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isn’t that right, Doctor Llewellyn?” asked Doctor Llewellyn’s holographic counterpart.
    â€œIndeed, Mrs. Llewellyn.” Again, the hinged fingers unfurled to point the way.
    The teenagers walked toward a glint of fake moonlight that spilled over the hunched shoulders of a large, hooded man who stood in the doorframe of what looked like a narrow little house. Dead vines clung to the brickwork around the door. A crooked window sagged overhead.
    As they approached, the cloaked figure’s snakish, beady eyes peered out at them through the slits of his black mask. His arms were wrapped around the wax figure of a girl in a low-cut velvet gown.
    Wavering lamplight glinted across the rise and fall of the girl’s pale breasts. The visitors inhaled a puff-cloud of cloying perfume.
    In the brief flicker of hissing gaslight, Katie could just make out the silky gleam of the girl’s black hair. Again, the man’s bloodshot eyes fixed on her, glared, and turned away.
    Collin was standing on one side of Katie, Toby on the other. Together they watched transfixed as the waxwork man dragged the head of the girl to his chest, and mechanically rumpled her hair. Swinging shadows threw brightness on the bulging outline of a knife handle sticking out of his waistcoat pocket. And as he swiveled and pivoted, the torn mouth of his mask showed a smiling ridge of discolored teeth.
    A rattling creak came from the crooked window overhead as it swung open, and a woman’s face popped out. “Who goes there?” she hollered. “State yer business, or be off with you!” The woman’s marble eyes peered out, searching the street corner below. A heavy silence ensued, followed by the clang of a rusty bolt as her head popped back inside.
    The hooded man leered up at the window, then down at the wax girl. Moonlight shone on the lower part of their waxwork faces. The man raised his arm, drawing a gloved finger across the girl’s throat. As if by a conjurer’s trick, a knife appeared in his hand.
    A flicker of light picked out his jerky arm movements as the blade slashed across the wax girl’s throat. Red liquid spurted from the gushing wound.
    A peal of bells rose in the distance, and the scene was transformed by a host of gilded mirrors swinging forward from all sides, blinding Katie with flashing, tinfoil glints of fake lightning.
    Multiplied by the mirrored slivers, the man’s robotic eyes began to glow in duplicate and triplicate as the head he cradled to his chest tilted and jerked, the scene replicating itself over and over in the long mirrors, a seemingly endless card-flip of quivering reflections. Finally, the girl’s image split, and she fell to the ground, her glass eyes staring blankly up at the three teenagers.
    In the mirror closest to Katie, the hooded man was laughing grotesquely.
    The lights went out.
    Katie turned and tried to hurry away. But in that instant of darkness she lost her sense of direction and stumbled. Somebody— Toby?—caught her by the elbow. She took a deep breath of musty, damp-smelling air.
    The hologram of Mrs. Llewellyn appeared before them in a soap bubble of golden light, her church organ voice rising and falling: “ Such a pity . Poor Mary Ann Nichols deserved better from life, as did Annie Chapman, ‘Dark Annie’ as she was called, who died eight days later . . .”
    A green-edged spotlight picked out the face of another girl standing in the gloom a little farther down. Wearing a long, white dress and lace shawl, she looked like a demure bride, her cheeks circled with bright spots of rouge. The hooded man sprang up behind her.
    A gas lamp burned murkily overhead.
    The hooded man’s bloodshot eyes, like dull marbles, seemed to grow round and then shrink, like a beating pulse. He rumpled the girl’s hair, making it fluff up in all directions. He dragged his gloved hand across her throat with the edge of a butcher’s