The Monster Within (3 page)

As Jack gazed about his room with satisfaction, he was once again amazed at how far
he'd come since being stuck in the orphanage, where he'd shared a room of this size
with a dozen boys. At Bee Street, he had his own bed, chest of drawers and an en
suite bathroom. Luxury, by comparison!

Jack changed quickly, throwing on a blue-and-white striped shirt and dark pants.
He pulled on his green coat, containing goggles, a disguise kit, pencils and other
paraphernalia. Finally, he slipped in the locket photograph of his parents and compass:
he always carried them with him. The photograph was of the three of them dressed
as
The Flying Sparrows
, and the compass was the last gift they had given to Jack
before they died.

Scarlet had changed into a grey day dress and sensible shoes. ‘You see the importance
of education,' she said as they strolled along the hall.

‘You don't believe in Toby's monster?'

‘And you do?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Education dispels darkness so we don't have to believe in monsters, ghosts or demons,'
Scarlet said.

‘You're not about to start telling me again about classical music, are you?'

She sighed. ‘I wouldn't dream of it, otherwise you might try sharing some of that
American jass with me.'

‘
Jazz
,' he corrected her. Phoebe Carfax, Mr Doyle's old friend and an extraordinary
archaeologist, who they'd met on their last adventure, had sent Jack a few records.
He had taken quite a liking to it. ‘And I thought you enjoyed it.'

‘It's an acquired taste.'

‘Like Brumbie Biscuitlid?'

‘
Brinkie Buckeridge
,' Scarlet said, rolling her eyes. ‘Will you ever get that name
right?'

‘Probably not.'

Scarlet's greatest love was a series of adventure novels written by Baroness Zakharov.
They featured a larger than life heroine, Brinkie Buckeridge, who, with derring-do
and aplomb, managed to vanquish evildoers and blackguards alike—and all without
breaking a fingernail.

‘This tale of the monster does remind me of one of her novels—
The Adventure of the
Six-Fingered Glove
.'

‘I can't even imagine what that would look like,' Jack sighed.

‘It looks like, well, a Six-Fingered glove. Anyway, Brinkie finds the glove on level
sixty-seven of her home.'

‘That's a big house.'

‘Larger-than-life characters need big houses,' she said. ‘Hers is called
Thorbridge
.
Anyway, it turns out
the glove belongs to a creature made from several different
animals. It has the head of a mouse, the body of a rhinoceros and the legs of a giraffe.'

‘The head of a mouse,' Jack mused. ‘That's a very small head.'

‘It turns out to be a fairly harmless monster.'

‘A zombie would have been more fun,' Jack said. He had been reading a series of adventure
novels entitled
Zombie Airships
and had become fixated on the living dead. ‘A crewman
finds a zombie in the hold. He gets bitten and, before you know it, there's a zombie
plague.'

‘Zombies aren't real.'

‘That's what they said on the airship,' Jack said. ‘And then—
bite!
'

They met Toby back in the waiting room, and within minutes all three were on a train
heading to Whitechapel. It was an old Hooper 55, an almost obsolete locomotive. Jack
peered about with interest. The people on board looked poor: thin, dirty and unhealthy.
Three men sat near the back of the carriage, passing a whisky bottle between them.

The train pulled into Whitechapel Station. Toby led them down an alley. While much
of London was being torn down and rebuilt, this part of the city was still old and
rundown. Jack spotted a woman in a doorway with a flagon under her arm. Further along,
a cat, missing most of its fur, ran across the street chased by a mange-covered dog.
There were a few shops, but many pubs.

‘We're not far now,' Toby said.

They skirted down another narrow alley until a man appeared at the far end.

‘Look what we got here,' he said. Unshaven and filthy, he had a flat nose as if he'd
been in too many fights. ‘Some toff kids wanting to give me some money.'

Jack looked behind. Two other men, one with a white, cloudy eye, and the other with
a black beard, now blocked the alley entrance.

It's the men from the train!

‘Stay between us,' Jack said to Toby.

‘There's an easy way,' Black Beard said. ‘And a hard way.'

