The Book of Daniel (29 page)

The fight was over very quickly. The Cyclops deployed its ghostly wings and attempted to leap over its frenzied opponent’s head, obviously hoping to outmanoeuvre its challenger, but the move ended in disaster. Instead, it found itself rising into the path of a red and silver cartwheel: the Berserker’s sword, thrown with deadly accuracy on a complementary trajectory. With the sound of an axe hitting an old, diseased tree, the two of them collided in midair, severing one of the Cyclops’s wings and sending the creature tumbling to the ground. The demon rolled to its feet, hissing with pain, only to be bowled over again as the Berserker ploughed into it. I watched, spellbound, as the two titans grappled with one another, tearing at each other with their bare hands, throwing up a storm of blood and dust, fighting like dogs over a scrap of meat; and then, with a final, decisive bear-hug and accompanying deadwood crack, the Berserker rose up victorious from the skirmish, like a bloody phoenix.

The effortlessness with which the Berserker had just dispatched its four rivals was the last straw. God hadn’t listened to my prayer, and I felt a fool for having wasted my breath. The victor of the savagery I had just witnessed roared its triumph and shook the corpse of its final foe, and with this vulgar display of power, I knew my end was inevitable. But alongside this feeling of resignation, I also made a decision: there was no way this particular demon was going to collect the bounty on my soul. If I was going to die, then it would be by my own hand.

I felt a chill run through me at the thought of giving up, of finally letting go of Jo once and for all, but the evidence of my own eyes filled me with an unarguable despair that was just as icy. I knew that I didn’t stand a chance against a creature that had just stamped on four of Hell’s legion like ants. If I was going to Hell, then fuck it, I’d rather walk in the front door under my own steam than be dragged in by this thing in front of me. And even if I
could
somehow escape, what then? To spend the rest of eternity cowering in the rubble of New Jerusalem now that God had abandoned me, my permanent separation from Jo just as torturous as if I had been consigned to Hell anyway? What kind of life was that to look forward to? A fresh wave of agony rolled over me as the Cyclops’s poison bit once again, but the pain only strengthened my resolve. I had to act now, before I was too weak to do so. I hoisted my sword up, blade pointed towards my heart, preparing to meet my fate. If Paolo were still there, he would no doubt have been horrified at the sin that I was about to commit, but he wasn’t there—no-one was—and besides, what exactly was left that God could do to punish me if I
did
commit suicide?

Time was running out for me to commit this last act of defiance. I had barely a moment to mutter a silent apology to Jo for having failed her again—and for the last time—before the Berserker’s head swung towards me, galvanising my arms to drive the sword as hard as I could into my heart. I gasped at the pain—immense, crippling, glorious—and smiled to myself, feeling the warm slosh of my blood against my teeth.

“Tough luck, arsehole,” I tried to shout at the demon, but all that came out was a satisfying gout of red. Instead, I looked into its eyes, hoping to convey the joy of this one last minor victory by staring it down. But now that I could see its face, what I saw there vaporised every last morsel of satisfaction I’d had about bringing my life—my second life—to an end.

On each of the demon’s cheeks was a ragged, cross-shaped rip.

Through the sea of pain, the penny slowly dropped.

This was no demon.

This was Jack.

“Now why did ye go and do a silly thing like that for?”

I spluttered a protest of blood at the dawning horror of my mistake, but that didn’t alter the unarguable fact of the sword stuck through my body. Jack strode towards me, smiling lopsidedly and showing little concern over my predicament. He stopped just short of the puddle I was slowly collapsing into and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at me like a man contemplating a job that needed doing, but who wasn’t quite sure where to start. A series of tuts accompanied the shaking of his head.

“Well, I’ll repeat what I said to you the first time we met, Little Man, and that’s that you’ve got balls. No brains, maybe, but balls, aye. How do you ever expect to get out of here if you go sticking yourself with your own toothpick?”

With no warning, he raised one booted foot and pushed me down flat on my back, or at least as flat as was possible with a sword sticking out of it. A fresh surge of warmth seeped out of my wound, washing a little bit more of my consciousness out with it.

“What the fuck are you playing at?” I asked lucidly in my head, but from my mouth I couldn’t even manage a croak.

“Hold still now, this might sting a bit.”

