by Nick James
‘How are they treating you here, are you enjoying it?’ I asked, hoping it was all okay, but I watched her still and shoot a quick look towards the stairs.
‘It’s okay, I have a place to eat and sleep,’ she said and gave me a weak but beautiful smile. ‘I have it better than most.’ She placed her thin-fingered hand on my bare but wet arm. ‘Enough about me. I see you are working for your father. I thought you wanted to do something different?’
I sighed. ‘Yes, we all thought we could do better, but there’s not much else to do,’ I admitted, putting my other hand on hers and giving it a squeeze. ‘Living with my parents is getting too much. We have to live by the Good Book,’ I explained and saw her roll her eyes.
‘Berty, you need to lead your own life. Get out if you can,’ she said softly.
‘WILL YOU GET YOUR BAG OF BONES BACK UP HERE, GIRL! YOU BOTH HAVE WORK TO DO!’ someone shouted down, must’ve been the cook.
It made Annabel jump. But before running off, she leaned in and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and then she was gone. I could hear her being chided by the fat cook.
I sat on a packing box and ate the sandwich. The bread was a bit dry, but along with the leftover beef it did the job.
Father came back and helped with the cleaning, but clearly the cook had got to him. He didn’t say anything while we were working. But when I was pushing the empty barrow back home, as we had left all our stuff in the basement, he told me off all the way.
I’d had enough. ‘So, all I did wrong was talk to a girl who brought me lunch?’ I argued back, making my father bristle, but I didn’t let that stop me. ‘You and Mother say I should find a nice girl, but when I speak to one, who I know from school, you shout at me about it!’
Father balled his fists. ‘I have had enough of your disrespect, Albert. If you are not careful, you will have to find somewhere else to live!’ he said angrily. ‘I wanted you to take over when I got too old, but you just don’t seem to care.’
My body sagged. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but I want to find my own path in this world. I want more than putting paint on walls for a living.’ It was then I saw that this little comment broke the small connection my father and I ever had. He just turned and walked away. I didn’t know at the time, but those words I shared with my father that day would be the last.
I was dreading going back home, but it was something that had to be done. I parked up the barrow and headed indoors. There stood my mother expressing the normal cold look with a hint of disappointment; at her feet was a bag with what I guessed contained my belongings.
‘Mother, please,’ I begged as tears filled my eyes. I started to tremble. ‘I didn’t—’ I was cut off by Mother raising her hand.
‘Albert, I gave birth to you, fed and clothed you, yet all you have done is disappointed your father and me. All you had to do was be a good son and follow our words, as well as the word of the Lord our God,’ she said in such cold tones that I felt ice particles in the air between us. ‘But now you have broken our hearts for the final time. You want a new life, there’s the door.’ She pointed to the door that I wished I hadn’t entered. ‘There is some money and sandwiches in the bag. Goodbye, Albert.’ With a sniff she walked away into the front room, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
Although I saw them on occasions, they never once acknowledged me. After walking out of the house I was born in, I headed to Adrian’s to see if they had any space for me. Thankfully they did, so I slept on a threadbare chair as my red-headed friend snored a tooth-rattling snore. But as sleep claimed me, all I could think about was the warmth of Annabel’s lips on my cheek and the regret I felt as I wouldn’t be going back there now.
The very next day myself and the red-headed beanpole walked up and joined the army. Surprisingly enough the London regiment numbers were down, so now we had a future, a roof over our head and a nice warm bed, although we spent hardly any time in it. The basic training was brutal, and the training officers were something that I don’t think could ever have been born of a woman. They were created in hell and banished to Bunhill Row drill hall in Finsbury to continue their evil works.
Adrian and I stood in our uniforms as we were inducted into the 8th London Regiment (Post Office Rifles). We were proud of what we had accomplished. I hadn’t received a single letter from my parents, even though I sent them some money every month. We were never sent anywhere hot, to the point our battalion didn’t even move that far from bloody England.
What can I say? I thought I would see the world with my friend. If you’re the kind of positive person most of us mortals hate, especially first thing in the morning bouncing around the barracks excited for the day ahead, that kind of person I am not. Adrian and I spent two soggy, wet-footed years in Ireland, trying not to upset the locals, especially as our government was doing a bang-up job of achieving that without our help.
Going on long patrols through depressing-looking towns and soggy countryside, some hailed us and treated us fairly, the next treated us like murderers. There were a few skirmishes, and we lost one or two boys on our patrols, and we even had a deserter. Tony Watkins just stood up one night while we were kipping in a barn in the countryside and said, ‘Fuck this shit,’ and then walked out. We found him stripped and gutted the next night. We were never sure which side did it.
Normally, life was boring. There were some nice local girls who would take care of a soldier’s needs for a fair fee. But during the early months of 1888, Adrian stopped, saying he had found love. He would never tell us who she was. But during that time he was winding up the regiment’s sergeant major, which meant he took his fair share of licks from the man and his friends, which were numerous. He was an evil man who had repeatedly been knocked down in the ranks for going too far with punishments against the troops.
