As many of you who follow my work know, I daylight as a history teacher. I’ve remarked many times about how when the world gives you so many horrors all by itself, why not use them? And there is no better bank of terrors to withdraw from than history. Tyrannical Kings, ruthless criminals, infamous serial killers, and war paving the way for the creation of increasingly destructive weapons.
That’s how ‘The History-Verse’ was born: because what if all these horrific aspects of humanity throughout history were able to meet at a single point in time?
The History-Verse
By Keelan Berry
“Professor Aldrich?” Kerrie looked around his lecture hall, but could barely see anything. She felt along the wall for a switch, realised there probably wasn’t one, and so tentatively stepped into the room in the hope that the movement would trigger automatic lighting. But still, nothing happened. Now she was just stood in darkness.
She kept one hand on the door, pulling it back open, letting the light from the corridor seep into the room. Allowing her eyes to adjust, she called out again for her lecturer, already knowing that there would be no response but just wanting to comfort herself with some sort of noise – even if it was only her making it.
Kerrie cast her eyes over the dozens of seats, rising upwards towards the ceiling of the huge room. She’d been sat up there earlier in the day with her friends, listening to Professor Aldrich deliver his lecture on media portrayal of Jack the Ripper. A strange man, with strange interests, Professor Aldrich… but that’s what had attracted Kerrie to this university in the first place. Attracted her to him.
She had already taken one of his other courses, in the previous year; that one on witchcraft. That’s when she’d taken the opportunity to grow close to him.
She’d read all of his work before even starting at the university. Ever since the open day, when she’d heard him speak, she knew this is where she wanted to be educated, and she knew Professor Aldrich was the man she wanted to be educated by.
In all of his books – most on witches in different historical eras, some on other supernatural beings such as the devil, and a handful of publications on Jack the Ripper – he included an acknowledgements page, and each one there was the name of a different woman. His ‘partner’, who he always thanked. Kerrie wondered how he got through so many different women – his outward appearance very much matched up to his bizarre obsessions – but more than that, she longed to be one of those women.
And she believed she was getting very close to being one of them. Perhaps the one who would be the name in all of his books from now on.
That’s why he’d asked her here tonight, she was certain of it. She knew he’d been working on something recently, as secretive as he’d been about it, but now it looked like he was finally ready to share, to let her in on that secret.
She felt herself growing more excited, and then she thought: what if he was playing a game? She knew full well he was not opposed to playing them. Was this a hide-and-seek before the big reveal?
She let her hand slip from the door, and the large room was once again cloaked in darkness. She took a few steps forward, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and once again called out for the professor. She squinted, and scanned the tiered seats, before turning to face the front of the lecture hall.
She could make out Professor Aldrich’s large desk, and the projector screen behind it. Both started coming into better focus after a few seconds, and she saw that something was not quite right. At first, she couldn’t tell what it was, only that something was… not out of place, exactly; Professor Aldrich always kept his desk immaculately tidy, so there was nothing to be out of place. Something was just different.
Instinctively, she turned towards the door again, as though to turn on a light switch. When she remembered (again) that the room didn’t have one, she turned back to the front of the room.
“What is it?” She whispered to herself, and squinted again. She felt her tongue poke out of her mouth too and rest on her lip: the ultimate focus face.
She looked slowly along the desk, which unnecessarily almost spanned the length of the whole room. The computer was still in place with all its wires and add-ons, like the microphone (which Professor Aldrich never opted to use). As far as she could make out – and her eyesight was adjusting pretty well now, she thought – there was nothing different about the desk.
Was Aldrich behind it, hiding in the darkness? Could she feel his eyes on her? Had she seen a flash of his silhouette amongst the shadows? She stepped forward, more excited than scared. “Professor Aldrich?” She’d lost count of how many times she’d said his name now. Not that it was tiring her.
She was trying to let her eyes adjust to the blackness behind the desk when they latched onto the difference in the room: the projection screen. Tall and looming, it should have been fully white, like the desk, easy to make out against the darkness. Except, it wasn’t fully white.
Kerrie spun around, wondering how she had missed the shining light of the projector. Instead, she was met again with darkness, until her eyes adjusted again and could make out the individual seats stretching upwards. The projector wasn’t on, so what exactly was being displayed on the projector screen?
She turned once more, slower this time, nervousness setting back in (but still just about overridden by the excitement she felt over this big reveal that Professor Aldrich had been building up to).
