London, 1979
The night watchman noticed himself before anyone else.
The old infirmary, on the edges of Southwark, had been shut for six years. Boarded up, doors chained, and flocks of pigeons upstairs. But he made his rounds - the council still paid to make sure the building was empty.
It was a ground-floor corridor. He caught a pane of wired glass with his torchlight.
It was his reflection. It was standing three steps behind him.
He turned around, but the corridor was empty.
When he looked back, the reflection hadn’t moved. But behind it, he could see that the dark wards were filled with people. There were patients in old gowns. Women and men holding laced handkerchiefs to their mouths. And at the far end, a little boy was waving to him.
The boy said his name.
He reached out to put his hand on the glass.
A few hours later, just after dawn, a constable found him sitting on the steps outside the front doors. They were locked. The man couldn’t explain how he’d got out.
His palms were bleeding. In each, a faint mark in red: a serpent eating its tail, wearing a crown of three thorns.
Judith Hall brought the report to their basement. It was in an envelope marked urgent. Beneath that, not for circulation.
Ethan stood at the edge of Giles’ desk and read the report upside down.
“More haunted municipal property,” he said. “London’s missing a prime redevelopment opportunity.”
Giles pointed at the photograph of the man’s hand. “It’s the same sigil.”
“Yes. I’d gathered.”
Judith leaned against the filing cabinet, smoking a cigarette. “You’ve already got the address. It’s the one Calloway gave you.”
Giles looked up sharply. “Southwark Infirmary.”
She nodded. “Council closed it after a fire in seventy-three. Most of its records were destroyed.” Judith tapped her ash into an empty saucer. “But Department C has a storage room for the bits the other departments misplaced.”
Ethan smiled. “You, and the Department, are a national treasure.”
They went just after lunch. The rain was pressing the city flat. The infirmary was behind a rusting fence. The bricks were dark, and the building was wedged between a warehouse and the river path.
Giles examined the padlock. “We should have asked the council for a key.”
Ethan was testing a a gap in the side gate. “By the time they answer, Rupert, we’d be pensioners.”
Judith handed Giles a ring of keys.
“Try not to get arrested,” she said. “The paperwork is a headache.”
It smelled like wet plaster and ancient disinfectant. The tiles echoed their footsteps down the corridor. There was a service door behind a newly broken board. The lock looked fairly new.
It yielded to one of Judith’s keys.
It opened into a room that must once have been an office. There was a battered desk that leaned with a broken leg. Delivery crates were stacked against one wall. Giles crouched beside them, peered at the brown paper label.
“It’s addressed to Calloway,” he said.
Ethan opened another of the crates. Inside were dozens of empty glass vials. Each of them seemed lined with a silver residue that shone briefly when he rotated it in the light.
“Seems he did have good homes for them, after all,” he said.
On the failing desk lay a map of London. There were pins with black plastic heads marking places. Camden, Bloomsbury, the Underground stops, Farringdon. All the places they’d been. Someone had joined them together with what looked like fine copper thread. The northern sites fed south, across Blackfriars Bridge, into a second set of older, unlabelled marks on the far bank. The final line ended beneath the infirmary.
Giles leaned closer. “It’s a circuit of some kind. This place is the terminus.”
“A terminus for what?” Judith asked.
“If I’m reading it right, it’s to move the residue,” he said. “And then collect it.”
Ethan was at the far wall, when he went still. He was looking at a fragment of mirror that still stayed fixed into a brass frame. The glass surface was clouded with grey.
“Ethan,” Giles said.
Ethan looked back over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t going to.”
Giles gave him a look.
“All right, Rupert. Maybe I was considering it.”
Judith’s was finishing another cigarette, the ember nearly burning her fingers. “Take photographs. We need to go back. I don’t think this is an inquiry the two of you can conduct on instinct.”
Ethan’s eyes kept watching the mirror.
“I can track down some of Calloway’s friends,” he said. “They’ll talk to me before they talk to a departmental pass.”
Giles looked at him. “We should stay together.”