With this colossal understatement, Jack planted his boot on my chest, pinning me down, and then wrenched the sword free. It felt like he was taking half the contents of my body along with it, but when King Arthur finally held his Excalibur aloft, only the merest trace of blood marred the blade.

“Right then, sir, let’s see about gettin’ you somewhere a little more congenial. Upsy daisy!”

A hand as large as the blade of a gravedigger’s shovel grabbed my arm and hoisted me up unceremoniously over one of Jack’s expansive shoulders. He began to stride away, gustily singing hymns, pausing only to retrieve his sword. “Come on, Devorah, me old girl. We’re not done with these buggers yet!”

I assumed we were heading back towards the relative safety of New Jerusalem, but all I could see from my perch was the back of Jack’s armour and the blood streaming across it. He carried me as effortlessly as the angels did—or at least as they had, before I’d been abandoned. The feverish thought rushed through my mind that maybe God had changed His mind, and that somehow Jack
was
an angel, sent to rescue me after all. Certainly he seemed to cut down any demons that tried to intercept us with the same ruthless efficiency, and even though I couldn’t actually see them fall, I could surely feel and hear the ease with which he tore through their number.

Some of my thoughts must have leaked out through my mouth, because Jack suddenly interrupted his cheerful slaughtering—of both demons and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’—with a wheezy fit of laughter.

“Angel? Me? You’re too kind. Old Jack’s been given many names over the years, but no-one’s ever called him an angel before. Usually the opposite! But I show them whose side Jack is on, prove it to them all, me and my Devorah.”

My ride got bumpy again for a moment as Jack dealt with another assailant, but I was still too weak to twist my neck around to see what was happening. My vision was filled only with Jack’s back, slick with my own poisoned blood and that of his foes—and even the sight of that was blurry. The only thing that I could sense clearly was Jack’s deep, rumbling voice, soaking into my mind through the tenuous grasp on consciousness I struggled to maintain.

Chapter 19

“I
apologise for the rough nature of our passage, my friend, but the denizens of this place make for inconsiderate travelling companions. And they can sense your weakness, yes they can; fancy stabbing yourself with your own sword, tut. There’s a tall tale you can tell one day, that’s for sure! But not today, not in your condition. No, today, you listen instead. I want to tell you the sorry tale of your friend Jack! Mayhap it will make the journey pass more quickly, but if not that, at least keep your mind from your wounds.

“Once upon a time, before this place, Jack was favoured by God, yes. An important man was I; a surgeon, at the Royal London Hospital no less! Very famous! Very refined! In those days, Devorah was only little. I could hold her in the palm of my hand, and the cutting was so soft, so gentle. I cut away the bad things and saved people’s lives. Just like now, ha!

“But I did not always succeed. It began with a fog—like a pea soup, do they still say that?—and with the fog there came an accident. A young woman was brought into the hospital, knocked down by a cab that was so enveloped by fog that the driver didn’t even realise what he had done; or, if you believed the old crone that bore the victim into the hospital, perhaps he was being paid enough not to care. Either possibility yielded the same outcome, which was to send for surgeon Jack with his dear blade and his needles and his threads, and for him to try to put Miss Humpty back together again.

“Alas! The poor thing was much too broken for me to save her. After much redness, with a shiver and a sigh, she passed over. Heart-breaking! Such rosy cheeks, even in death. Little did I know at the time what manner of creature I had before me; if I had, I would have shed no tears. But in my ignorance, I was sad, too sad even to wash the blood of failure properly from my hands. With heavy feet, I dragged myself out of the theatre, making for the departed’s companion—whom I took to be her mother—to offer her my condolences and my prayers.

“What a shock for poor Jack when the old prune turned on him like a scalded cat, blaming
him
for her friend’s death! I tried to protest my innocence, but nothing I said would calm her. All I could do was try to steer her to a side room before she disturbed the other patients, but as soon as I reached out to touch her, she flung a torrent of strange words at me in no language I had ever heard before and declared to all listening that her lover—her lover!—would be avenged. The Rotting Log Coven would see to it! Her fury seemingly spent, the hag turned her back on stunned Jack and stormed off into the night.

