The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [125]
The back of Queen Victoria's skull exploded.
Shit! No! That wasn't meant to happen!
He gripped the gunman, shook him, and heaved him off his feet.
His ancestor fell backward and his head hit the low cast-iron fence. There was a crunch and a spike suddenly emerged from the man's eye.
"You're not dead!" exclaimed Oxford, staggering back. "You're not dead! Stand up! Run for it! Don't let them catch you!"
The assassin lay on his back, his head impaled, blood pooling beneath him.
Oxford stumbled away.
There were screams and cries, people pushing past him.
He saw Victoria; she was tiny, young, like a child's doll, and her shredded brain was oozing onto the ground.
No. No. No.
This isn't happening.
This can't happen.
This didn't happen.
The smiling round-faced man was suddenly at his side. "Bravo, my friend!" he muttered. "Jolly good show!"
Oxford backed away from him, feeling terrified, fell, got up again, shoved his way out of the milling crowd, and ran.
"Get back to the suit," he mumbled as his legs pumped. "Try something else!"
He raced up the slope and ran into the trees.
What had caused that bolt of lightning? It had come from the same direction as the shout: "Stop, Edward!" Who had that been? He hadn't seen anyone clearly; there was too much happening.
He found his suit, slipped on the helmet, and activated it.
A sense of well-being flooded through him as the distant noise of electric cars, passenger jets, and advertising billboards assailed his ears. He pulled on the suit and set the navigation system for three months into the past. His lunatic ancestor would be working in a public house-the Hog in the Pound on Oxford Street; that was a recorded fact.
"I'll go and talk him out of it," he whispered. "It's what I should have done in the first place."
A terrifying feeling of inevitability sank into his bones.
It won't work.
Try anyway!
It won't work.
He pushed through the undergrowth, returning to the edge of the woods.
"Step out into the open, sir!" came a voice.
Oxford froze. What now?
He crept ahead, trying to see whoever it was through the trees.
"I saw what happened-there's nothing to worry about. Come on, let's be having you!"
He remained silent.
There! A policeman!
"Sir! I saw you trying to protect the queen. I just need you to-"
Oxford plunged out into the open.
The policeman gasped, stepped back, and fell onto his bottom. He threw his truncheon.
The club whirled through the air and crashed into the control unit on the front of the time traveller's suit. Sparks exploded and a mild electric shock jerked through his body.
"Damn!" he cried, and bounded away. He slammed his stilts into the ground, leaped high, ordered the time jump, and winked out of June 10, 1840.
The suit malfunctioned.
Instead of sending him back three months, it sent him a good deal further; and rather than shifting him half a mile northward to a secluded alley behind the Hog in the Pound, it threw him twenty-one miles beyond.
He blinked into existence fifteen feet in the air with an electric charge drilling through him and crashed into the ground, unconscious. His limbs twitched spasmodically for thirty minutes, then he became very still.
Four hours later, a horseman narrowly avoided riding over him. The man reined in his mount and looked down at the bizarrely costumed figure.
"By James! What have we here?" he exclaimed, dismounting.
Henry de La Poet Beresford, the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, bent and ran his fingers over the strange material of the time suit. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before. He grasped Edward Oxford by the shoulder and shook him.
"I say, old fellow, are you in the land of the living?"
There was no response.
Beresford placed his hand on the man's chest, beside the lanternlike disk, and felt the heart beating.
"Still with us, anyway," he muttered. "But what the devil are you, old thing? I've never seen the like!"
He pushed an arm under Oxford's shoulders and lifted him; then, with no small amount of difficulty, shoved him onto the horse's