The words came out too quickly.
Ethan’s face moved slightly. “You go with Judith and take the files back. I’ll be more useful elsewhere.”
For a moment Giles looked like he wanted to argue. Instead he folded the map carefully and put it in his case.
“Try and back by eight,” he said.
Ethan came back to the infirmary at dusk. The service door was still unlocked. And in the office behind it, the framed, broken mirror was still on the wall.
This time he touched the glass.
And for one breath he saw a warm, cosy room. Giles was making tea, books everywhere. Ethan recognized his own coat over the back of a chair. It seemed safe. No threats, no questions. There would be nowhere he needed to go.
He broke the last piece of glass with his fist, and left.
Giles and Judith were in the basement below a basement, where Department C’s oldest records were. The lights buzzed and the wooden shelves were warping with damp.
They found the file under emotional containment, civic incidents.
The Serpent’s Crown was on the first page.
“It wasn’t originally a mark of ownership,” Giles said, reading. “Looks like it was intended as some kind of containment.”
“A warning, maybe?” Judith said. “Something to let the emotions at a site finish their course.”
“Perhaps.”
The file named a junior analyst: Miriam Vale. “Her brother died at Moorgate,” Giles said. “1975.” He read on, “All the same residue we’ve seen. There’s interviews, recommendations for follow up.”
The next page was stamped deferred. The one after that was dated three years later. It said archived.
“Nobody did anything,” Giles said.
Judith shook her head. “It’s documented. There was advice. We’re good at both.”
“And Miriam?”
“Let go after the last reorganisation,” Judith said. “I checked her last address. It’s two streets away from Southwark infirmary.”
“There’s a new moon tomorrow night,” Giles said, half to himself. “That’s when she means to complete it.”
It was near midnight before Ethan got back.
Giles was waiting in the office. His tea had long gone cold. The files were spread out over his desk.
Ethan’s coat was damp, and there was blood on his hand.
“You missed dinner,” Giles said, glancing up.
“Tragic. Will it be a public or private inquiry.”
“What did you do to your hand?”
Ethan took off his coat. “A door.”
Giles stared at him for a long moment.
Ethan looked away.
“I found something,” he said. “A chamber, under the old mortuary. More mirrors and more brasswork. It’s terribly Victorian. But there’s enough charge stored there to light Westminster.” He flexed his hand. “Whatever it is, it’s nearly finished.”
Giles nodded. He pushed one of the files forward slightly. “Miriam Vale. She’s former Department C.”
“Of course she is.”
“I think she’s going to try and close the circuit tomorrow. But I don’t think it can only be her.”
Ethan gazed at Giles for a moment, as if about to say something. His face was oddly open, as if in hope.
Then he lit a cigarette.
“Well,” he said. “Even without an invitation, at least we know where the party is.”
Giles turned back to the files.
Somewhere beneath Southwark, Miriam Vale set another glass vial into its brass cradle.
She had a large map of London on her wall. On it, one small light came on.
Then another.
The city was almost connected.
This is the first episode of Ripper & Rayne that I’ve written since the sad passing of Anthony Stewart Head. I’ll restate here what I said in the Buffering the Vampire Slayer Discord channel.
Shows aimed at teens in the 90s generally had, I think, "the kids" and "the grown ups" as their main two character types. Giles was different. He wasn't a simplistic "the grown up" so much as fully formed, complex, nuanced and entirely whole.
He is the most important character - to me - in the show. It has been strange growing older, catching up, and then overtaking Giles in age. The first time I started a rewatch and realized that I was older than Giles is at the start of Season 1 was...a moment.
I'm a straight, white man. I am incredibly lucky in my life that in reality with my dad, and in fiction in Giles, that I have had the best examples of how straight, white men should - and can - show up in life. In world where there are so many harmful claims or examples of the alternative.
By all accounts, Anthony Stewart Head was that kind of man in real life, too.
← Episode 9: The Angel’s Tongue
Episode 11: The Reckoning Charm (coming soon) →
Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.