Mind the Gap

chapter Nineteen

daddy's girl

Jazz ran ahead of him, fleeing into the darker shadows of the Underground. They left the Palace

behind, but not without being seen. Shouts followed, and then footfalls, and as Jazz emerged into a wider

tunnel where the distant sound of modern Tube trains could be heard, she knew there would be no escape.

There were too many Uncles, too many BMW men. Her mother had told her to hide forever, but there was

nowhere left to hide.



Deeper, Terence had said.

F*ck that. Deeper only meant a dead end.

Jazz raced along the tunnel. The only light was the barest illumination coming from a couple of vents

that were still open to the surface, not nearly enough by which to watch her footing. Yet she threw aside

caution and simply ran.

"Damn it, Jasmine!" Terence shouted after her.

It felt fine. Wonderful, in fact. For too long she had al-lowed herself to be guided by the

assertiveness of others. No longer. A hundred yards ahead, she knew of a passageway that separated this

tunnel from another, abandoned but more recently in use. It still had rails, and there was a plat-form there

whose many exits had long since been boarded over. But Stevie had shown her a way up, an emergency

exit. It was the nearest path up from the Underground.

Her eyes were wide, trying to pick up any source of light, peering at the wall on the right in search of

that pas-sageway. More shouts came along the tunnel. Light from torches bobbed dimly behind her, helping

to show the way. Then she saw it —a patch of shadow even darker than the rest of the tunnel—and Jazz

ran for it. At the wall she paused, taking ragged gasps of air, and reached out with her hands to make sure

she wasn't going to run into anything.

A hand clamped her shoulder, spun her around, and in the darkness she could just make out the

shape of Terence's face. His scent was warm and comforting, sweat and cinna-mon and rich earth. But

she didn't want his brand of com-fort anymore.

"Let me go!" she hissed.

More voices shouting. She glanced back the way she'd come and saw a dozen points of searching,

bobbing light from the torches of the Blackwood Club and their minions.

"Go where? You don't think they'll find you up there?" Terence snapped. "There's only two ways this

can end. One of them is with you dead, and I won't see that."

"I'm supposed to trust you?"

"You're supposed to want to put an end to them. Take power from the people who murdered your

mother. Prevent them gaining the magic that'll change them, corrupt them. Jazz, it could turn them into

monsters!"

Jazz glanced into the passageway, swore, and shot him a hard look, hoping the darkness did not

prevent him from seeing it.

"Deeper it is, then."

Terence sighed and took her hand, and they ran on to-gether. Their pursuers had drawn closer during

the pause. Bright torchlight swept around them.

"I see them!" a voice cried.

"Shoot f*cking Whitcomb!" a man ordered.

"Don't hurt the girl!" a woman said.

A woman, Jazz thought. And she knew of only one woman who could give instructions to these men.

Josephine Blackwood herself had descended into the Underground.

A gunshot echoed along the tunnel, and Jazz flinched. Terence just kept running. They darted to the

left and the torch beams danced around them, trying to pinpoint them again. A short way ahead the tunnel

forked, though the nar-row left fork had been closed off and bricked over a couple of generations past.

Jazz's breath hitched and she stared at the dark brick, feeling a tug on her gut and her heart. She'd felt

something similar before, but never this strongly.

She started for the wall, but Terence pulled her along the open fork.

"No. We're supposed to go that way," she said.

"I'm glad you know that. Glad you feel it."

He drew her to a stop just a few yards beyond the split, and she realized there was a heavy wooden

door set into the wall, separating one of the fork's tunnels from the other.

Terence turned the handle and it opened easily. He stepped through and crouched down, searching

for something in the dark. Jazz heard a click, and light blossomed from a torch in Terence's hand. Just like

Harry and the United Kingdom, he must have had them stored in various locations under-ground. What Jazz

wanted to know was why.

"Where are you taking me?"

Terence narrowed his eyes. "Hurry."

It was good advice. The Blackwood Club was closing in. Someone called her name, as if they knew

her, and it turned her stomach to realize that they probably did. Some of those men —the Uncles—had

known her since she was an infant.



