The Gammon stepped into the blow, embraced his assailant, and held him tightly against the anti-stab vest he wore under his waistcoat while he brought the muzzle of his UMP9 up under the pimp’s chin.
Eve had other worries. She whirled and opened her left hand, huffing with effort as she flung her will at the marbles. There was no betraying bang of gunpowder and no whip-crack as they broke the sound barrier—she wasn’t that strong—but a rippling hiss as the glass bullets drilled holes in the mist, and, almost simultaneously, thudded into flesh.
Eve was reaching for another handful of glass beads even as she heard a bubbling moan and a body falling; footsteps fading into the mist told her that their third assailant was out of the picture. She finished her pirouette, to see the Gammon had marched their attacker back against the wall and pinned his wrists to the crumbling brickwork.
“What part of no didn’t you understand?” the Gammon asked mildly. The pimp gobbled incoherently. He sighed. “Never mind.” He pulled the trigger and Eve winced at the bang. Contrary to movie folklore, suppressors didn’t actually silence guns—they just rendered them less deafening. At least he had the sense to select single-shot, she thought. “We should get a move on,” he commented as if nothing untoward had happened. His gaze tracked past her and came to rest on the other body in the alley. “Looks like you didn’t need me after all.” He sounded affronted.
“Nonsense, a lone woman on her own in a place like this would just attract more trouble.” Eve kicked the Apache aside, then checked her bodyguard for damage. “Button your coat, he slashed your stabby to ribbons and I left my sewing kit a hundred and thirty years in the future.” She took his arm. “Now let’s be off before their friends come to steal their clothes.”
The Gammon shook his head as they hurried deeper into the byways of Whitechapel. “Just as long as you pay for my rabies shots when we get home, ma’am.”
They were halfway to Whitechapel when Doc started on the Ripper lore; to everyone’s surprise it was Game Boy, not Wendy or Rebecca, who punched him first.
But before that happened they found their way onto the ghost roads.
The graveyard was tiny and ancient, tucked behind a church near Pembroke Square. Nobody had been buried in it since the eighteenth century. By their own time it had long since been redeveloped and turned into a commercial property let.
The mist swirled thick behind the lich-gate and the air tasted of muddy river silt, of things left buried and now long forgotten, so ancient that even the ghosts of the mourners’ grandchildren had faded. Imp led them between headstones and family memorials to a grove of beech trees that clustered like stately pallbearers around a forbiddingly gated crypt. He checked his papers in the glow of a cheap penlight: “It’s here but we need to spring the lock—” He frowned. “Shit. Can anybody pick—”
Wendy rolled her eyes. “Leave it to me.” She crouched. “Torch.” She held out her hand for his penlight, then shone it in the keyhole. “Hah.” She touched the lock, and an age-blackened key shimmered into existence. It turned easily, then vanished as she pulled the gate open: dust to dust, ashes to ashes. “What now?”
“Eh, well.” Imp looked abashed, as if he’d just been caught with his fly at half-mast. “Follow me? Oh, remember not to eat or drink anything you find in here or you won’t be able to leave. And the natives aren’t friendly.”
Doc said, “Crosscheck your buddies?” Then he nudged Imp. “Is the eating or drinking thing for real?”
“I don’t know, Dad might have been gaslighting me—I was only fourteen—but do you really want to find out? Are you feeling lucky?”
“Babes in the fucking woods,” Wendy murmured disgustedly.
Rebecca looked at her sharply, then took her hand. “Stick with me, I can always find my way to wherever I’m going.”
Wendy gently tugged her hand free. “Where we’re going I might need both hands for fighting.”
“Stop it stop it stop it!” Game Boy quietly shouted, his voice breaking in a quiet shriek: “I can’t stand this shit!” He darted ahead and ran down the steps leading into the crypt before anyone could stop him.
“Welp,” said Doc, diving after him: and that was that.
Lit by smartphone flashlights, the crypt was a disappointment. Stone walls, stone floors, thick stone shelves fifty centimeters apart. Some of them bore crumbling wooden boxes, while others were covered in leaf mold and rat droppings. But as they moved deeper, the shelves disappeared, the walls narrowing to a stone tunnel that forced Doc and Imp to lower their heads. Then the tunnel roof disappeared, leaving lichen-crusted flagstones underfoot that formed the paving of a sunken lane surrounded by mossy hedge-topped banks that rose out of sight.
The lane was almost as dark as the tomb itself. Moonlight wasn’t filtering this far down. It felt as ancient as the first stone-age settlements up the river on whose banks the Romans would later build the trading camp of Londinium. A couple of times Wendy thought she saw a faint flicker like swamp light; and her ears kept straining to catch a faint, malignant titter that seemed to hover just beneath the threshold of hearing, masked by the clatter of five pairs of boots beating on stone.
After thirty seconds or twenty minutes (it was hard to tell) Del complained: “This is creeping me out. Does anyone else feel like you’re taking seven steps forward every time you lift your feet?”
“That’s a feature, not a bug,” said Imp. “We’re on a ley line, remember?”
“Just stick close and we’ll be fine,” Wendy reassured her.
“Not necessarily.” Doc sounded indecently smug about something.
“What makes you say that?”
“We’re doing okay for now,” he said, “but wait until we get to Whitechapel.”
“Don’t wanna know,” said Game Boy. He sounded tense but Doc missed the warning signs and mansplained regardless:
“The year is 1888. Whitechapel hasn’t been