Her eyes were getting used to the dark by now, and so she didn’t have to squint or wait for the scenery to come into focus this time. Instead, this time, the difference finally struck her.
Her eyes apparently bypassed the filter of the brain, and sent the realisation straight to her lips, because she whispered what was written on the projector screen.
“1888.”
Surely the work of Professor Aldrich, and the game she thought (hoped) he was playing, she wondered if he’d been up there after today’s lecture on a ladder and painted the numbers on himself.
Was this his big reveal? If so, the visual was impressive, but she’d already guessed his latest work was going to be on the 1888 Whitechapel Murders – committed by the infamous ‘Jack the Ripper’ who, as Aldrich had postulated in that day’s lecture, was likely only a conjured up figure, created by the media to sell newspapers.
“Professor?” She called again. This time, convinced that he must be lurking nearby, she followed it up. “Cool artwork.” She found herself grinning, and she rounded the long desk to approach the projector screen.
The bottom of the numbers were just above her head, and she reached out a hand to stroke the paint, expecting to feel a rough, dry texture, which made her question how the professor was going to explain his decorating, and how he was going to get the screen replaced. No doubt it will just get blamed on some drunken students, she thought, although what about cameras? They’d be able to show that wasn’t the case.
Kerrie was ripped out of her thoughts when, rather than her touching the paint, the paint touched her.
Just a drop, but it was cold and made her skin feel like it was trying to peel itself from her body. If she wasn’t alert before, she was now. She shut her eyes quickly and wiped her forearm across her face, wondering for a second if it was paint, but once she looked at the way it was smeared against her arm, and smelled it, she knew it definitely was.
She let out a shaky breath.
Maybe Professor Aldrich had hidden himself quickly because he’d just finished the painting, and he was trying to quietly set up another part of the reveal? She had gotten here a little early, after all.
Not long after the paint droplet had struck her, she realised that the chill she had gotten wasn’t just from the coldness of the liquid; there was a genuine frostiness to the room that hadn’t been there when she’d walked in… or when she was on the other side of the desk.
She held out a hand and touched her fingertips to the projector screen, and almost gasped at how ice-cold the material was; she felt like the blood in her very veins had frozen over. The shock at the coldness quickly gave way to another disbelief; this time from what she was seeing. The projector screen was moving.
Kerrie felt her feet retreat but her hand stretch forward even more. Her mind was now evenly split: one half telling her to get out of the room, the other needing to know what was going on.
The projector screen started to move, like a flag in the wind, but Kerrie knew it ought to be sturdy and unmoving. She pushed further, and half of the screen started to move back, but the other half didn’t. It was parting down the middle, like a set of curtains.
As well as the red paint, Kerrie now saw that the screen had been sliced – or rather, ripped – down the middle.
She walked through the parting and came out on the other side.
The first thing she saw was the streetlamp; a Victorian style gaslight, and she no longer thought that Professor Aldrich had gone to extreme lengths. Now, she thought that she had uncovered the secret: Aldrich had been so excited about this latest project because it wasn’t going to be a book, it was a documentary. His lecture theatre had been serving as the studio. Did he want her to star? Perhaps as an expert, or play a role in the re-enactment footage?
But then she saw the cobbled stones, stretching so far back, and the purple night sky beyond. Far too elaborate a scene to have been constructed in a lecture theatre; as big as it was, Kerrie knew that the area behind the projector screen should have only been a few metres long.
And the draught – it was blowing from down the cobbled street.
Her mind was growing tired with all the puzzles, and the bizarreness of the room. The situation and her surroundings felt so unreal that she actually considered the possibility she might be dreaming.
The cobbled street – gas-lamp and all – started to shrink, and Kerrie thought she was fainting, but realised her feet were still firmly grounded. In the blink of an eye, the whole scene had gone, as though a black hole had sucked it up. It disappeared in a faint glimmer of light and a zip! sound.
She was back in darkness, but at least the frostiness had started to dissipate along with… whatever the Victorian street scene had been. She wondered if it was the projector somehow conjuring its image through the small slit in the screen and onto the back wall of the lecture theatre; but she’d already seen that the projector wasn’t on. No, it had been… something else.
“PROFESSOR ALDRICH!” Suddenly it all hit her at once: the red paint, the coldness, the torn screen, the visual of a past place that was all too real, conjured up into thin air and then disappearing.
“‘Ello girlie.” The voice that answered back was a hushed whisper, as soft and as cutting as a snake’s hiss. It wasn’t Aldrich, that much she knew. He was a well-spoken academic, whereas this voice had come straight out of the East End.
