Mind the Gap

An Uncle had pulled the trigger. Terence darted aside but not quickly enough. The bullet caught him in the shoul-der, spun him halfway round. He swung his gun hand, sighted along the barrel, and shot the man in the chest. The other two with guns began to fire, but Terence was already moving. Philip —mad, one-eyed Philip—charged toward him. Terence shot him twice, once in the abdomen and once in the leg.

But he had nowhere to hide.

Josephine Blackwood raised her hands and the shadows began to coalesce around her fingers. She chanted something and the air shimmered. They might all dabble in magic, but whatever of it remained in the world, she had tapped it.

Jazz opened her mouth and screamed.

London answered with anguished cries from its past. The fire crackling around the circumference of the room flickered as a wind roared through the chamber. The Hour of Screams had arrived once more, but differently this time. Steam cried from the valves of the apparatus. Jazz howled her frustration and fury.

The ghosts of old London joined her in a chorus, and then the chamber seemed to contract for a moment before exploding in a rush of apparitions.

A phantom train roared through the room, right through the apparatus, and Jazz was its screaming whistle. Piccadilly Circus flooded with people throwing their hats into the air, women kissing men who were total strangers, hundreds and then thousands embracing, celebrating the fall of Berlin. Parades marched by.

Killers stalked victims in dark alleys. Lovers walked hand in hand. Rough-hewn men unloaded crates from ships along the filthy Thames. Bobbies walked their beats. Children played in parks and gardens. Tires screeched and horses whinnied as accidents took the lives of innocents. The wealthy walked past street beggars with nary a glance. Little girls sold flowers. Dancers performed upon a stage. An old woman pulled her shawl around her and wept for a love lost, a life unfulfilled. And more.

The ghosts of old London filled the chamber, the appa-ratus summoning them into a hurricane of memory and emotion. Jazz saw them all, and she felt their yearning for rest. For solace.

She arched her back, pressing down on the levers of the apparatus with all of her strength. Her eyes went wide as the first of the ghosts rushed into her. They began to push into her throat, sliding in through her nose and eyes and ears and, with a chilling rush, sifting through the pores of her skin. They filled her entirely, and as they did, the stories and secrets played no longer before her eyes but across the stage of her mind. All of the tales, funny and tragic, sweet and wistful and heartbreaking and horrifying, became hers.

All of the magic passed into her.

With a thunderclap, it ended. The apparatus gave a hiss like a final gasp and the gears began to slow.

The screams were gone, along with the regret in the heart of the city. Jazz inhaled deeply, and the air down in that vast subterranean world smelled clean. The world had moved on. She under-stood now. The world had moved on, but London had clung to the past, dragging the weight of its ghosts like iron chains.

But she had felt its sigh of relief. And now the city was free to seek its future.

****

Jazz freed herself from the apparatus. Its gauges were cracked and broken, the gears bent and rusted. How the thing had ever worked, she could not imagine. She slid out between the pipes and jumped to the floor of the chamber.

In the flickering of firelight, Terence Whitcomb and the members of the Blackwood Club lay sprawled across the stony ground. Slowly, groaning, most of them began to rise. Two men lay still, either unconscious or dead. Terence stag-gered toward her, a weary smile on his face, yet there also seemed to be an air of sadness around him. He had dedi-cated his life to this moment, and now that it had arrived, what would he do?

Josephine Blackwood and the Uncles seemed shriveled and diminished. The woman raised her hands, malice etched upon her face, but she looked foolish sketching the air as she tried to cast some kind of spell. The realization shattered her. Jazz saw it fill her eyes, watched as her body went slack. She was just a sad old woman now. All of the power she'd lusted after, like youth, was a lost dream, for-ever beyond her grasp.

As Jazz looked on, they all seemed to be growing older. One by one, heads hung in despair, they turned away and began to shamble back the way they had come.

All save for Josephine.

She crouched and picked up a fallen pistol.

"Josie, no!" Terence shouted, scanning the ground for his own gun.

The crone pointed the gun at Jazz and fired. As Josephine pulled the trigger, Jazz felt her gorge rise as though she might vomit. Instead, what burst from her was a human figure —a gray shimmering form in a top hat and tails with a simple prestidigitator's wand. He waved it even as the bullet passed through him, but what struck Jazz was a wilted daisy.

