Jaclyn the Ripper

 

 

 

Jaclyn the Ripper

 

 

 

 

 

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Time After Time
^*

A Private Investigation

The Curse of the Vampire

Papa and Fidel
^*

Jaclyn the Ripper
^*

 

 

^*
A Tom Doherty Associates Book

 

 

KARL ALEXANDER

 

 

 

 

 

 

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEWYORK

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

JACLYN THE RIPPER

 

Copyright © 2009 by Karl Alexander

All rights reserved.

Edited by James Frenkel

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Karl.
      Jaclyn the Ripper / Karl Alexander.—1st ed.
          p. cm.
      Sequel to: Time after time.
      “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
      ISBN 978-0-7653-1894-7
      1. Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866–1946—
Fiction. 2. Jack, the Ripper—Fiction. 3. Wives—Fiction. 4. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
   PS3551.L3569J33 2009
   813'.54—dc22

2009034611

First Edition: November 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

 

 

 

 

For all my good girls: Kateri, Damien, Laura,
Dennette, Maggie, Annabelle, Ruby, Ava Rose
and Rainy May

Jaclyn was conceived over lunch and conversation with my good friend Hammad Zaidi. Thanks, dude. . . . The prime mover behind the novel was my manager, John Bennett. Without his insistence and determination,
Jaclyn
never would have been written or published. Thank you, John. . . .

My oldest friend in this universe is Dr. Appletree Rodden, Ph.D., M.D., a scientific genius in his own right, who happily answered medical and scientific queries. Thanks, Tree. . . .

Thanks also to my editor, Jim Frenkel, for his insight and patience. . . . But thanks most of all to Kateri for being there . . . and here.

 

 

 

Jaclyn the Ripper

In 1893—on the run from Scotland Yard—Jack the Ripper stole H. G. Wells's time machine and journeyed to 1979 San Francisco. Outraged, Wells followed, determined to bring the Ripper back to justice in Victorian England. Along the way, he met Amy Catherine Robbins, a modern American woman, and they became time-crossed lovers. In a showdown, Wells used his scientific genius to send the Ripper to infinity without the machine, leaving him stuck out of time. Then Wells and Amy journeyed back to 1893. Two years later, they were married, convinced that they would live happily ever after. Thirteen years passed, and in another universe. . . .

Flash.

The West Pavilion of the J. Paul Getty Museum exploded silently from within, obliterating the darkness, rendering the night instantly translucent like an overexposed negative. A millisecond later, the flash receded, and everything looked as it had before. But it wasn't.

Teresa Cruz, temporarily blinded, jumped up from the small desk in the lobby, and was blinking for her vision to come back when her walkie-talkie crackled.

“What's happening over there?” said Peterson in the security room. “I lost all my monitors!”

She jerked her radio up from her belt. “I dunno. . . . Lightning, maybe?”

“Check it out, will you?”

“Copy.”

If it had been lightning, it would have been lightning with no meteorological disturbances, lightning with clear skies. Lightning with no thunder. It wasn't lightning.
What was it, then?
Teresa did a three-sixty, taking in the exhibition posters, the signs, the literature racks, the
H. G. WELLS—A MAN BEFORE HIS TIME
banner spanning the back wall of the
lobby. She swallowed hard. The flash had come from one of the galleries, from inside, yet even the night outside had lit up. She tried to convince herself that it had been an electrical short, but knew in her heart it wasn't. There was no burning smell, no smoke, and the night-lights were still on. She straightened her blue blazer and charcoal-gray slacks, was aware of her heart pounding.

“I'm jonesin' for a gun, Peterson,” she said into her walkie. “They ought to let us carry guns.”

“You need backup, sweetie?” he said sarcastically.

“Forget it.”

Angry, she snapped off her radio. Peterson had always been on her case, saying she was “too gutless” to be a security officer and that management had only hired her because she was a female Hispanic.
I don't need him or his abuse.
Yet she paused, looked outside and was afraid. Her eyes lingered over the fountains and pools, the rectangular museum courtyard that stretched to the rotunda splashed yellow by recessed lights, then the other pavilions framing the courtyard, their travertine stone faces ghostly white under the soft moon. Then she frowned, shook off her fear, squared her diminutive shoulders and strode to the galleries: those large, tasteful rooms delineated by archways so that one gallery framed another as if they themselves were works of art. In the first room, she stepped around display cases of memorabilia, faded manuscripts and original editions of books, then moved past stark black-and-white photographs that documented the turbulent life of H. G. Wells. None of it registered, so drawn was she to a strange light emanating from the center gallery where they had installed his time machine.

Roped off, the time machine sat alone in the room. An intense bluish glow was fading from the engine compartment, leaving it silhouetted against the gray gallery walls. The tapered, steel-plated cabin rose eight feet above the engine and resembled a primitive space capsule. When she'd first seen the machine, Teresa had found it squat, ugly and askew, reminding her of those monolithic stone sculptures carved by her Mayan ancestors. Of course,
The Utopia
had never been known to work, the brochures all said. Regardless, she was frozen in the archway like a lower
mammal caught in the headlights of an onrushing car, held spellbound by the time machine's inexplicable glow of energy.