In the moment she twisted her body to see where the voice had come from, she regretted it instantly. Just run, always run, her mind berated her, as though she had left her own body and was watching herself in a horror film, where the victim always makes stupid decisions.
Victim? No, she wouldn’t let herself be that.
She was almost expecting what happened next, which is probably why she instinctively lunged backwards. The blade slashed through the air; she heard it – whoosh – and saw it, even in the shadows – sharp and shiny, and she felt it – a cold blast of wind once again attacking her skin.
She wondered if that’s what it felt like to be cut with a knife, but didn’t have time to stand around and check. She bolted into action, throwing herself back onto the other side of the projector screen. For a brief moment she considered leaping over Aldrich’s desk, but thought again of horror films: that’s when she’d trip, fall, and he’d be on her within seconds, plunging his-
She heard his knife shredding through the projector screen – angry, frustrated strokes, all punctuated by aggressive grunts – and started to run.
She heard her own breath quickening, and feared she wouldn’t have the stamina for a chase. She was a historian, not a sportswoman…
It was that thought, and the lack of footsteps following on the heels of her own, that stopped her as she reached the classroom door. Even without the time to digest what she’d seen, and what was happening, she had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Professor Aldrich had combined his two obsessions: witchcraft and the Whitechapel Murders, using the former to make the latter a reality once again, to experience first-hand the infamous figure behind the mysterious slayings. She wasn’t a sportswoman, but she didn’t need to be; she’d taken Aldrich’s classes, she knew what the Whitechapel Murderer was all about, and she could draw on that acumen to help her now. She was no Ripperologist, but she thought she had still learned enough to survive this ordeal.
‘Jack the Ripper’, she knew, worked in the narrowest of places, concealed by shadows. A secret figure, he did not want to be caught, did not want to be spotted. The presence of other people – or the threat of being spotted by them – ought to be enough to keep him at bay.
Just getting herself into the corridor might be enough; it was brightly lit out there at all hours of the day, and even if he followed he was bound to be extremely cautious, certainly not brandishing a knife and slashing at her.
She smiled, believing that the horror was over almost as soon as it had started, and she could see the light of the corridor through the small box window near the top of the door… only to find that the door itself wasn’t moving when she pulled it.
She pulled again, unable to believe that the door had just locked itself in the few minutes she had been in the room. Locked itself. She almost cried out his name again, for what felt like the hundredth time in about five minutes, but she held her tongue. If he was in the room, he was either incapacitated or watching; and she had a pretty good idea which one given that the door was now locked.
Aldrich didn’t only want to know who the Ripper was, to finally unmask him, to have it confirmed in the flesh before publishing it to the world: he wanted to see him in action, and she was to be his latest offering.
She turned to face the room again: now a gladiator pit, Professor Aldrich’s own private arena.
His immaculate desk, which she had so often admired, she now cursed. Couldn’t he at least keep a pen on there? Just something she could use to defend herself. She’d just have to use the room itself instead.
She headed towards the steps leading up to the rows of seats, trying to attempt a jog on her tip-toes, but she was thrown off-balance by that sound again. The Ripper’s knife slicing through the air, seeking to cut into flesh and flay it from the bone.
She wondered – in the brief moment it took her to lose her balance and fall to the floor – at which stage in his serial killer career the Ripper was when he had come through Professor Aldrich’s portal. However many murders he had committed at this point determined her fate: was she going to be strangled and sliced, or was she going to be mutilated beyond recognition?
She twisted her body as she landed so that she was on her back, and she watched him as he came towards her. She crawled backwards, kicking her feet against the floor and moving her elbows up the steps. If she could just elevate herself enough…
He was coming towards her slowly. She knew the Ripper liked to take his time, and that was playing into her hands perfectly. Now that they were no longer in the shadows behind the projector screen, she could see the infamous villain more clearly, and she took a few moments to study him. Yes, to spot any potential weaknesses she could exploit, but also to have a look at the figure at the centre of a century-old mystery.
She hadn’t exactly been expecting the black-cladded figure in a top hat, but the man – or rather, the boy – who stood over her, was so far removed from what she envisioned any killer to look like, let alone the most famous in history.
His lower body was barely visible – the black trousers and shoes blending in with the shadows – but the white garments of his upper body, like with the projector screen, made him much more visible in the darkness of the room.
White shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, covered by a heavy-looking apron, splattered and stained with blood. She looked away from the red-stained cloth as quickly as she could, feeling her muscles start to tense and her vocal chords start to vibrate. She didn’t want to freeze, and she definitely didn’t want to scream.
That’s when she looked at his face, into his eyes, and saw that this was someone around her own age. Give or take. Not a monster, barely even a man. His hair was greasy and scruffy, his skin was smooth but patchy with stubble, and his eyes were wide. Like the projector screen, and like his clothes, they pierced a hole through the darkness with how white they were.
From out of the pouch on his apron came his bony hand, clasped around his knife. She continued to back up, ascending the steps slowly. His foot came down on the first step, causing the whole seating area to vibrate and send an echo around the room. With each step, his pace quickened, and his smile widened.
She was waiting for him to pounce, felt certain that his urges would overcome him at any moment, but still both of them continued to climb. Was he so intent on claiming her that he didn’t realise what she was doing? But, she supposed, having glimpsed into the cobbled streets of Victorian London’s East End – in the flesh – Jack had never slain anyone up high. It was always on flat ground, in narrow spaces, he was acting on her turf now, not his own. But he didn’t seem deterred…
Just as she was about to act, he did first, on her as quickly as a lightning bolt, with the sharp, shiny tip pointed down. Not his usual MO, but she supposed he was desperate to incapacitate her before he had his fun. She lifted her leg – high, thinking that was her best chance of sending him careening down the rows of seats and hitting the bottom hard – but she overpitched it by a couple of inches, and his blade sliced effortlessly through her shoe, into her flesh and bone, and came out the other side.
Finally, her body did seize, and her vocal cords let loose. But not for long; with his one hand he held the knife firmly inside her foot, and with the other he grasped her throat. His face was right in front of hers now, and she could smell him. Not only his breath – which was foul – but him.
She thought of some of the houses and accommodation she’d been in during her time at uni, how some students were real slobs and apparently didn’t clean up for months on end. How they left food to rot and fester, to become odious, to fill the nostrils with the stench of death. That’s what the Ripper smelled like, but a hundred times worse, as though he’d bathed in a bin full of rotting things.
She felt vomit rising – even with his hand squeezing her throat so tight not even the tiniest sound or the smallest bit of air could seep through – and she knew she would probably only get one final shot at survival.
For such a small man, and with hands so bony, she was shocked at the force with which he was throttling her. The horror films came back to her again, this time the killers: they were always supernaturally skilled; able to haunt you in your nightmares, or physically gifted; capable of giving chase while wielding a chainsaw. This man (boy, her mind kept saying) was apparently neither. She could see in his eyes – wide and wild – that he was driven by something in his mind, an instinct to kill, a desire to cause the harshest form of physical harm he was capable of. She wished once more that this was the Ripper in his early days, or at least that if he did manage to strangle her, he killed her rather than leaving her half-alive.
The thought of him slicing her open, taking her insides out while she watched, helpless, gave her the motivation to take her last chance at escaping alive. She started to lift her bottom half, aided by the way both of them were positioned on the steps. She wanted to check that her one good foot was poised to strike correctly, but she couldn’t move her neck at all. In fact, even if she could, black circles were starting to blot her vision.
Her mind screamed NOW!, and she kicked, with as much force as she could. She thought she’d failed – that too much life had been drained out of her and she’d made a limp attempt – but suddenly his grip loosened, and then retracted altogether. She felt his knife exit her foot, and an excruciatingly sharp shooting pain blasted through her entire leg. She heard him grunt, all his breath exiting his lungs, followed by the successive crashes of him cascading down the stairs.
Her mind continued to scream at her, telling her to get up and run, but she couldn’t (not least because of her one wounded foot, which she hoped was not fully sliced in half). Her throat still felt closed, and she scratched at it, trying to open it up and pump oxygen back into her starved body. She managed to roll onto her side, and that seemed to open her airways; she was able to suck in some air, which made her dizzy, but dispelled the black spots.
She grabbed onto a seat and used it to pull herself up to her knees, and eventually to her feet. She swayed from side to side, but was able to steady herself after a few moments, and turned to see what state the Ripper was in. He was on his hands and knees, and seemed to be fumbling around for something – probably his knife, which Kerrie guessed would have flown out of his hand on the way down.
