EIGHT
St Magnus the Martyr, London
Tuesday, 3rd September 1940
Weyland had been unsettled and unhappy ever since Jack had reappeared in London, but his sense of foreboding had grown stronger since he’d realised the imps were responsible for the Ripper murders. That the imps murdered occasionally, Weyland had no doubt, but this series of murders…
There was something about them.
Something sinister.
Something purposeful.
Something, Weyland knew, that should scare him halfway to death.
All the bodies of the women had been laid out under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr. Weyland had no idea about the significance of that location, although he worried at it, and worried Silvius about it. The police had a constant but surreptitious presence in the vicinity of the ancient church, watching both the porch and the streets and alleyways leading to it, but their presence had not stopped the murders, or stopped the bodies mysteriously appearing under the porch within the blink of an eye.
The imps were using power to lay the bodies out, but Weyland could match power with power, and he could see what police surveillance could not.
Unable to find the imps at their house, or anywhere else within London, Weyland had spent weeks, off and on, watching St Magnus the Martyr. Noah had asked him what he was about at night, but he had merely shrugged, and passed his absences off as nocturnal wanderings, or extra ARP warden duty atop the Savoy. Noah didn’t believe him, and her disbelief, as well as his absences, contributed to the growing rift between them, but Weyland didn’t want to confide in her.
She was too close to Jack, especially now that she, too, could sense this cursed “shadow”.
Weyland could bear, just, to watch Noah drift away, but he hated beyond anything Grace’s growing closeness to Jack. To lose both wife and daughter to him. Ah! That was too much!
He was wandering within a block of St Magnus late on the night of the third of September, cloaking his activities in power, when he felt the unmistakeable presence of the imps coming closer. He ducked down an alley, keeping himself cloaked in both power and shadows as much as possible, and crept closer to the church.
Weyland passed a policeman, standing in the darkened archway of a door, but the policeman, halfdozing, realised neither the presence of Weyland or the closing presence of the imps.
He arrived at the church, clinging to the darkened recesses of an alley’s entrance, just as the imps came down the main street. What he saw appalled him.
The imps were dragging between them a shrieking young woman.
Weyland stared, then looked back over his shoulder at the policeman. Surely, even with his mortal-cursed blindness, he could somehow sense this horror?
But the policeman merely yawned, and leaned more comfortably against the door jamb.
Weyland looked back to the imps. They had dragged their victim to the porch, where Bill kicked her legs out from under her, seizing her disordered hair as she fell to the pavement.
Before Weyland could move, before he could run out and somehow try to save the woman from her fate, both imps looked skyward.
“Do you like it?” hissed Jim. “Do you like your meal?”
“Does her terror taste good to you?” said Bill. “Is it enough for you?”
To Weyland’s horror he realised the imps were addressing the shadow. He froze where he was, unable to think, unable to act, wondering what in the gods’ names it was, hovering up there, that demanded such a sacrifice?
He clenched his fists, knowing he should act, knowing he should do something, but just as his muscles tightened to dash out, Bill leaned down to the woman and, evading her hands that tried to stop him, buried the blade of a knife deep into her belly.
Weyland froze in horror.
Bill dragged the knife back and forth in the woman’s abdomen, needing to use both his hands on the hilt to do it. Her heels drummed up and down on the pavement, shrieks bellowed forth from her throat, and her hands grabbed futilely at the knife—but none of it made any difference.
Bill was being deliberately slow, Weyland realised through a haze of sheer revulsion. He was drawing her death out, drawing her terror out.
So that the shadow could feed.
Jim was jumping about frenziedly, his face turned upwards, his hands dancing about at his sides. “Do you like it?” he shrieked. “Can you feel it?”
The woman was still struggling, but her screams had died to moans, and her hands were now only moving feebly.
The ground beneath her was soaked with blood.
Then Jim came to an abrupt halt, reached down with both hands into the ruined mess of the woman’s belly, and started to rummage about.
Weyland took a step back, unable to watch any more. Another step, and yet another one, and then he had turned and was running away.
Under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr, Bill and Jim looked up, blood spattering their faces and coating their hands.
“What was that?” said Bill.
“A rat, nothing more,” said Jim, and they bent back to their enjoyment.