Page 17 of Across Space and Time

Something suddenly dropped to the ground in front of him, in a swirl of black and white, landing almost silently except for the snap of a dark cape. Hugh nearly leaped out of his skin. He wondered for a moment if the creature had moved that quickly, but he realized that the figure in front of him had his back to him and was facing down the monstrous creature, poised in a similar crouch. Light glinted off of metallic claws at the end of hands that were spread wide. It was Spring-Heeled Jack, his arms up to keep Hugh away from the creature, or the creature away from Hugh, he wasn’t quite sure which yet.

The creature at the end of the alley let out a snarl, the sound making every hair on Hugh’s body stand on end. It suddenly charged forward, dropping onto all fours to run like a canine.

The next moment, the alley was suddenly almost as bright as daylight. White and blue flames erupted from Spring-Heeled Jack’s mouth in an almost biblical torrent of flame that Hugh felt heat his skin even with the man’s back to him. The creature was still moving, but it had ceased its dash, now flailing and roaring, the sound echoing off the walls so loudly that he had to put his hands over his ears. The flames licked over its body, consuming it as the roars died away, and the creature collapsed into a heap of charred flesh and bone in the middle of the alley. The air smelled of smoke and singed hair and burning flesh.

And then Jack turned to look at him. Without breaking his gaze, he reached down and scooped up Hugh’s truncheon from the ground where it had fallen, holding it out to him, handle pointed toward Hugh. “Glittering guinea pigs, I was almost too late. Are you all right?”

Hugh reached up to take it, wrapping his palm around the handle. For just a moment, they both held it, before Jack let go, and Hugh let his arm fall to his side.

“I…” Hugh realized with a start that Jack had asked a question. “Yes, I’m all right,” he said. “Are you?”

Jack laughed, a sound so lyrical it might have been arranged by an Austrian composer. It was the exact opposite of the sound the smoldering creature had made when the flames had encased its body. “I am fine.”

“What was that thing?” Hugh asked, glancing past Jack to the burning pile of flesh and fabric.

“I believe that is the reason I am here,” Jack said.

That cryptic answer was not helpful in the moment, and Hugh had a thousand more questions flying about in his head like a flock of starlings. “I… I need to report this,” he said, his voice dropping a little. How was he going to explain any of this to Sergeant Reardon?

“Oh, of course,” Jack replied with a polite smile that showed off the pointed tips of his sharp teeth. “I shall retire away from the scene while you alert your authorities. I shall return for you when the coast is clear. But please wait a moment on that blasted whistle blast. It really is terribly aggravating to my ears.”

And then Jack bent his knees and gave a great leap, landing on the sill of a window three stories above Hugh’s head. With another leap, he had reached the rooftop of the tenement building and disappeared up and over the edge of it.

And suddenly, Hugh was alone again, in the dark alleyway with its monstrous shadows from the flames that still licked and lapped at the monster not far from him. He wondered for a moment if he had simply imagined this whole thing. But the blazing corpse at his feet beleaguered that question. He certainly had not set the creature aflame.

The sound of feet running alerted him to the presence of others, and several men in work clothes appeared at the entrance of the alleyway, one holding a broken bottle, another a sharp knife. All of them stared at Hugh, then at the mess on the ground. Hugh saw the tension ease from them as they realized that the threat was no longer a threat. “Are you all right, sir?” one of them asked, pulling off his bowler hat to scratch at his balding head.

“Yes,” Hugh said, starting toward the men before realizing that his legs were trembling. He could not appear weak or collapse. He had to be strong and do his duty. “Excuse me, I must call additional officers.” He raised his whistle to his lips and blew a note on it. It rang off the walls, and more than one window opened, sleepy heads poking out to see what the commotion was about. A moment later, he heard an answering whistle.

“That fella, he’s dead?” asked one of the men, gesturing to the pile of charred and smoking flesh with the knife he held. Hugh realized it was a steak knife; the man must have grabbed it off of a table at a nearby tavern when he and his friends came running to help.

“Yes. Very much so.” Hugh’s mind turned back to what the creature had been crouched over when he had come upon it. “I must check the victim, please wait here.”

The three men did not look all that eager to follow him past the flaming pile of meat and blackened clothing. Hugh edged carefully past it, half-afraid the beast would suddenly lunge in a shower of fiery sparks and latch onto him, but it did not move, beyond the flames continuing their mad dance over the gentleman’s cape.

He smelled the body of the victim before he saw it clearly, the scent of fresh blood and other innards thick in the air, coating his tongue and the inside of his nostrils. Hugh shifted to try to get as much light from the alley entrance and the flames as he could.

The victim was definitely dead, ripped open from throat to groin, ribs broken and pulled aside, as if the creature had been searching for the organs beneath it. The internal body cavity was a mess of meat and blood and bile. Hugh gagged but pressed his hand to his mouth to keep back any additional reaction.

The victim’s head was turned away from him, and he shifted around, trying to avoid stepping in any blood or other things that littered the ground. It was a man, with blond hair that lay ragged, coated in sticky clumps of drying blood. He was not a child, but neither was he very old. Perhaps late 20’s, though it was obvious that London streets had not been kind to him. He had healing bruises on one cheek. Whether he was a prostitute, Hugh could not immediately say, as his clothes were strewn about as nothing more than rags; they looked as if they had been ripped or slashed off of him.

He heard shouts and feet approaching, and then another constable reached the alley mouth where the laborers still stood with their makeshift weapons. Two more followed close behind him as they began to talk to the men there. One constable detached himself from the group, and he recognized Depesh. He gave the Indian man a tired look. “Another one,” he said, and Depesh nodded, looking pale in the dim lights around them. “Deceased.”

“What is this?” Depesh asked, pointing to the smoldering remains, the flames nearly out now.

“Whatever it was, it was… I think it was eating the victim,” Hugh said. There was so much viscera and not enough light for him to tell if the boy at his feet was missing anything from inside of him, but he couldn’t think of any other explanation for what the monstrous figure had been doing stooped over the body like that.

Depesh pressed a hand to his mouth quickly. “Good God…”

Hugh nodded. He had no other words for it himself.

As he walked back into Scotland Yard with Constable Depesh after interviewing witnesses, in what was becoming a very familiar and uncomfortable pattern, Hugh saw no sign of Spring-Heeled Jack. He sat down with Sergeant Reardon to give his statement about what he had found, describing how he had stumbled upon the monster in the alley, with the body of the dead blond man.

“Surely you don’t expect me to believe that there are creatures of the supernatural sort traversing around London, preying on people in the black of night,” Reardon said as Hugh described the monstrous creature that had attacked him.

“I might not have myself, sir,” Hugh said, heat rising in his cheeks as he realized what he was about to tell his sergeant. “But I encountered someone else in the alley as well.”

“Oh? And who might that have been?” Reardon asked, his voice dripping with detestation.

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