The Wolves of London (45 page)

It was only when I reached the arch that I realised it wasn’t simply a doorway, but a short passage, which cut through a stone wall that must have been at least two metres thick. At the far end was a glow of brownish light, illuminating an expanse of floor, beyond which was what looked like a wooden surface heaped with clutter.

I plunged through the passage, my head still swimming, my breath rattling and phlegmy at the back of my throat. My limbs felt stiff and awkward through lack of use. After half a dozen shuffling steps, I was standing at the threshold of the next room, my left hand clutching the stone wall to stop me from swaying. I looked around, taking in the details, my mouth open in astonishment and horror.

The room was at least four times bigger than the one I had come from. It was a laboratory of sorts, or maybe more accurately it seemed to be part laboratory, part workshop and part operating theatre. The stone floor was dominated by a large central table, the wooden surface of which, although scrubbed clean, was covered in ominous dark stains. In an alcove in the corner furthest away from me, to the left of a closed wooden door, was a glass-fronted cabinet whose shelves were stacked not only with phials, bottles and items of medical equipment, but also a line of specimen jars, each of which was filled to the brim with a cloudy, yellowish preserving solution. In some of the jars floated small creatures (monkeys, cats, snakes), whereas others contained bleached bodily organs. From half a dozen jars at the end of the row peered a number of deformed human foetuses in various stages of development.

Stretching along the next wall, at a right angle to the cabinet, was what I had seen through the arch – a long workbench, on which stood the room’s only illumination, a glowing oil lamp. The workbench was heaped with scientific equipment and what looked like the metallic paraphernalia from a number of dismantled engines. Many of these bits and pieces had been screwed and bolted together to create new and bizarre forms, the purposes of which I could only imagine.

My eyes barely skimmed across these details, however, intriguing and grotesque though they were. It was the wall to my left which snagged and held my attention. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with dozens of cramped wooden cages, and in each cage was a living creature. I could see rats, cats, dogs and, on the bottom row, most horrifying of all, children.

Because the room was dimly lit, my mind was reluctant to accept what I was seeing at first. The children, filthy and dressed in rags, had been forced into spaces so small they could do little more than lie with their knees drawn up to their chests. As I slumped against the wall, unable at first to do little more than stare, one of them raised its head and looked at me. When I saw what had been done to it, my gorge rose and I clapped a hand to my mouth.

The child, a scrawny boy of maybe six or seven, had had his teeth and lower jaw removed and replaced with a hinged, grotesquely oversized shovel-like contraption, inset with a double row of triangular metal ‘teeth’. Though the light was dim, I could see that where the boy’s flesh had been forcibly fused with the metal it was horribly infected. His face above the artificial ‘jaw’ was black and swollen, and around the heads of the screws that had been affixed to the bone just beneath his ears, the skin was split and suppurating with pus.

The boy was not the only prisoner to have been mutilated so horribly. As my gaze skittered from cage to cage, I couldn’t see a single child or animal who hadn’t been subjected to some kind of monstrous modification. A tiny girl of no more than six or seven had had her right arm removed and a metal limb, comprising a number of linked pistons operated by an intricate system of levers and pulleys, inserted in its place; an older boy had had the upper left quadrant of his skull – including his eye – replaced by a transparent dome, in which a seemingly haphazard assortment of tiny interlocked cogs whirred and spun within a tangled nest of multi-coloured wires. In the upper cages I could see a rat whose legs had been replaced with wheels; a cat with an exposed metallic spine and a raised scorpion-like tail; a dog whose working internal organs, including its heart, pulsed and twitched in an external glass container that was attached to its butchered body via a mass of rubber tubes.

As I peered into one cage after another I shook uncontrollably, not only with cold now, but with fear, pity, revulsion and disbelief. These were clearly Tallarian’s early experiments; prototypes for his army of flesh and clockwork monstrosities that I had encountered in my own time. Horrific and pitiful though the creatures were, at least their presence here provided evidence that Tallarian had not become corrupted purely because of my proximity to him. On the contrary, I had stumbled into a world of madness, even of evil, so palpable that it seemed to poison the air. My instinct was to run, for fear that I’d become somehow contaminated by that poison, but I resisted the urge, and instead pushed myself away from the stone doorway and approached the stack of cages. As I got closer to them the boy with the metal jaw hissed like an angry cat. I opened my mouth to speak to him, and with an effort forced a few croaking words out of my dry throat.

‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.’

But how
could
I help? By opening the cages and letting the poor souls free? By putting them out of their misery? The boy stared at me as I spoke to him, though I saw nothing approaching comprehension in his eyes. He hissed again, his hideously oversized jaw creaking open and shut.

Some of the occupants of the other cages were stirring now too, turning bodies or heads to regard me. I heard scraping and clanking and (horribly) squelching. A cat began to yowl; a dog in an upper cage started to growl and then to make high-pitched yelping and whimpering noises. Afraid that the din would alert Tallarian, I raised my hands and made what I hoped were reassuring shushing sounds, but that only made things worse. The clamour increased, the yowls and barks accompanied by clicks and whirrs and creaks. It was like some hellish orchestra, a symphony of working machine parts and the tortured screams of living creatures.

Abandoning my attempt to placate the menagerie, I crossed to the workbench on the opposite wall and snatched up the oil lamp. I raised it to head height and swung round, looking for a weapon I might use to defend myself against Tallarian and his henchman, should I encounter them. The light fell across a wooden chair in the shadows to the right of the door, on the seat of which I was delighted to see my leather jacket. I hurried across and picked it up, and saw that my sweater, jeans, underwear, socks and boots were tangled together in a crumpled heap underneath. The clothes were a bit grubby, and a V of material had been snipped from the pocket of my jeans, presumably so that Tallarian could examine the denim in more detail, but they were generally okay. With no sense of self-consciousness whatsoever, I peeled off the smock-like gown I was wearing and dressed quickly in my own clothes. The jeans pockets were empty, and there was no sign of the items that Tallarian had taken from them, but I could live with that. It would be a pain to be without them if I ever got back to my own time, but as things stood, just
getting
back to my own time would be cause for celebration.

Psychological it may have been, but being dressed in my own clothes had an energising effect on me. It was as if I’d put on my battle armour; all at once I felt not only physically stronger, but more determined and confident than I’d been since arriving here. Skirting the stained table in the middle of the room, I crossed to Tallarian’s workbench and rooted among the paraphernalia. I came across a half-metre length of copper pipe, which I hefted in my hand, swishing it through the air. It wasn’t the greatest weapon in the world, but it was better than nothing. With the pipe in one hand and the lamp in the other I crossed to the door.

Tucking the pipe into my belt, I glanced back once more at the stack of cages on the opposite wall. The glow of lamplight reflected eerily from dozens of pairs of eyes, all of which seemed fixed on me. There was still some caterwauling from the occupants of the cages, but most had quietened down again now. Logic dictated that those watching eyes contained nothing but a primitive wariness of the intruder in their midst, but I liked to think there was expectation, even hope, in some of them too.

‘I’ll fetch help,’ I whispered, and then, bracing myself, I opened the door. As it swung inwards, my hand moved quickly from the brass knob to the copper pipe, ready to pluck it from my belt and bring it down on the head of whoever might be lurking on the other side.

But there was no one. The door opened on to a flight of uneven stone steps leading upwards. Stepping forward, I noticed there was a key dangling from the keyhole on the outside of the door and guessed that this room was probably kept locked when Ruby and the other nurses were about. I assumed that Tallarian was more lax with his security when he was here alone, but as I began to ascend the steps another possibility struck me. Maybe Tallarian wasn’t lax at all; maybe whoever had unbuckled the strap around my wrist had also unlocked the door for me. But who might that be? Huckerby? Could Tallarian’s right-hand man be less tolerant of his employer’s activities than the doctor realised?

No, that didn’t ring true. If Huckerby was concerned about Tallarian’s experiments, why had he left it until now before doing anything? Why, for that matter, was he relying on me to escape and alert the authorities instead of telling them himself? Wouldn’t it be a long shot on his part to assume that a) I would wake up in time, b) that I would manage to get away once I
had
woken up, and c) that even if I
did
get away I would have enough of a conscience to go to the police?

