Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  Ulysses tried the bell again. There was still no response to his constant buzzing.

  “Looks like he’s out,” Ulysses muttered to himself. He turned to Constance, but seeing the forlorn look on her face turned back to the door saying, “But having come all this way it would be good to double-check before we leave.”

  Ulysses looked at the sturdy door in front of him and then brashly ran a finger over the column of bell-pushes. They rang and buzzed in quick succession.

  There was a pause, followed by a crackle of static and then an irritated, elderly, female voice came through the speakerphone. “Yes?”

  “Delivery!” Ulysses announced cheerily, holding down the button of the intercom.

  There was a second buzz and with a click the door catch released.

  “Works every time,” Ulysses chuckled as he pushed the door open and then stepped aside, holding it open for Constance to enter the communal hallway ahead of him.

  Once inside, however, the dandy led the way up the wide staircase, taking the tiled steps two at a time, so that Constance was forced to jog up the stairs after him in order to keep up.

  On reaching the second landing he stopped. “Oh,” he said, surprised, the door to Flat C open before him. “Well I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Constance joined him a moment later. “John?” she called out in a wavering half-excited, half-anxious voice, moving past Ulysses and into the flat before he could stop her.

  She halted as suddenly as if she had run into a brick wall. “What is that smell?” she exclaimed, putting a hand over her nose.

  Ulysses’ nostrils flared as the smell of rancid meat and squalor hit him too. He knew that smell of old. It was the smell of death.

  Horribly aware of what they might well find inside the apartment, Ulysses stopped Constance with a hand and stepped past her.

  “Wait here,” he instructed as he moved deeper into the oppressive gloom beyond.

  The place was a mess, but it was also currently uninhabited.

  It was then, as he was surveying the heaps of broken furniture, the filthy piles of rags and the diamond shards of broken glass covering the carpet, that Ulysses heard a loud thud, followed by a reverberating crash. Constance had heard it too.

  “It came from upstairs,” she said, staring at the ceiling.

  Ulysses sprang into action in an instant. Leaving Schafer’s apartment at a run, sprinting up the next flight of stairs, on reaching the next landing he hesitated once more. The door to Flat D was open, just as Schafer’s flat had been. And from the open door came what sounded like the last throes of a scuffle.

  Approaching the door with slow, cautious steps – unsheathing the rapier blade buried within the blackwood haft of his bloodstone-tipped cane – Ulysses steeled himself as he peered into the strangely lit gloom beyond.

  His finely balanced blade in hand, he followed the rustling sounds and the glow of a table lamp to a back room that appeared to be the doctor’s study – judging by the framed certificates mounted on the walls and the heavily-laden bookcases filled with medical journals and a plethora of thick, leather-bound books. One bookcase lay on the floor, its papery contents lying in drifts beneath it.

  The room was lit by the amber glow of a table lamp that was lying on its side on the floor amidst a pile of tumbled documents. And the reason for such disarray was obvious.

  Sprawling in a swivel chair in front of a roll-top writing desk was the body of a man, although all Ulysses could see were the man’s blood-soaked trousers and his still twitching feet. Squatting on top of the dying man’s chest was something grotesque and hunched, like some demonic incubus captured in oils by a gothic grandmaster, its face buried inside the dead doctor’s shattered ribcage.

  “Have at you!” Ulysses shouted, lunging at the thing with his blade.

  The creature – whatever it was, and his mind didn’t want to linger too long on the question of what exactly it was – hissed and recoiled. In the gloom Ulysses could see that it had a vaguely humanoid form but its knobbly hide appeared to be covered with all manner of bony protrusions whilst patches of its flesh gleamed black as chitin.

  “John? Is that you?”

  The cannibalistic killer’s attention was immediately on the woman now standing behind Ulysses. It hissed again and recoiled, as if trying to hide itself in the shadows. And then with a sudden spring it hurled itself sideways, escaping through the nearest window.

