A Killer Through Time Book 1

The fog came down over Whitechapel that November night the way it always did, thick and yellow and smelling faintly of coal smoke and the river, but Constable William Thorne would remember this particular fog for the rest of his life as something else entirely. It did not simply hang over the rooftops. It pressed against the cobblestones like a living thing, curling into doorways, swallowing the gas lamps until they became no more than pale smudges floating in the dark. He walked his beat along Hanbury Street with his lantern raised and his collar turned up against the damp, and he told himself, as he always did on nights like this, that the cold in his bones was only the cold of London and nothing more.

The scream changed that.

It came from somewhere off to the east, thin and ragged, cut short before it could rise into anything a man might call a proper cry for help. William stopped walking. He held his breath and listened, and for a long moment there was nothing but the drip of water from a gutter and the distant clatter of a cart somewhere beyond the fog. Then it came again, fainter this time, as though someone had clamped a hand over a mouth too late to stop the sound entirely.

He drew his truncheon and moved toward it.

The alleys of Whitechapel were not built for haste. They twisted back on themselves, narrowed until a man's shoulders brushed brick on either side, opened suddenly into courtyards strung with washing lines and reeking of refuse. William had walked this ground for six years and still there were nights it seemed to rearrange itself around him, funneling him toward some destination he had not chosen. He passed the shuttered front of a chandler's shop, then a doorway where a drunk lay curled and snoring, oblivious to everything, and he did not slow until he reached the mouth of Chapman's Court, where the fog seemed to gather thicker than anywhere else, as if the alley itself were exhaling it.

A shape moved at the far end. Tall. Cloaked. Moving with the unhurried certainty of a man who did not fear pursuit.

"You there," William called out, and his voice sounded small against the wet stone. "Scotland Yard. Stop where you stand."

The figure did not stop. It did not run either, which unsettled William more than flight would have. It simply turned a corner and was gone, swallowed by the yellow murk, and when William reached the same corner moments later, breathing hard, his lantern threw its light against a blank brick wall and nothing else. No footprints in the wet grime. No door he could see. Only a smell that had no business being there, a smell that cut through the fog's usual stench of soot and sewage with something sharper, something that reminded him of the hospital wards on Commercial Street. Carbolic acid. And beneath it, so faint he almost convinced himself he had imagined it, a smell like the inside of a thundercloud, hot metal and lightning, though there had been no storm that night.

William had been a constable long enough to know when a wall was not truly a wall. He ran his gloved hand along the brick until his fingers caught the edge of a seam, and with a grunt of effort he found the door disguised as stonework, a service entrance long since forgotten by anyone who did not already know to look for it. It gave way with a groan of old hinges, and a set of stone steps descended into darkness beneath what he now recognized, with a small cold jolt, as the rear of the old Whitechapel clinic. The building had been shuttered for the better part of two years, ever since its resident surgeon lost his license and vanished from polite society amid whispers no one cared to repeat above a murmur.

He should have gone for help. Every instinct trained into him by the Yard told him so. But the scream had not repeated itself, and something in the silence that followed it felt worse than any cry could have been, and William Thorne descended the steps with his truncheon in one hand and his lantern in the other, telling himself he would only look, only confirm, only retreat the moment the situation called for more men than one.

The stairwell smelled stronger the lower he went. Carbolic acid, yes, the sharp antiseptic tang of it thick enough to sting his eyes, but underneath that another odor crept up to meet him, coppery and warm, the smell he had come to associate with the abattoirs near the docks. He swallowed hard and kept walking. At the bottom of the stairs a passage stretched away into gloom, lined with old gas fixtures that had been re-wired, he realized with some confusion, into a tangle of copper piping and rubber tubing that snaked along the ceiling like something grown rather than built. Faint light pulsed at the far end of the passage, a strange blue light that did not flicker the way flame did but breathed in slow, steady waves, as though something behind the walls were drawing breath.

And beneath everything, so soft he almost missed it, he heard the ticking.