I pushed my thoughts aside, deciding that the only important thing right now was not to look this gift horse in the mouth. The steps I was ascending were steep, and so narrow that I could have touched the walls on either side if I had wanted to. I was about halfway up them when I heard a noise – or
thought
I heard a noise. There was still enough of a racket coming from the cages below that I couldn’t be entirely sure. I hovered in an agony of indecision, wondering whether I should carry on or wait until I was sure the coast was clear. Then my decision was made for me. The door at the top of the stairs started to open.

For an instant I was a rabbit in the headlights. Then I moved. Adrenaline flooding my system, I turned and raced back down the stairs. I didn’t look over my shoulder, so had no way of knowing whether I, or the light from the lamp, had been spotted. Slipping through the door back into the laboratory, I hesitated for barely a second, knowing I had only moments to decide what to do. I realised that whoever walked in here would know immediately that I had escaped. Not only were my clothes no longer on the wooden chair beside the door, but my hospital gown was crumpled on the floor and the oil lamp which had been sitting on the workbench across the room was now dangling from my left hand. There was no way I’d be able to sort out all of these things
and
find somewhere to hide before whoever was descending the stairs entered the room. Which left me with only one option.

I scooted across and put the lamp on the operating table, then ran back and pressed myself against the wall beside the hinge side of the door. I was only just in time. Even as I was sliding the copper pipe from my belt the door began to open. I was half-tempted to throw myself against it, to slam it into whoever was entering the room, but I forced myself to wait. The best-case scenario would be to avoid violence altogether. If the newcomer didn’t twig I was hiding behind the door, they might move far enough inside for me to slip out behind them and lock them in.

Nothing in life is ever that simple, though. What happened was that the door came three-quarters of the way open and then stopped. There was a pause, during which I pictured Tallarian standing with his hand gripping the door knob, his gaze sweeping across the room and taking in the discarded gown, the misplaced lantern.

Sure enough, it was Tallarian’s voice which snapped, ‘He’s escaped.’

My heart sank as I heard another growling voice beyond Tallarian’s. ‘’Ow’s ’e done that then?’

Tallarian’s response was cutting. ‘Well, I don’t know, do I? But the main door is locked, so he must still be in the hospital. Quickly, we must search the premises!’

The door began to close. For a second I considered allowing Tallarian and his companion to precede me up the stairs, and then it occurred to me that the doctor might lock the door and pocket the key, trapping me here. Acting on impulse, I leaped forward, grabbed the edge of the door and wrenched it open. Caught by surprise, Tallarian, who was still holding on to the handle, stumbled forward. As I stepped in front of him, his eyes widened in shock and rage.

Raising the copper pipe I whacked him as hard as I could on the side of the head. There was a sickening crack and he staggered sideways, blood instantly gouting from a wound above his left eye. As his legs crumpled, I thought about hitting him a few more times – but then with a roar the other man came at me.

He was huge! Grey-haired and grey-bearded, he was well over six feet tall. His shoulders were so wide you could easily have stood a couple of pint glasses on them. As he rushed at me, raising hairy, shovel-like hands, I backpedalled frantically. After three or four stumbling steps the base of my spine connected with something hard – the edge of Tallarian’s operating table. I barely had chance to register the pain before the man-mountain was upon me. As he lunged for my throat I swung the copper pipe towards his head. He threw up his left arm, swatting the weapon aside as if it was a troublesome fly. Wrenched from my hand, the pipe spun through the air and hit the wall beside the arch with a metallic clatter. Desperately, fending my attacker off as best I could, I groped to my left, grabbed the oil lamp off the table and swung it with all my strength.

Glass smashed against the man’s shoulder, dousing his hair, face and clothes in hot, burning oil. As he screamed, I jumped back to avoid getting splashed myself. Exposed to the air, the fire took hold instantly and within seconds the giant’s hair and clothes were ablaze. His screams rose in pitch until they sounded barely human as he careened about, slapping desperately at his head and body, trying to douse the flames which even now were roaring and spreading, transforming him into a human fireball.