Jaclyn the Ripper - Hardcover

4:53 A.M., Sunday, June 20, 2010
Flash.
The West Pavilion of the J. Paul Getty Museum exploded silently from within, obliterating the darkness, rendering the night instantly translucent like an overexposed negative. A millisecond later, the .ash receded, and everything looked as it had before. But it wasn’t.
Teresa Cruz, temporarily blinded, jumped up from the small desk in the lobby, and was blinking for her vision to come back when her walkie- talkie crackled.
“What’s happening over there?” said Peterson in the security room. “I lost all my monitors!”
She jerked her radio up from her belt. “I dunno.... Lightning, maybe?”
“Check it out, will you?”
“Copy.”
If it had been lightning, it would have been lightning with no mete­orological disturbances, lightning with clear skies. Lightning with no thunder. It  wasn’t lightning. What was it, then? Teresa did a  three- sixty, taking in the exhibition posters, the signs, the literature racks, the h. g. wells— a man before his time banner spanning the back wall of the lobby. She swallowed hard. The .ash had come from one of the gal­leries, from inside, yet even the night outside had lit up. She tried to convince herself that it had been an electrical short, but knew in her heart it wasn’t. There was no burning smell, no smoke, and the  night-lights were still on. She straightened her blue blazer and  charcoal- gray slacks, was aware of her heart pounding.
“I’m jonesin’ for a gun, Peterson,” she said into her walkie. “They ought to let us carry guns.”
“You need backup, sweetie?” he said sarcastically.
“Forget it.”
Angry, she snapped off her radio. Peterson had always been on her case, saying she was “too gutless” to be a security of.cer and that management had only hired her because she was a female Hispanic. I don’t need him or his abuse. Yet she paused, looked outside and was afraid. Her eyes lin­gered over the fountains and pools, the rectangular museum courtyard that stretched to the rotunda splashed yellow by recessed lights, then the other pavilions framing the courtyard, their travertine stone faces ghostly white under the soft moon. Then she frowned, shook off her fear, squared her diminutive shoulders and strode to the galleries: those large, tasteful rooms delineated by archways so that one gallery framed another as if they themselves  were works of art. In the .rst room, she stepped around display cases of memorabilia, faded manuscripts and original editions of books, then moved past stark  black- and- white photographs that documented the turbulent life of H. G. Wells. None of it registered, so drawn was she to a strange light emanating from the center gallery where they had installed his time machine.
Roped off, the time machine sat alone in the room. An intense bluish glow was fading from the engine compartment, leaving it silhouetted against the gray gallery walls. The tapered,  steel- plated cabin  rose eight feet above the engine and resembled a primitive space capsule. When she’d .rst seen the machine, Teresa had found it squat, ugly and askew, reminding her of those monolithic stone sculptures carved by her Mayan ancestors. Of course, The Utopia had never been known to work, the brochures all said. Regardless, she was frozen in the archway like a lower mammal caught in the headlights of an onrushing car, held spellbound by the time machine’s inexplicable glow of energy.
And then— behind its small windows oxidized from  age— something moved. The cabin door opened. A .gure stepped out, ignored the lad­der and sprang lightly to the gallery .oor, landing in a crouch and look­ing around warily, its chest heaving.
Disbelieving, Teresa shook her head slowly. She  couldn’t stop star­ing, couldn’t deny what she was seeing. Not only had something alive emerged from the time machine, but in the darkness, that something glowed a toxic reddish green. Distracted, the .gure turned back, reached up on tiptoes and took a  prism- shaped device from inside the cabin, shoved it into a slot beneath the door.
Suddenly, the .gure noticed itself and saw what Teresa had seen. Emitting shocked little cries, it held its arms away from its body and tried to back away from  itself— its  aura— then desperately tried to rub the colors off, but the glow came from within as if an  X-ray.
Teresa had seen enough for a lifetime and backpedaled out of the gallery. The .gure spun around, saw her moving, came for her at a fast trot. Cowering in the archway, Teresa brought her radio up to her mouth. As she keyed it to call Peterson, the .gure ripped it from her hands and hurled it across the room. Teresa ducked instinctively. The walkie hit the wall and shattered. Astonished, frozen, she watched the .gure de­tour around her and disappear in the lobby, heard the door close be­hind it.
Suddenly angry— more with herself than with this  creature— Teresa balled her .sts, reminded herself that she was a security of.cer, and a damned good one at that. She sprinted after the .gure, pushed against the glass doors of the entranceway, burst outside.
Running up the courtyard, little feet whisking on stone, the .gure saw that under the moonlight the toxic glow had faded from its  skin— its normal .esh color returned. Perhaps the glow was merely a harmless fourth- dimensional residue, it thought. Then it realized that it was wearing rags and needed clothes or whatever the human condition cloaked it­self with these days. Except that was the least of its problems. Some­thing was wrong— terribly wrong. The .gure  couldn’t run as fast as it remembered from the streets of London and then San Francisco. Its stride was shorter, its breath not as quick and easy, its hair too long and falling in its face. And these things kept slapping up and  down— what were these things? Distressed, the .gure was about to stop and examine itself when it heard footfalls and turned. The security guard— that pa­thetic little bitch with teresa cruz on her  nameplate— was in hot pursuit. Normally, it would confront this Teresa Cruz, but in this  here-and- now nothing was normal, nothing at all. Fearing the worst, not knowing where or even what it was, the .gure ran faster, ran gasping for breath, .nally veered toward the rotunda. It went inside, looked around wildly, didn’t appreciate the graceful sweep of glass and stone. It gravi­tated to the darkness, where it huddled, a wounded beast, under the curved staircase. As it worked to catch its breath, it wondered if it had eluded the security guard or if others  were on the way. Then, in the ab­sence of light, it saw that glow creeping back in its skin. It recoiled, tried to brush the glow off again, but then Teresa Cruz was coming into the rotunda. The .gure bolted from under the stairs, not so much run­ning from Teresa as from itself. It raced for an alcove, read men’s rest-room, rushed inside the  well- lit space and went to the mirror.
The .gure shrieked with horror, had to hold on to the sink to re­main upright. It  wasn’t the glow it saw, for that had disappeared with the  light— it was something  else entirely. “Good God, no,” the .gure moaned. “Please, God, no!” The .gure shut its eyes tightly, willed itself to see a different  re.ection— the familiar dark, forbidding countenance with thin lips, long nose and beady, hooded eyes that it loved and remembered— but when it looked again, the image was inevitably the same....