Vengeance from above, thought Garrick. As I came down the chimney.
George Billtoe had heard rumors that papers had been passed on him, and he grew increasingly secretive and prudent, barricading himself into the upstairs apartment, employing an urchin to run his errands. Garrick was forced to use all his skills as a contortionist to inch his way down the man’s chimney.
Garrick chuckled. On that night he had actually roused Billtoe before slitting his throat, just so the mark would realize that his precautions had counted for nothing.
Happy days. How he and Riley had chortled over that faker’s folly.
Garrick remembered acting out the entire episode, right down to Billtoe’s stunned final plea for mercy before he gave him a close shave across the Adam’s apple.
The magician smiled at the memory as he scaled the hotel fire escape to the third floor, sliding silent as a shadow across the cast-iron steps. The top step stood eight feet below a flat copper roof, which offered a wide lip and ample grip for a man of Garrick’s abilities. He trusted the strength of his fingers and launched himself upward from the railing, grasping the cold copper rim and swinging himself bodily onto the flat roof.
Across the dull copper he ran, hunched to avoid the prying eyes of curtain twitchers, bent so low that his torso was horizontal and Orange’s sharp nose cut the night air like a beagle’s.
This is indeed the life of champions, thought Albert Garrick. A fresh breeze from the Thames, preternatural quantum powers, and a room full of Yankee bully boys to test my skills against. Magic is real and lives inside my person.
The chimney was where he remembered it, a red and yellow brick stack bound with crumbling mortar, weather-stained, perhaps, but otherwise virtually unchanged. Even during Billtoe’s residency the chimney had been out of service, plastered up at the base with a line of cracked clay pots that had not diffused smoke in many a decade. Garrick brushed the pots aside with a cavalier sweep of his arm and heaved the chimney cap from its perch.
Not even a slap of mortar, he thought, almost disappointed. These federals are supposed to be the world’s finest. The chimney pipe stretched below him from dark to pitchdark. There was no comforting smell of soot that would have reminded Garrick of home, but there was the feeling of depth and drop and the sour gust of damp. The magician swung his legs easily over the stack and sat on the rim, peering down.
It’s narrow as I remember. Garrick’s breadth of shoulder could barely squeeze down that shaft, even on the diagonal.
Last time descending this box took some time and a fifth of nerve, thought Garrick. This time will be different.
Garrick used his quantum abilities to order his shoulder ligaments to slacken so that the ball of his humerus popped out of his socket.
No pain, he told his sensory neurons. I need my senses sharp, and last time I descended through this shaft the agony was a chink in my plate.
Garrick had always been a touch shortsighted but enjoyed excellent night vision, which he attributed to boiled vegetable poultices that he molded into his eye sockets two nights a week, then ate for breakfast in the mornings.
Even so, he thought, using his good arm to hoist himself into the black shaft, no harm in opening my pupils a little to trap the ambient light.
Garrick smiled, his teeth shining like candied lemon drops in the gloom.
Ambient light? Smart, my friend, I cannot thank you enough for educating thyself so thoroughly on your multifarious interests.
Garrick’s pupils zoomed till they filled his irises and he could see black spiders hiding in the black hole of a dark chimney at night.
This is what magic really is, he thought. An open mind. Garrick cranked his knees apart until they braced his body weight, then lowered himself into the darkness like a demon descending into hell.
Inside the bathroom of the safe house, Riley was wondering if his brain had been somehow etherized by his trip. Or if he had suffered some form of mind malady brought on by a life of continual terror.
I feel nothing. Even my fear is fading. Perhaps I am in a sanatorium somewhere wearing the lunatic’s overalls.
And yet this futuristic fantasy was particularly detailed. Miss Sav-a-no was plainer to him now than any individual he had ever spied. He could make out the drops of sweat on her brow as she worried the plastic ties on her wrists. He could hear her teeth grind in frustration and see the cords of her long neck stand out like a schooner’s rigging.
“Are you looking at something in particular?” said Chevie.
Riley started to mumble a denial, but Chevie interrupted him.
“You want to hear something ironic, kid?”
“Yes, miss. As you please.”
She tugged on her cuffs, which held her arms fast around the toilet’s plumbing. “I find it ironic that I could really use a bathroom right now.”
Riley tried not to smile.
“And this is ironic because you are tethered to a bowl and yet cannot use it?”
“Exactly.”
“Thank you, Chevie. I have often encountered the term irony in my reading but never truly understood it till now.”
“To educate and protect,” said Chevie. “Though I’ve been falling down a little on the protecting.”
“It was bad luck that you came up against Albert Garrick. Of all the coves you could have scooped out of the past, he is the worst, no doubt about it.”
“He’s just a man, you know, Riley. Whatever you think about him, that’s all he is.”
Riley slumped in the bath. “No. There are men who are somehow more than men. Garrick has always been one of these, and now even more so. The trip from the past has given him gifts, I would swear on it.”
Gifts, thought Chevie. Or mutations.
“Garrick is truly beyond your experience,” continued Riley. “Mine too.”
“You make him sound like Jack the Ripper.”
This casual reference caused the blood to drain from Riley’s face as a memory hit him like a mallet, and while his mind wandered, Chevie shifted her focus to the room beyond. For the last fifteen minutes the only sounds had been typical agents-on-babysitting-duty noises: sharp comments, jock laughter, coffee percolating, and an almost incessant flushing from the second bathroom.
“Hey!” she called. “Waldo! Duff! You want to open the door? We’re feeling a bit unloved in here.”
In response someone turned up the TV. The loud bass of dance music bounced off the door.
“I hate those guys,” muttered Chevie. “I am going to work real hard, get promoted, then fire every last one of them.” She noticed Riley’s stricken face. “Are you okay, kid? Riley?”
Riley’s eyes came back to the present. “Garrick told me a story once about old Leather Apron, Jack the Ripper. He playacted the whole thing in our digs.”
“Don’t tell me, Garrick is Jack the Ripper.”
Riley’s head jerked backward as if Garrick would hear this accusation. “No. Certainly not. Garrick hated Jack the Ripper.”
Chevie kept one ear on the noises outside and the other on Riley’s tale.
“He hated the Ripper? Weren’t those guys like peas in a pod?”
Riley sat up as far as he could. “No. Oh, no. Old Jack did what Garrick would never do. He courted the bluebottles and the press gentlemen. Sent ’em notes and so forth. Gave himself a nickname. Garrick prided himself on being a like specter with his business, and here was this night slasher leaving kidneys and hearts strewn about all over Whitechapel.”
Riley’s eyes glazed over as he lost himself in the story.
“The Ripper was busy before Garrick got me, but the case obsessed him for years after. I knew to stay clear if the papers were running a story on Jack. Until one night Garrick comes home, just as the sun hangs between the spires. He shakes me gentle, like we are genuine family, and his touch was so soft that I came out of my dream thinking my father had come and I says, ‘Father?’”
Riley paused to spit toward the plughole. “
I was barely eight years in the world and knew no better, but the word is magical to Garrick, and he smiles like Alice’s cat. ‘I suppose I am,’ he says. ‘That is my responsibility.’
“I am full awake by this point and more than a little afraid. Garrick is covered from head to foot in blood, like he’d been swimming in the slaughterhouse trough. Even his teeth are red. He must’ve seen how scared I was, for he says then, ‘Don’t worry, son. This is not my blood. Jack will be ripping no more.’ And then he waits for this nugget to sink in.