“You’ve inserted one name too many, my friend, but I shall overlook that. Now be so kind as to introduce yourself and explain what you want with me.”

“I don’t know.”

Burton stopped in front of the creature and examined it. The description given by Monckton Milnes was accurate; it was totally lacking in any human detail.

“You don’t know?”

“Perhaps—”

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps I have to—”

Without warning, it pounced.

“Kill you!”

A swinging fist knocked the point of Burton’s blade aside. He felt himself grabbed by the upper arms, solid fingers gouging into his biceps, and was lifted high into the air as if he weighed nothing at all. With tremendous strength, Spring Heeled Jack dashed him viciously to the ground. Even through the padding of snow, Burton’s head cracked with such force against the paving that his senses reeled.

“Got you!” his assailant shouted. “Stop interfering! Leave me alone! Tell me why I’m here!”

A shrill scream of outrage echoed through the square, and Swinburne came racing to his fallen friend’s assistance. The poet swiped at Spring Heeled Jack with his cane. It impacted against a broad shoulder and snapped in half, its lower end spinning away. “Get off him, you brute! Scat! Scat!”

The stilted figure turned and swatted the poet. Swinburne cartwheeled and landed in a tangled heap.

Tom Honesty put his whistle to his mouth and blew.

Jack squatted over Burton. “What am I supposed to do? Where is the prime minister? What is your significance? What happened at nine o’clock?”

Flat on his back, the king’s agent looked up at the blank countenance.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His attacker reached down, clasped the front of his coat, yanked him upright, and threw him. Burton saw the black night sky and the pink ground of Leicester Square alternating around him as—with shock slowing everything to a crawl and causing him to feel like a dispassionate observer—he pirouetted through the air. He passed over Trounce and the members of the Cannibal Club and glimpsed them looking up at him with expressions of sheer horror. Then he impacted against a plate glass window. Fragments exploded around him. They glinted and flashed. They rained like a thousand jewels.

This surely hurts, yet I don’t feel a thing.

He crashed down onto a table. It collapsed beneath him. Cutlery and broken crockery danced up, colliding with the showering glass. A symphony of clatters and smashes and bangs and clangs sounded from afar. Distant voices ululated. Everything was dreamlike.

Of its own accord, his right hand rose into his line of sight, and he was fascinated to find that it still held his rapier. He watched as the weapon’s point lowered toward his feet until it was directed at the jagged rectangular hole where the window had been.

Poor Bartolini. He’s having a bad evening. His restaurant is wrecked.

Spring Heeled Jack bounded in and dived forward. Burton’s sword adjusted itself and struck the apparition in the middle of its chest. The blade bent, scraped across to the left, gouged a scratch in the hard white skin, but didn’t penetrate it.

Jack snatched the weapon, wrenched it from Burton’s hand, and cast it aside. Planting a stilt to either side of the fallen man, it looked down and gave vent to an agonised whine.

Burton whispered, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I must serve Queen Victoria,” it responded. “But I’ve forgotten how.”

Trounce came pounding into the restaurant. Bellowing, he thudded into the creature, wrapped his arms around it, and declared, “You’re bloody well nicked, old son!”

Jack staggered. Burton quickly pushed himself out from between its legs and dragged himself backward through splintered wood and glass.

Trounce’s grip broke as his captive flung out its arms. A solid elbow smacked into the detective’s face, sending him tottering backward with blood spurting from his nose. His legs hit the ledge of the window, and he toppled out into the snow.

Burton heaved himself to his feet. He lunged at his opponent. They locked arms and grappled, twisting this way and that, thudding into tables, knocking them flying.

The king’s agent was no match for the other. Sent reeling, he plummeted out through the doorway and went slipping and sliding outside, somehow maintaining his footing, though he possessed hardly any sense of what he was doing.

Spring Heeled Jack followed and laid into him with its fists. It wailed, “Where am I? What must I do, Prime Minister? I’m alone! I’m alone!”

Blood spattered the snow. Burton fell and was hauled up again. He became vaguely aware that constables were running toward him.

“Please!” his opponent screamed. “Help me!”

Swinburne suddenly came cannoning from one side and dived at its ankles, locking his arms around them. Caught off balance, Spring Heeled Jack pitched face-first into the snow. Immediately, Burton delivered a vicious kick to the side of its head before he, too, lost his footing and fell.

Trounce blundered back into the melee. He stepped over the king’s agent and thudded down knees first onto Jack’s back. Honesty and three other constables swooped in and grabbed at the creature’s arms. The detective inspector had a pistol in his hand. He raised it and cracked it down onto Jack’s head. The white cranium split, and a bolt of blue electrical energy sizzled across its surface. A transparent skin detached itself from the prone figure and began to expand outward.

Burton knew what would happen next. “Get away from it!” he roared, as the world snapped back to normal speed. “Move! Move!”

He scrambled across the ground on all fours, grabbed Trounce by the back of his coat and heaved him aside, then gripped Swinburne’s ankle and, dragging the poet with him, slithered backward. The constables rolled aside just as the transparency swelled into a bubble and popped with a thunderously echoing retort.

Spring Heeled Jack vanished, taking with it a bowl-shaped section of Leicester Square’s paving.

Trounce sat up, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and applied it to his bleeding nose. “By Jobe! Whad a monstrosidy!”

Flat on his back, with cold moisture soaking into his clothes, Burton lay panting, his mind awhirl, his body finally starting to register the pain.

Beside him, Swinburne said, “Is it as bad as it looks?”

Burton moved his tongue around, feeling his teeth to check they were all present. They were. After a few moments’ preparation, he managed to croak, “What?”

“Your condition.”

As reality continued to reestablish itself, the king’s agent struggled to his feet and stood swaying. His clothes were hanging in tatters. Blood dribbled inside his ragged sleeves and slowly dripped from his fingertips.

After a little exploration, he discovered that the left side of his chin bore the most serious of his many lacerations—it was small but through to the bone—and there was another, longer and more painful cut at the side of his left elbow. None were incapacitating.

“I’m an atheist, Algy,” he murmured, “but I must confess, the fact that I went through a window and can still stand strikes me as somewhat miraculous.”

“You must have hit it head first. Broke it with solid bone before the rest of you passed through.”

The poet rose from the ground and helped Trounce up. The detective inspector drew a second handkerchief—clean—from his pocket and passed it to Burton, who uttered a grunt of thanks, wiped his hands on it, then pressed it to his chin.

The king’s agent said, “For certain, that was not a man in a suit.”

“A clockwork device, then?” Trounce asked.

“More sophisticated.”

Thomas Honesty and his fellow constables had risen and brushed themselves down. Honesty looked at Burton, who, seeing that Monckton Milnes and the Cannibals were poised to rush over, said to him, “Would you hold everyone back for a minute, Tom? Just while I gather my wits.”