They decide to head out in the small hours of the morning when the skies are black and the lights are dim, when much of London that sleeps is still in bed. They leave the weapons behind for the other two to protect themselves.
“Tiger!” calls Jon when they are about to leave. “Take this and use it well if you have to. I know you can.”
He is gripping his wooden cricket bat, flat like a shovel at the business end, holding it so tightly that his knuckles have turned white.
“I have my pistol,” she says, patting the side of her coat. She somehow always makes it disappear in there.
“This can be even more effective.”
She smiles and takes the bat from him, making sure that her hand touches his as she receives it. They stand there for a moment, close to each other, her hand lingering on his.
“We must be going,” insists Edgar.
“Thank you,” says Tiger, still looking at Jon.
“See you shortly.” He gently squeezes her fingers as he releases her.
Edgar and Tiger do not speak for a while as they walk along quiet Progress Street toward Mansfield Road. They have a long trip in front of them. They aren’t bothering with finding a hansom cab, especially since there are not many in this area at this hour. They are moving down Highgate Road before either of them says a word.
“He is developing quite an interest in you.”
She merely grunts.
“And you in him.”
“I wouldn’t say that. And why would you care, anyway, if it were true?”
“I don’t.”
“Really?” She looks over at him, but he is not looking back.
“Yes.”
They walk on in silence, but after they reach the bottom of Kentish Town Road and near the St. Pancras Railway Station and the Midland Grand Hotel, Edgar’s nerves start to bother him and he needs to talk.
“Do you believe the things I’ve been seeing are real?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I believe in you, yes, always have.”
“That isn’t what I asked either. Tiger, Lawrence sent me to a mind doctor and the chairman of the London Hospital is a reasonable man, wouldn’t you think?”
She hesitates. “Are all the things that have happened to you real? I suppose we will soon find out.”
It almost sounds like a threat. An overpoweringly dangerous thought flashes through his mind, a thought about Tiger Tilley. He pushes it away.
Edgar would prefer to stay to the main roads, but once they are through Clerkenwell and moving down wide Commercial Street on the edge of Bethnal Green and into unsafe Spitalfields, Tiger wants to cut through the narrow streets to get to their destination faster. This means walking right into London’s worst rookeries, through the tight alleys populated by wizened old prostitutes who look like witches and carry cutthroat razors to protect themselves, and past greasy thieves, and starving children. Stinking pubs and tawdry rooming houses line these roads. Tiger doesn’t seem to care, in fact, she appears to be seeking the most frightening arteries to see what she can face, readying herself for what they are about to encounter in Thomas Street. She gives Edgar the pistol and instructs him to hold it in his coat pocket so part of it is visible and she swings the cricket bat as she walks, letting one-and-all know she can use it.
A drunk approaches. “I’ll play cricket with you! In me bedroom!” he shouts at Tiger. He has a leering expression on his face that would suit Mr. Hyde and a staggering young woman on his arm who is dressed in little more than rags, just a few teeth in her gummy mouth. There is a knife gleaming in the waistband of his trousers. He reaches for Tiger. She steps back and cracks him so hard on a kneecap with the bat that the sound echoes up and down the street, and the man drops like a rock onto the cobblestones, howling. “Well struck,” she mutters to herself. They move on.
They get to Baker’s Row, pass a workhouse and the Broad School, slip onto Thomas Street and turn south, Whitechapel Road looking well lit and like an oasis at the end of this tunnel-like street. There are not many people here and the only ones who are about seem to be minding their business.
“It’s about ten doors down,” says Edgar.
Tiger pulls her lock-springing tool from her trousers. As Edgar learned when they were at the College on the Moors together, she can break into anything.
Edgar finds the building and that wide wooden door with the big black handle with the two sharp points on it like horns. He swallows and tries it. It opens.
“Not bolted? It must be three in the morning,” says Tiger, putting her tool back into her pocket, and gripping the cricket bat tighter.
The door creaks as they push it farther open.
It is difficult to know if they are alone inside the building’s nearly pitch-black confines. They start walking up the staircase, feeling their way, their footsteps whispering and echoing on the gritty steps. They are all the way up the first flight before their eyes begin to adjust.
Suddenly, he is there.
“You is back, is you?” says the big, bearded thug to Edgar, his thick, shaved head like a dark pumpkin and his wide body a wall on the dim landing.
He can see Tiger but merely sniffs at her and reaches for Edgar, so she pivots and swings the bat even harder than her last effort, as if she were striking a six for England on a cricket field, and it connects with that big skull, which might as well have been sitting on the wickets for her. Edgar is tempted to look up the stairs to see how far the head will travel. The sound is like a gun going off and the rough becomes instantly limp and falls in heavy thumps nearly a dozen steps down the stairs to the bottom.
“He won’t bother us for a while,” says Tiger.
Edgar stands there with his mouth open as she continues to stride up the stairs. Tiger Tilley still surprises him. He wonders what it would be like to oppose her.
