Will turned back. “Him?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“You know who I mean: Jack the Ripper. I know there’s been talk. Rumour. Every murder has been committed within a ten-minute walk from the London Hospital. Some folk even say it’s Sir Frederick Treves, the Queen’s physician. He arranged for me to take refuge at the London Hospital, you know. So very kind. But it’s not him and it’s not me either.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever had you down as Jack the Ripper,” said Will.

“Well I think that’s most unflattering. But then it’s obvious who the murderer really is, isn’t it?”

Will sat back down again. “Is it?” he asked.

“Of course it is.”

“So who is Jack the Ripper?”

“Was,” said Joseph Merrick. “Was, because he did himself in. Committed suicide, he did. Sickened by his own crimes he took his own life.”

“Really?” said Will. “So you know who it was?”

The Elephant Man nodded his bulbous bonce. “Plain as the great big nose on my face,” said he. “His name was Hugo Rune.”

18

“It wasn’t Hugo Rune,” said Will. “I was with him during the time that the murders were committed. We were in Tierra del Fuego.”

“Oh,” said the Elephant Man. “Then I must have been misinformed. That’s the last time I travel on the Clapham omnibus.”

Will sighed deeply. “I should have expected this,” he said, “as soon as I decided to strike out on my own.”

“It’s my turn not to understand.” Mr Merrick lifted his champagne glass, passed it under his head sack and slurped upon it noisily.

“Running gags,” said Will. “I’ve read about them, but never encountered them before, in the flesh, as it were.”

“Speaking of flesh,” said Mr Merrick, “there’s a couple of right crackers over there; why don’t we move in as a team and have a pop at them?”

“I’m here on important business,” said Will.

“And you can’t fit in time for a shag?”

“Well,” said Will. “I have to confess that it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a shag.”

“How long?”

“More than three hundred years.” Will couldn’t count the woman Barry had picked up the previous night, because he couldn’t remember her.

“Are you an associate of the Comte de St Germain? I see him over there, chatting up Her Majesty.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Will.

“Claims to have discovered the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Claims to be two thousand years old and to have met Christ.”

“You’re kidding me,” said Will.

“I am not possessed of a sense of humour. And when you clock my boat race, you’ll see why.”

“I’ve seen photographs,” said Will. “Although I’m sure they don’t do you justice.”

“They do. I look like shit.”

“But you’re still a big hit with the ladies.”

“Every cloud has a silver lining. Or, as I like to put it, every skirt has a pink one. So shall we have a pop at a couple? There’s two over there. Although I don’t like the look of your one.”

“All right,” said Will. “I can spare a little time.”

“Suffer from premature ejaculation, do you?”

“Your conversation is somewhat coarse,” said Will.

“If you think that’s coarse, you should see my—”

“What?” Will asked.

“Let’s go and pull.”

“All right,” said Will. “Let’s go.”

And they did pull. Will was amazed. His one wasn’t a catwalk model but later, in Mr Merrick’s room at Bedstead Square, she proved herself to be a willing and imaginative lover. And what Mr Merrick got up to, Will didn’t know. It sounded like a lot of fun by all the noise of it, but Will really didn’t want to look.

Will slept very soundly after everything was done, and was somewhat surprised to suddenly awaken in the dark.

Will didn’t say, “Where am I?” for he knew just where he was, but he wondered what had woken him and why.

Curious sounds came to Will in the darkness. Hissing sounds and clickings and the sounds of whispered words. Will raised his head and eased himself away from the sleeping female at his side.

The hissings and clickings continued and so did the whispered words. Will rose from the hospital bed.

A door was ajar; a wan light shone through the ajarness. Will stealthily crept towards it.

“Ground control,” he heard words whispered. “Ground control to Major Thomas.”[17]

Will peered through the gap between doorframe and door.

Mr Merrick sat at a table. Before him was a complicated-looking piece of apparatus. Some kind of radio transmitter, Will correctly assumed, but not of a type he’d ever seen before.

“Ground control to Major Thomas,” said Mr Merrick once more.

“Major Thomas speaking,” a voice replied. “What do you have to report?”

“The date for the moonship launch is confirmed.”

“Well, you’ll just have to stop it happening, won’t you?”

“I can’t do that,” said Mr Merrick. “How can I do that?”

“Blow it up. I don’t care.”

“I’m hardly equipped to blow it up, am I? I’m not a trained assassin. I’m just a spy.”

“And a pretty rubbish one,” said the voice of Major Thomas.

“Well, that’s hardly my fault. You said that the alien-human hybridisation programme would make me indistinguishable from a normal human being. That wasn’t exactly true, was it?”

“A bit of a glitch in the system, but you have achieved a certain celebrity. You’re a darling of royalty. You have connections in high places. That’s worked out much better than we could ever have hoped for.”

“That’s all right for you to say. I have to cart this big huge head around.”

“Just stop the launch,” said the voice of Major Thomas. “We don’t want the British Empire builders blundering onto our moon base.”

“I have certain connections in the London underworld,” said Mr Merrick. “Anarchists. I will arrange to have a bomb placed in the moonship, to explode when the countdown reaches zero!”

“Splendid. That will do nicely. Is that all that you have to report?”

“Well, actually, no, it isn’t. The British Empire’s space programme may be a threat to our home planet Mars, but there is an even greater threat. It is not the British government we have to fear. It is the power that lies behind the British government.”

“Her Majesty Queen Victoria?”

“Not her,” said Mr Merrick. “A cabal of witches. They are up to all manner of wickedness. Their evil extends throughout this society and their power grows ever stronger. I hear rumours from my informants that these witches seek to take control of the government. They disguise their evil by passing as the seemingly benign middle class ladies of a philanthropic chit-chat and charity organisation called the Chiswick Townswomen’s … just hold on, will you?”

“What’s going on?” asked Major Thomas.

“I thought I heard something.”

Will edged away from the open door, returned to his bed and feigned sleep. He heard the approach of the Elephant Man, the shuffling feet, the movement of fabrics. He felt the warm breath against his cheek, and smelled it also. It smelled of woman.

Will made snoring sounds.

The breath left his cheek. Mr Merrick moved away and Will heard a door shut behind him.

“And what do you make of that?” Will asked. “Zzzzzzzzzzzzz,” went Barry.

“So let me just get this straight,” said Tim McGregor, downing Large and running a knuckle over his mouth. “Sorry to interrupt you in mid-chapter as it were. But your tale seems to have entered other dimensions. We now have Barry the Holy Guardian sprout or Phnaargian genetically-engineered Time Sprout, depending upon your particular take on reality, or otherwise. And Mr Merrick, the Elephant Man, who is a human-alien hybrid spy.”