She started to follow Terence through the door and froze, seized by the lure of whatever lay beyond

it. Jazz threw back her head, inhaling sharply as a wave of bliss passed through her. Then Terence took her

by the hand, and for a moment it was as though the temptation that lay beyond the door was Terence

himself.

Jazz broke the contact with him.

"Come on!" he snapped.

She glanced toward their pursuers. They were close enough that she could make out the silhouettes

of the Uncles and the BMW men by the gloomy light of their torches. One figure was that of a woman.

Josephine Blackwood seemed to float along the floor of the tunnel, long hair framing her face, catching the

glint of the lights as though she was more a specter than the ghosts of old London.

Someone laughed, a booming thunder that rolled across the tunnel, and her skin crawled with

revulsion. Philip, the half-mad. By now perhaps entirely mad.

"Jazz!" Terence shouted.

But she was no longer paying any attention to him, or to the Blackwood Club. The wind had started

blowing along the tunnel, tousling Jazz's hair, and she could hear the ban-shee cry of the city's ghosts rising.

"Again?" she whispered.

The Hour of Screams had returned once more. The in-tervals between them were growing shorter

and shorter. Harry had been unnerved by them coming so close together, but Jazz breathed deeply and let

the breeze wash over her, let the screams come. The ghosts of old London were cry-ing out to be heard.

Harry might have seen the phantom im-ages of the city's past, but he had never listened to their cries...

their pleas. The time had come for someone to listen.

"Oh, Christ," Terence muttered. "Cover your ears, Jasmine. Find a song!"

Jazz shook her head. "Not this time."

The Uncles and their hired thugs began to shout in alarm. Philip howled like a wolf. Josephine

Blackwood snapped off orders to those who had gathered in her name.

The Hour of Screams roared in, and all around Jazz the ghosts of old London began to rise again.



****

At first, the parade of echoes seemed familiar. There were visions from the days when bombs rained

down over London, images of chaos and heartbreak, but the stream of ghosts soon produced

more-mundane memories, which vividly revealed the life and laughter of the city, along with its tragedies.

There were music halls and couples dancing, actors on a stage, streets filled with early-model cars giving

way to brougham carriages. The ghosts of London swept around her like a rushing river, and Jazz stood in

the midst of the current and let it wash over her.

She looked up, and the magician was there in his top hat and tails. From one sleeve he produced a

bouquet of flowers, and from within his jacket a white dove. The dove took wing.

And it changed.

The Hour of Screams roared around her, and in the midst of that mournful wailing, the dove

transformed into another sort of ghost. The entire spectral flow shuddered and rippled and changed.

"What is this?" Jazz whispered. Or perhaps she only thought the words, for the wind would have torn

them from her lips.

They overwhelmed her, rushing around her and into her, all of the secrets of old London. She knew

not only the pain and the grief but the magic that the city had once contained.

Terence was down on his knees just inside the door into the other tunnel, hands clamped over his

ears. Somewhere farther along the ghostly torrent, the members of the Blackwood Club and their

bone-breakers would be doing the same, or be tearing at their ears and eyes the way that Philip had.

But Jazz only stared in wonder.

The spectral flow coalesced, shaping itself into a vast chamber whose every wall was covered with

bookshelves, a massive library of arcana. There were tables strewn with tools and metalwork, pipes and

bolts, along with talismans and still more volumes of lore and magic.

But the heart of the room comprised an enormous con-fusion of pipes and gauges, gears and levers.

It clanked and hissed with steam that emerged in clouds from small valves. The pipes and gauges were

ordinary enough, but many other parts were oddly shaped and roughly crafted, obvi-ously made specifically

for this machine. They were like nothing she'd ever seen before. Except that wasn't true. One of the gears

looked precisely like the blade she had stolen from Mortimer Keating's house.

The steaming structure could only be Alan Whitcomb's apparatus.

And the bespectacled man who stood before it, inspect-ing a gauge, could only be Whitcomb himself.

The resem-blance to Terence was not exact —perhaps because of his father's mustache—but it was



there.

The Hour of Screams cried in the hiss of the steam from the apparatus. The ghosts of old London

shrieked.

