"Thank you for agreeing to this meeting," Thursday said cordially, nodding to the lady of the house, whose features were hidden behind a dark veil. "I'm told you are the investigator to see if there are strange goings-on."
Madame Vastra inclined her head. "I read of your brother's death. Another victim of the Crimson Horror, I believe."
"So it is claimed," Thursday agreed. "He was a newspaper man. He and a young woman were working undercover." He looked between the two women, the married sleuths of London Town. "Tell me, madam... do you know what an optogram is?"
"It is a silly superstition, sir," Vastra snorted. "The belief that the eye can retain an image of the last thing it sees." Thursday pulled a photograph from his inside pocket and handed it to Jenny. Her eyes widened. Then she handed it to Vastra, who threw back her veil to take a closer look. "Good grief."
Thursday stared, Vastra's reptilian appearance revealed to him for the very first time. "Oh, God..." He fainted. Across the room, Vastra rolled her eyes.
***
"Well, I'll be blowed," Jenny murmured later, as she and Vastra made enlargements of the photographs. "I think, madam, that we'd better make plans to head north." She indicated the image before her, which depicted a red-skinned, screaming Doctor.
***
Later, in the carriage to Yorkshire, they were discussing their plans. "According to my research, Sweetville's proprietor holds recruitment drives for her little community. She is only interested in the fittest and most beautiful." Vastra smiled at her wife.
Strax nodded. "You may rely on me, ma'am."
Vastra blinked. "I was, in fact, speaking to Jenny." Jenny raised her eyebrows pointedly.
"Jenny?" Strax echoed flatly. "If this weak and fleshy boy is to represent us, I strongly recommend the issuing of scissor grenades, limbo vapour and triple blast brain splitters."
"What for?" Vastra asked, shaking her head.
Strax hesitated. "Just generally. Remember, we are going to the North."
***
Later, Jenny had made it into the audience of such a recruitment drive, where Mrs Winifred Gillyflower was to speak on 'The Present Moral Decay and the Coming Apocalypse'.
"Bradford," she began, "that Babylon of the moderns with its crystal light and its glitter, all aswarm with the wretched ruins of humanity. Men and women crushed by the devil's juggernaut. And moral turpitude can destroy the most delicate of lives. Believe me, I know, I know..." A curtain was drawn back onstage, revealing a finely dressed young woman with scars surrounding her milk-white eyes. "My own daughter, Ada, blinded in a drunken rage by my late husband. Her once beautiful eyes, pale and white as mistletoe berries.
"And what, my friends, is your story?" Mrs Gillyflower continued as her daughter tapped her way across the stage with a white cane. "Will you be found wanting when the End of Days is come, when judgement rains down upon us all? Or will you be preserved against the coming apocalypse? Do not despair. I offer a way out. There is a different path. Sweetville!" Ada pulled a cover from a display showing an illustration of the community.
YOU ARE READING
One Last Chance |6| The Ascension
Science Fiction✅ approx. 215,000 words After the horrors of the war against Thanos, the Doctor and McKenzie are finally together again, albeit missing a limb. But that isn't the only thing they are bereft of. The death of their son cut them to the core and they wi...
