Authors: Paul Finch
“Good God,” the soldier breathed. Though he already knew about this place, the sight and smell never ceased to repulse him. “Good God in Heaven.”
He pivoted slowly around, casting candle-light into every odious corner. In one of them there was a low truckle bed with a thin, stained mattress on it. Alongside that, a row of misplaced items sat on a narrow ledge: among them there was a necklace, several rings, a brooch, a chewed leather wallet and something broken and bloodstained, which looked alarmingly like a child’s rattle.
“I see he’s still following his natural instincts to raid and pillage,” Charles said tightly.
Annabelle came into the room behind him. “This is not what you think it is.”
“No?” He glanced up and saw the high single window; a heavy steel grille hung loose, having been peeled back like the lid from a tin of bully beef. “No, it isn’t. I see, if anything, that he’s now even more powerful than he was before.”
“That’s because he’s younger and stronger,” Annabelle explained.
It took several moments for the significance of that comment to sink in. Charles whipped around. “What’s that?”
Her face was wan in the candle-light. “I tried to tell you. But of course you weren’t listening.”
“Annabelle …”
“You came in here like some mad preacher, Charles.
Holier than thou, determined to lay the law down to us again.
And, as usual, you just weren’t listening.”
“Tell me now,” he urged her.
“Will you listen this time? Will you listen and understand?”
A few seconds passed, and he nodded. “I shall
endeavour
to.”
“Very well.”
She halted briefly to touch a small handkerchief to her nose. Though a lifelong resident of this house, there were times when even Annabelle found the
odour
in this upper room unbearable. “The moment father died,” she said, pausing to restrain her emotions. “The moment father died – which happened just as I assured you it did – the curse or hex, whatever you want to call it, was passed on.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “Charles, within minutes of father’s death – literally minutes – the same transformation began to afflict Sebastian.”
“Good Lord, no.”
“Yes.” She nodded and sniffled.
“The brother who when he was a baby I used to bounce on my knee.
Who, when he was an infant, would delight us all at Christmas with his lisping rendition of
Winter
.”
Charles tried to swallow his horror, but was unsuccessful.
Surely not Sebastian – that lively, intelligent youth: a picture-book image of his sister, young, polite, angelically handsome, and yet so manly, so unquestioningly stoic in the face of the scourge that had befallen his family. Charles made some swift mental calculations: Sebastian would only recently have finished his schooling; he’d be in his late teens now. Under ordinary circumstances, the world would be opening up for him, just waiting to shower him with its gifts and opportunities. What a gut-wrenching time to be bound like some beast. But still, despite all of this, despite Charles’s genuine affection for the young man who would soon become his brother-in-law, there was only one answer.
“Annabelle,” he said, “whether this is your brother or not, as long as you give him refuge here, this terror will go on.”
“But this is his home,” she pleaded.
“You call this filthy roost a home?”
“We only keep him in here at night. In the morning he’s normal.”
“N-normal?”
Charles stuttered in disbelief. He strode out of the room and turned right. There, a second iron door gave through to an adjacent chamber, though this one was smaller than the first, and only had space in it for a wood pile and a coal-scuttle, and between those, a large fireplace filled with soot and ashes. Charles grabbed a poker and thrust at the blackened debris. Almost immediately, one of the horrible things he’d been expecting to find came into view: it was a cast-off, a shell, now badly charred, but large and vaguely humanoid around the head and shoulders, though after that all similarity to humanity ended. The head was disturbingly insect-like. It was oval in shape and sloped forward. Two gaping sockets revealed where bulbous eyes must once have been. Between these, black stubs were all that remained of its antennae. Charles struck at it with the poker, and it broke inwards, exposing a hollow interior still shiny with mucus.
“Normal!”
Charles said again, with a bitter laugh. He rose to his feet. “Annabelle, there is nothing at all normal about this. Good Lord, how many of these horrors have you people had to burn now?
Six thousand?
Seven thousand?”
“He’s my brother,” she repeated. “I won’t have him locked in a museum.”
“Annabelle, he’s assaulting people nightly – with ever greater violence. Even now, as we stand here talking, he’s out there running riot.”
Annabelle shook her head. She was properly in tears now. “The newspapers are exaggerating. They even accuse him of murder, but that was an accident.”
Charles took her by the shoulders. He’d been hardened by his experience of war, angered that the respectable family he’d soon hoped to make his own had failed to heed his warnings. But suddenly Annabelle was his gentle fiancée again; beautiful, vulnerable, frightened. Her breast heaved as she wept. Her perfume, as always, was intoxicating. But for the present at least he had to be firm.
“Sebastian may not have killed anyone,” he said, “despite what the newspapers claim. But my dear, at some point he is going to. You must stop thinking of him as your little brother. He’s now a wild, ungovernable thing. And he must be stopped.”
“Indeed he must,”
came
another voice, this one deep, gravelly.
The couple turned, and Annabelle drew a sharp breath at sight of the imposing figure at the top of the spiral stair. He was elderly but huge, an impression his immense greatcoat only served to enhance. His top hat was tilted at a rakish angle, and he had an enormous pair of lush, fleecy whiskers. His cat-green eyes twinkled as though he thought this whole business a marvelous joke, and for briefly Annabelle was reminded of the ‘Father Christmas’ character now being
immortalised
in seasonal sketches. But there was something about this particular fellow that forbade
true
jollity: the bull-neck under his muffler perhaps; the broad, ape-like spread of his shoulders; the hard set of his mouth.