Alan Whitcomb stepped into the heart of his machine. He locked a metal arm across his chest and

slid his arms into iron cuffs. He positioned his feet so that the sole of each shoe sat atop a different lever.

Jazz saw the fear on his face —fear of the unknown—and she understood then that Terence's father had

made the apparatus to function with himself as the battery.

In that fog of ghosts, she watched as the man withdrew from the machine. At first she thought he

had lost his nerve, but when he sat down at a table with a sheet of calculations and a heavy, dusty

grimoire, she realized that some essential element had not yet been completed.

The spectral image flowed and changed, and now she saw him seated in a meditative pose amid a

circle of candles, letting his own blood flow with a sharp blade, spattering crimson droplets onto long metal

gears inscribed with strange runes and a quartet of crystal spheres that seemed to absorb the blood.

This is for me, Jazz thought. Aside from the visits of that Victorian magician, all of her previous

experiences with the ghosts of old London had seemed random, but there was nothing random about this.

The Hour of Screams was the cries of those ancient echoes, the restless, anguished spirits of the city, and

they had chosen to replay these events for her.

"Show me," Jazz said.

A figure manifested and she knew him immediately, though only from photographs.

"Dad," she whispered.

The ghost made no sign that he had heard her or even recognized her presence. With the exception

of the magi-cian, that was always the way. The shades of the past acted out some bit of ghostly theater, but

that did not mean they were the wandering spirits of the actual people whose faces were revealed to her.

The fading magic of London itself might have manifested those images or the collective yearn-ing of those

whose ghosts did still linger in the city.

This specter was not her father.

Yet Jazz's heart ached terribly as she watched him. The shouts and singing of the members of the

Blackwood Club —themselves trying to survive the Hour of Screams— retreated beyond her awareness.

Though Terence knelt quite nearby, he seemed a world away. In those moments, Jazz felt as though she

had been swept into the substance of the spectral, becoming a ghost herself.

The gray shadow of Alan Whitcomb's occult laboratory still existed around her, the bulky apparatus

with all of its odd juttings still in the center of the room, yet the image of her father existed in the same

space, a ghost of her own past layered on top of one from Terence's. The phantom of the elder Whitcomb

stood by the apparatus, fixing a bloodied — perhaps bewitched—gear into place.

Her father's ghost stood among the burning candles and the spatters of Whitcomb's blood, and he

drew a curved dagger from his coat, moving within the shifting shadows toward the other man.

Jazz stared, eyes wide.

The specters weren't layered. The vision unfolding be-fore her was not some odd combination of

events but a sin-gle moment from London's past.

Her father spoke, though she couldn't hear his voice. Whitcomb spun, hands up instantly, ready to

defend his infer-nal machine. James Towne gestured with the blade, which Jazz now saw had been marked

with strange symbols not unlike those on the apparatus itself. He tried to force Alan Whitcomb away from

his invention, but the man's face contorted with ha-tred and fury. Her father brandished the blade, a

warning, a threat, and the two men began to shout at each other.

All Jazz heard was the wailing of the Hour of Screams, but she didn't need to hear the words spoken.

She saw the story playing out on their faces. Her father wanted Whitcomb to back away from the

apparatus, intending to either destroy it or use it somehow. Whitcomb had a zealot's eyes.

When her father made a move toward the apparatus, Whitcomb lunged at him, yet it seemed to Jazz

very little like an attack. The inventor leaped upon her father, who tried to back away, tried to pull back his

blade. The curved tip of that wicked dagger punctured Whitcomb's abdomen. Her father tried to push the

man away, and then Whitcomb did something entirely mad. He wrapped his hands around her father's

throat and began to throttle him, pushing him backward and down even as he dropped himself down onto

that blade.

Blood flowed from his belly, soaking her father's shirt.

Her father pushed Whitcomb off. He clamped his hands on the sides of his head, staring at the

inventor in an-guish. He shook his head and began to shout. Jazz could read the cursing on his lips. The

gruesome pantomime be-came even more bizarre as her father, panicking, raced to the apparatus and



studied it for a moment before rushing to the table Jazz had seen Whitcomb seated at before.

