The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) Read Free Page B

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