  The sharp crash of breaking glass and splintering staves filled the study for a moment and then the strange creature was gone, away into the night.

  Ignoring the brutalised corpse sprawled across the desk, Ulysses dashed to the window leaning out through the shattered pane as if ready to launch himself after the creature.

  He shot glances down the side of the building, to both left and right, but seeing nothing there quickly looked up. And there, nothing more than a black shape now against the shadows of chimney stacks on the roof of the building opposite, he saw the creature again.

  “Get yourself downstairs and tell Nimrod what’s happened; then wait for me there!” Ulysses instructed Constance.

  “What about you? What are you going to do?” she asked, as Ulysses, sword in hand, eased himself out through the shattered window, taking care not to cut himself on a razor-sharp shard, and onto the narrow stone ledge beyond.

  “What does it look like?” he said. “I’m going after that thing!”

  VIII

  Fight or Flight

  FROM THE LEDGE it was only some six feet to the building on the other side of the alleyway. Ulysses peered down at the forty foot drop to the cobbled backstreet below and immediately regretted it. He wasn’t one of those unfortunates who suffered from an irrational fear of heights. It was the perfectly rational fear of what the fall from such a height would do to him that bothered him. But the longer he clung to the wall and the window dithering, the faster the murderous creature was getting away.

  Gripping his sword-stick tightly in his right hand, with a cry of, “Here goes nothing!” he threw himself at the building opposite.

  He sailed through thin air for a moment and then his strong, re-grown left hand reached out and grabbed hold of a length of cast iron guttering. He was over. Scuffing his shoes against the wall beneath him as he found footholds in the crumbling mortar, it was a relatively simple matter for the dandy to then pull himself up and over the edge of the building and onto the flat roof beyond.

  With only a glance back to the broken window behind and below him, Ulysses turned his attention back to the escaping monster.

  He could see it quite clearly, silhouetted against the moon-lit Smog, its backwards-jointed legs taking great galloping strides over the rooftops.

  And yet it wasn’t so far away that Ulysses felt he wouldn’t be able to catch up with it if he gave chase. Despite the length of its stride, its curious, hook-clawed feet appeared to be having trouble finding purchase on the slates.

  Even as he set off after it, following his own precarious course across the angled roof-scape, the thing slipped again, kicking a succession of loose tiles free of the roof altogether as it made a desperate grab for a chimney pot with elongated finger-bones.

  Ulysses threw himself after the gargoyle, displaying a level of agility not significantly less impressive than that demonstrated by the changed thing he was chasing. He leapt over voids, skidded down sloping roofs and danced along ridges only half a brick wide, every step he took bringing him closer to his quarry.

  And then, with the end of the terrace only a matter of yards away, the creature slipped sideways. Ulysses flung himself after it, his rapier raised high above his head, ready to bring it down in a decisive executioner’s strike.

  The gargoyle-like thing lay sprawled beneath him, in a gulley between two sloping roof sections. It raised its elongated claws over its head, as if ready to block his blow with its arms.

  And then the creature cried out, taking Ulysses so entirely by surprise that he faltere
d and landed awkwardly, his sword-blade dropping to his side. There had been something familiar about its cry.

  The creature cried out again, and this time Ulysses was able to make out the words its malformed mouth was struggling to articulate.

  “Pleassse!” it screeched. “Ssstop!”

  Ulysses peered at the cowering creature in front of him, trying to catch a glimpse of its face through the shield it had made of its arms.

  “Schafer?” he said, his voice little more than an incredulous whisper. “Is that you?”

  The kick came out of nowhere, taking the dandy completely by surprise. A distended foot hit him squarely in the stomach, doubling him up and sending him reeling, his sword-stick falling from his hand as he crashed onto the sloping roof behind him, gasping for breath as pain flared in his chest.

