The Humbug Murders (41 page)

Humbug stood before us. Cloak, veil, skeletal hands. Yet—unarmed. Now was the time to flee. I could smell the sickly odor of chloroform she'd used to render Sunderland's men inert when she'd come at them from behind. Yet I had heard her voice. Knew exactly who was under those veils and still thought it impossible, though the sudden resurrection and second death of George Sunderland should have prepared me for anything.

A ghostly chill settled on my neck as the voice of my one-time master whispered,
No more, Ebenezer. Just you!

“Nellie Pearl,” Adelaide said beside me.

With another peal of laughter, the actress tore back the veils and stared at us with that same malevolent gleam I'd seen in the mirror the last time we'd visited.

“Nellie Pearl's dead,” she said. “Don't you read the newspapers? Hmmm . . . I will say, I can't help but be curious: how long will it take people to start wondering what happened to Sarah?”

“The chorus girl, the one who looked so much like you,” I said. “She was the one you were dragging around in St. Paul's. You kept us far enough away so that we would not realize she said nothing the entire time, the voice we heard was yours.”

Adelaide shivered. “You had to be sure her face was destroyed so no one would see her scar and know it wasn't you.”

“Aren't you two the clever little ducks,” Nellie said. “Quacking away. I meet so many of your kind. Like dear, disfigured Crisparkle. The greatest costumer I ever had, though it was Sarah he loved. I suppose he thought that little scar of hers made them alike. But his wounds, hideous.”

“He made that for you,” I said, pointing at her costume and gloves, assembling the pieces of the puzzle strewn before me. Then I recalled the man with the torn-apart face that Dickens had gazed upon in the underground chamber where the bodies fished from the Thames were stored. “Before you killed him.”

“Clever, clever!” Nellie said, beaming. “I'm so very proud of you both. I've slaughtered so many stupid animals. Stupid and trusting. It'll be a pleasure to gut you both and send you to your reward.”

Adelaide stumbled back. “Why? Why my poor Tom? Why all of this?”

“Well,” Nellie said as she bent low, working the blade free of Sunderland's now-still form. “I could say it dates back to some of those awful Bible lessons Jane Fezziwig would give, ‘do onto others
before
they can do onto you' or whatever it was. . . .”

Dipping her hand in the spray of blood from the wound in the fat man's neck, she wrote HUMBUG on the flat stone.

“But at the end of the day, I think this one had it right. What difference can it possibly make to someone who's about to die? Just one thing: where is that bastard Shen, anyway? He should be with you.”

“Dead,” I told her.

She blanched. Shook her head. “No . . . No,
I
kill him. I get to see his face when he realizes who is stabbing the life from him. He followed me constantly, everywhere I went. Do you know how many times that infernal foreigner nearly discovered my secret? I couldn't let that happen. The play had to be allowed to continue until the final act, the final scene. That was going to be my greatest triumph! The show must go on!”

I said nothing, simply prayed that Adelaide, still behind and off to one side of me, could see my hand as I motioned her to back away.

“You're lying!” she screeched. Her eyes blazed in the moonlight.

“I'm not.”

Bounding to her feet, she rushed at me, blade slicing the air. I flew at her, whipping the stolen blanket from over my shoulders. Half-stepping to one side as the cold steel rushed past me, I flung the blanket over her head and wrapped my arm about her. We went off balance and tumbled down the path in a mad tangle. I heard running boots—Adelaide's, I prayed, then was jolted as the side of my head struck a heavy stone jutting up from the path. Dazed, I lost my grip on Nellie, who spun far from me.

Head throbbing, dizziness threatening to take hold, I rose and stumbled in the direction of the running footsteps I'd heard earlier. The footfalls doubled back, and I fought against the throbbing in my skull long enough to lift my head and see Adelaide rush towards me. She cast an anxious look towards the snowy hill at my right, then silently hauled me back down the path to the ruins.