“Let’s sneak up to the top as quietly as we can and investigate the floors from there, downward,” she says. “That way, if we encounter something else, it won’t come at us from either above or below.”
Edgar does not want to think of what “something else” might be.
As they step quietly upward, though, all is eerily silent, and they have the sense that the rooms on the lower floors are unoccupied. At the top, five floors up, they can see a dim light in the cracks of a big door. Tiger touches the knob and the entrance swings inward.
As Edgar takes out the pistol, Tiger lifts the bat into striking position and pushes the door all the way open.
Nothing comes at them, but what they see is breathtaking: a large, strangely cold room lit with candles. In fact, there are candles everywhere, even surrounding the big black throne that sits at the front of the room on a stage. It has red horns on the top of both sides of its back and on its arms. There is a red trident painted on the seat and carved green snakes curl up the legs. Arranged on the room’s floor, as if looking up at the throne, are more than a dozen rows of large and elegant wooden chairs. Painted images of pyramids and staring eyes with light rays emanating from them decorate the walls. There are just a few stained-glass windows, and large jars rest on the floor on either side of a center aisle. Edgar and Tiger walk toward the stage and pause at the first jar. It has something in it: a red liquid.
Blood.
It is up to the brim in every jar.
Then there is the sound of something moving along the floor on the other side of the wall beyond the stage, thudding forward, moving in two beats at a time—boom, boom…boom, boom. Whatever is there seems to be on two feet, but they are not footsteps like any sort Edgar has ever heard. They sound unbooted and loud, striking the surface with the force of a large animal with hooves. He dare not look at Tiger, who has gone silent. “This does not make any sense,” he says so quietly he can barely hear himself. “We are at the far end of the building and up above the two beside it. Are those steps coming from mid-air?” Tiger does not respond, and when he turns to look at her, she is gone. He frantically surveys the room and finds her on the stage near the throne gazing upward. He wonders if she heard what he heard.
“Look,” she says, still staring up. There is a dark column, smooth as marble, ascending to the ceiling, so dark that it was not visible from the back of the room. Up at the top there is some sort of big box, oblong shaped, carved and decorated with more pyramids, eyes, snakes and horns.
Edgar walks toward Tiger and feels something underfoot. He reaches down and finds a feather. He lifts it so it is between their faces, and cannot believe its size: large and black, it is more than half the length of their bodies.
“A dark angel’s wings,” says Tiger. He can see fear on her face, which is remarkable to observe, since he has never seen it there before.
“We should leave,” says Edgar, and surprisingly, Tiger does not offer resistance.
The two friends instantly turn and walk out of the room at a brisk pace. Edgar has never known Tiger to flee from anything, but she seems to be doing so now. They pound down the steps without speaking, descending all five flights of wide, winding stairs in a minute. As they reach the bottom, the big rough with the squashed nose and pumpkin skull is just getting to his feet, staggering, shaking that wide head, bringing the two young people who assaulted him into focus. Tiger smacks him again, another batter’s blow across the face, and he drops to the floor once more and lies still.
It takes them half the time to get out of the seedy neighborhood that it took to get into it. Edgar looks back several times as they move, imagining the devil on the loose in London and chasing them through its streets, his mind reeling with vivid, changing images of something large, something red, black, grotesque, slithering, hobbling, flying, howling. Nothing, however, seems to be following and they slow a little as they progress. They go the safer route: down to Whitechapel Road and through Aldgate and the more frequented parts of the city. They say nothing. Only once they are past the Midland Grand Hotel do they start to talk.
“Perhaps we should have stayed longer, investigated more,” says Edgar. “The candles were lit, so someone must have been there recently.”
“Perhaps,” says Tiger, and when she turns to him, he can see that she does not look frightened at all. It is the old Tiger. He wonders again if she heard what he heard, saw what he saw. He realizes that she has not said a word to confirm any of it. She bears the expression of someone who has simply made a prudent decision.
They walk on in silence, going up the hill along Kentish Town Road toward Highgate and the Lear home. The sun is just beginning to come up, casting a warm, foggy glow over London. They stop on Mansfield Road.
“What are we going to do?” asks Edgar. “We are in much deeper trouble this time.”
“So it appears.”
Did she really say that? he asks himself. Simply that? We were just in the devil’s room!
“We need to stick together,” he says. “That’s the first thing. Any one of us alone would be an easy target. We do everything together now, until we figure out how to survive…or kill it.”
“Stick together…yes.” He thinks he detects a slight bit of suspicion in her face. Tiger is so good at being strong, even emotionless, so it is difficult to read her sometimes.
They don’t say anything again for a while, trudging along Mansfield Road until they come to Progress Street. The Lear home is just a dozen houses away.
“At least we came out of there unscathed,” says Edgar. “When we get to the house, we’ll have the weapons and be on our home ground.”
Tiger does not respond.
Then they hear a shriek. It takes them a moment to realize that it is Lucy’s voice.
They run toward the house. She is sitting on the front walkway near the little brick wall that separates their tiny front lawn from the street, rocking a lifeless Jonathan in her arms.