  Its lithe body taut like a coiled spring, the creature turned its obsidian eyes on the suffering dandy. Its features remained hidden in the darkness, but the orbs of its eyes sparkled like black diamonds.

  And the gargoyle spoke again: “Sssorry!”

  The creature turned away again and, before his eyes the chitin covering its back split apart. With a stomach-churning stretching, tearing sound, flesh and bone warped and distended as a pair of translucent leathery red wings unfolded from its shoulders and the thing – more like a gargoyle than ever now – launched itself from the roof’s edge, gliding away into the night.

  In a moment it was gone.

  IX

  Return To Bedlam

  AT A LITTLE after nine the next morning, a Mark IV Rolls Royce Silver Phantom pulled up outside the imposing gates and high barbed wire-topped iron railings of Bedlam Asylum in Lambeth.

  After losing his quarry the night before, as the creature had become airborne, Ulysses had returned to street level via the nearest fire escape he could find, still feeling frustrated after his run-in with the gargoyle. He had been met outside Schafer’s tenement building again by Nimrod and a quivering Constance.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” she had asked, shock lending her cheeks an unhealthy pallor.

  “Yes, I believe it was,” Ulysses had admitted reluctantly. There had seemed little point in hiding what he believed to be the truth from her; especially after all she had witnessed herself firsthand.

  To her credit, Constance hadn’t gone to pieces at hearing this, but instead asked the inevitable question. “What’s happened to him?”

  “That I don’t know,” the dandy had replied, “but I can assure you that I won’t rest until I’ve found out.”

  Opening the rear nearside door of the Silver Phantom, Ulysses helped her into the Rolls. “Do you think he can be cured?” she had asked, her eyes pleading with him as he went to close the car door again.

  Ulysses had sighed at that, as though the weight of the world was suddenly on his shoulders, absent-mindedly rubbing at his sternum where the gargoyle-thing had landed its kick. “We can only hope.”

  The three of them had then returned to the Quicksilver residence in Mayfair, Ulysses insisting that Constance stay, having Nimrod put the call through to her parents that she was safe and well and would see them again on the morrow. Nimrod made her up a hot toddy, the poor girl having little appetite for anything more, before settling her in one of the guest bedrooms.

  On returning to 31 Charles Street, the dandy had retired to his study in a contemplative mood. He hadn’t emerged again until after midnight, at which point, having already partaken of a nightcap, he had retired to bed.

  He had risen again not long after seven the following morning. Possessed of a steely purpose, and having wolfed down the full English Mrs Prufrock had set in front of him and his guest, he set off again in the company of Constance and Nimrod, this time headed across town to the infamous Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Incurably Insane. For it was also there that, since the Jupiter Station Disaster, some of the more notable examples of those termed ‘the Changed’ now resided.

  It had been something Ulysses remembered reading in Victor Gallowglass’s notebook as he travelled half way across Russia that had set him on his current course. A reference to a component of the weaponised blood agent the haematologist had created that had enabled him to tailor the pathogen to those of a specific bloodline, that changed the chemical structure of the blood-plasma into what was effectively a deadly poison.

  After Prince Vladimir’s attempt to claim the throne of Russia, Ulysses had recovered Gallowglass’s notebook and brought it back with him to England. He had found the reference again as he sat perusing the journal’s encrypted contents in his study. Once translated from the code language ‘Babel’ that Ulysses and the Queen’s personal haematologist had a shared knowledge of from their school days, he discovered that the mysterious substance went by the name of ‘Proteus’.

  During his adventures across the continent, he had thought it was some other artificial agent that Gallowglass had created himself in his laboratory, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  But that had been only one part of the puzzle. Another clue had come from John Schafer’s altered appearance, the nature of the gargoyle-like beast itself. There had been something of the insect about it that smacked just a little too much of the aftermath of the chemical attack Uriah Wormwood had perpetrated against the city three months before.

