The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [112]
He grabbed Swinburne, threw him over his shoulder, and took to his heels.
With the basset hound scampering along beside him, he sprinted westward over a patch of wasteland toward railway lines and, beyond them, the busy Kingstown Road and Chelsea Bridge.
"Hurry! They're coming!" cried Swinburne.
A quick backward glance proved the poet right: the loups-garous were pouring through the gate.
Despite his short legs, Fidget put on an astonishing show of speed and sprang ahead across the railway track. Burton tried to keep up but Swinburne's weight slowed him and now he spotted, to his right, a locomotive pelting down the line. There was no way, it seemed, to make it to the other side before the engine passed; his escape route was blocked and the wolf-men were gaining fast.
He set his mind to the task, sucked in a deep breath, and focused every ounce of his being into his pumping legs. Run! Run!
The events of the next few seconds happened so quickly that his consciousness couldn't register them, yet he dreamed about them for many months afterward.
The locomotive was upon him.
He put everything he had into a jump across its path.
His feet left the ground.
Claws ripped through the back of his jacket and ploughed through his skin.
A deafening whistle.
A wall of metal to his right.
Scalding vapour.
Gravel slamming into him.
Rolling.
A thunderous roar.
The blur of passing wheels and, under them, flames.
A receding rumble.
Slowly dissipating steam.
The grey sky.
A spot of rain on his face.
A groan at his side.
A moment of silence.
Then: "Ow! For Pete's sake! The blessed beast bit me again!"
Sir Richard Francis Burton started to laugh. It began in his stomach and rose through his chest and shook his whole body and he didn't want it to stop. He laughed at India. He laughed at Arabia. He laughed at Africa. He laughed at the Nile and the Royal Geographical Society and John Hanning bloody Speke. He laughed at Spring Heeled Jack and the wolf-men and the albino and that silly damned dog that kept biting Swinburne's ankle.
He laughed away his petulant anger, his resentments, his confusion, and his reluctance, and when he finally stopped laughing, he was Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king's agent, in the service of the country of his birth, and it no longer mattered that he was an outsider or that he stood in opposition to the Empire's foreign policies. He had a job to do.
His laughter abated. He lay silently and looked at the grey sky.
London muttered and grumbled.
He sat up and examined Swinburne. The poet had lapsed into unconsciousness. Fidget the basset hound was sitting at the little man's feet, happily chewing at a trouser leg.
The railway track was empty; the locomotive had disappeared from view behind a group of warehouses, though the tracks were still vibrating from its passing.
The loupr-garous were nowhere to be seen; all swept away by the train.
He stood, hoisted his friend back onto his shoulder, and, using Oliphant's cane to help him balance, walked down a gravel slope toward a wooden fence beyond which lay Kingstown Road.
He was halfway down when a loud throbbing filled the air.
Burton turned and looked back at the power station. An incredible machine was rising from it, seemingly pushed upward by the boiling cone of steam that belched from its underside. It was a rotorship; an immense oval platform of grey metal with portholes set along its edge. Its front was pointed and curved upward like the prow of a galleon and from the sides, like banks of oars, pylons projected outward. At their ends, atop vertical shafts, huge wings rotated faster than the eye could follow.
Was Speke aboard that ship? And who else?
He had to get Swinburne treated; had to find out what the poet knew.
As the rotorship ascended and moved northward, Burton continued on down to the thoroughfare and made his way along to Chelsea Bridge.