He felt something wet hit him. He looked at the far door and saw his shadow cast there by sudden light. He looked down and saw silver.

He leaped forward up the centre aisle and felt the blow miss him.

He looked over his shoulder as the train threw him left and right. Passengers looked up from their seats, wondering what he was heaving himself away from, if it could possibly hurt them. Deciding that it couldn’t, that he was mad, they looked back to their papers and books.

It came bouncing after him, leaping down the length of the train. It left dripping silver in its wake. The silver was pouring from it, not just from the mask, but from under the cape, from its limbs. Quill felt for an animal moment that he might survive this, because it looked wounded, because that looked like blood.

But it was flying at him now with all its strength.

He knew exactly what it was going to do to him.

He reached the end of the carriage, where cooler air was blasting through the window down the middle of the cars. He was damned if he was going to let this thing get him without every ounce of fight. He dragged open the connecting door, then the one after it, and threw himself through them and slammed the doors shut.

The darkness outside the train and the nature of the roar around it changed in that second, and he looked back again.

The Ripper was slowly pushing through the first of those two double doors.

This had been a long train, hadn’t it? A bloody long train. He’d got on somewhere near the back. Thank God.

Quill ran up the train, going through every connecting door and making sure they closed behind him. Door handles were too prosaic for the Ripper, he thought for a moment. After three sets of doors he looked back, though, and there it was, two carriages behind him, now flinging open a door, obviously having started to use them. Of course it had. It had probably written that message in blood. It could use its fingers if it wanted to.

Quill sprinted, put another two carriages between them. He saw the train was pulling in to Finchley Road. He was in a nightmare. He looked to his phone. He found slight reception. He texted the number Gaiman had left. He stepped out onto the platform with a bunch of other people and stayed wary of falling under the Ripper’s eyeline as he raced up the stairs from the platform.

*   *   *