‘We're not giving you a penny,' Scarlet said.

‘Then we're gonna do this the hard way.'

CHAPTER FOUR

Flat Nose laughed as Scarlet squared up to him.

‘This girly thinks she can fight. She—'

He got no further as Scarlet slammed a fist into his stomach, followed by an uppercut
to his nose. Grunting, he fell in a heap.

Jack snatched up a piece of pipe from the ground and waved it at the other two men.

‘Just give us yer money, kid,' Cloudy Eye said. ‘And no-one gets hurt.'

Without waiting for a reply, he swung a fist. Jack ducked, slamming the pipe into
his knee. The man cried out and Jack punched his good eye, knocking him out.

This only left Black Beard. He swung, clipping
Jack across the side of his head,
and the blow made Jack see stars.

‘That's enough!'

The voice came from behind Scar Face, who glanced back, and Jack saw his opportunity,
kicking straight up into the man's groin. Scar Face slumped, choking, hatred in his
eyes.

‘I said that's enough!' It was an old woman, wizened and tiny like a witch. She cracked
a walking stick against the wall. ‘When Granny Diamond speaks, you listen!'

Cursing over their shoulders, the three men hobbled away. The woman called Granny
Diamond peered closely at Jack and Scarlet, then her eyes focused on Toby.

‘You're Sally's boy, aint ya?' she said.

‘Toby.'

‘Why're you with these toffs? You in trouble, boy?'

‘No, Granny.' Toby looked around, fearfully. ‘I brought ‘em here because of the monster.'

‘How're they going to help?'

Scarlet cut in. ‘Ma'am, we work with Mr Ignatius Doyle, the detective,' she said.
‘Toby asked us to come and investigate.'

‘I see.' She regarded them, the lines in her face deepening. ‘You best come to Granny's
home and we'll talk. It's not safe for foreigners in these parts.'

Jack was about to point out they were English, but then understood what she meant:
they were foreign to this part of London.

Granny led them out of the alley and to a door under
a set of rickety stairs. A faded
sign on the building read
Pete's Papers and General Supplies
. Inside was a single
cramped room, jammed full with a bed, chest of drawers and a bench. A deck of cards
sat on the drawers.

Granny was very short, little more than five feet tall, with wispy grey hair. She
wore half-a-dozen layers of torn clothing; none of it seemed to match. Her hands
were gnarled with rheumatism, her fingernails long. She pointed to the bench and
they sat on it.

‘So Toby's told you about the monster,' she said.

‘You know about it?' Jack said.

‘I know everything that happens here,' Granny Diamond chuckled. ‘A few in these parts
have seen it at night. They say it comes out at the witching hour when the moon be
dark.'

‘The witching hour?'

‘Three in the morning.'

‘And where does it come from?' Scarlet asked.

‘From under the streets.'

Jack and Scarlet exchanged glances. Under the streets could only mean the sewer system.
They had been into the sewers once before and it was a claustrophobic place. The
London sewers ran for miles beneath the city, draining out into the Thames, and to
the sea. They were dangerous and ancient tunnels. While most of it had been modernised
in recent years, some sections had not been visited for decades. It was rumoured
that people had become lost in them and were never seen again.

‘Have you seen it, Granny?' Toby asked. ‘The monster?'

‘I have.' She nodded sagely. ‘Old women have trouble sleeping. The ghosts of the
past won't let us be.'

‘Where was it?' Jack asked.

Granny nodded to the window. ‘The street outside. I heard a sound near my door. I
looked out. Couldn't see nothing, at first. Then I saw the cat.'

‘The cat?'

‘It was purring in the shadows on the other side under the awning. Then the shadow
moved.' Granny swallowed. ‘It was a monster. Seven feet tall. It picked up the cat
and took it away.' She fixed them with a stare. ‘Even monsters got to eat.'

A cat-eating monster
, Jack thought.
Could there be truth to this story?

There was a maintenance building for the sewers about a block away, Granny explained.
‘It's the only place big enough for a creature like that to enter the sewers,' she
said. ‘But you shouldn't go down. It's dangerous.'