She’d already evaded him twice. She didn’t think she’d get a third chance to not feel the cold steel pressing against her skin and then ripping mercilessly through it. That image again: of him stood over her, pulling her innards out and examining them before discarding them around her body. She closed her eyes and tried to shake it from her mind. If she kept dwelling on that image, she knew it would distract her, slow her down, lead to him catching her: become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But still the visual lingered, and to cast it away her brain linked it to something else: another gory part of history. How criminals who had committed treason centuries ago were hung, drawn and quartered: not that far removed from what the Ripper did. Hung until nearly dead, cut down and had their innards removed while they were forced to watch. Kerrie thought back to secondary school history, and remembered how animated her teacher (Mr Birch; a short, rotund man) had gotten when he used to talk about blood and guts, particularly the punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering. Whenever it would come up in class, even if only in a passing comment, he would insist on it being acted out. He would choose someone to lie down on a table while he demonstrated what would happen to them and describe, in graphic detail, how they would be cut open, which parts would be taken out, and how it would all be shown to the victim.
Mr Birch had only ever acted it out, never on her, but she was coming perilously close to feeling the real thing. She couldn’t imagine the horror – the agony – and didn’t want to experience it like treacherous figures such as Guy Fawkes had after failing to blow up the King and Parliament in his Gunpowder Plot.
She opened her eyes.
The Ripper was no longer in front of her. Neither was the classroom. Instead, another of those holes was tearing its way into the present, into her reality. Small and blurry, it quickly spun and grew, became clearer, until she could see inside it.
A man with a tall hat and cloaked in black garments (someone who would have been more fitting of the Ripper image) peered back at her from inside a small, dark and dingy room. She knew who this was, though: she’d brought him into the present by just thinking of him. He was leaning over several barrels; was surrounded by them, in fact.
“NO!” Kerrie jumped, but recognised the voice instantly: Aldrich. “You’re ruining everything! Close it! CLOSE IT NOW!!!”
It all clicked for Kerrie, finally, and she acted swiftly. She lunged into the portal she had inadvertently opened, wrapped one arm around a barrel, and with the other she snatched a match from a stunned Guy Fawkes. “Thanks.” She said, while at the same time commanding the portal to close with her mind, which it did. It shrunk slowly, and just before it closed (with the same zip! sound the Victorian London portal had minutes earlier) she heard the sound of a door crashing open, feet stomping on stone, and a struggle. She knew what had happened, was aware of how the story went, but she had her own problem to fix.
In front of her now was the Ripper – on his feet again, knife brandished – and Professor Aldrich. The latter was holding an old, heavy-looking book. It was open, cradled in his arm like a baby. The Ripper was looking from her to Professor Aldrich, and back again, the look of a crazed murderer replaced with the face of a confused boy.
“How did you even do that?!” Aldrich boomed. His voice was accustomed to projecting itself across a large room of people, and it showed. “I’m supposed to be in control here!”
Kerrie held tightly onto the barrel, it wasn’t big enough to rest flat on the steps, and if she let go it would also crash down to the floor of the lecture hall. It was heavy, but she was able to support it. For how long she would be able to was another matter. Especially with her one foot out of action. Still, she tried to act without worry, because she had two madmen in front of her who she needed to escape from.
With her free hand she brought up the match. A weapon of her own. She wondered how much of the university the one barrel would blast through, and estimated it contained enough gunpowder to at least destroy Aldrich’s classroom.
“Don’t either of you fucking move.” She snarled. Her voice was croaky from the Ripper’s grasp, but she thought it made her sound even more threatening. Hoped so, anyway. It wasn’t the Ripper she was worried about – if he came towards her she had options: light the match, blow them all up, or let go of the barrel, send it flying towards him and make a run for it (if she even could). No, the Ripper was no longer the biggest threat in the room. Now it was Aldrich. She wondered what other powers had been granted to him by that book he was holding.
“Now, Kerrie,” Aldrich began, but she moved the match towards the side of the barrel, as though ready to light it. He held a hand up, “Okay, come on now.”
“You wanted him to kill me!” She screamed, pointing her match towards the Ripper, who still seemed dumbfounded.
“No! Kerrie, my dear…” Aldrich moved forwards slightly, “I was trying to send him back! I didn’t realise…” The words died on his lips.
“You fucking liar,” She hissed, “You wanted to see it first-hand. The work of the Ripper.”
“I’ll send him back,” Aldrich spoke quickly, which was out of character for him. He was usually a very deliberate man, enunciating every syllable, but now he was panicking. “Just let me-” He looked down at his book, and Kerrie swiped the match against the side of the barrel, forcing him to look up again.