The gun in Josephine Blackwood's hand had become a bouquet of flowers.

The old woman crumbled to the ground and began to weep quietly.

Terence stared at Jazz and then at the ghost of the magi-cian. "It can't be."

The magician reached toward him, spectral fingers pass-ing through Terence's cheek and reaching behind his ear to produce a silver coin. Then he bowed deeply, stepped back-ward into Jazz, and vanished within her.

The stories and secrets of old London had not disap-peared or been destroyed; they had found a new home.

Jazz reached for Terence and pulled him close. He winced at the pain from the wound in his shoulder. She drew his face down to hers and brushed her lips against his in a gentle kiss, then kissed him more deeply, a maelstrom of emotions rushing through her.

"Jasmine," he said.

She shook her head, gave him a final glance, and then turned from him. When she walked past Josephine Blackwood, the old woman didn't even look up. Terence called after her once, but Jazz did not falter. She had de-scended so far into the underneath that the journey upward would take time, and she was keen to get started.

London awaited.

****

On a Tuesday in the last week of October, Jazz sat on a low wall in Regent's Park, away from the zoo and the rose garden and the major pedestrian traffic. A man with a guitar strummed and sang on a nearby footpath, instrument case open but for the moment filled only with the hope of future generosity.

A small group had begun to gather around her, an odd coterie that included a tidy young professional, a couple of aging homeless, and a dark-eyed junkie thief unused to be-ing as exposed as the park required.

The thief's eyes were skittish, but Jazz often found that she loved them best of all.

Tuesday. Jazz had discovered that she liked knowing what day it was. That had taken some getting used to once she had returned topside and become part of the city again. But she liked the feeling. It made the day hers, in a way London was enjoying an Indian summer, and the sun felt warm on her arms, now turned a rich bronze from many such days. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore a spaghetti-strap tank top, cutoff shorts, and a cute pair of sandals she'd retrieved from the closet in her old bedroom. After all she had been through, robbing her own house be-fore the bank finally sold it off hadn't been difficult.

A few others approached cautiously, seeing her there on the wall. Among them she saw Aaron, a nouveau punk, maybe twenty, sauntering toward her with his usual arro-gance. When he reached the small, strange group sitting on the grass in front of the wall, his entire demeanor changed. He stood up straight and even smiled. The green hair must have seemed out of place elsewhere in the park, but not here. No one was out of place here.

"Mornin', Jasmine," Aaron said. He had a pack slung across his back and now he brought it down, unzipped it, and produced a bottle of water. "Here's for you," he said, handing it over, "and I've got a bunch more. Give 'em to whoever."

Jazz touched his hand. "Thanks, Aaron. You're a good one."

He shrugged and glanced away, almost sheepish.

Jazz took a long sip from the water and looked at the gathering again. A homeless woman, perhaps forty-five but looking sixty, met her gaze with damp blue eyes. The woman reached up and tucked a long strand of greasy hair behind one ear, a gesture that reminded Jazz that once the woman had been an ordinary girl with the usual concerns —school and boys and clothes.

"What's your name?"

"Peg."

"Hello, Peg."

The woman smiled so gratefully it nearly broke Jazz's heart.

"What's on your mind?" she asked.

Peg lowered her gaze a moment, then looked up. "It's my sister, love. She and her husband lived in a flat in Battersea. When things took a turn for the worse for me, I was too embarrassed to ask for help.

Hadn't talked to her in years. Had a falling out, you see. Two, three years ago, I fi-nally realized how stupid I'd been, what I let happen to me-self, you see. Went to try to find her, but they'd moved. Don't know if she's still in the city or even still alive, but —" Jazz smiled and reached out for her hand. Peg rose and clutched at her fingers, trying to stifle her hope.

"You know the address where she used to live?"

"Twenty-seven Watford Close."

A shiver went through Jazz, as though a chill wind had passed through Regent's Park, but the sun still shone warmly down and the Indian summer heat would not have been abated by a simple breeze. She closed her eyes, and in her mind's eye she raced across the city, through alleys and over rooftops, into the Underground and all the way out to Bromley.