Not the ordinary tick of a clock on a mantel. This was quicker, more urgent, dozens of small mechanisms working in concert somewhere ahead of him, gears meshing against gears, a sound like a hundred pocket watches wound too tight and left to run themselves ragged. William's hand drifted to his own waistcoat pocket without his quite meaning it to, feeling the familiar weight of his brass pocket watch, a plain thing his father had given him, ticking along at its own honest, unhurried pace. He did not know why the sound from ahead made the hair on his arms rise, only that it did, the way a wrongly tuned instrument sets a listener's teeth on edge before he understands why.

He followed the passage toward the light.

It opened into a chamber that had clearly once served as a surgical theater, tiered seating carved into the stone walls where students might once have observed a lecture on anatomy, though no student had sat in those seats for a long time. Now the room was something else. Something William's mind struggled, in that first frozen instant, to organize into any shape that made sense.

Brass and copper machinery dominated the center of the space, a great arched framework easily twice the height of a man, ringed with glass tubes through which some pale luminous fluid circulated in slow, deliberate pulses. Wires and cables ran from the framework to a bank of dials and levers, and at the heart of it all, cradled within a ring of curved metal like a chrysalis half-formed, hung a sphere of dark glass that pulsed with that same restless blue light he had seen from the passage. The ticking he had heard was coming from within the machine itself, hundreds of tiny gears turning in patterns too intricate for William to follow with his eye, all of it working toward some purpose he could not name and did not want to understand.

Surgical tables stood along the near wall, their surfaces gleaming under gas lamps turned low, and it was there that William's gaze finally settled on the man he had followed into this buried horror.

Dr. Victor Sterling did not look up when William entered. He was bent over a second table, one draped in white sheeting soaked through in places with fresh red, and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow, his forearms slick to the wrist. In his hands he held a fine surgical blade, and he worked with the unhurried precision of a man laying out cutlery for supper, extracting something small and glistening from the ruin of what had, until very recently, been a living person. William's stomach turned. He had seen the aftermath of violence in his years on the force, the drunken brawls that ended in blood on the cobblestones, the occasional knifing outside a public house, but he had never seen anything like this, a killing turned into surgery, butchery performed with the calm precision of a man threading a needle.

"Almost," Sterling murmured, and William realized with a fresh chill that the man was not speaking to himself, nor to the corpse before him, but to someone else in the room. "Almost, my dear. A little longer. The tissue must be fresh, you understand. It will not hold its integrity otherwise, and I have learned, at such terrible cost, exactly how little margin for error the process allows."

William followed the surgeon's gaze and saw her for the first time.

She lay on a third table, set slightly apart from the others, dressed in a pale high-collared nightgown that had once, William thought, been very fine, though now it hung loose on a frame wasted thin by illness. Her hair had been arranged with a strange, tender care around her shoulders, as if someone had taken pains to make her presentable despite everything else in the room screaming otherwise. Tubes ran from her arms into the great humming machine at the chamber's heart, and her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven movements. Her eyes were closed. Her face, even wasted as it was, held a kind of stillness that made William think of the marble angels that stood watch over graves in Highgate, beautiful and terrible in their silence.

"Clara," Sterling said, and his voice cracked on the name, all its clinical calm draining away in an instant to something raw and pleading. "Clara, can you hear me? I am so close now. I promise you, so close."

He set down the blade and lifted a small glass vessel from the tray beside him, something inside it catching the blue light and throwing it back in threads of crimson and gold. He carried it to the machine and fed it into a receptacle near the base of the glowing sphere, and the ticking within the mechanism seemed to quicken in response, as though the device itself were hungry and had just been fed.

"You think me a monster," Sterling said, still without turning, still addressing the woman on the table as though she might answer him at any moment. "I have heard them say it, in the corridors of the college, before they took my license and my name from every register that mattered. Sterling has lost his reason. Sterling tampers with things no Christian man ought to touch. But none of them loved anyone the way I love you, Clara. None of them watched a sister waste to nothing while the finest physicians in London shrugged and spoke of God's will and the natural order of things. I will not accept the natural order. I will build you a vessel that does not fail, flesh drawn from the strongest and the purest, and I will give you a body time itself cannot touch."

