. “Something’s happening.” He stared at her for a moment, so intensely that she thought he was going to run at her, strike her. Then he sighed and sat down, singing his own sad song.

Jazz stood and ran. She could not bear to share the experience of London’s pain with this man or be in the same place as him when she felt the ethereal tendrils of the old town’s ghosts passing by. She went back into the tunnels, passing the place where she had hidden those photos. That seemed like so long ago now, and she almost saw the form of her younger, more innocent self squatting there, picking away broken glass and closing the dumbwaiter on the images of her father. She sat against the wall opposite and felt the screams beginning deep within her bones. It always came that way first, a feeling, before the true sounds came in. It was almost as if the ghosts came from within instead of without, and Jazz wondered whether it was like this for everyone.

She hugged herself, eyes open, and sang softly as the Hour of Screams washed over, around, and through her. The air in the corridor became opaque at first, and then the walls seemed to fade away to welcome in a long column of marching people. At first she thought they were soldiers, but then she saw the weary faces and sad eyes—none of them turned her way—and she recognized kindred spirits. These were lost souls, wandering the Underground because daylight would not welcome them.

Jazz followed, gasping as a line of people walked right through her.

Out in the main tunnel, the figures had faded away, but there were others now, blurs of motion, movement, and sensation that threatened to overwhelm her senses. Several of them turned to her as though pleading that she continue watching. She kept singing softly as she followed them away from the Palace. The tunnel turned a corner and merged with a connection route between two larger tunnels, and here the images started fading.

Wait,
she thought, because she had the pressing idea that they had something to tell her. Jazz stopped singing, ready to shout at them to wait for her. But as she exhaled, her breath seemed to forge a clear space through the fleeting shapes, as though they were made of little more than mist. They wavered in the air before her. The screaming diminished and started to echo, retreating even as the ghosts dissipated. And as the real screaming began behind her, a more solid shape swam through the fog of London’s agonized past to stand before her.

Mortimer Keating raised a pistol and pointed it at Jazz’s face. Her breath caught in her throat. And now she understood the smile on his face outside the mayor’s house. They’d found Harry and the United Kingdom once before, and now they’d found them again. He’d been in no rush to give chase, because he’d already known where to find Jazz.

“You’ve led us a merry chase, Jasmine. Your old man would’ve been proud,” Uncle Mort said.

Hatred gave her courage. “I’m sure he’d be pleased you murdered his wife. Now you’ll kill his daughter too? What a friend.”

The man’s grim facade faltered a moment. “Tragic, that. But it couldn’t be avoided. Your mum knew all along that you were the very thing we were hunting for. We tried to do right by the two of you, for the sake of your father’s memory. But your mum hid the truth. When we figured out you were the battery, we came for you. If she hadn’t fought us, she’d still be alive.”

Jazz stared at him, eyes wide and mouth agape.

Mort frowned. “Christ, you didn’t know?”

Shouts reverberated through the tunnel. Beyond Mort, she saw other Uncles and their thugs fighting with the kids of the United Kingdom. Gob kicked one of the BMW men in the balls and caught a blow to the face for his troubles. A dark-suited man struck Leela with a hard backhand, but then Marco leaped on his back, giving her a chance to run.

Jazz felt sick and hollow inside.

“The battery’s inside me?” she asked, turning her gaze upon Mort.

“Not inside you, Jazz. You
are
the bloody battery. Took us forever to figure it out, but—”

She strode toward him. Mort frowned and started to back up.

“Then you won’t kill me,” she said.

He shot out a hand and grabbed a fistful of her hair. “Doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you. Oh, and thanks for sorting out the mayor, by the way. He’d become a liability lately. You’ve done us quite a favor.”

Jazz punched him in the throat as hard as she could. The gun fired, bullet ricocheting off down the tunnel, the shot incredibly loud. Mort dropped to his knees, choking, and reached for his throat.

“Fuck off,” Jazz said.

A roar erupted down the tunnel and she looked over the kneeling Uncle Mort to see Philip—one-eyed and half mad from exposure to the Hour of Screams—running at her. Mort might not kill her, but Philip certainly would.

She’d started to flee when a shadow rushed past her. She blinked, startled when she saw Harry Fowler brandishing a cricket bat. He swung. Philip raised his forearm to block the attack, and both bat and arm snapped.

As Philip cried out in pain, Harry spun on Jazz, and she saw the
knowing
in his eyes.

“Jesus,” she said. “You knew!”