  Wormwood was missing, presumed dead, as was anyone else associated with the production of Dr Feelgood’s Tonic Stout, the supposed patent panacea which had in truth contained a portion of the cruel physiology-warping agent. But there was at least one other person he knew of who had studied the effects of the DNA-altering compound firsthand.

  “AH, QUICKSILVER, ISN’T it?” the small bespectacled man said, rising as Ulysses and Constance were ushered into the director’s office.

  “That’s right, Professor.”

  “You were here with another young lady last time, weren’t you? A black girl; very pretty.”

  “That’s right. But now I’m here with Miss Pennyroyal.”

  “Well please, take a seat,” the small man said, indicating the two chairs carefully angled in front of his huge desk, the scale of which only served to make the professor appear even more diminutive.

  Ulysses and Constance did as they were bidden.

  “So what can I do for you this time?” Professor Brundle asked jovially, taking his own seat again. His face suddenly clouded over. “It’s not about our mutual friend, is it?”

  “No,” Ulysses replied, his easy smile immediately putting the asylum’s director at ease. “Actually I wanted your professional opinion about something.”

  “Oh, right you are,” Brundle said, regarding the dandy over steepled fingers. “What is it you want to know?”

  “Tell me, Professor, have you heard of something – a drug perhaps – that goes by the name of ‘Proteus’?”

  THE TWO INVESTIGATORS emerged from the hospital building half an hour later, Ulysses Quicksilver with a marked spring in his step, Constance Pennyroyal trotting after him, her fitted skirts making it hard for her to move in any other way.

  “Well that was most useful,” the dandy announced cheerily as they made for the hospital gates and the robo-orderly on duty there.

  “Was it?” his companion challenged him. “Professor Brundle had never even heard of this Proteus thing, or whatever it was.”

  “No, you’re quite right, he hadn’t,” the dandy said, still smiling. “But he was able to confirm a theory of mine.”

  “That some derivative of whatever it was that rained down on London on Valentine’s Day could have been responsible for...” She broke off.

  Ulysses’ smile slipped for the first time. He revelled in the thrill of the chase but sometimes forgot that real people with their own thoughts and feelings were involved. “For what we witnessed,” he finished for her. “Yes.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Constance asked as they passed beyond the limits of Bedlam Asylum.

  “East,” he declared confidently as he
opened the door of the Rolls for her. “We’re going to ruffle a few feathers. The game is very much afoot!”

  X

  The Beast Within

  FROM HIS ROOST among the statues adorning the aerial Victoria Line, hidden among the pigeons perched there under the track’s cast iron arches, John Schafer looked down upon the city with altered eyes and watched the world go by.

  From his vantage point he could see a fishwife in Kennington berating her layabout son. He watched a drunken father in Vauxhall chase his five children out into the street, belt in hand. At Hyde Park Corner Overground station, half a mile away, he clearly saw the stolen kiss shared by a squaddie and his girl as the young infantryman boarded the train. It was true what they said; all human life could be found, there in the city. But his gaze lingered on one pair in particular.

  He’d not seen the dandy in the flesh since they had returned to Southampton Docks as survivors of the sinking of the Neptune, although he had read about some of Ulysses’ more recent exploits in The Times and watched live footage being relayed via the broadcast screens as the Jupiter Station had come down in the Thames only a matter of months ago.

  He had last properly seen his sweetheart only three days before but to him it felt like a lifetime. His heart ached more than any of the open wounds in his flesh from where the beast had emerged to prey on the weak.

  He had been trailing the couple since waking that morning to find himself curled in the lea of a chimney stack atop the dandy’s Mayfair townhouse. He had been with them ever since, always at a distance, but close enough nonetheless to know that they had met with the hospital director at Bedlam.

  Schafer had followed the dandy’s car as it headed back across town, stopping first at his apartment building before heading off again. He had watched with interest as the Silver Phantom pulled up outside an unremarkable, dilapidated house, the dandy entering alone, only to emerge, alone still, some minutes later.