William's grip tightened on his truncheon until his knuckles ached. He had heard enough. Whatever madness had taken hold of this man, whatever grief had curdled into this atrocity, it did not change what lay bleeding out on that table beside him, did not change the fact that a woman or a girl had died screaming in this pit while London slept above, unknowing.

He stepped fully into the chamber, lantern raised.

"Dr. Sterling." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "You're under arrest. Step away from the table and put your hands where I can see them."

For the first time, Sterling turned.

He was younger than William had expected, though something in his eyes made him look ancient, hollowed out in a way no simple exhaustion could explain. His face was drawn tight over sharp bones, his lips pressed thin and bloodless, and there was a faint tremor in his jaw, as if some great effort of will was required simply to hold his features still. A silver ring gleamed on his finger, engraved with some mark William could not make out from where he stood, a surgeon's signet, he supposed, from whatever college had once been proud to claim him.

"Constable," Sterling said, and there was no fear in his voice, only a weary sort of amusement, the tone of a man interrupted at some tedious but necessary task. "You should not have come down here."

"Step away from the table," William repeated, drawing his revolver now, the weight of it steadying his hand even as his heart hammered against his ribs. "I've men within a whistle's call. There's no way out of this cellar but the stair behind me."

Sterling's gaze flicked, almost lazily, to the great pulsing machine behind him, its blue light washing his ruined face in shifting color. "There are more ways out of a room than you imagine, Constable. More ways out of an hour, a day, a year, than your kind has ever dreamed to ask after." He took a step toward the machine, and William's finger tightened on the trigger.

"I said stay where you are."

"You misunderstand me," Sterling said, and for just a moment something almost gentle crossed his ruined face, something that might, in a kinder life, have been mistaken for sorrow. "I am not running from you. I am simply finishing what I started, and there is nothing left in this city or this century that can stop me from doing it."

He reached for a lever set into the base of the machine.

William fired.

The shot cracked through the chamber like a thunderclap, deafening in the enclosed stone space, and for one terrible instant William believed he had struck true, that the matter would end there in blood and silence and a body he could drag up the stairs to face whatever inquiry followed. But Sterling only staggered, one hand flying to his side, and when he straightened again there was no wound William could see, only a faint hiss of escaping steam from somewhere beneath his ribs, and a wet clicking sound like a broken clock trying valiantly to keep time.

"That will not be enough," Sterling said, his voice strange now, doubled somehow, as though two throats spoke the words at once, one his own and one far older, far wearier. "Nothing built by your century can stop what I have already begun."

He pulled the lever.

The machine screamed.

William would never find better words for the sound that followed, not in all the years he would spend trying to write it down in careful constable's script for reports no superior would ever quite believe. The ticking that had filled the chamber since he first descended the stairs rose to a frantic pitch, gears grinding against gears too fast for any mechanism to survive, and the glass sphere at the machine's heart flared from its slow blue pulse into a blinding white-blue light that seemed to fill the entire chamber, pressing against William's eyes like a physical weight. The air itself seemed to thicken, charged with the smell of scorched metal and something else beneath it, something that reminded him, absurdly, of the inside of a church during a lightning storm, ozone and old stone and fear.

"Victor!" William shouted, though he was not certain, afterward, why he had called the man by his given name, as if some instinct told him formality no longer mattered in whatever was about to happen. "Stop this! Whatever you mean to do, stop it now!"

Sterling did not answer. He had turned his back on William entirely, both hands braced against the machine's framework, his head bowed as though in prayer, and the tremor that had haunted his jaw now ran through his whole body, his shoulders shaking with the strain of holding something in place, or perhaps of letting something loose.

"I will find another century," Sterling said, and his voice had gone very quiet now, almost tender, almost lost beneath the machine's rising howl. "I will find fresher blood, purer tissue, whatever this age cannot provide. I will not fail you, Clara. Not now. Not when we are so close."

The glass sphere cracked.