After the Watkins affair, the regiment was being replaced in Ireland and we were being sent back home to smoggy old London. I was hoping we could stay in London forever when we got back there. I would have been happy with that; travel was highly overrated if you ask me.
We were all excited about going back to home barracks. Adrian’s mum had written when she heard, overjoyed about her son coming back and again agreed to let me kip on the floor. The letter was full of news and gossip of recent events in our area of London. There had been a murder of a local working girl, Martha Tabram. There had been a spate of other murders, too, but hers was laid at the feet of a man they were calling Saucy Jack, or the more publicised Jack the Ripper.
What can I say except that my army career ended the same weekend that my best friend Adrian died. On 30 August 1888, the stupid red-headed idiot had spent the day enjoying some more one-on-one manoeuvres with a busty blonde – his words, not mine. Unfortunately, it turned out she was the wife of the regiment’s sergeant major, a big brute of a man from the East End of London, and he was well known to be a good knifeman in a close-quarters battle. Unfortunately, he came home early and showed the rutting pair both his temper and how good he was with a knife. At least my friend died doing what he loved. It turned out it had been going on for months, but Adrian couldn’t help teasing the woman’s husband, which turned out to be his death sentence.
That day I took as much money as I could find, walked out of the barracks, headed back to the streets of my birth, started to drink, and midway through took some company into the alley before resuming drinking again.
I somehow managed to find my way out of the pub in the very early hours, and that’s how I stumbled into Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. It was then I saw in my drunken haze a man on top of a woman with her skirts pulled up to her waist. Personally, I didn’t care. I had been doing the very same thing earlier over an old beer barrel – less chance of getting a rat in your breeches.
As I got closer, the man seemed to be out of place. This wasn’t a man of my ilk; he looked like a toff the way he was dressed. But what stopped me was the flash of a knife in the gaslight that barely lit the street.
‘OI, OI, WHAT YOU
DOIN’?’ I shouted, making the man still as I approached, my army hobnailed boots echoing on the cobbles.
‘This doesn’t concern you, human, move along and live,’ he said and kept on doing what he had been doing to the poor woman.
What did he mean ‘human’? I dismissed that thought as my army training kicked in and I ran towards him. Although, clearly, the drink told me I was going faster than I was. I balled him over, both of us crushing down on the poor girl’s body, but I didn’t know she was already dead at that time.
His knife skittered into the darkness as we collided and punches were thrown. My vision blurred even more than it was as he connected with my jaw. ‘You shit,’ I muttered before thumping him in the face. It was like hitting a brick wall not a head, and I felt a bone snap in my hand making me scream out, which seemed to panic him slightly.
‘You will pay for this, human,’ he growled, and then sank his teeth into my neck. The pain shot through me like nobody’s business. What are we, kids again? Who bites in a fight? Once again my training kicked in, and I pushed my thumb into his eye making him cry out a piercing scream as it popped under the pressure I applied. As he raised his head, I decided to play him at his own game and drove my mouth towards his neck and bit down savagely. I gagged as the warm blood filled my senses with a metallic smell and taste.
His scream echoed through the streets, bringing shouts from the surrounding houses. He repeatedly hit me until the pain and punishment were too much. I dropped to the ground panting, my face awash with his lifeblood. That’s when I saw the angry man’s face with dark eyes and a trimmed moustache almost looking like a posh gentleman. I watched him collect his knife and disappear into the night.
I tried to follow, but my stomach was on fire and my feet slipped away from me as the world turned upside down and I hit the deck. The pain spread throughout my body rapidly; it felt like my skin was burning. I tried to crawl away. Even in my bad state I knew that I shouldn’t be caught with the body of that poor woman. What disturbed me was the sweet smell all around which made me want to linger.
The world had started to move slowly and my vision had improved, but the pain in my stomach was still there. But not only that, I felt anger; a fury was building up inside from where I knew not.
Finally, I managed to get back on my feet and weave through the tide of people coming from all quarters. Now there was something else hurting me: a cacophony of rhythmic sounds, not just from one place, it was everywhere. What was it?
So many things were happening to me all at once: anger, tiredness and pain. I saw a rundown shop down an alley which hadn’t seen much foot traffic over the years. I leaned against the door as my vision started to swim. Using my weight, the brittle and rotten wood cracked. I fell through the door, hitting the floorboards hard, scattering rodents and sleeping pigeons alike, before the pain overtook me. I managed to roll further into the ruined shop, and that was it. The darkness suffocated me into unconsciousness and more.
Chapter 3
Rage. Pure unfiltered rage was flowing through my body as I shot up and looked around. My vision was tinged with a red hue and the clarity was perfect even in this pitch-dark room. There was still the burning in my stomach, a hunger that matched the rage I felt, but hunger for what? I didn’t know how long I had spent in this damned place. My head snapped to the left and my mouth filled with saliva. There it was, voices just outside.
I silently moved to the still broken door and heard two different sounds of the same rhythmical-type noises that overcame me earlier. It was heartbeats, all of them together but never once synchronised, just a mass of noise that threatened to shut down my brain.
