Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

He was inside, curled up on one of the bunks they’d improvised. He’d returned from the last short jump in an odd, un-Liam-like withdrawn mood.

‘Best leave him, Sal.’

He’s internalizing something, Maddy figured. Guilt? Disgust? Anger? Bob said he’d glimpsed the murder scene, the inside of Mary Kelly’s room. Maddy could only imagine what horror he must have seen through her window. It must have been the stuff of nightmares. The kind of image once seen that remains in your mind like life-long retina burn.

‘Just leave him be, Sal. The time wave isn’t anything he hasn’t already seen before.’

‘Caution,’ said Bob. He nodded down the street. ‘There is the time wave.’ He pointed.

To the east, above the tall townhouses opposite them, above roof eaves and smoking chimney pots, the afternoon sky was darkening prematurely. Soldiers and policemen, street sweepers, peddlers and traders, the man standing on the flatbed of his coffee shop on wheels… all began to look up with burgeoning curiosity as the crisp winter sky became an overcast and improbable, swirling impressionist’s oil painting.

‘My God!’ uttered Rashim. ‘It’s incredible. Quite beautiful!’

‘Won’t the wave affect our dungeon?’ asked Sal. ‘You know, not having a field up and running?’

‘It shouldn’t. Holborn Viaduct is here in either timeline. Mr Hook and his dodgy import/export business were here in either timeline too, so they won’t change. And everything Liam and Rashim have done setting this place up had happened, would happen, whether Jack the Ripper had been killed or not. Two timelines, Holborn Viaduct and everything inside the same in either one.

‘In theory we should be all right.’ Maddy looked at Rashim for confirmation as she spoke. ‘Our dungeon shouldn’t be affected by this.’

He nodded. ‘Maddy is right.’ As he spoke, his eyes remained on the sky. ‘But this street, the rest of London… all of this will change. The riots will have never happened. This damage will never have happened.’

All returns to normality once more. Maddy watched as a cloud of pigeons fluttered from a rooftop nearby, startled by the first gasp of a squalling wind.

The poor remain poor and subservient, ignorant of a gentleman psychopath whose sport was carving up the bodies of unfortunate fallen women.

It didn’t feel particularly good this time around restoring the status quo. But, as Foster had once explained, sometimes you have to allow space for a little evil in order to sidestep a much greater one. An irradiated earth, that’s what they were avoiding by allowing a murderer to escape and live the rest of his life undiscovered, perhaps even going on to murder again and again, indulging his secret, grotesque pleasure, undiscovered. Of course they were never going to find out for sure if this evil monster went on to kill again, whether ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ victims went on to secretly number far more than the commonly accepted five.

The Wikipedia article listed many more prostitutes who died grisly deaths after Mary Kelly, who might have also been Ripper victims, but somehow didn’t quite fit the same pattern of mutilations as the first five. Perhaps he was going to kill more. Perhaps his near capture and discovery frightened him off his grisly pleasure once and for all.

Maddy decided she needed to sit down with Liam and remind him that whatever that sick animal did, and possibly went on to do, once again their actions had saved this world. A fair transaction in the greater scheme of things.

A woman fifty yards down from them screamed out in alarm as a spectral tendril suddenly curled across the sky, like a negative image of forked lightning. The time wave was almost upon them. Much closer — Maddy had seen it coming from across the East River, roiling and boiling — she knew it would no longer resemble a bank of cloud, more a pulsating school of mackerel, twisting, turning, extruding tentacle-like outgrowths. As for Rashim, he’d only briefly witnessed it roar past the archway’s open entrance. This time, they were going to be standing amid the swirling mass.

‘Don’t let it freak you out, Rashim!’ cried Maddy. ‘It’s weird but it’s totally harml-’

Her voice was lost in the sudden roar of a tsunami.

Wind buffeted and rocked them on their feet. They all suddenly became enveloped in a wind tunnel of blurring reality, streaks of matter twisting, curling, changing. Fleeting visions of Hell and Heaven like an insane zoetrope.

Sal narrowed her eyes against the onslaught. She saw gargoyle faces whip past her; one or two seemed to sense her presence, wretched hands clawing towards her. She thought, in one fleeting moment, that she saw a face she recognized. A woman… dark-skinned, much older, grey-haired, with bulging cataract eyes full of raging malice. The face imploded into the snarl of some beetle-black underworld horror, claws, pincers, teeth.

Standing two feet to her right, yet entirely alone in her own wind-tunnel Hell, Maddy watched reality-soup conjure up momentary nightmares. She too thought she spotted a familiar face: pale and slim, a young man, framed by flailing hair — was laughing or was it screaming? Was that Adam? She reached out towards him, wondering if she might just be able to rescue him — pull him out of this swirling matter to have him join them once again. Her hand almost but not quite touching his slender fingers, then he was whipped away into a swirling reality tornado and became a thousand and one impossible things.

Then, as always, it was all gone in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

They were left staring at a Farringdon Street busy with the clop-clop-clop of horse-drawn hansom cabs and private carriages. Street hawkers barked the price of their wares; a knot of leering dock workers passed right in front of them, sharing a dirty laugh at some muttered punchline. One of them turned to Maddy and Sal.

‘Awl right there, me loves?’ he crowed, quite obviously drunk — swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘Come an’ join us lads, eh?’

Sal flipped a hand gesture at him that wasn’t going to have a proper meaning for another hundred years yet. The drunk shrugged it off with a grin. ‘Your loss, love!’ He tossed a good-natured laugh back at them, turned and staggered to catch up with his mates.

Maddy sighed. ‘Men, eh?’

2067, Piccadilly Circus, London

Another warm sunset across the overgrown ruins of mankind. The cry of a fox, the chirp of crickets. The gently swaying ochre sea of tall grass. The predatory swoop of a hawk.

A peaceful grave of humankind. Like some windswept site of archaeological interest — the ruins of Troy, of ancient Sparta, Babylon. Now, just like those places, worn stubs of masonry overgrown by an emerald carpet of nature. Tumbledown walls, caved-in roofs. Nothing lasts forever.

Here bleached bones lie amid the tangled roots of wild grass, doing a far better job of weathering time than the rusting, flaking skeletons of cars.

Peaceful, like a prairie, like the Serengeti, like an African veldt.

But now there’s a fresh breeze, and the faintest distant rumble. The peach-coloured sunset sky has suddenly gained a faint twisting ribbon of black. At first as thin as a pencil scribble following the line of the horizon across a landscape painting. But, very quickly, becoming as thick as a marker pen as it approaches rapidly, and seconds later a looming, dark, continental crust swallowing the land beneath it.

A dozen seconds of deafening chaos as this black horizon sweeps in over the ruins of London and this peaceful post-human world is swept away; a possible future that had its short chance to exist. Swept away to join a million other begrudging futures that will never get a chance to see the light of day.