Light poured from the fracture in a widening seam, blue-white and terrible, and William threw an arm across his eyes as the chamber around him seemed to buckle, stone dust sifting from the ceiling, the tiered seats groaning as though the whole buried theater might collapse in on itself. He heard glass shattering somewhere to his left, the tubes that fed the machine bursting one after another in a chain of small sharp detonations, luminous fluid spraying across the stone floor and hissing where it touched the wet ground, throwing up curls of pale vapor that stung his throat and made his eyes water.

Through the blinding light he saw Sterling reach the machine's very core, saw him press both palms flat against the fractured sphere as though embracing it, and for one impossible heartbeat William thought he saw something behind the surgeon, some rent in the air itself, a tear at the edge of the world through which he glimpsed shapes that made no sense at all, towers of black glass, lights that did not flicker like gas flame but glowed with a cold steady hum, a street that was and was not Whitechapel, both at once, folded together like two photographs held up to the same candle.

"No," William breathed, though he could not have said what he was refusing, only that every instinct in him recoiled from what he was seeing, some deep animal understanding that the world was not meant to look the way it looked in that instant, was not meant to show two centuries occupying the same square foot of stone floor.

The machine erupted.

The blast threw William backward off his feet, his lantern flying from his hand to shatter against the tiered stone seating, his revolver skittering away into the dark. He struck the ground hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, and for a moment the world was nothing but ringing silence and the after-image of blue light seared onto the inside of his eyelids. When his vision cleared enough to make sense of shapes again, he found himself staring up at a ceiling cracked in a dozen places, fine streams of dust and mortar sifting down through the wreckage of what had been, until moments ago, an intact vault.

He forced himself upright, coughing against the acrid smoke that hung thick in the air, carbolic acid and ozone and burnt copper all tangled together into something that coated the back of his throat like ash.

The machine was gone.

Not destroyed, precisely, though the framework lay in ruin, scattered brass and shattered glass strewn across the floor in a wide circle, but gone in the sense that whatever essential thing had animated it, whatever force had driven those frantic ticking gears, had vanished entirely, leaving behind only cold metal and the smell of a storm that had already passed. Of Dr. Victor Sterling there was no sign at all. No body. No blood beyond what already stained the surgical tables. No trace that a man had stood at that machine's heart only moments before, save for a scorch mark burned into the stone floor in the rough shape of two outstretched hands, black and permanent as a shadow caught in the instant before the sun that cast it disappeared.

William stood very still amid the wreckage, his ears still ringing, his uniform torn at one shoulder where he had struck the stone seating. He thought, distantly, that he ought to be more afraid than he was, that a sane man confronted with such a sight should be gibbering with terror rather than standing quietly among the ruins cataloguing what he saw the way he might catalogue evidence at any ordinary crime scene. Perhaps that was simply the nature of the training that had been drilled into him. Perhaps it was something else, some deeper numbness that came from witnessing a thing too large for fear to properly attach itself to.

A soft sound drew his attention to the third table, the one where the woman called Clara lay.

She had not moved. The tubes that had run from her arms into the machine now hung loose and severed, dripping the last of that pale luminous fluid onto the stone floor, where it hissed faintly and then went dark, as though whatever life had been in it had burned itself out all at once. Her chest, William saw with a fresh chill, still rose and fell, slow and shallow, but there was something wrong about the rhythm of it now, something suspended, as though she breathed not in the ordinary passage of seconds but in some other measure of time entirely, each breath stretched thin and strange.

He approached her carefully, half expecting the ground to open beneath his feet, half expecting the machine's wreckage to flare back to terrible life at any moment. Up close, her face was even more like something carved from stone than it had appeared from across the chamber, pale to the point of translucence, faint blue veins visible beneath skin gone thin as paper. Her eyes remained closed, her lashes dark against her cheek, and yet William had the unshakable sense, standing over her, that some part of her was aware of him, was watching him from behind those closed lids the way a woman watches through a veil.

"Miss," he said softly, though he doubted she could hear him, though everything about her stillness suggested she had traveled somewhere far beyond the reach of an ordinary voice. "Miss, can you hear me? I mean to help you, if I can."

