“Whoa,” one of them called out.
Bryan strode to him, ripping off the mask.
To his surprise, he saw a young man. A kid. No more than eighteen. He knew damned well that he’d never seen him before.
He went from Blood-bone to Blood-bone, ripping off masks.
“I’m not here to hurt anyone!” the first kid said. “I swear.”
“None of us are!” another shouted.
“It’s a show—it’s just a show!” the third Blood-bone said.
“This costume was banned.” Bryan’s voice sounded like a roar in his own ears.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but I have college next fall,” the first kid said. “Some dude—a talent scout—called and offered us five hundred bucks apiece to wear Blood-bone outfits for an hour and just stand here. I swear, I—”
Bryan turned away from the kid.
Marnie was gone.
*
Marnie was chasing Bridget.
The moment the Blood-bone troop had appeared, Bridget had cried, “Oh, my God,” her voice filled with absolute panic. “We have to get out of here,” she’d said urgently to Marnie. “We can hide in the cave!”
“No!” Marnie had shouted.
Too late. Her cousin had already disappeared behind the doors—guarded by a pair of skeletons and adorned with a plaque reading Surrender All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!
She might be giving up all hope, but Marnie had no choice but to follow Bridget.
“Bridget, you idiot, please,” she cried. “This isn’t a good place to be!”
And it sure as hell wasn’t.
The convention staff seemed to have gone. The fabrications and mannequins and tableaux remained.
Which path had Bridget taken?
Marnie started down one walkway.
She found herself in Victorian London. Gas lamps had been fashioned—they were just battery-operated candles in period reproduction pieces, she knew. Still, they had their effect.
She went under a sign that read Mitre Square.
She tried to remember. Yes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims had been found there.
Catherine someone. Like most other people, she had read about Jack the Ripper, but right now facts were eluding her.
She turned a corner and jumped. Two people—No, two mannequins in clothing from the period were leaned against a brick wall, huddled together.
They were absolutely excellent.
Madison Darvil might have created something like them, something like this scene...
“Bridget?” she called softly.
Something moved near her.
Marnie wanted to shout her cousin’s name.
She didn’t dare. She kept inching forward. She came around another corner. Carefully.
She drew back, her scream catching in her throat.
Jack the Ripper stood before her, a knife raised high in his hand. He was in a Victorian frock coat, a medical bag in his other hand, a top hat on his head.
He whirled around to greet her.
*
Bryan swore, looking down the path they’d taken. They were gone, just gone.
Bridget and Marnie. The two of them. Suddenly he had a flash of insight.
Two of them. There had been two killers. One, of course, was alpha, planning it all out. But that would allow for details like David Neal spiking Marnie’s tea while his coconspirator had been the one to see to it that Jeremy Highsmith had been “poisoned” with an erectile dysfunction drug.
His phone rang, and he answered it urgently.
It was Jackson. “I’m at the hospital ER with Roberta.”
Bryan kept moving. He came to the entrance to the Horror-palooza Cave exhibit.
“Marnie’s missing... Blood-bones were paid to appear and throw us off. I’m following, heading into a horror cave. Get everyone searching.”
“Will do. But you need to know, Roberta is freaking out. She says she’s going to die. She says that she was just supposed to be sick. She’s spilling her guts. Bryan, she was the woman who was in on it. Roberta Alan. But she was just acting with the man who had a plan. She was supposed to get sick from a bar she had in her own purse. A bar that we wouldn’t suspect because she was carrying it herself. She’s in a panic now, thinking that she was used, that she is supposed to die. And she was working with—”
“I know who she was working with—she was supposed to die, most probably. She just didn’t die fast enough.”
“David Neal is at his house.”
“It isn’t David Neal,” Bryan said.
*
There was a whirring sound.
Jack the Ripper turned to stare at Marnie.
He had maddened, bloodthirsty eyes in a narrow, cruel face.
His arm rose.
And fell.
And the whirring sound came again.
Jack the Ripper was just an animatronic dummy.
A breath of relief escaped Marnie. She reached for her phone. Her pocket was empty; it was back at the table.
Swearing silently to herself, she stood dead still and listened. Nothing. And then...
A soft sobbing sound.
“Bridget?” she called cautiously.
“Marnie?”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. I think... I think it’s Chicago. It’s really dark. Some of the lights are gone. Where are you? I’m moving. I’m moving... I can’t get back to the exit!”
A killer could be listening.
“Don’t talk!” she commanded. “I’ll find you!”
She couldn’t talk anymore herself. She could lead the killer right to herself.
She kept walking. The streets changed. It was very dark, but there were still gas lamps, and they were creating small shells of light that fell upon old brick buildings and there, ahead...
A sign announcing the Chicago Exhibition.
She had entered the realm of H. H. Holmes, the man who had slaughtered dozens more people than Jack the Ripper. He’d kept a “murder hotel,” killing, among others, those who had traveled across the country, from far and wide, to visit the fair. He’d offered them lodgings, and then he’d killed them—husbands, wives and children. He’d incinerated their bodies down in the furnace.
She stumbled upon a tableau of one of his torture rooms.
A madman stood over a table. A beautiful damsel in distress lay on it, her mouth open in a silent scream. He held a wicked-looking bone saw over her head.
There was a whir...
The mannequin turned to look at Marnie. This time she was prepared.
It was just a mannequin.
She could hear sobbing. Bridget. Of course, she was terrified.
Marnie wanted to talk to her, to assure her that everything was going to be okay.
She passed another display.
A woman in a rich costume, blood streaming down her face, her eyes alive with pleasure as she seemed to consume it.
Madame Bathory. She had supposedly bathed in the blood of young virgins to maintain her youth and beauty, but...in this exhibit, she was drinking blood, too.
Marnie moved quickly.
She came to the French Revolution. There was a giant guillotine. On the ground before it there was a basket, overflowing with severed heads.
A body remained on the machine itself. An executioner stood by the mechanism for the blade. He had his hands on the next victim.
Guards from the French Revolution stood nearby, rifles with bayonets raised, ready to stop anyone in the crowd who might think that the executions were just becoming too gruesome.
“Bridget!” Marnie shouted.
The executioner turned. He was not a mannequin or animatronic of any kind.
He was real, decked out in appropriate style, wearing a hood, as seen in so many images from the era.
“Let her go!” Marnie shouted.
He turned and looked at her.
“Oh, Marnie. Not on your life. What a saying. Yes, it is your life. Time to end it. Oh, this is truly delightful. I have really pulled it off.”
Marnie didn’t think that she was especially courageous. She was just desperate.
She moved in a flash, lunging closer and ripping one of the rifles and bayonets from a French soldier and hurtling it at the executioner.
He screamed, letting Bridget loose as he was struck in the shoulder.
It wasn’t a real blade; it wasn’t very sharp. It was enough.
Bridget broke free.
“Run, run!” Marnie shouted.
Bridget turned to flee, and Marnie spun around to do the same. But she slammed into another French soldier and reversed, blindly seeking to make her way out and to safety.
She felt something touch her arm.
A hand.
A real hand.