They didn't answer. As they stood, Scarlet stepped on her dress and slipped, her
hand hitting the table and knocking the cards off. They scattered, but one flipped
face up. She picked it up, examining the picture.

‘This is…' Scarlet started.

‘Death,' Granny said. ‘I do tarot readings. It's how an old lady like me earns her
living. You needn't worry too much about that card, miss. The cards have many meanings.'

With that cryptic remark, Granny ushered them out. Jack and Scarlet took Toby to
a nearby factory where
he said his mother worked. Inside, a hundred sewing machines
were operating, women at all of them, and the noise was tremendous. Small children
ran from one end to the other, carrying armfuls of fabric and clothing.

A woman hurried over. It was Toby's mother, Sally. She wore a plain grey dress and
a scarf over her head.

‘Toby!' she scolded. ‘Where have you been? I've been so worried.'

‘We came here to investigate Toby's monster,' Jack said. ‘Have you seen it?'

‘I haven't,' Sally said, looking about fearfully. ‘But a few have. I don't know what
it is, but I know one thing.'

‘What's that?' Scarlet asked.

‘You had best be careful. Whatever it is, it's big.'

Jack memorised their address and promised to report back. They left Toby and his
mother and weaved through the narrow streets of Whitechapel. Scarlet had fallen silent.
Jack asked her what was wrong.

‘I have two things on my mind,' she said. ‘The first is this monster. And the second
is that tarot card I knocked onto the floor.'

‘It's just a card.'

‘But it was the
Death
card. I don't normally place belief in such things, but there
was a Brinkie Buckeridge book—'

‘Isn't there always?'

‘—about the tarot. In
The Adventure of the Hopping Tarot Cards
, Brinkie and Wilbur
Dusseldorf investigate a series of murders based on the tarots.' She shivered. ‘Some of them die in quite gruesome ways.'

‘I'm sure they do,' Jack said. ‘You can't take much stock in that sort of thing.
Mrs McGregor, the fortune teller from the circus, told me she made it all up.'

Scarlet raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?'

‘She used a technique called
cold reading
. She would take note of how people were
dressed, if they had jewellery, if they seemed happy or sad, and judge their reactions
to what she said. Then she would fish for information, and feed it back to them as
if she'd thought of it herself!'

‘Goodness.'

‘It made some people happy,' he said. ‘And even Granny said the death card doesn't
necessarily mean death. It can just be the ending of something, or it signals a change
in the air.'

‘That makes me feel a little better.'

‘It would be different if there were a zombie card,' Jack continued, stifling a grin.
‘It would mean you, or someone you knew, was about to become one.'

Scarlet rolled her eyes.

Off Osborn Place, they found the sewerage maintenance building. It was squat and
square with metal doors and a small barred window. Cobwebs laced the glass. The roof
had tiles missing and the doors were red with rust. Jack pointed at a nearby wall.
The letters
VC
had been painted on them.

‘It looks like someone from the Valkyrie Circle has been here,' he said.

‘They probably have members everywhere,' Scarlet
said. ‘Or people who consider themselves
affiliated with the organisation.'

Jack stared doubtfully at the building. ‘Doesn't look like anyone's been in or out
of there in years.' He tugged at the door handle and it shrieked open. ‘Or maybe
they have.'

The interior was gloomy, smelling of mould. A metal spiral staircase disappeared
into the ground. A bird chirped in a nest in the corner of the roof. A starling.

Scarlet pointed at their feet. There were footprints in the dirt. ‘Looks like someone's
been here before us,' she said. ‘Whoever they are, they've got big feet.'

Jack placed his own foot next to the print. It was tiny by comparison.

Peering into the darkened stairwell, he said, ‘I suppose we should go down.'

‘Mr Doyle would advise caution.'

‘I'm sure he would, but we won't find out anything by staying here.' Jack produced
a candle from his green coat and lit it. ‘Let's take a look.'

But the flickering light barely banished the gloom. A worse smell, like something
dead, wafted up. Jack heard the distant splash of running water.