Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  So, as he turned into Paxton Terrace, he was rather taken aback as three dark shapes detached themselves from the shadows of an Overground arch, and approached with cocksure steps. Their footsteps were accompanied by the hollow slap of a cosh hitting an open palm.

  “Well, well, well, what have we here?” the first announced with the bravado born of knowing that there were worse things abroad after dark than Locusts and giant cockroaches, and that he was one of those things.

  The three men were all dressed alike, in anonymous black, hats pulled down over their heads, ensuring their faces were left in darkness.

  All of them were armed. As well as the cosh in the tight grip of the biggest of the three, Schafer caught the dull glint of a flick-knife and heard the rattle of the chain looped in the hands of the third, who was also the tallest and skinniest of the muggers.

  “Look,” Shafer said, his tone calm and measured. After all that he and Constance had gone through at the bottom of the Pacific in the company of the dandy adventurer and Hero of the Empire Ulysses Quicksilver, he didn’t scare easily anymore. “I don’t want any trouble and you don’t really want to put yourselves to any trouble, do you, so what say we make this easy?”

  He put a hand into his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. The three thieves eyed the leather case greedily. “I’ve got thirty pounds here, which I’ll gladly give you – that’s a tidy sum for each of you, for no effort at all – and then what say we go our separate ways?”

  “We’ve got a toff, that’s what we’ve got here,” the leader said, as if he hadn’t heard a word the young man had said.

  Schafer put a hand into his waistcoat pocket and took out his fob-watch. “Look, what say I throw in my father’s watch as well? Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

  “A toff who thinks he can just order us about like we was his lackeys,” the thief snarled. “A toff what needs to be taught a lesson, eh boys?”

  A slow, rumbling chuckle rose from the big man’s chest.

  “I’d say about time too, boss,” his taller partner in crime sniggered.

  Realising that violence was inevitable, Schafer began to slowly back away.

  “The thing is, you see, I’m getting married on Saturday and I can’t show up at my wedding looking like I’ve gone three rounds in an illegal bare-knuckle boxing match now, can I? So cut a chap some slack, won’t you, just this once? I’m sure you understand.”

  “Oh, I see,” the thief drawled, “well now you put it like that.” The thieves continued their relentless march towards Schafer. “Ah, but, you see, the thing is we’ve got a reputation to uphold and our professional pride to think of. So we’ll take the money, and the watch, and anything else you’ve got hidden about your person that you’ve not told us about yet, but only when we’re done giving you a damn good thrashing. I’m sure you understand.”

  Schafer turned on his heel to run but the three muggers were off the starting blocks first, the beanpole covering the distance between them in only a few bounding strides.

  Links rattling, the chain whipped across the cobbles, catching Schafer round the ankles and yanking his feet out from under him. The young man came down hard on the uneven stones, winded, and winced as he almost bit through his tongue.

  Before he could kick his feet free of the chain, the muggers were on him. The cosh caught him across his spine, laying him out flat again. Gasping from the pain he struggled to turn and face his attackers. But even as he managed to manoeuvre himself onto his backside, the cosh fell again.

  This time it struck him on the temple, and he fell back onto the ground as his world exploded into darkness.

  “YOU BLOODY IDIOT!” Bulldog Drummond growled. “You only gone and bloody killed him!”

  “Sorry, boss,” the big man apologised forlornly. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You didn’t mean to?” the tall one sniggered. “Oh that’s all right then, just so long as you didn’t mean to.”

  “Shut it, Stickler!” Bulldog bit back. “You’re the one who’s going to have to help Riggs lug the body to the river.”

  The gangling thief stopped giggling abruptly.

  “What’s it matter if he’s dead, anyway?” Stickler wheedled. “We’re still going to rob him, aren’t we?”

  “Were you born that thick or did you take lessons?” Bulldog retorted. “What difference does it make? Only the difference between the noose and a stretch in the Clink, you idiot, that’s what! So get busy emptying his pockets and then you and Riggs can get busy disposing of his nibs here.”

  “Where’s he gone?” the big man asked.

  “What?” Bulldog turned from berating Stickler. The street was empty, their victim gone. “Where is he?”

  “Don’t know, boss,” Riggs said unhelpfully.

  “Weren’t you watching him?”

  “I was watching you two. You said he was dead. Dead men don’t get up and walk away by themselves,” Riggs said in his own defence.

  The shrill blast of a whistle cut through the fog and the night.

  “Christ! Peelers!” Stickler hissed.

  “Get out of here!” Bulldog growled. “And be quick about it!”

  Something swept through the foul fog over their heads. They all heard the whoosh of disturbed air and felt the downdraft of its passing.

  “What was that?” Bulldog muttered, craning his head to peer through the smog above them.

  And then the fog disgorged a horror such as the three thieves had never witnessed before.

  Bulldog Drummond was right. There were things worse than Locusts and giant cockroaches abroad after dark, but on this particular night, he wasn’t one of them.

  ITS SIREN WHINING into silence and the flashing blue light descending back into its helmet, the robo-Peeler screeched to a halt on reaching the slaughter.

