The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [73]
The room fell silent and she slumped forward. He withdrew his hands. The door clicked behind him.
"I say, is everything all right?" came Swinburne's voice.
"Leave us a moment, Algy. I'll be out shortly."
The poet grunted and closed the door.
Burton moved around the table and, taking the countess by the shoul ders, pulled her upright. Her head fell back, revealing eyes that showed only the whites; the pupils had rolled up into the sockets.
The king's agent crooned a low chant in an ancient language and made a couple of strange passes across her face with his left hand. His words throbbed rhythmically and, gradually, she began to rock again, in time with the chant. Then he stopped and said: "Awake!"
Her pupils snapped down and into focus. She gasped and clutched at his forearm, holding it tightly.
"I cannot help you!" she mumbled, and a tear fell from her long eyelashes. "Your very existence is not as it should be and yet, at the same time, it is exactly as it should be! Listen to the echoes, Captain, the points of time's rhythm, for each is a crossroads. Time is like music. The same refrain emerges again and again, though different in form. What does this mean? What am I saying?"
"Countess," said Burton, "you have told me what I myself have half suspected. Something, somehow, is not as it should be. I know who holds the secret to this mystery and I mean to get it from him."
"The stilt-walker," she hissed.
"Yes. You see much!"
"Beware the stilt-walker. And the panther and the ape, too."
"What are they?"
"I can tell you no more. Please, leave me now. I must retire. I am exhausted."
Burton straightened. He pulled two guineas from his pocket and laid them on the table.
"Thank you, Countess Sabina."
"That is too much, Captain Burton."
"It is what your reading has been worth to me. There is no greater cheiromantist in all London, of that I am certain."
"Thank you, sir."
Burton left and, with Swinburne, departed the premises.
It sounded like you were strangling her," noted the poet.
"I can assure you that I wasn't," replied the king's agent. "Keep your eyes peeled for a hansom. Let's get to Battersea and the Tremors. I need a drink."
They picked up a cab a few minutes later and, as it chugged southward, skirted around Hyde Park, and headed down Sloane Street toward Chelsea Bridge, Burton told Swinburne about his new post, about Spring Heeled Jack, and about his theory that the stilt-walker was a supernatural beingpossibly Moko of Africa's Congo region. He also told the poet about the East End werewolves.
Swinburne spent the entire journey with his wide eyes fixed on his friend.
Finally, as they crossed the Thames and rattled past the prodigious and brightly lit power station, with its four massive copper rods towering against the night sky, the poet said quietly, "You have always been an inveterate storyteller, Richard; this, though, beats any of your Arabian Nights tales!"
"It's certainly as strange as anything recounted by Scheherazade," agreed Burton.
"So we're going to the Tremors to speak to its landlord?"
"Yes. Joseph Robinson, the man who employed Queen Victoria's assassin."
"I'll tell you what I like about your new job, shall I?" said Swinburne.
"What's that?"
"It seems to involve a lot of public houses!"
"Too many. Listen, Algy-I want us both to cut back on the drinking. We've been going at it hammer and tongs these weeks past, letting our frustrations get the better of us. It's time we took ourselves in hand."
"That's easy for you to say, old thing," responded Swinburne. "You have this new job to keep you occupied. Me, though-all I have is