He was frantic. Though that ritual dagger still jutted from Whitcomb's belly, it seemed obvious he

hadn't meant to kill the man. In a frenzy, her father began to gather items from the laboratory, lining them

up just outside the circle of candles Whitcomb had left on the floor. Then he grabbed hold of the bleeding,

barely conscious inventor and dragged him in a swath of blood across the floor into the midst of those

candles, leaving a crimson streak behind.

Alan Whitcomb's mouth opened, half a sneer and half a smile. He laughed and blood bubbled on his

lips. When he spoke, even with the Hour of Screams around her, she un-derstood every word. In that

moment it seemed almost as though all the ghosts of old London were speaking with him, whispering the

words into her ears.

Without a battery, it's just rubbish. Damn fool. Without me, it's useless.

The inventor laughed again, choking on his own blood. Jazz's father ignored him, relighting

extinguished candles and unrolling a scroll that seemed ancient at first glance, un-til the designs and writing

were revealed. These were plans for the apparatus. Her father tossed the scroll aside and grabbed another,

and another still, until finally he had be-fore him a pattern of symbols.

He had piled small dishes of dye or paint nearby, and now he plunged his fingers into one filled with

ochre and daubed it at his temples, then inscribed circles upon his cheeks. Tearing off his shirt, he painted

his chest with the symbols on Whitcomb's scroll, flecks of ochre flying like spittle. Even as he did this, his

mouth was moving and his body rocked to some repetition of words, some spell or chant.

Then he knocked the ink pots aside and slid over beside the dying Whitcomb. He tore open the man's

shirt and there, laid bare, were the same symbols he had just painted upon himself. His eyes were filled with

regret and he hesi-tated, shaking his head in frustration.

Jazz watched her father place both hands onto the han-dle of the dagger.

"No," she said, the word both a plea and a denial.

Chanting, he withdrew the curved dagger from Whitcomb's abdomen, raised it, and drove the blade

into the man's chest, stabbing him in the heart. Jagged lances of bright silver light crackled around the blade

and raced up James Towne's arms. His hair stood on end, and the sigils he'd daubed on his flesh with ochre

ink flashed with a bril-liant light. As though electrified, her father shook, hands still locked on the dagger, a

circuit of power traveling from his fingers down through the blade and into Alan Whitcomb's heart.

Jazz screamed, her voice mixing with the anguished moans and wails of old London. The wind of the

Hour of Screams buffeted her, increasing in force and urgency. The fog of ghostly images wavered as

though it might blow away, but instead it rippled and altered yet again.

Whitcomb's apparatus evaporated, the laboratory around it shifting. Lights cut the darkness, and at

first she thought that somehow the Blackwood Club had overcome the Hour of Screams and was attacking,

the lights their torches. Then she saw the silhouette of the car rolling through the fog and staggered back.

The headlamps shone through the spectral mist, and in it she could make out dozens of tiny, dour faces.

The car jerked to a halt at a strange angle, half on the curb. The door swung open and her father

staggered out, not bothering to close the door. Jazz stared at him and she knew something had gone horribly

wrong. He'd gone to try to take control of Whitcomb's apparatus, but the inventor had sacrificed himself to

deprive the Blackwood Club of the battery, because he'd made himself the battery. Her father had tried to

use the same magic Whitcomb had manipulated to transfer the power into himself, to become the battery so

that it would not die with Whitcomb. But he'd been rushed. Frenzied.

It had not gone well.

Whatever magic Whitcomb had used, in his desperation her father hadn't done it correctly. Looking

at him, Jazz could see it all. His eyes bled scarlet tears. Silver light flick-ered behind them, and the sigils on

his flesh glowed. His body had begun to wither. This must have been the very same night, but he looked

twenty years older, as though some cancer had eaten away at him.

He staggered toward the house. Jazz nearly crumbled when she saw it, sketched there in the fog of

ghosts. Her childhood home. Only when she tasted the salt of her own tears on her lips did she realize she

had begun to cry. She shook her head, wishing she could call back to her father across the years.

Jazz watched him go up to the door, fishing in his pocket for the key. "I don't want to see," she

whispered, the words a kind of keening cry, a prayer, a wish.