“Put… the… book… down.” She said, holding the flaming match up to her face.
Aldrich crouched slowly, but never got chance to put the book on the floor. Instead, it fell from his hands naturally when the life left his body: Jack the Ripper’s knife plunging into the side of his neck. The Victorian butcher took a handful of Aldrich’s slicked-back black hair and pulled his head back, causing the veins in his neck to bulge as though trying to wriggle their way out of his body. Throat exposed, the Ripper started to carve. Slicing his knife back and forth, he cut all along the professor’s neck, until the head started to detach. Kerrie could hear the snapping of bones and the tearing of flesh.
“Just… me…” The Ripper turned to look at Kerrie as he made the final slice, blood spraying across his leather apron in a thin mist as Aldrich’s body slumping to the floor, his head held suspended in the air, “and you.” He smiled, and dropped Aldrich’s head, moving towards the steps.
Kerrie didn’t want to die, but she was becoming increasingly concerned it was inevitable: either blow them both up, or try to run from him again (which still wasn’t really much of an option; she dared not even try moving her foot).
But there was a third option. How could she forget? She’d already used it once.
As the Ripper’s boot thudded down onto the first step, Kerrie just started to think. Her mind was frantic: she didn’t have time to carefully consider anything. Dozens of people ran through her mind: other historical figures who could give the Ripper a run for his money. And, one by one, they all started to come through. From the walls, from the rows of seats, from behind the projector, from underneath the desk.
Two men, side by side, wearing black suits. Almost identical, but one was larger than the other, and carrying a pistol. He turned to his twin, and spoke in a similar accent to the Ripper who, despite all the different holes opening around him, continued his ascent.
A woman with long, fiery red hair marched into the middle of the room purposefully, her chequered green cloak flying out behind her, her wooden spear accompanying her. She looked around, the blue warpaint on her face bright and luminous.
Barely visible beneath his long black hair and bushy beard, another man jumped onto Aldrich’s desk and brandish a longsword high into the air, letting out a battle cry. With his other hand, he unholstered a one-shot pistol from his belt (which seemed to be holding several), and fired at the ceiling.
A metal man stomped slowly along one of the rows of seats, barely able to lift his thick sword with all the armour weighing him down. He paused, lifted his other arm, and removed his visor. The heavy-set man looked around the room, huffing.
The Kray twins, Boudicca, Edward Teach – better known as Blackbeard – and Henry VIII were some of the more noticeable figures in the room. But dozens more came, too. Swords, pistols, rifles, grenades and more were being bandied around casually.
Kerrie was so dazed by everything going on that she only just registered how close Jack the Ripper had gotten to her. She realised, with mounting horror, that even if she got through him, she was going to have to deal with all the other men and women she’d brought through. Okay, they wouldn’t all try and kill her, but what would they do?
She looked at the match, nearly worn out, back to the barrel, and finally to Jack the Ripper. The crazed look dropped from his face, he saw what she was going to do before she did it, and he wasn’t close enough to stop her.
She smiled, and waited for the boom.
All that came instead was blistering pain when his knife sliced her face. He had thrown it, in his own last, desperate attempt. She felt herself fall backwards, and the barrel slip from her hand, but she didn’t hear it fall (didn’t hear anything, in fact) as all sound was drowned out by the ringing in her ears.
She collapsed onto the stairs, and stared at the white ceiling. She could no longer see the chaos all around her, either, but could feel it happening. She wondered which historical figures were fighting one another, and the thought of an East End gangster scrapping with the ancient Queen of the Celts was almost enough to make her laugh – if Jack the Ripper wasn’t once again looming above her.
She didn’t know how much time she had left, but she knew now that she wasn’t walking out of the classroom alive. How long was Professor Aldrich’s magic going to last before she could no longer open another of those portals? Shouldn’t it have stopped when he died, if he was the one who’d cast the spell, and shouldn’t the Ripper have disappeared back into 1888?
Questions she no longer had time to consider, as the Ripper came down on her.
One thing she did wonder, though, is if she could bring past people into the present, could she bring past events? She’d already snatched a barrel and a match from Guy Fawkes, so she knew objects could enter her reality, too.
She looked beyond the Ripper, to the ceiling, and opened another portal. The sky was bright and blue, and as the plane soared past, she waited for the payload to be delivered.
The bomb fell, and fell, grew larger; she waited for the boom again, even though this time, she knew she wouldn’t hear it at all before her world was obliterated.
February, 2022
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