The crimson glow beyond the great walls made its remaining windows look like the devil's eyes, fixed and watching us. From the screams and commotion on the other side of that wall, where the women were being held for the foul pleasures of the masked men at the country house, chaos had finally erupted.

Lazytree was bellowing orders. Whips snapped and piteous wails rose up. Echoing voices, guttural laughter, prideful boasting, frightened screams, all bounded from beyond the crumbling walls where the red flames were stoked and cracked and licked the blackened sky.

Hell indeed.

“This way, this way!” Lazytree demanded. “Put that unpleasantness behind you and see the delights you have in store!”

Even without the photography, the night of cruel use and abuse of the stolen women was proceeding.

Panting, desperate to catch our breaths, we looked about for Nellie. We saw nothing. I felt my boot pressing against something and looked down to spy another of the large trunks. This one was pressed up against the rear of the great wall. So far as I could see in the dim light, it was but one in a series, a link in a chain that stretched all about the cradle.

I opened it, praying I might find a weapon, and a familiar stench of chemicals punched up at me. All I could make out was blankets, towels, food, yet as I rummaged I found, buried beneath all the rest of the supplies, jugs of the chemicals that had brought down entire warehouses in the Royal Quarter when they had combusted.

Humbug had promised death by the dozens. How many men and women had now been herded into the cradle of the abbey ruins?

“Tsk, tsk,” came a bit of nastiness carried on the whipping breeze. I heard the blade whoosh down instants before I felt Adelaide yank me back and out of the way. We turned and ran deeper into the ruins before Nellie could try again. Her cloak made her melt into the night, but I had to remind myself that she was as mortal as Adelaide and me. The idea that she was an unstoppable spirit,
that
was the true humbug.

We ran along a narrow pathway, cold stone at either side of us. My boot kicked bits of debris, we stumbled along at sudden sharp turns, the moon rose overhead then blinked away. Patches of ice cracked under our feet, we rose up a flight of half-steps and leaped into the unknown, miraculously gaining footing while scrambling ahead, through an archway.

I stole a glance beside me. Adelaide was no longer at my side. I turned back, hesitating for only an instant, which proved long enough to summon death's avatar.

Nellie surged from the blackness, blade held high, a chilling banshee shriek torn from her lungs. I stepped back, stumbled on a ragged stone, fell, and she threw herself on me, straddling me as the blade sliced down with chilling finality—

CRACK!

Her head jolted to one side, Nellie dropped on me, the blade scraping the rock to the left of my ear. She was surprisingly light, but far from frail, my hands finding the great masses of muscle she'd developed in her years of study as a dancer as I shoved her from me. Adelaide stood over us with a heavy stone tinged with red and bits of blonde hair. A crimson wound marked Nellie's skull where Adelaide had struck, apparently after she had flattened by the archway to wait in ambush as I served as bait.

I couldn't tell if Nellie was yet breathing or not, and cared even less. I managed to get to my feet and held the quaking Adelaide, who had carefully set down the chunk of rock.

As I held her, so many of the answers I'd been seeking came clear in my thoughts. George Sunderland, on the bridge, and his sudden burst of madness as he demanded I tell him what secrets of his Fezziwig had revealed. My sudden uptick in fortune at the Dyer affair when Lazytree secured all the investors I could possibly need for the rail deal, and their crashing reversal just this morning. All meant to control and distract me, to bring me bit by bit under Sunderland's—Smithson's—sway.

“Ebenezer, we should go,” Adelaide said softly. “There's little we can do for anyone here if we tarry any longer.”

She was right. Nellie—Humbug—might have been subdued, but Lazytree would still have his men searching for us.

“We need to find something to bind her with,” I said, nodding down at the madwoman.

But Nellie was gone.

We raced about through the ruins, even climbed once more to the high stone keep and looked out onto the crowd. Back where we'd seen the trunks filled with the strange flammable chemicals, someone drifted about hauling a lantern.