And then—behind its small windows oxidized from age—something moved. The cabin door opened. A figure stepped out, ignored the ladder and sprang lightly to the gallery floor, landing in a crouch and looking around warily, its chest heaving.

Disbelieving, Teresa shook her head slowly. She couldn't stop staring, couldn't deny what she was seeing. Not only had something alive emerged from the time machine, but in the darkness, that something glowed a toxic reddish green. Distracted, the figure turned back, reached up on tiptoes and took a prism-shaped device from inside the cabin, shoved it into a slot beneath the door.

Suddenly, the figure noticed itself and saw what Teresa had seen. Emitting shocked little cries, it held its arms away from its body and tried to back away from itself—its aura—then desperately tried to rub the colors off, but the glow came from within as if an X-ray.

Teresa had seen enough for a lifetime and backpedaled out of the gallery. The figure spun around, saw her moving, came for her at a fast trot. Cowering in the archway, Teresa brought her radio up to her mouth. As she keyed it to call Peterson, the figure ripped it from her hands and hurled it across the room. Teresa ducked instinctively. The walkie hit the wall and shattered. Astonished, frozen, she watched the figure detour around her and disappear in the lobby, heard the door close behind it.

Suddenly angry—more with herself than with this creature—Teresa balled her fists, reminded herself that she was a security officer, and a damned good one at that. She sprinted after the figure, pushed against the glass doors of the entranceway, burst outside.

 

Running up the courtyard, little feet whisking on stone, the figure saw that under the moonlight the toxic glow had faded from its skin—its normal flesh color returned.
Perhaps the glow was merely a harmless fourth-dimensional residue
, it thought. Then it realized that it was wearing
rags and needed clothes or whatever the human condition cloaked itself with these days. Except that was the least of its problems. Something was wrong—terribly wrong. The figure couldn't run as fast as it remembered from the streets of London and then San Francisco. Its stride was shorter, its breath not as quick and easy, its hair too long and falling in its face. And these things kept slapping up and down—what were these
things
? Distressed, the figure was about to stop and examine itself when it heard footfalls and turned. The security guard—that pathetic little bitch with
TERESA CRUZ
on her nameplate—was in hot pursuit. Normally, it would confront this Teresa Cruz, but in this here-and-now nothing was normal, nothing at all. Fearing the worst, not knowing where or even what it was, the figure ran faster, ran gasping for breath, finally veered toward the rotunda. It went inside, looked around wildly, didn't appreciate the graceful sweep of glass and stone. It gravitated to the darkness, where it huddled, a wounded beast, under the curved staircase. As it worked to catch its breath, it wondered if it had eluded the security guard or if others were on the way. Then, in the absence of light, it saw that glow creeping back in its skin. It recoiled, tried to brush the glow off again, but then Teresa Cruz was coming into the rotunda. The figure bolted from under the stairs, not so much running from Teresa as from itself. It raced for an alcove, read men's restroom, rushed inside the well-lit space and went to the mirror.

The figure shrieked with horror, had to hold on to the sink to remain upright. It wasn't the glow it saw, for that had disappeared with the light—it was something else entirely. “Good God, no,” the figure moaned. “Please, God, no!” The figure shut its eyes tightly, willed itself to see a different reflection—the familiar dark, forbidding countenance with thin lips, long nose and beady, hooded eyes that it loved and remembered—but when it looked again, the image was inevitably the same.

The figure saw a dark-haired woman with wide-set almond eyes, full lips, cute upturned nose, and smooth ivory skin—a woman comfortable with a worldly, bemused smile no matter where or when—a woman in the shredded remains of a late-seventies leisure suit. Even
with the agonized expression she was wearing at this moment, even in rags, the woman was undeniably and classically beautiful.

Instinctively, she felt between her legs.

Nothing was there.

“Nooo!”

Sobbing, she covered her face, turned away from the mirror, sagged against the sink, numb with questions. She had been a man before, a formidable, dark shadow of a man.
This is a joke, a cosmic mistake of some kind, this is unacceptable. I hate women, I unequivocally hate them, I—
She straightened up and noticed her body reflected in the brushed aluminum wall adjacent to the stalls. Like her image in the mirror, it was perfect—so perfect, in fact, that she was reminded of her sister, Penelope, teasing and posing before their first indelible moment of passion behind the caretaker's house. Hyperventilating, the woman clutched the sink for support again, then turned back to the mirror, recalling that she had forgotten the special key—she had left the damned key in the time machine. She was about to scream at her exquisite reflection that she had to get the key and go back to a time where she would recognize herself when Teresa Cruz banged into the restroom.