  It stood stiffly, as its wheels retracted inside its body, and swept the scene with the pulsing red light of the optical scanner hidden behind the helmet-visage of its face-plate.

  The cobbles beneath the Overground pillar were slick with blood; a very great deal of blood. Body parts lay like gory puzzle pieces across the alleyway – a jaw here, a few fingers there, a patch of scalp stuck to the bricks of a nearby wall with congealing blood. To say that the scene looked like an abattoir would have been an understatement.

  The automaton’s Babbage unit working as fast as clockwork, the Peeler droid assessed the scene and determined that the organs and limbs littering the ground belonged to at least three unique individuals.

  And not one of the body parts was bigger than a suitcase. A flick-knife glinted dully where it had fallen not far from the slick of blood, although its blade remained unbloodied.

  V

  Constance Pays A Call

  “TAKE A DEEP breath,” Ulysses Quicksilver told the young woman now sitting in the drawing room of his Mayfair home, “and start again from the beginning.”

  Constance Pennyroyal fought to master her rising hysteria, taking long controlled breaths, even though her whole body was still shaking.

  The last time he had seen her had been when they disembarked at Southampton docks after the Royal Navy frigate HMS Dauntless had returned the few survivors of the sinking of the Neptune to British soil.

  When they had returned to Blighty, Constance Pennyroyal had been arm-in-arm with her fiancé John Schafer. And now, here she was again, ten months on, alone. He hadn’t expected to be seeing her until the following Saturday, when she was due to marry her beau at St Mary’s in Knightsbridge.

  “I don’t know to start,” she said through her sobs, as she struggled to compose herself.

  She had managed to maintain a passable facade of calm collectedness right up until Nimrod had left the two of them alone in the drawing room and at that moment she had broken down in tears. Up to this point all Ulysses knew for certain was that Schafer had broken off their engagement less than a week before their wedding and was refusing to even see her.

  “All r
ight, let me help you.” Ulysses placed a hand on her knee, offering her his handkerchief in place of her own sodden rag. “Tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  The anxious young woman, her eyes red and puffy from crying, nodded, took a deep breath and began. “It was two days ago. We had spent the afternoon together and then enjoyed a stroll through Battersea Park. We walked along by the river and then took a cab back to my parents’ house in Knightsbridge. The last words we shared were ones of love.”

  Constance sniffed, dabbing Ulysses’ balled up handkerchief at her puffy eyes.

  “And you haven’t seen him since?” Ulysses spoke gently, in an attempt to cushion the force of his words as much as possible.

  She shook her head.

  “And had John been behaving in any way that made you think something might be wrong. I hate to say it, but these things rarely come completely out of the blue.”

  “No,” Constance answered a little too quickly and a little too forcibly.

  “Really?”

  “Well, he’s been a little under the weather recently, but nothing more.”

  “Under the weather?” Ulysses repeated, pouncing on this one small clue as a potential line of enquiry. “In what way, exactly?”

  “Well, it was like a bad cold or the ‘flu really. That was all. He said he felt fine.”

  “And how long had that been going on for?”

  “A week or two, I suppose.”

  “And he was still unwell the last time you saw him.”

  “Yes, but he said he felt fine. He said that I shouldn’t worry.” At this the tears came again. “But I was right to worry, wasn’t I?”

  Ulysses waited a respectful moment before asking the next difficult question. “And when did he call off the engagement?”

  “The very next day.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yes. We were due at the church for a rehearsal that afternoon, but before lunch this came.”

  At that she handed the dandy an already opened envelope with a shaking hand. Ulysses took it, removed the folded piece of vellum writing paper from within and quickly scanned the letter.

  “I see,” he said, having considered its contents. The letter was brief and to the point. It stated that he could no longer go through with the wedding, apologising for the upset this would cause, and for wasting her time, and asking that she never try to see him again. “And you received no other explanation from any other source.”

  “No, none,” Constance sobbed. “I went round there to see him after I received the letter but he wouldn’t even come to the door. I went round again this morning but all that happened was he screamed at me until I left.”

  “You poor thing.”

  “After that I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “You did the right thing in coming here,” Ulysses told her.

  She looked at him with wide, weary eyes. “The last time I saw him he told me not to worry, that everything would be all right.”

  “Hush, now,” Ulysses said, patting her knee again, in an effort to calm her down. “We’ll get this sorted, don’t you worry.”

  “Do you think this can all be explained by the fact that he’s been feeling unwell?” Constance managed at last.

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “I don’t see why a case of the ‘flu should stop him from being able to marry me.”

  “Indeed,” Ulysses ruminated.

  Constance looked at him with wide, anxious eyes. “Do you think it might be something worse than the ‘flu?”

  “I don’t know. But I think we should find out, don’t you?”

  Constance continued to stare at him, a disbelieving, delighted smile slowing lightening her face. “You mean you’ll help me?”

  “I hope I’m going to be able to help both of you.”

  The tears came again then, but this time they were tears of relief, tears of joy; tears of hope.

  “Come on,” Ulysses said, jumping to his feet.