Of course he’d known. He could sense magic, couldn’t he? He’d helped Terence locate the other pieces of the apparatus. It all came tumbling over her now. If she truly was the battery, Harry must have known from the moment he met her and never said a word. When it came time to break into the mayor’s house, he had known that they wouldn’t find anything. He’d manipulated them all just to get his revenge, and that had cost Stevie his life.

Philip shouted in fury and used his good hand to knock the shattered bat from Harry’s grasp. They faced off against each other, an old thief and a madman.

“Just go, Jazz girl,” Harry said. “Find a place where nobody knows who or what you are. Not Terry and not Josephine Blackwood. The world’ll be better off if they all just leave it alone, let things happen in their own time.”

Clutching his injured throat, Mortimer Keating began to rise to his feet, shaking. “Philip,” he rasped, “kill him.”

Philip grinned.

“Harry—” Jazz began.

“Run!” the thief screamed.

Two other BMW men rushed up then, joining Philip, and they fell upon Harry, beating him with their fists and kicking him once he’d dropped to the ground.

Uncle Mort looked around for his pistol. Jazz saw someone else move from the corner of her eye. At first glance she saw the spectral shimmer of a ghost, a familiar jacket and top hat, a flower in the phantom magician’s lapel. But the ghost vanished and in his place was Terence Whitcomb.

He held Mort’s pistol in his hand.

“Mr. Keating,” he said.

Uncle Mort sneered. “Whitcomb.”

Terence shot him through the left eye, the back of Mort’s head bursting like rotten fruit. The chaos in the tunnel continued. It wasn’t the first gunshot to echo around them all, and the Uncles and BMW men who’d come with Mort kept at their task—all save the two who were helping Philip. They looked up and fixed their attention on Jazz, realizing they’d found their target.

Jazz hesitated, wanting to save Gob and Leela and the others. But if she was the cause of all this, the only way to make her friends safe was to get these bastards away from here. She had to surrender herself.

As if plucking the thought from her mind, Terence reached out and grabbed her wrist. “No. We can lead them away.”

“But—”

“You can’t do anything for them, Jazz! And the Blackwood Club
can’t
have you.” He held her arms and spoke into her face, their noses touching, and she could smell the fear on him. His lips touched hers as he spoke, but there was nothing more than words. “We have to leave. Now!”

“But where? Nowhere’s safe anymore.”

“Down,” Terence said. “Deeper.” And he pulled, holding her arm as if he might never let go.

Jazz ran ahead of him, fleeing into the darker shadows of the Underground. They left the Palace behind, but not without being seen. Shouts followed, and then footfalls, and as Jazz emerged into a wider tunnel where the distant sound of modern Tube trains could be heard, she knew there would be no escape. There were too many Uncles, too many BMW men. Her mother had told her to hide forever, but there was nowhere left to hide.

Deeper,
Terence had said.

Fuck that. Deeper only meant a dead end.

Jazz raced along the tunnel. The only light was the barest illumination coming from a couple of vents that were still open to the surface, not nearly enough by which to watch her footing. Yet she threw aside caution and simply ran.

“Damn it, Jasmine!” Terence shouted after her.

It felt fine. Wonderful, in fact. For too long she had allowed herself to be guided by the assertiveness of others. No longer. A hundred yards ahead, she knew of a passageway that separated this tunnel from another, abandoned but more recently in use. It still had rails, and there was a platform there whose many exits had long since been boarded over. But Stevie had shown her a way up, an emergency exit. It was the nearest path up from the Underground.

Her eyes were wide, trying to pick up any source of light, peering at the wall on the right in search of that passageway. More shouts came along the tunnel. Light from torches bobbed dimly behind her, helping to show the way. Then she saw it—a patch of shadow even darker than the rest of the tunnel—and Jazz ran for it. At the wall she paused, taking ragged gasps of air, and reached out with her hands to make sure she wasn’t going to run into anything.

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 cinnamon and rich earth. But she didn’t want his brand of comfort 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 together. 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 narrow 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 underground. 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 banshee cry of the city’s ghosts rising.

“Again?” she whispered.

The Hour of Screams had returned once more. The intervals 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 crying out to be heard. Harry might have seen the phantom images 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 confusion 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, obviously 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, inspecting a gauge, could only be Whitcomb himself. The resemblance 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 magician, 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 yearning 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 before her was not some odd combination of events but a single moment from London’s past.

Her father spoke, though she couldn’t hear his voice. Whitcomb spun, hands up instantly, ready to defend his infernal 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 hatred 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.