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passageway. Katie walked behind Collin, beside Toby, down a pebbled path that swam in greenish twilight from a source Katie couldn’t see. Like a pea-soup fog, it distorted the stone walls on either side, where waxwork figures stood motionless behind iron bars, peering out. Some were cartoonish. Others were amazingly lifelike, with twisted facial features, despair etched forever on their wax faces. A London police officer, a bobby, stood stiffly to the side. Was he real? Katie wondered.
    They continued along the corridor, the slow green tentacles of light picking out iridescent slime and moss on the rock formations. Grim pools of light punctuated the darkness ahead, illuminating a tall waxwork man in a red opera cape and glossy stovepipe hat. As the three teenagers approached, the man’s robotic lips began to open and shut above a grey, rat-tail beard.
    His voice, a kettledrum baritone, boomed forth like a circus ringmaster’s. His wax fingers beckoned.
    â€œEnter, ye who dare, into a bygone era where you will come face to face with the verisimilitude of evil. Each waxwork victim you are about to encounter is an exact replica of the actual young woman, painstakingly assembled by Madame Tussauds’ team of forensic artists using death masks, old photographs, and cutting-edge digital technology.”
    The mechanical man gave a hinged bow and pointed the way into a dark passageway whose walls swelled in and out. Katie felt the pinch of claustrophobia. Just the effect the museum wanted, she reminded herself.
    â€œLike being in a bleedin’ Edgar Allan Poe story,” Toby whispered, as they moved through a foggy sort of mist until they came to a giant hologram of a woman floating in a halo of silvery light. Her grey hair was tucked under a lace cap, her soft-looking skin wrinkled like an overripe apple’s.
    â€œCome. Follow me,” came the hologram’s disembodied voice, high and raspy like an old church organ.
    Katie, Collin, and Toby followed as the holographic woman floated backward.
    â€œImagine if you will,” quavered her shrill voice, “that you are entering the Victorian world of horse-drawn carriages, flickering gaslights, cobblestone streets, and steam-engine locomotives.”
    A black-and-white projection of a fast-moving train tore toward them, making Katie and Collin duck as the three-dimensional optical illusion howled past, puffing great, billowing clouds of black smoke.
    â€œThe industrial age is reaching its zenith,” the apple-skinned woman continued, her face floating overhead. “Queen Victoria has just celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Hot air balloons, bear baiting, and Punch and Judy shows are all the rage. Young men in shiny top hats saunter down the boulevards of Mayfair and the Strand, accompanied by fashionable young ladies wearing the latest Parisian bonnets and bustled skirts.”
    In the distance the train whistle shrilled, echoed, and died away. An odor of boiled potatoes wafted through the air.
    The hologram woman continued. “Steam-powered technology has brought progress and prosperity to the middle class, making for an attitude of self-satisfaction and smug complacency. Londoners, from the most regal duke to the humblest chimney sweep, feel that, in the British Empire where the sun never sets, ‘God is an Englishman.’
    â€œBut all this is about to change, isn’t it, Doctor Llewellyn?” twinkled the hologram woman.
    â€œYes, Mrs. Llewellyn,” boomed the rat-bearded man, popping out from a blanket of darkness to their left, his mechanical arms moving jerkily up and down. “Yes, indeed. On the last day of August, in the year 1888, under a bright, treacherous, full moon, Jack the Ripper began his one-man reign of terror, murdering and disemboweling girls in the Whitechapel district of London.”
    â€œStarting with poor, dear Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was discovered in the gutter of Buck’s Row,