Honesty straightened and looked around. His five-strong team of head-pulverisers had been set upon by a large group of Rakes. The constables were fighting for their lives.
“Not very sporting!” exclaimed the corpse at his feet. “Hitting me in the knees like that. How am I supposed to toddle about?”
Honesty ignored the question and took a step toward his men. The fallen Rake grabbed his ankle and unbalanced him. He hit the ground face-first.
“I demand an apology!” said the Rake.
The detective sat up, twisted around, and thumped a truncheon onto the cadaver's head.
“Ouch! Good grief, man! What sort of an apology is that?”
The weapon descended again, harder.
“You should go,” said the Rake, in a slurred voice. “I'll just lie here for a bit.”
His head caved in under the third blow and he lay still.
“Purple flowering laburnum,” said Honesty. “Very hardy. Grows anywhere.”
He got to his feet.
An arm wrapped around his neck and yanked him backward. One of his truncheons was wrenched from his hand and thrown into the fog. He felt teeth sink into his left shoulder and tried to yell in pain but his throat was too constricted. He struggled, his vision blurring. Bells began to chime insistently in his ears.
He pitched sideways and hit the ground. His assailant's grip broke and Honesty rolled free, lay on his back, and gulped at the dirty air.
A foot slammed down onto his hand. He cried out as his fingers broke around the grip of his remaining truncheon. A body thumped onto his chest, its knees on his shoulders. Hands seized his neck and tightened around it like a band of metal.
The ringing in his ears increased, yet, somewhere behind the cacophony, he heard an approaching rhythmic thunder, too.
The ground started to tremble beneath his back.
Through a red haze of pain, Honesty looked up and saw that his assailant was the bearded man with the dent in his cheek.
Detective Inspector Trounce was covered from head to foot in gore. His truncheon dripped brain tissue. His mouth had frozen into a ferocious snarl and his eyes were blazing. He stood on a pile of motionless Rakes and waited for the next one to come. It was not a long wait. A man lurched into view and ran toward him. He was dressed in evening attire and there was a monocle jammed into his right eye socket. He'd obviously already been in battle, for his jaw was broken and hung loosely with the tongue flapping over it. It didn't matter to him; he was already dead.
The Rake scrambled over his fallen fellows. Trounce sprang to meet him and swept his weapon down, double-handed, onto the bare head. The skull broke with a horrible noise. Trounce hit it again and again and again.
The Rake went limp and still.
There was a moment of respite.
The Scotland Yard man wiped his sleeve over his eyes and peered around. Through the dense murk, he could see shadowy figures locked in combat. A great many constables lay dead or wounded in the road. Rakes milled about.
“How many heads have I smashed in tonight?” he rasped. “And still the bloody stiffs keep coming!”
He turned his head and saw Detective Inspector Honesty sprawled in the road, his face turning blue as a Rake, kneeling on his chest, throttled the life out of him.
Trounce took a step, lost his footing, slipped, and slid across corpses to the cobbles. He scrambled to his feet and made to run to his friend, but he'd taken no more than a single stride before two wraiths suddenly wafted into view and grabbed him by the arms.
“No!” he croaked, as, struggling furiously, he was dragged into the fog, borne away from his dying friend.
The wraiths came to a halt as Krishnamurthy emerged from the haze. The ghostly figure of a top-hatted man loomed behind the commander.
“Watch out!” Trounce cried. “And save Honesty! He's back there being strangled to death!”
“I'm sorry!” the Flying Squad man gasped. “I-I can't-can't-” Lifting his truncheon high, he approached his superior. “Tichborne is-is innocent!”
“Krishnamurthy!” Trounce yelled. “Pull yourself together, man!”
“The op-oppressors must-must die!”
He swung his weapon back, ready to sweep it down onto Trounce's head.
Thunder sounded: Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!
The ground vibrated.
A police whistle shrieked repeatedly.
A powerful gust of wind suddenly swept over Trounce, and the two wraiths lost hold of him. They were ripped apart and blown away. Behind Krishnamurthy, the top-hatted apparition disintegrated.
The commander looked over Trounce's shoulder, his eyes wide with astonishment, his mouth gaping.
The detective turned.
“Bloody hell!” he gasped. “I'm seeing things!”
It came pounding across Waterloo Bridge, and when it entered the Strand, the cobbles cracked and powdered beneath its hammering hooves.
Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom! Ba-da-da-doom!
It was a colossal horse, a mega-dray, and on its back, looking as tiny as a child's doll, sat Algernon Swinburne, a Pre-Raphaelite knight, his fiery red hair streaming behind his head, a tremendously long, thin lance gripped in his right hand.
He was blowing enthusiastic blasts on a police whistle, and, perched on his shoulder, a little blue and yellow parakeet was gaily screeching insults at the top of its voice.
As the enormous steed came charging out of the fog, the base of a pantechnicon, to which it was harnessed, followed. The wagon presented the incredulous spectators with an even more fantastic vision, for mounted vertically upon it was a huge spinning wheel. It was similar to a waterwheel in construction, though built from lightweight materials, and it was revolving at a tremendous speed on well-oiled bearings, driven by the twenty greyhounds that raced flat out on its inner surface. Miss Isabella Mayson stood beside the contraption and encouraged the runners with claps and whoops and morsels of food.
From the wheel, a series of simple but extremely well-designed gears and crankshafts drove a mammoth pair of bellows up and down, and snaking away from the nozzle, a tube ran up to the top of a tower at the rear of the wagon and into the back of a cannon-shaped barrel. This was mounted on a swivel and was being aimed at wraiths by Constable Bhatti.
The whole contrivance was a masterpiece of engineering, for it depended upon neither springs nor complex machinery, and was so simple in design that Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been able to build it in a matter of hours.
As the mega-dray pulled the wagon onto the wide thoroughfare, Bhatti directed the jets of air hither and thither, and, though his range was extremely limited, the wraiths caught by the strong blasts were ripped out of existence.
A great cheer went up from constables as they scattered out of the horse's path.
Detective Inspector Trounce and Commander Krishnamurthy looked on in amazement as Algernon Swinburne lowered his lance and aimed its tip at the back of a Rake's head.
Charles Altamont Doyle pressed his dead fingers into Detective Inspector Honesty's neck.
“Squeeze!” he said. “Squeeze the life out of you and into me!”
A fairy pranced at the periphery of his consciousness.
“Recurrence comes!” it sang.
“No! Life comes!” Doyle whispered. “Start again. Get it right. Mend my mistakes.”
He felt something touch the back of his neck. From the perspective of his astral body, which drifted through the fog nearby, he could see that it was a long lance held by a small man on a big horse.
His head burst into flames.
“Now!” said the fairy.
The fire ate into his face and scalp, clawed hungrily into the bone and tissue beneath.
He rolled off the police officer and collapsed onto the ground, thrashing wildly as the flames gouged deeper and deeper into his dead flesh.
The lance touched him again, on the chest, and his entire body ignited.
He felt himself being consumed, found that he could struggle no more, lay still, and allowed the conflagration to suck him into oblivion.
Nearby, swirling through the fog, he watched and felt himself burn.
“No!” he thought. “What about all the things I still have to do?”