The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [170]
"What the heck!" Old Carter the Lamp-lighter sighed. "If you can't beat em, join 'em!"
He hurried after his neighbours.
Down the hill they marched until, at the bottom, with the Alsop field sloping up before them, they came to the cottage.
Four constables, who'd been guarding the premises since the fight commenced, came forward.
"Folks! You should return to your homes at once!" said one. "It's not safe here!"
"Aye!" cried a villager. "And it'll never be safe until we're rid of Darkening Towers!"
"It's true!" shouted another. "We're going to burn the accursed place to the ground!"
The constable shook his head. "You'll be doing no such thing!"
Suddenly one of the women screamed and pointed at the field. They turned and saw the dirty cloud parting as a dreadful apparition came hopping toward them. The tall, gangling creature was familiar to them all; it had been associated with Old Ford ever since it attacked Jane Alsop twenty-three years ago on the very spot where they were standing. It was Spring Heeled Jack!
With cries of terror, the villagers scattered as the grotesque bogeyman ploughed into them, swinging a shovel left and right while shrieking, "Get away! Get away!"
The constables were mown down by his frenzied attack. The villagers raced away. The cottage was left unprotected.
The stilt-man threw the shovel aside and vaulted over the gate, stalked up the pathway, and slammed his shoulder into the front door. It swung open. He bent and peered into the hallway.
A young woman was standing in it. She held a pistol levelled at his head.
"Tell me, girl-do you have a birthmark on your chest?" he demanded.
"I'm not Alicia Pipkiss," she replied coolly. "She's been taken to a place of safety. You'll never find her."
He expelled a sulphuric hiss of fury and for a second Sister Raghavendra thought he was going to pounce upon her, but then a voice rang out: "Edward John Oxford!"
Spring Heeled Jack whirled around.
Sir Richard Francis Burton was standing at the gate.
He held a strange weapon in his hand.
He pulled the trigger.
A bolt crackled through the air and thudded into the time suit's control unit.
Oxford screamed and convulsed as lines of energy writhed up and down his body.
He tottered, nearly fell, crouched, leaped, and vanished.
"Bismillah! Where the hell has he gone now?" muttered Burton.
He heard his name called from the battlefield. It was Detective Inspector Trounce, who was waving his bowler above his head to attract the explorer's attention. He strained to hear what the man was shouting.
"He's here! He's here! The Technologists have him!"
When Spring Heeled Jack leaped out of 1861 with the energised crossbow bolt embedded in his suit's control unit, he had no clear idea of a destination. His mind had been pushed to the brink of unconsciousness by an electrical discharge. He jumped without considering a landing place and, for a split second, or possibly an eternity, he floated beyond time.
He fragmented.
All the elements that had made Edward Oxford the man he was separated from one another and drifted apart. Decisions taken were unmade and became choices; successes and failures reverted to opportunities and challenges; characteristics disengaged and withdrew to become influences.
He lost cohesion until nothing of him remained except potential.
Yet, set apart from this strange process, something observed and wailed and grieved as it watched itself disintegrate into ever smaller components.
It was that same something that clung despairingly to one final possibility; that issued a last command to the ebbing time suit; that hoped against all evidence to the contrary that another attempt to dissuade the original Edward Oxford from assassinating Queen Victoria might-just mightwork, and wipe this crazy version of history out of existence.
Spring Heeled Jack popped into existence above Green Dragon Alley on February 27, 1838, hit the ground, fell, and dragged himself into an angle in the narrow passageway.
He pulled the suit's cloak