“She's going to kill them all,” I whispered.

“What?” Adelaide asked.

Taking her hand, I raced for the great stone steps. “I'll explain on the way!”

“Bankers,” a man groused as he untied his boots. “You know what they say. Give them an inch!”

Beside him, the jokester from the party laughed. “Really, Henry? From what I've been told, an inch is all you
have
to give!”

We crouched low outside the abbey walls, looking for Nellie. Seven of the trunks now lay open, the chemical jars discarded, their contents soaked in the foul-smelling rot.

“Those women,” Adelaide whispered. I could see from her expression that, like me, she wouldn't have cared if these walls caved in and flattened every one of the wretched bastards who'd organized this night or who had paid for a place in the “festivities.” But the women did not deserve to share that fate.

“We have to stop her,” I said, looking for anything I might use as a weapon. When I looked up again, Adelaide was gone.

I crept to the edge of the nearest towering abbey wall and peered through a narrow, ragged opening. I couldn't fit through it, but Adelaide already had. Taking advantage of her footman disguise, she made her way through the sweaty, stinking orgy of debauchery, a key she had evidently lifted from one of the guards in her hand. She unlocked a woman's shackles while pretending to be about some other business. Yet the doe-like, uncomprehending looks of the thin, exotic women brought here to act as slaves gave me little hope that even if the sky split above them and an angel thundered down from heaven to order them to run, that even half of them would make it to their feet before judgment rained down on them.

“You!”

Nellie's voice tore a chilling gash through my nerves. I saw a whip sitting on a boulder just inside the ragged gap and reached in even as Nellie charged me. My fingers were not quite reaching the whip, tapping it away—

Then I had it, yanked it out, and cracked it once while Nellie was still a dozen paces away, knife at hand. It bit into the icy range between us, and she darted to one side, stopped short. Blood-matted hair blew before her face and she twitched it away, panting, snarling, her gaze darting all about.

“You sent her to warn them? Idiot, they won't listen to her. They'll just cast her onto the pile!”

Meaning they would treat her as another vessel for their lusts.

“What do you care?” I asked.

Tossing the knife from one gloved hand to another, hunching forward, locking gazes with me, the madwoman blew me a kiss—then ran at me again.

CRACK
!

Frankly, I was lucky I hadn't put out my own eye with the whip. But the threat of what I held had been enough to make Nellie pause. She backed away, slipping the blade back in her cloak, and reached for the lantern she'd set down on the ground.

I raised the whip, hoping the threat alone would stop her. She raced back for the lantern.

CRACK
!

This time she shrieked in pain, a red welt forming on the side of her perfect face, a bleeding fissure not unlike the one her fallen look-alike Sarah had sported. With trembling fingers, she reached for her face, caressed the stinging welt, and surveyed her bloody fingers.

“I thought I could get my life back,” she whispered. Her teeth flashed as she lost herself in a mad smile. “Who would pay to see me now?”

Suddenly, a cacophony of outraged voices exploded from within the crimson-lit chamber. Pistol shots rang out. Screams.

“Get them out of here!” Lazytree yelled. “Get them out!”

A burst of shouts in a rapid-fire foreign tongue joined the unmistakable shouts of Constable Crabapple's “Here now,” “Watch that,” “You lot are under arrest” as well as Adelaide's warnings that the walls would soon come down.

“Run away, Mr. Scrooge,” Nellie urged, edging again towards the lantern. “You won't stop me.”

I tightened my grip on the whip and chanced a look inside the cradle. The jokester had raised a bloody fist to strike at Adelaide. But she was too quick for him. In a flash she snatched up an urn filled with the material used to make the fires burn red and emptied it into the man's face. Startled, he stumbled back and fell into a cauldron, where his screams joined a sparking plume of flames that consumed him. She turned from the grotesque sight of his wildly thrashing limbs even as Shen's people rushed into the midst of the scene, pistols and swords drawn.