But she could not look away from the sight of him stag-gering up the stairs and into her bedroom,

where he stood over her crib. He swayed as he gazed down at baby Jasmine.

He reached down into the crib and picked her up, then made his way —stumbling once and nearly

dropping her—to the rocking chair in the corner. Withering even as she watched him, crumbling in upon

himself like wilting flowers, he collapsed into the chair, holding baby Jazz in his arms.



Crying, he kissed her forehead.

In the now, Jazz dropped to her knees and wept along with him, the ghosts swirling around her head

with a final gust of wind.

Silver light spilled from her father's lips and his tears, and it crackled like lightning in a burst of

illumination from the sigils on his papery skin. In his arms, the infant gurgled happily as her entire body

flared with brilliant light, eyes gleaming silver. The glow slowly vanished.

James Towne's last breath rattled in his throat.

Baby Jasmine settled down, slipping back to sleep.



****

A slap cleared her mind. Blinking, Jazz stared up at Terence, her cheek stinging from the blow. From

the depths of her sadness, anger flared, even as she became aware again of the ground under her knees

and the cool air of the tunnel. Her tears began to dry on her face.

"What the hell —" she began.

He grabbed her wrist, pulling her to her feet. "Pay atten-tion, Jasmine. While you were off with the

fairies there, the Hour passed. Or didn't you notice the screams were gone?"

Jazz glanced around. In the midst of the vision that had played out before her, she hadn't noticed at

all. But he was right. The Hour of Screams had ended. A ragged voice came to her from down the length

of the black tunnel, ex-horting others to rise and give pursuit. Torches clicked on, one by one.

Some of the Uncles and the BMW men might have been affected by the Hour, but not all. Josephine

Blackwood would have seen to that. They were still after her.

"Come on!" Terence whispered, tugging her through the door and into the parallel tunnel. His torch lit

the way, picking out dripping sludge and a scurrying rat.

It was her nature to resist, but not this time. Jazz let him lead her along the tunnel, careful with her

footing and try-ing to pick up the pace. She had to make sense of what she'd seen, had to decide what it

would mean for her.

"Faster!" Terence said.

His grip tightened on her hand. Jazz shook her head to clear it and matched him step for step.

"What happened to you back there? What did you see?"

She took a deep breath and cast a sidelong glance at him. All along she'd held her secrets close. Her

mother had taught her never to share too much of herself. A dreadfully sad lesson, now that she considered

it, but Terence had done the same, and Harry as well. All of them with their secrets. If only they'd been

truthful with one another, things might have turned out much differently.

"You know about the ghosts," she said, and it wasn't a question. Of course he did.

"Harry sees them," Terence said. "I had an idea early on that you see them too. Now I know."

A loud crash behind them signaled the arrival of the Blackwood Club. The Uncles and the BMW

men would be pouring through the door between tunnels now. A glance back showed her the wavering

glow of a trio of bright torches, but there would be more.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"I told you. Deeper."

Jazz gave a soft, sickened laugh. Still more secrets.

"I know the story now. How this all began," she said. And then she told him, as succinctly as she

could, the tale of their two fathers and their shared tragedy.

"I've never been much of a believer in destiny," she whispered, breathing heavily now with the

exertion of their flight. "But this is all so tied together, it can't just be coinci-dence."

Terence could only nod.

They were still holding hands and Jazz felt the contact acutely.

"So what am I supposed to do? It's magic, isn't it?"

Terence darted abruptly to the left, hauling her with him and nearly colliding with the stone wall. She

put out a hand and leaned against it, feeling the rough surface under her fingers. He held his torch pointed

at the ground, and the yellow gloom it cast made them both look like ghosts.

"That's not why we're here," Terence said, his gaze grim. "We're here to move on from magic, not to

grow stronger from it. If you have a destiny, it's to finish the job my father started —the job your father

interrupted."

She felt his grief and relented. Whether he was right or wrong, Jazz wasn't sure it mattered. All of

the tales she had heard about magic —Terence's and Harry's and her own— they were all tragedies. Had

her mother known the truth of what her baby had become all along or only learned it in the end?

It no longer mattered. She'd tried to run away from the part she had been meant to play. Her mother



had tried so hard to prepare her for that. But she could never have run far enough or hidden deep enough.