“Hard to believe that with all my strength, I was frightened, eh? But Jack was a God-fearing man, and if he feared God, then he also feared the Enemy. Witches! I did not dream that such as that still existed in the modern world, and I didn’t need to understand the words she had uttered to feel her hex sitting on me like a toad on a gravestone. Sure enough, over the next few days, a strange weakness began to seep into my bones. No appetite—imagine that with one so big as I! And no more surgery for Jack, either. I sent word to the hospital that I was ill, and would spend a few days in convalescence, catching up on my reading; but ah, little did they know what kind of reading Jack was about. Not the unimportant words of so-called great minds, no; instead, the sweet words of the Torah filled my head, even as my belly emptied. And there it was, written clearly: ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’ Adonai commands it! Other, darker books told of ways to recognise the spoor of the sorceress, and how to confront their kind. Those Italian fops with their fancy buildings and holy smoke, Jack has no time for them in general; but their Inquisition, ah, they knew their business.

“The witch’s evil hunger gnawed at my frame, but I had strength enough. And purpose, aye! From the kitchen, beautiful Devorah called to me, now longer, brighter, sharper than before. Angry! But where to find the coven? I had an idea. The crone who cursed me was old and frail, not like Jack. She could not have carried her young companion far to get to the hospital. And if the instigator of my misery was so perverse as to fornicate with one of her own gender, then of course, the best place to start the hunt was in that nearby, sordid lair of debauchery: Whitechapel!”

The trickle of my blood running down Jack’s back had slowed, and even though a fresh wave of agony lanced through my body with every jolt that Jack’s uneven progress through the demons produced, I thought I could feel my fever receding. I started to offer up a prayer of thanks, but then I remembered how I had ended up in this situation in the first place, and cut it dead. My strength slowly returned and Hell’s grasping fingers receded—at least, for the moment—allowing me to focus more easily on Jack’s tale. And at his mention of Whitechapel, there suddenly came a horrifying suspicion about the giant over whose shoulder I was slung. Could it really be that my rescuer was… Jack the Ripper?

I must have said something out loud. “Aye, that’s what they called me in the end, and maybe rightly so. But not at first, though, no sir! At the start, Jack was no ripper. He was afraid, yes, and watchful. The eyes in the fog, that was me. I wasn’t insane, not then—not now, either, maybe, ha!—and had no desire to kill an innocent. No desire to kill at all, for that matter, but Adonai had made it clear that’s what I must do. As a surgeon, I had saved lives; as a witch-hunter, I was to take them. Balance from the unbalanced, how do you like that?

“It was not long before I picked up the trail. There are many shadows in the night, and Jack was in all of them. The business dealings of the people who strolled through Whitechapel were always conducted loudly, brazenly, raucously; and pillow talk could be easily overheard by one scurrying with the rats in the alleyways. I soon knew where to find a member of the coven: a brewer of love potions, if you please, and no surprise.

“I was cautious. Mayhap this strumpet was innocent and only sold bottles of lies to her customers, having in fact no knowledge of the dark arts at all. But if she was indeed a sorceress, then Jack must be sure to strike swiftly lest she turn her foul spells upon him. For a while, I observed the antics of her clients and their purchases, and the effects of her philtres made it clear that she was suckling at Satan’s teat. Under their power, the unwilling became wanton, and the accompanying leers of the witch’s customers confirmed they were up to no good but their own.

“The proof obtained, it was time for Jack to conduct a little… interview with this harlot. How can one remove a curse? Can its progress be slowed? Where could I find the one who had put the hex upon me? Many questions, but be careful not to let that witchy tongue flap too much, Jack, or she’ll doubtless compound your misery! I chose my moment carefully, late at night—although not the witching hour, ha ha!—but those supernatural senses of hers were sharp. As she staggered from the warmth of some dim saloon, reeling with cheap alcohol, I approached, but she turned and spoke to me before I could get close enough.”

Jack’s voice changed to that of his victim. “‘Alright, my lovely?’ she crooned. ‘Don’t be shy now, old Polly always has time for customers. I’ve seen you in the shadows. I was wondering how long it would be before you got your courage up enough to approach me. But then that’s Polly’s speciality: potions to help fine gentlemen such as yourself to get their courage up!’ A knowing laugh. A lewd wink. Disgusting creature! But her guard was down, so I shuffled forward, playing the role of timid Romeo, head down, Devorah hidden close by my side in the folds of my coat.