A twinge of sadness touched her heart.

"Your sister's husband has been dead five years, Peg. Cancer. But Polly herself is still alive and living in a flat in Bromley." She took up a notebook that lay on the wall be-side her and scribbled the address down, ripped off the page, and handed it to the woman.

Peg took the page and stared at her writing, lips moving as she read the address to herself. She shook her head as though she could hardly believe it, and then a tentative smile touched her lips.

"Oh, love, you've no idea what this means."

But Jazz knew exactly what it meant. "Good luck," she said.

Peg took her hand and kissed her knuckles. "Thank you, dear. Thank you so very much."

She hurried away. Jazz watched her go, but as she did, something colorful caught her eye. Coming to join the small gathering was a young girl wearing a pretty wide-brimmed hat with fake flowers tied to a ribbon around the crown. It looked like something the queen would have worn in the 1980s.

Jazz and the girl saw each other's faces at the same mo-ment. The girl's expression changed from that familiar, ten-tatively curious look to one of recognition and surprise.

"Hattie," Jazz whispered.

The girl took a step back, as though deciding whether or not to run away. Jazz slid off the wall and started toward her, leaving the others behind. "Hattie!" she called.

Then Hattie was moving toward her as well. Laughing, they ran up to each other and embraced, spinning around.

"Jazz," Hattie said. "Oh, Jazz, I missed you."

They held each other at arm's length then, and Jazz saw that Hattie's nose had been broken and not healed properly and her smile was absent two teeth, all the remnants of the beating she had sustained that night in the tunnels.

"I love your hat," Jazz said.

Hattie kissed her nose, then pulled her in for a tighter hug. "I heard whispers about this oracle in Regent's Park. Got me thinking if the story was true, about this girl who could find anything in the city, maybe she could help me find you. I missed you so much."

Playfully, Hattie pushed Jazz away. "But I never imag-ined she'd be you!"

Jazz faltered then, her smile fading. "I'm sorry, Hattie. I should've come to see you. But after what happened, I couldn't go back down there. I don't belong in the Underground anymore. No more hiding in the dark."

Hattie nodded. "I know. That's what Harry said. He told us you weren't coming back. But I missed you."

Jazz took the girl's hands in hers. "I've missed you too."

Harry had survived, though he was still recovering, bro-ken bones healing. Jazz had sensed that, just as she had sensed that Leela and Marco were dead and that Bill had left the Palace, returning topside as Jazz had done.

"I'm sorry about the others, about Marco and Leela," she said.

Hattie's eyes glistened with tears, but she took a deep breath and nodded. "Me too. We gave 'em to the river, just like we did with Cadge. The coppers kept Stevie's body, though. Never could find out what happened to it."

Jazz knew. Stevie still had family, and they'd claimed his remains. Where he'd been buried, she couldn't have said, for they lived beyond the outskirts of London and she did not feel anything out that far.

Terence had gotten what he'd wished for; the city's ghosts had been laid to rest. London could put the past behind it now and move into the future. Instead of crumbling into diminishing echoes of an ancient empire, it could embrace the new millennium and seek glo-ries yet to come. But there had been a side effect that Terence had not foreseen. Perhaps even his father, who'd designed the apparatus, hadn't fully understood his inven-tion.

All the lingering bits of London's magic were inside Jazz now; all its secrets had been fused with her.

She knew the city in ways that nobody else ever could, every person, event, street, and shady corner. Every brick and garden. Jazz and London were irrevocably linked. With all of the wisdom of the city inside her, she would never be alone again, as long as she lived. And though it had occurred to her to wonder what would happen when she died, she'd decided that was beyond her control. Perhaps the city's secrets would pass to someone else, and perhaps not. Somehow, she felt sure the wisdom and magic that the city had shed in order to sur-vive —and which she had taken into herself—would endure long after she was gone.

"It's all past now, Hattie," Jazz said, smiling at her.

"I miss it, a little," Hattie said.

The half dozen or so people who had gathered by the wall to see Jazz kept a respectful distance, though they watched her and Hattie with fascination. The girl fidgeted a bit, not liking the attention.

"You ever comin' back down to see us?" Hattie asked.