S.M. Peters - Whitechapel Gods

When Duty Calls

John beckoned into the dark. Come out, come out, my grubbers. Dont you want to see your uncle at work? Two wide-eyed, emaciated children shuffled out of the dark, dressed in naught but rags and grime, towards Pennyedge, giving the groaning prisoner a wide berth.

Tell me, said John to the prisoner. He was one of the three?

One of them fell from the tower. The other was taken by the Boiler Men.

Johns eyebrows squirmed. The Boiler Men? Foul news. Hell have to be retrieved. He locked iron rings around the prisoners legs and another around his neck.

Pennyedges unfaltering stare began to grate on Bergens nerves. It was a constant reminder that he was an outsider, an employee, rather than family.

John loosened the drawstring of the bag over the prisoners head. He gestured to the children. Step up, little pups. Dont be afraid.

They cautiously moved around to stand in front of Pennyedge. With a flourish, John whipped the bag off. The children screamed and fled back into their corner.

My hunchback is quite a craftsman, isnt he? John caressed the iron bands that encircled the prisoners head, held there by thick nails punched into his skull.

Marvelous work. Dont you think so, grubbers?

How dare you do this to children? Bergen growled. His hand twitched towards his gun. Duty was all that kept him from putting a bullet through the mans forehead.

WHITECHAPEL GODS

S. M. Peters

ROC
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Copyright S. M. Peters, 2008
All rights reserved

ISBN: 1-4295-9374-1

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For my wife

Acknowledgments

To the incomparable Alan Moore, who provided the inspiration for this work; to Don Maass and Don McQuinn for their down-to-earth advice; to Liz for giving me a shot; to Joel, Fraser, James, and the rest for years of good times and great ideas; to my brother for his help in revision and for his friendship; to my parents for their support and love; to Mike for sorting out that shillings/ pence confusion; to Jessi for everything; to allthanks.

The First Day

A horrible black labyrinth, think many people, reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations; its streets, mere kennels of horrent putrefaction; its every wall, its every object, slimy with the indigenous ooze of the place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery and whose recreation is murder; the catacombs of London darker, more tortuous and more dangerous than those of Rome, and saturated with foul life.

Arthur G. Morrison, 1889

Chapter 1

They first came to me before I was old enough to speak. She was a red heat from beneath my crib; He, a scratching from the shadow beneath my windowsill. They spoke to me not in words, but in intentions and desires that my terrified infant mind could not comprehend. I cried out and hid from Them beneath my blankets. My mother rocked me and soothed me and told me They were imaginary. How could she have known, I wonder, when I was not old enough to tell her what I saw?

I. xi

Bailey was not surprised when the doctors first incision drew up something darker than blood.

The patient writhed and struggled in the bed, fighting a pain that distorted his features into something less than human. He was a comrade named Tor Kyrre, though Bailey could barely recognise him. Spikes of iron had sprouted from his bald pate and his bare chest was riddled with gears and bulbs of all types of metals, the tips of much larger growths festering beneath the skin. As the doctor made his second cut, lateral and shallow, across the base of the rib cage, black oil welled up, slipping down Tors flanks and staining the sheets and blankets.

The doctors called the disease the morbus imperceptus incrementum. Other folk called it the clacks.

Tor spasmed and groaned, the pain of whatever was eating him inside proving too much for even the powerful whiskey the doctor had fed him.

Bailey sucked on his cigar, inhaling the smoke right down to the base of his lungs, where it burned in tiny bursts of heat. It was wrong that a man should die this way, that he should be so robbed of his dignity in his final hours.

Bailey bit back an impulse to ask Dr. Chestle to cease the surgery and let his patient pass on.

No more! Not one more life will I surrender to this horrid city. Chestle, though he looked frail and of weak nerves, was as skilled as any two of his peers, and Tor had the fortitude of a bear. If this blasted machine-disease insisted on taking him it would have a fight on its hands.

He was about to slip away into the hall when Chestle cried out. The doctor jumped back from his patient, wildly flailing his left hand. Something black toppled to the floor, flinging oil and bits of foulness all across the floorboards.

Chestle backed into the corner, holding his scalpel in front of him like a weapon.

The object twisted and gyrated, slashing at the floor with shapeless, pointed appendages. Bailey took three steps towards it, swept up a stool, and crushed the object under the stools foot, bearing down on it with the weight of his knee. A screech and a crunch followed, and the thing went still.

Bailey lifted the stool to reveal a twisted mass of metal gears and articulated fingers.

Was this the source?

Paler than his patient, the doctor nodded.

Then youre finished. Sew him up.

The look of blank terror lingered on Chestles face as he again bent over Tor and went to work. Fifteen minutes later, with Tors chest sealed and covered in gauze and bandages, Chestle nodded at the door. Bailey opened it, admitting Tors wife, who went directly to her husbands side and conferred with the doctor in her broken English. Bailey extinguished his cigar now that a lady was present.