Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

in a great black wig and the worst stage whiskers I ever seen. He couldn’t act a lick to save his soul, this friend, but it was a small part so it didn’t matter so much. Anyroad, the second Corsican brother stepped through the trees and challenged the villain to a duel. There was a great sword-fight and the villain fell dying in agony and at the very end the ghost appeared again to talk to his brother. Both brothers were played by the same actor, a wonderful trick that must have been done with mirrors, and you should have heard the shouts and applause. After the play there was an acrobat, and then the burlesque, and it was nearly midnight when it was finished. You tell me where else you’d find yourself an evening like that for a sixpence, because you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t find it for a pound.

      And if I’d seen my mother on that stage, it would have been perfect. I was watching for her, of course, like I always did. But, just like always, it turned out she was somewhere else.

      THE NIGHT AIR was cold, coming out of the theatre, and Christ the noise and jostle. The street out front was clattering with coaches, looming at you out of the fog—cos what else would there be except fog, on a London night? Yellow fog in the gas-lamps, waiting to swallow us, and rivers of Londoners flowing in all directions. That was London, all hours. Just slip into the current and let it carry you away, like a tiny lump of something—don’t ask what—bobbing along on the Thames.

      Just before it carried me round the corner, I seen the Printer’s Devil again. He was standing under a gas-lamp clutching his tracts. Someone had stopped to take one—a tall old gentleman in a queer old-fashioned black coat and boots and a slouchy low-brimmed hat. The gentleman was standing very close, looming over him like a hawk on a tree branch. I only seen them for a second, and it was hard to be sure with the fog, but it seemed to me like the gentleman was saying something. The Printer’s Devil was shrinking back with his eyes wide and white, like a horse’s when a fist is raised to strike.

      That’s when the gentleman looked across and seen me. Just an instant. His face beneath the low-brimmed hat, staring at me from out of the fog, like something coiled up in a cave.

      I WAS A NGLING SOUTH and west towards the Haymarket, so the route took me along the edges of the old rookery of St Giles. The Holy Land itself—the biggest and worst of all the London slums.

      It wasn’t like it was in the old days, or so I’d been told. In the old days the Holy Land was one great maze of tiny stinking streets and blind alleyways, stretching from Drury Lane west to Charing Cross Road, and from Great Russell Street in the north all the way to Long Acre. You could stumble in and not come out again, not ever—just wander lost till someone took pity and slit your throat. A lot of it had been torn down, but parts of it remained. Houses so rickety you’d think the next big wind would blow them over, all jumbled together so close that one couldn’t fall without taking a hundred more with it. Broken windows patched up with rags and paper, with poles sticking out for hanging clothes, and slops being emptied look-out-below. In the old days there was paths through the Holy Land that never saw the light of day—you could go from one end to the other through windows and cellars. This was wonderful handy for thieves and footpads, for how was the Watch to follow? Nip in and just disappear, like a rabbit in a field of brambles. There were still routes like this, if you knew where to look—and I did, since the Holy Land is where I’d lived with Mrs Dalrymple.

      But I wasn’t deep into the rookery that night, just on the very fringes. The roads beyond were still crowded and busy, but here it was just filthy and quiet. Dark too, and choked with fog, for who’d waste good gaslight on a shit-hole like St Giles?

      That’s when I knew someone was following me.

      I looked quickly round, but of course there was no one there.

      “Hello?”

      Nothing.

      I started forward again, and tried to tell myself I was just being a fool, and frightening myself with imaginings. But I was moving fast, now. This was London, and you knew the risk you took. There were gangs who roamed these streets at night, looking for a girl on her own, to rob and do things to and leave half dead. There was eyes watching from alleyways, belonging to God knows who. And if you were really unlucky, there was the London Burkers. Luna Queerendo laughed at this, but Luna was a twat. God forgive me for saying that, but she was, no matter what happened to her afterwards.

      The London Burkers were a gang of murderers. They crept about in the London fog slitting throats and selling the corpses to medical students, who wanted them for cutting up and studying. When Luna heard me mention this, she gave that laugh of hers— hooting like an owl, all smug—and said the last of the London Burkers was hung at Newgate twenty years ago, which everybody knew except for poor Nell apparently. And anyway the law’d been changed so medical students could get their corpses other ways, poor Nell she’s such a daisy isn’t she, hoot-hoot-hoot.

      Twat.

      Besides, there was worse than the London Burkers. There was Spring-Heeled Jack. I knew for a fact he was out there, cos everyone knew about Spring-Heeled Jack. I knew someone once who actually seen him. She nearly died. He jumped up from behind a wall—jumped twenty feet into the air—with his eyes burning and two horns on his head. Except you couldn’t think that way. You couldn’t slink about scared all the time, cos then you couldn’t live a life at all.

      I’d been listening to my own footsteps echoing on the cobblestones: one-two-one-two. And then I heard the others: muffled and uneven. They stopped, half a second after I did. But I’d heard them, behind me.

      Clip-clop.

      I stood very still.

      “Who the fuck is there?”

      Silence and fog, growing thicker by the second. A deadly chill creeping over the cobbles.

      “You better know, I got a knife. I know how to use it. You don’t believe me? Then try.”

      Fog like a living thing, moving.

      There. Something moving that wasn’t fog.

      I ran for my life, with him behind me—whoever it was. I slipped, and almost fell, and every second I expected to feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and hands laying hold. But I was fast, and he wouldn’t catch me. I knew these streets—I knew where I was going. Except I’d turned the wrong way, or this was the wrong street, cos it was a dead end. In front of me was a wall of brick.

      The yellow glare of a bull’s-eye lantern came lurching at me out of the fog. There was a face. I screamed.

      “Good God!” he exclaimed.

      A chalk-white face with the eyes black and horrible. “Christ, you startled me! No, it’s all right. Look, I’m sorry. I think I got turned around—bit lost—the fog and these damned winding . . . Look, I really wish you wouldn’t wave that thing in my face.”

      Cos I had the knife in both hands, never mind how both of them was shaking. “You bastard—keep away!”

      “Yes—fine. Look, I’m not going to hurt you . . .”

      The two of us, in the yellow pool of light from the bull’s-eye. I’d seen him before—I was suddenly sure of that. But where?

      “Stop following me!”

      “Following you? How could I be following you? I was coming the other way. I was back there—whichever way it was. I was coming from the theatre, and now I’m completely turned around.”

      The Kemp Theatre. The black around his eyes was make-up. That was where I’d seen him. He stood uncertainly, the lantern rocking in his hand.

      “Look, I’m sorry if I frightened you, but look here, could you please stop—Christ!”

      He broke off with a shout of pain. He’d put his other hand out, and this startled me, which was too bad for him, cos I was still very twitchy—even though I recognized him now.

      “You’re him. You’re that French turd.”

      “Look what you’ve done! What did you do that for? You’ve