Her lips parted very slightly. No sound came from them, not at first, only a faint exhalation that stirred the cold air of the ruined chamber. Then, so quietly William would spend the rest of his life uncertain whether he had truly heard it or only imagined it in the aftermath of shock, she spoke a single word.

"Sarah."

William frowned. He knew no Sarah. He had no wife, no sister, no sweetheart by that name, and yet the word settled into him with a strange, cold weight, as if it were meant for him specifically, as if she had reached across some unfathomable distance to place it directly into his keeping. He waited, half hoping she would say more, but her lips stilled again, her breathing settling back into its slow, suspended rhythm, and after a long moment William understood she would say nothing further, not that night, perhaps not for a very long time.

He straightened and looked around the ruined chamber with fresh eyes, the constable in him reasserting itself over the shock. There would need to be a report. There would need to be men sent down here, a surgeon of the Yard's own choosing to examine the young woman and see what could be done for her, and a full accounting of the wreckage, though William already suspected, with a bone-deep certainty he could not have explained to any superior, that no accounting he wrote would ever capture what he had actually witnessed. Some truths did not survive translation into the dry language of official reports. He would write what he could. He would leave out what he must, not from any wish to deceive, but because there simply were no words in the English language built to hold it.

It was as he turned to survey the wreckage more closely, stepping carefully over shards of glass and coils of severed tubing, that he became aware of the ticking again.

Not the frantic, screaming rhythm the great machine had produced in its final moments. This was smaller. Steadier. Almost gentle by comparison, and it took William a long moment of confused searching before he realized, with a jolt that ran cold down his spine, that the sound was coming from his own waistcoat pocket.

He drew out his father's brass pocket watch with trembling fingers.

It had always kept good time, a plain honest piece with a scratched case and a chain gone slightly tarnished with age, nothing remarkable about it save the steady, dependable tick that had marked the hours of William's life since he was a boy of twelve receiving it as a gift on the occasion of his confirmation. Now, in his palm, it ticked at a pace that did not match any clock he had ever owned, quicker in some moments, slower in others, as though it were listening to some rhythm beyond the ordinary count of seconds and struggling to keep pace with it. The glass face, when he tilted it toward what little light remained in the wrecked chamber, seemed for one impossible instant to hold a faint blue glow deep within its workings, gone again before he could be certain he had seen it at all.

William closed his hand around the watch and held it tight against his chest, as though the simple act of gripping it might steady the wild unease climbing up through his ribs. Above him, somewhere beyond the collapsed stairwell, he could hear the first shouts of other constables, drawn at last by the shot he had fired and the muffled roar of the machine's destruction, their lanterns bobbing faint and yellow through the gap where the stone had cracked open to the alley above. Help was coming. Ordinary, sensible help, men who would ask him sensible questions and expect sensible answers, and William Thorne stood amid the wreckage of a machine that should not have existed, holding a woman's whispered word and a watch that ticked to no earthly rhythm, and understood, with a certainty that would never quite leave him for the rest of his days, that whatever report he wrote tonight would be only the first page of something far longer, and far darker, than any single life was meant to carry.

He looked once more at the woman on the table, at her stillness, at the faint rise and fall of her breath measured out in that strange suspended time, and he made her a silent promise, though he could not have said why it felt so necessary to make it, or to whom, precisely, he was making it.

He would remember this. Whatever else happened, whatever explanation the Yard demanded and whatever version of events found its way into the official record, William Thorne would remember exactly what he had seen in this cellar, and he would carry it forward, in his own hand, in his own words, for as long as ink and paper and his own failing memory allowed.

The shouts above grew louder. Boots rang against loosened stone as the first constables began working their way down through the broken stairwell, lantern light spilling gold across the ruined chamber, chasing back at last the lingering trace of that terrible blue glow. William slipped the ticking watch back into his waistcoat pocket, feeling its strange quickened pulse against his chest like a second heartbeat that did not belong to him, and turned to meet the men descending toward him, already composing in his mind the first careful, insufficient words of a report that would follow the Thorne name down through a hundred years and more, waiting patiently in a locked drawer of some future evidence room for a descendant he would never live to meet.