The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [107]
"Very well. Release him. Mr. Brunel, bring him outside, please."
The blank-eyed Francis Galton placed the syringe back onto the trolley, approached Swinburne, and began to unbuckle the straps. One of Brunel's limbs unfolded and the digits at its end clamped shut around the poet's forearm.
"Get offl" screamed Swinburne. "Help! Help!"
"Enough of your histrionics," snarled Oliphant. "There's no one to hear them and I find them irritating."
"Sod off!" spat Swinburne.
Galton pulled open the last of the straps and Brunel swung the little poet up into the air.
"Ow! Ow! I can walk, curse you!"
"Follow," commanded Oliphant.
With Isambard Kingdom Brunel clanking and thudding along behind, holding the kicking and squealing Swinburne high, Laurence Oliphant crossed the vast laboratory and passed through huge double doors into a large rectangular courtyard. Swinburne was surprised to see a noonday sky abovehe had no idea how long he'd been unconscious.
He instantly recognised the location: he was in Battersea Power Station, which towered around this central enclosure, a colossal copper rod rising up in each of the four corners.
"Drop him."
Brunel released the poet, who landed in a heap on the wet ground.
Oliphant held the point of his blade at Swinburne's throat.
"You may go, Brunel."
A bell chimed and the hulking machine stamped back through the doors, which closed behind it.
Oliphant stepped away and sheathed his rapier. He turned and loped across the courtyard to the entrance, a big double gate into which a normalsized door was set. This latter he unbolted and opened.
"Your escape route." He smiled, his pink eyes glinting, the vertical pupils narrowing. He moved away from the exit. "Go! Run!"
Algernon Swinburne looked at the albino curiously. What was he playing at?
He scrambled to his feet and began to walk toward the door. Oliphant continued to move away, giving the poet more and more space.
"Why?" asked Swinburne.
Oliphant remained silent, the smile playing about his face, the eyes following Swinburne's every step.
The poet shrugged and increased his pace.
He was less than four feet from the portal when Oliphant suddenly sprang at him.
Swinburne shrieked and ran but the albino was phenomenally fast and swept down on the little man in a blur of movement, grabbing Swinburne by the back of the collar just as he was stepping across the threshold and yanking him backward.
Swinburne flew through the air, hit the ground, rolled in a spray of rainwater, and found himself lying exactly where Brunel had dropped him.
Oliphant cackled; a cruel, vile noise.
Swinburne staggered to his feet. "Cat and mouse," he said under his breath. "And I'm the bloody mouse!"
THE TRAIL
When we adjust some element of an animal's nature, a quite different element alters of its own accord, as if there is some system of checks and balances at work. What we cannot fathom is why the unplanned changes seem entirely pointless from a functional perspective. I an baffled. Glalton is baffled. Darwin is baffled. All we can do is experiment, experiment, experiment!
-ftoma NIGHTINGALE
it Richard Francis Burton arrived at the Squirrel Hill Cemetery and quickly found the area where the loops-garous had been feeding. Graves had been torn open, coffins ripped apart, and putrefying corpses shredded and gnawed at, left scattered across the wet mud.
Even though, while in Africa, he'd become fascinated by the notion of cannibalism, Burton actually possessed a deep-seated fear of the ghoulish. Anything connected with graveyards and corpses unnerved him. The many cadavers he'd seen, and even accidentally trodden on, in the East End had filled him with horror; Montague Penniforth's ravaged carcass had sickened him to the core; and now this! His mouth felt dry and his heart hammered in his chest.
At his feet, Fidget growled and whined and pulled at his leash.
Burton squatted and took the dog's