  The grandfather clock at the end of the hall chimed seven. A split second later the whining voice of the curfew sirens could be heard howling their lamentations over the rooftops of the city.

  “The curfew!” Constance gasped.

  “Don’t worry,” Ulysses announced, flashing the young woman a devilish grin. “We’ll take the Rolls.”

  VI

  Awakening

  JOHN SCHAFER SLEPT fitfully, his body twitching beneath the knotted, sweat-drenched sheets, and as he slept he dreamed.

  But this time his recurring nightmare had subtly changed. This time he was no longer alone. He saw the sad, desperate faces of destitute men, women and children staring at him with dead, soulless eyes. Then the beast had arrived, as it always did, and the beast had hungered. The people had died, slaughtered to sate its savage hunger.

  He woke with a start, and for one blissful moment, it seemed as if it might have all been a dream – the whole sorry debacle.

  Then his sleep crusted eyes took in the mess of his bedroom – the piles of broken furniture, the shredded books, and the torn and filthy piles of clothes – and realised, with a bitter taste in his mouth, that it was all true. At least he hoped that it was that realisation that had left the foul taste in his mouth and not something else, too horrible to consider.

  There were great gaps in his memory of the last two days, but his rational mind had been able to work out what must have happened in the spaces in between the few bits he could remember.

  The last clear memory he had was of the night he had last seen Constance. He had dropped her back at her parents’ house in Knightsbridge before heading home on foot. He remembered the thieves in the fog and then...

  And then the next clear memory he had was of being at home, with the door to his apartment still locked and the curtains flapping in the breeze coming in through a broken second floor window. He had barely been dressed, the clothes he had worn for his promenade with Constance hanging off him in torn and bloodied strips. And then there had been the wounds that covered the whole of his body. He had no recollection at all of how he had come by them – he had first wondered if it was from coming in through the window without bothering to open it first – but now he wasn’t so sure.

  What came after that was a patchwork of half-recalled incidents and the pieces of the puzzle he had worked out for himself later. He thought he had slept for much of the time since, although he felt wrung out and exhausted, and then there had been Constance and the reason, hidden deep down within himself, why he had felt compelled to call off their wedding...

  And now, as he lay there in bed, stinking like God alone knew what, his body a lost memory map of cuts and bruises smeared with filth and blood – much of which he had a horrible suspicion wasn’t actually his – the bedclothes in the same state, his frantically working mind kept coming to the same conclusion and it was enough to drive him mad.

  And then there was the constant noise. He could hear the clatter of the Overground, the wail of the curfew klaxons, as the square of light that was his bedroom window faded to purple, and the chugging grumble of steam-engines across the city as people made for home as night fell, as thick and oppressive as the Smog.

  The sounds of the city rang in his ears, giving him no peace. He felt terrible. He felt exhausted, even though he had only just woken, although neither did he know for how long he had slept.

  But the strident voice of London was nothing compared to the noise coming from upstairs. Dr Rathbone’s apartment lay directly above his, but what was the bastard up to that he had to make so much noise? It sounded like a herd of elephants had moved in upstairs. He wasn’t usually able to hear anything but now even the tiniest sound was amplified to his sensitive hearing – every footstep on the bare floorboards above a resounding thud, every clink of glass or scrape of cutlery on china was screeching fingernails on a blackboard, every cough as the man cleared his throat the mucus-laced cacophony of a TB sufferer. He could hear it all. And it was slowly dri
ving him out of his mind.

  Suddenly leaping out of bed, pulling on a ragged shirt and filthy, shredded trousers from a pile of abandoned clothing in the middle of the floor, John Schafer made for the door to his apartment.

  It was time he had a word with the good Dr Rathbone.

  And reaching for the door he saw the wounds on the back of his hand open as the bones beneath reformed and a chitinous claw took hold of the handle.

  VII

  Death Is Now Thy Neighbour

  “IS THIS THE place?” Ulysses asked as the Silver Phantom rolled to a halt outside the shadowed tenement building off Paxton Terrace.

  “Yes. This is it,” Constance answered in a quiet voice.

  Together they exited the vehicle.

  “Right you are then,” Ulysses said, once the two of them were standing at the foot of the steps leading up to the communal front door. “Let’s see if he’s home, shall we?”

  The car window opened.

  “Would you like me to wait, sir?” Nimrod asked.

  “Yes please, old chap, just hang on there would you?”

  “Very good, sir.” The window closed again.

  “Which number is it?” Ulysses asked, leading the way up the steps to the door.

  “Flat C,” she replied.

  Considering the facade of the house it was clear to Ulysses that the place had once been all one private residence, but like so many properties in the capital it had long since been divided into a number of separate apartments, each one occupying a single storey of the house.

  He rang the bell for Flat C labelled with the name ‘Schafer’ written in smart copperplate on an adhesive label. As he waited for a reply, Ulysses noticed that the smarter brass nameplate next to Flat D was etched with the name ‘Dr Michael Rathbone’. Ulysses wondered what the doctorate was for. Was he a doctor of medicine, or merely a pretentious academic who liked to show off his qualifications, having little else in his life of which to be proud?