Chapter 369 - In Transit part 6

She awoke later that night to the stealthy scrape of her bedroom window.

It was a soft sound, little more substantial than the scurrying of a mouse, but she came awake with a start, her senses jangling. She was a light sleeper, had been since the fire that took her family's lives. She supposed, on some subconscious level, she was waiting for another such catastrophe to befall her again. Always would be. But there was more to it than that, wasn't there? She felt an indefinable, instinctive dread. The rational part of her brain said, Calm yourself, girl, you're safe in your bed. But the other half, the animal half, was clamoring, Danger! Danger! Danger!

She sat up, drawing a breath to speak. She wasn't certain what she intended to say, whether she meant to shout for help or address the presence she sensed slinking through the darkness towards her. For she was certain there was someone in her bedroom now. She could smell the air that had wafted in when whoever (or whatever) it was that had stolen into her bedchamber gained entrance through the window. She could see the curtains subtly rippling in the grainy half-light. But before she could call out, there was a sudden shifting of shadows, and then some hulking shape, which had been standing betwixt her bed and the window, hitherto unnoticed, swelled suddenly in her vision and enveloped her in darkness.

A cold hand clamped over her mouth.

She was shoved roughly onto her mattress, wrapped up in her blankets and lifted bodily from her bed.

Too late, she tried to cry out for help, but her cry was muffled against the hideously cold palm pressed firmly over her mouth.

As she was borne rapidly across the room, she attempted to pry the hand from her lower face, but her attacker's arm was like stone, his strength implacable. She clawed at the man's flesh, but her nails found no purchase. Tried to bite but her teeth skidded over the strangely unyielding skin of his palm.

She was being abducted!

Helpless, she recalled stories she had read in the paper of late. Tales of the privileged, usually children, kidnapped from their beds at night. Sometimes they were ransomed back to their frantic parents. Far too often the victims simply vanished, never to be heard from again. The criminals, whoever they were, didn't often take adults, not unless their victims were important or rich. She was neither of those things, so why was this man kidnapping her? And who was he? She tried to make out a face but his features were a swirl of oily shapes in the gloom, like a painting by Henry Fuseli, nightmarish and inhuman.

Curtains billowed. The windows blew open, tinkling glass. The little balcony outside blurred past. Moon and stars canted overhead, and she realized her abductor had leapt from the balcony.

She clutched at the man with a little shriek, memories of the fire flashing through her mind. The smoke. The heat. The sudden stark terror when she awoke. The knob of her bedroom door had seared her palm when she tried to open it, and she had retreated to her window with a sob, clutching the injured hand to her breast. Coughing. Eyes watering. Too terrified to think. She could hear screams coming from somewhere in the house. Her mother? Or one of her sisters? Oh, daddy, where are you? She opened her bedroom window so she could breathe. When she did, the door on the other side of the room burst into flames, blue fire spreading liquid-like across the ceiling. All this flashed through her mind in a sort of psychic shorthand. Leaping from the window. The way the bones in her ankles and wrist had given with a sound like kindling being snapped over one's knee. Nora squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for her abductor to hit the ground. Waiting for the snap. Waiting for the pain.

The impact, when it came, was curiously gentle. Somehow her abductor had cushioned their fall.

Before she could even begin to question how he had managed this feat, there was an immediate sensation of acceleration. Now they were moving up, springing into the air. The force of their ascent was like a physical weight pressing down on every inch of her body.

The earth recoiled. House and trees, bathed in moonlight, dropped beneath them with dizzying haste.

I am flying! she thought, and her heart leapt inside her breast. For one shining moment, she forgot her fear. She gaped from the tangle of her bedsheets and could see the roofs of all the neighboring houses, their grounds and gardens and various outlying buildings, spread out around her, silvered by moonlight.

Still higher they rose, until the entire neighborhood was a patchwork of streets and lawns and wooded lots. She had never been so high up in her life, not even in her dreams. It was like standing over a scale model of her aunt and uncle's neighborhood, every feature reproduced in painstaking detail. For a moment, the stars seemed so close she imagined she might reach out and pluck them from the heavens, like twinkling jewels scattered upon black felt. For a moment, she was weightless, untethered from all that was ordinary, witness of miracles.

And then she turned her head to see what manner of man or beast had delivered her into this numinous realm, this domain where a girl might fly and pick the stars like diamonds from the firmament.

Stark terror shattered the illusion.

It was Duke Crowden, Lord Venport's notorious host.

Malice had distorted his features into a terrible caricature of humanity. Nostrils flaring. Hair blown wild by the wind. His mouth was a wound in which fangs as long as her pinky finger erupted from bloodless gums. He looked down at her and grinned, and the moonlight turned his eyes to flashing coins. Nora screamed as they fell to earth.

Down, down, down, screaming all the way, and then an instant later, laughing at her terror, the duke sprang once more into the air.

This time it was not so gentle, and the jolt snatched her breath from her lungs. Nora cringed as they brushed through the canopy of a hoary oak tree, the leaves flapping past her face like a shoal of panicked fish. They shot through the tree in a swirl of tattered foliage, landed on the roof of the Pennelegion's home, and then bound again into the air.

Crowden did not speak as he spirited her away from her aunt and uncle's home. He did not utter a sound other than that brief, malevolent laugh, which was more a snarl than any outburst of mirth. And neither, for that matter, did Nora. Her tongue, it seemed, was paralyzed by terror. She could not even think coherently, much less bring her frantic thoughts to speech. All she could do was wonder what had become of her dashing Lord Venport. Was he a conspirator in this nightmarish abduction? Or had he met some terrible fate at the hands of the beast who had stolen her from her bed? Perhaps this wasn't even the duke but some fiend who had stolen his likeness! She had known Duke Crowden since she was a toddler. He was a lecher, yes, and a bit of a bully, but she was fairly certain he could not fly. Perhaps this was a nightmare and she would wake any moment now, warm and safe in her bed.