“Excuse me, sir,” Annabelle said. “Who are you? By what right to you enter my home uninvited?”
Charles put a hand on her arm. “He
has
been invited, of a fashion … by me. Annabelle, allow me to introduce Colonel Thaddeus Thorpe. The deadliest shot in the whole of the British Empire.”
*
It was a grim story, made grimmer still when recounted with knowledge of the dread events that would follow on from it.
Twenty-two years before the birth of his granddaughter, Annabelle, the eminent archaeologist, Professor Reginald Cyrus-Jones, commenced the most difficult excavation of his career. In the vast grassy wilderness of northeast Abyssinia, then a land torn by warring chieftains, he and his colleagues dug beneath the ruins of a third century Coptic church, having uncovered inscribed tablets that suggested a pagan temple might be found there. They hoped for a positive outcome; it was common
practise
in the early days of Christianity to construct churches on sites that had once been the focal points for earlier religions. As such, Professor Cyrus-Jones was delighted when he broke into a shallow, underground cave whose walls were engraved with curious symbols, many of which appeared to represent local insect life. The fact that, on seeing this, his native
labourers
abandoned their work and ran away, did not concern him. If anything, he was encouraged by this; he felt it meant something valuable was in his grasp.
The professor did not understand that he’d opened a shrine to one of prehistoric Ethiopia’s most fearsome deities:
Kalengu
, the locust god, a completely amoral being whose idle whims could unleash the most devastating forces imaginable in a land entirely dependent on agriculture. Shortly afterwards, as other finds – idols, statuettes, items of pottery – were brought to the surface, a shaman from one of the nearby villages arrived. Alerted by the
labourers
who’d fled, this respected religious figure insisted that the desecrations cease; the under-temple had to be closed and the trespassers must depart, or a terrible vengeance would fall. Cyrus-Jones, now certain he was onto the find of his career, had the fellow seen off the site.
The shaman raved incoherently from the boundary of the camp, but aside from this the dig went uninterrupted for three weeks, until envoys arrived from the local warlord,
Adula
Yakub
. He too had now been informed that a temple to
Kalengu
was being despoiled. Though always keen to curry
favour
with moneyed whites,
Yakub
was on this occasion obdurate in the orders he issued: all licenses to dig on the spot had been rescinded; all treasures must be restored to their resting place; the temple was to be closed. Cyrus-Jones was outraged. To have the discovery of the age snatched away from him by someone he considered little more than a bandit was too much. Work on the dig ceased, but the professor had no intention of handing back any of the valuables he’d unearthed. He and his team crated them all, and then left the country in secret, taking a steamboat up the Red Sea towards Cairo.
On returning home to England, the professor’s discoveries, which were given pride of place in the British Museum, became the talk of London. Cyrus-Jones was lauded by all the leading figures of society. Of course, it was around this time that the first incidents involving Spring-Heeled Jack are alleged to have occurred. A
man
who could leap astonishing distances, even over the roofs of houses, was reported to be frightening and even attacking residents of the capital. Initially, Cyrus-Jones made no connection between this bizarre phenomenon and his recent trip to Abyssinia. However, several months later, a chamber-maid drew his attention to his eldest son, fifteen-year-old George, who was furtively leaving the house each night. That evening, the professor concealed himself on the upper floor of his smart Belgravia home. A short while later, he was amazed to see his son steal out of his bedroom, climb to the attic level and vacate the building through a skylight in the roof.
The following morning the professor confronted the boy. Young George claimed to have no memory of these events, though he did admit to feeling lethargic and weary during the day, as if he’d been indulging in excessive physical exercise. Concerned, the professor searched his son’s bedroom, and was horrified to find, under the bed and in one of the wardrobes, a collection of what appeared to be discarded exoskeletons: greenish, man-sized shells, which resembled
something
part way between a human and a locust. Only then did the first horrible suspicions creep into the professor’s mind.
He waited the next night, and again saw his son leave via the roof. This time, he stayed where he was until dawn, when the lad returned. The professor watched in disbelief as young George – now a ghastly hybrid, complete with insect-like appendages such as a shell, antennae, claws and long, strong back legs – returned to humanity by shedding his outer carapace, which he kicked out of sight beneath the bed. After this, the boy fell promptly into a deep sleep.
Only after several large brandies was the professor able to assess the predicament. And there was no obvious answer. Though he was a man of science, he’d seen this abomination with his own eyes, and had no doubt that it was the result of a curse or spell, probably passed on him for his transgressions in Abyssinia.
The problem was how to end it.
All normal avenues were closed: to consult medical science would make public the lurid details of the case; to consult a magician or sorcerer would risk the same thing, as well as mockery among the professor’s fellow scholars. For the meantime, Cyrus-Jones confined the boy in a specially-adapted room, which was constructed in an attic of the family home. This strategy proved effective, though occasionally, as George grew to manhood and became stronger and wilier, his night-time incarnation would escape, and Spring-Heeled Jack, who, after his startling early rampages, had apparently vanished into the fog of London folklore, would briefly re-appear again.