Terence shone his torch on a rectangular metal hatch about four feet high and two wide. He pushed

it open, and once more Jazz felt that tugging, a fishhook set deeply into her chest, pulling her through and

downward. A narrow curving stone staircase lay before them, and they quickly de-scended.

"Quiet," Jazz said, concerned about the sounds of their footsteps.

"It doesn't matter. Josie Blackwood's got a little magic of her own. The whole club dabbles, fancying

themselves as true sorcerers. They want to take the old magic of the city into themselves, have the kind of

power no one's seen for centuries. But for now she's got enough to follow our trail. How do you think they

found you? It took a while, but they found you every time. And she's come too close to lose us now."

The stairs continued winding downward. Jazz had not thought to count them, but just when she began

to think they must have descended two hundred or more —and the shouts of their pursuers started to follow

them down—they reached another iron door. Terence swung it open on thick, squealing hinges and flashed

the torchlight into the cham-ber ahead.

Shadows retreated, strange silhouettes scattering into the deeper darkness. Jazz might have asked

what they were, but Terence pulled her through into the chamber and then they were running again. What

she saw of the floor and walls in the torchlight unnerved her. The stones that had been built into the

foundations and arches of these subter-ranean caverns were ancient things, dating back at least to Roman

control of London, perhaps further. These were the halls of old kings or the churches of archaic gods.

They raced through corridors and courtyards and chambers, down short flights of stone steps. At last

Terence drew them to a halt. Jazz shook her hand loose from his, si-multaneously relieved and disappointed

at the loss of con-tact. Without the feel of his hand in hers, she felt alone. The weight of the entire city hung

over her.

Terence fished in his pocket and withdrew an object. Jazz narrowed her eyes, trying to make out

what it was. He snapped it open and gave it a flick, and a tiny flame blos-somed to life. A lighter. What did

he need with that when he had a torch?

He dropped it into a narrow gutter to the left of the door they had just stepped through, and a small

rivulet of oil ignited. A line of fire raced along the perimeter of the circu-lar room, a ring of flame that

illuminated the vast chamber and threw dancing shadows on the high, domed ceiling.

Alan Whitcomb's apparatus filled the center of the chamber.

Jazz caught her breath. "You've been building it down here all along?"

"I couldn't do it aboveground. They would have found me eventually. And this was my father's

intention from the start, to use it down here in what was once the heart of the city."

In the flickering firelight, she stared at the massive con-traption. It sat awaiting its final component,

the battery that would bring it to life.

"They're not far behind us," Terence warned.

"I know that!"

The visions she had seen in the tunnels above were fresh in her mind. Whitcomb had prepared all of

the parts of the apparatus. She had seen him testing the gears and levers in his occult laboratory.

Taking a deep breath, she approached the apparatus. She could see the levers where she was

supposed to put her feet, the metal braces that would hold her arms, the bracket that would close upon her

chest. The ghosts had not only given up the secrets of Jazz's past. They had shown her what they required

of her.

"I don't understand," she said, wrapping her hand around a cold metal pipe that made up part of the

apparatus. It thrummed in her hand like the rails in one of the Tube tunnels, alive with distant power. "You

rebuilt this thing, but you didn't know the battery was a person?"

He shook his head. "I knew someone had to operate it from the inside. I've strapped myself in a

hundred times, try-ing different power sources. There are connections for out-side power; I suppose he left

them intact only to test the apparatus, but I always presumed the battery would attach there. How could I

have known the battery would be a hu-man? Who could have imagined it?"

Jazz took a deep breath. Trembling, she gazed up at the gauges and bars and steam valves of the

apparatus. When Terence put a hand on her shoulder, she did not turn to meet his gaze.

"What will happen to me?" she asked.

Down there in the cold heart of the city, the only sound was the crackling of the flames that lit the

chamber. Then Jazz heard approaching voices and footfalls and knew that they were out of time.

Terence did not reply. That was good. If he'd said any-thing other than I don't know, it would have

been a lie, and the time for lying was over.

Jazz grabbed hold of two thick pipes and stepped up into the apparatus. It began to hum.