If only it were true!

But she knew that it was not. The sensations her faculties reported to her brain were much too vivid, too immediate, to be a sleeping fantasy. She could feel the misty night air prickling her cheeks, the wind lashing her hair and hooting in her ears, even the texture and smell of the blankets that were twisted around her body, holding her immobile. And she could smell the creature that had spirited her away. It was a combination of two things: fine cologne… and the liver-like reek of blood.

The smell of blood was very strong.

All at once, it struck her. The Duke was not kidnapping her for ransom. He had stolen her from her bed to kill her. They were flying now to his secret lair, some dank cave perhaps with rusty iron shackles dangling from the walls and human bones strewn haphazardly across the floor, and there he would hold her captive until it came time to devour her, like some monster in a children's fairy tale.

A terrible fatalism came over her with the realization. She felt that she was shrinking inside her own body, as if her spirit were contracting into a defensive posture. The Duke glanced down at her, eyes glinting with hunger, fangs jutting out over his lips, but he didn't seem so frightening anymore. She didn't care who he was, or what he was, or even what he meant to do to her. Such details were irrelevant. Death had come for her, finally, just as she always knew it would. It had been stalking her since the night of the fire, dogging her steps, staying just out of sight. What did it matter how Death was dressed or what face it wore or how it meant to have her? She had known all along, in her heart of hearts. She was never meant to escape that fire Christmas Eve, and she had been living on borrowed time ever since. Like a man who had been shorted his change at the market, Death had come to collect its recompense. It was futile to resist.

At first, she had some idea what direction the creature was carrying her, but with the speed of their flight, the foggy darkness, and her very limited knowledge of London, she soon lost her bearings. She knew only that he seemed to be carrying her a very long way.

At the beginning of the journey, they bound up and down, up and down, as if she had been kidnapped by some crazed kangaroo, but as they passed into a denser part of the city, where the houses were more closely spaced, her abductor kept mostly to the rooftops.

He zigzagged between smoky chimneystacks. Dropped down into alleys and bound across parks. Then it was back up to the rooftops where they raced up and down the steep roof peaks like a swift ship bounding over the waves of a storm-tossed sea.

She caught a glimpse of the Thames, the city lights glittering on the tranquil waters, before her abductor dropped back down into another squalid alley. He dashed around the corner with her, then bound over a high brick wall into a lot of waist-high grass with a narrow, polluted stream wending through the center of it.

Leaping.

Dashing.

Leaping again.

A name rose unbidden to her thoughts: Spring-heeled Jack.

Duke Crowden's Christian name, if she remembered correctly, was James. Jack was a bastardization of James. Was it coincidence? Or was her abductor really the infamous Spring-heeled Jack, who had terrorized Londoners in the thirties, forties and fifties?

When she was a child, Nora had harbored a morbid interest in fanciful tales. Some might call it the occult. It was an interest she was careful to conceal from her parents, who would have been appalled if they had known of Nora's fascination with ghosts and grave robbers and things that go bump in the night. Spring-heeled Jack was just one of the many legends that had piqued her curiosity. But so fascinated was she by the mysterious criminal that the details of his crimes sprang full-blown from her memory, even as her abductor whisked her through the grassy backlot.

In October of 1837, after visiting her parents in Battersea, a young woman by the name of Mary Stevens was walking to a house on Lavender Hill, where she worked as a servant. On her way through Clapham Common, a bizarre figure leapt at her from a dark alley. After immobilizing her with his iron-like grip, he began to fervidly kiss her face, all the while tearing at her clothes with his clawed hands, which were, according to her deposition, "cold and clammy as those of a corpse". Terrified, the servant had screamed, causing the attacker to flee from the scene. Her cries brought several residents to her aid. They immediately launched a search for her attacker, but the young woman's assailant was never found.

Several more attacks occurred in the years that followed, and though the details varied slightly from incident to incident, they all shared some common elements: that the creature was roughly human in appearance, that he was immensely strong, that he possessed cold white clawed hands, and that his eyes burned like two hot coals. Some claimed that he had a diabolical physiognomy, others that he was the Devil Himself. He was able, by most accounts, to leap to astounding heights. Some eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him jump a nine-foot wall, and even clear over the roof of a house. That extraordinary capability was the basis for the name the papers bestowed on him: Spring-heeled Jack.

Yes, now that she thought about it, it seemed more and more likely that her abductor and Spring-heeled Jack were one and the same. It seemed, in fact, nearly a certainty.

She had been kidnapped by Spring-heeled Jack!

How many women had been accosted by the lascivious scoundrel, the mysterious Spring-heeled Jack? Poor Mary Stevens, and a few other blameless women, had escaped from his clutches, but how many more had suffered a darker fate? Was Duke Crowden truly his identity, or did the fiend have the power to assume another man's shape?

She did not have long to ponder the questions.

They came at last to a dark and forbidding neighborhood, a district with no streetlamps and very few lighted windows. A long line of grim brick houses stood sentinel. Most were dark. All were in a state of terrible disrepair, or falling down altogether, roofs sagging, doors gaping open like the mouths of the insane, windows empty black sockets. The only light, save the moon and stars, was the dim yellow glow of the public house down on the corner.

She believed they were near the river, for she could smell mud and rotting timbers and the sickly-sweet smell of death: fish and drowned rats and whatever else had washed up on the bank to decompose in the open air.

In a series of jolting maneuvers, movements so violent she was momentarily dazed, her abductor leapt onto the balcony of a yawning tenement, yanked open the balcony door, and retreated with her into darkness.

And now I die, Nora thought.

But she did not.