But now there were only two, and the human voices filtered towards me, which then turned into grunts and groans. My mind screamed, food, kill and feed. I was struggling to remain in control. One part of me told me to burst out and rip them both to pieces. The other, a calm and calculating part of me, said to take the man and let the woman go. I didn’t know how, but I had a sense of who was out there and their genders. An instinct inside told me so.
My stomach burned while one word continued to repeat forcefully inside my brain: feed, feed, feed. I craned my head through the doorway and saw the back of a man as a woman laboured on her knees to fulfil the details of the verbal contract they had agreed to. The smell of the man’s lust disgusted me. Yet her feeling of hate and desperation had no effect on me at all, although I didn’t know why.
My movement was like lightning. The dust barely moved as I darted from the doorway in a fraction of a second to the man. I felt a pain in my fingers and then I saw that my nails had grown into something alike claws as my hand went to his neck. The man’s scream was cut off quickly as my left hand crushed his larynx. Then my right hand dug into his shoulder, pulling him back into the darkness from where I had come. The prostitute, a youngish girl with long blonde hair, didn’t even scream. All she did was stare into the darkness with what seemed to be a piece of her client hanging from her mouth. Cleary, I wasn’t quick enough and she had clamped her mouth down in shock.
As the girl ran off, leaving her gift on the floor, I forced the struggling man’s head to the side and clamped my mouth onto his neck. I could hear the pop as my incisors pushed through his skin and into his pulsing jugular, letting his lifeblood fill my mouth. I drank and drank until his racing heartbeat decreased, getting slower with every tired beat. At the same time the burning in my gut and the rage I had was now dissipating, along with the man’s life.
I fell onto my backside and scuttled backwards on all fours away from the corpse. The dead man’s sightless eyes judged me in the darkness. My mind, which had started to work again, seemed sharper. I closed my eyes, trying to calm myself and enhance my senses. All I could smell was blood and where the man had voided his bowels as his soul was returned to his maker. I needed to leave just in case the girl called for help.
Knowing that my funds were limited I took what money the man had and ran into the night without a destination in mind. Again, I didn’t know why but not only could I see perfectly in the dark but somehow I could also feel the moon upon me, and I knew how long I could be in the fresh air before the sun returned and the pain would come.
Luckily, in the depths of the West End there are many abandoned houses and businesses. I just needed to be alone and think with somewhere to shelter. Then, there it was, like a beacon in the night, a shop that had been foreclosed by the bank. At least that’s what the poster pasted over the window was telling me.
I waited in the shadows caused by the flickering gas-fuelled streetlamps until the stream of people walking through the street had cleared enough so I could force open the property door. My new strength impressed me, but the rest just flat out scared me.
As the door closed me off from the world, I looked around and took in the room before me just containing bare tables and chairs, so it looked like it had been a place to eat. I moved a table in front of the door to stop any nosey bugger from coming in.
I moved through the property and found an old bed with an even older mattress. I couldn’t sense any heartbeats, so that meant I wouldn’t be laying my head onto a rat’s nest. With the screams of rusty springs, I lay down, stretched out and closed my eyes, even though I was nowhere near tired. The moon still had a few hours left gracing us with her presence, but I needed to think.
Adrian was dead, and I had left the barracks to drown my sorrows, which I had done proudly. Then I’d chanced across that monster killing the woman. No, not killing. Torturing. But why the hell did he bite me? I did get the bugger back, I thought to myself, making me chuckle. But the question is, what was he?
So, let’s think about this. I’m stronger than I have ever been before. I can see in the dark and move quicker than any person should able to. I have extreme anger and a burning need to feed. Where the hell did that come from? That monster must have infected me with something. But what? While in my musings, the sun had started to rise, sending rays through th
e moth-eaten curtains. I smelt smoke, then I felt pain.
‘Bloody hell!’ I screamed, jumping up and looking at a small hole burned through my hand by the sunlight. Then, just as I started to examine the wound, it began to change. A scab formed and then quickly fell away to show my perfectly healed hand.
Things were getting crazy. What had happened to me? I walked about and managed to find some other rags to cover the holes where the sunlight was encroaching on my rest. Finally, I could once again settle down to think and plan.
I thought back to my schooldays and a book that my friend Annabel had lent to me, it was by John Polidori called The Vampyre: A Tale. Surely they were just the ramblings of a drunk or a man with a gift for telling tall tales.
As I thought back to the story, I shook my head in disbelief. There were too many similarities to the book, but it just couldn’t be. I refused to accept that I was now a demon of a man. Somehow, I managed to calm myself and allow sleep to claim me, but the dreams that came were not pleasant.
When I did wake, the sun had finally started to hide itself beyond the city limit. I walked to the window and watched the scuttling forms of Londoners going about their business. When the darkness claimed the world again as its own, the rage which had started to build was accompanied by the burning in my stomach. I gripped the windowsill as a wave of anger flooded me, causing the rotten wood to fragment beneath my hand, the splintering pieces scattering into my face.
How I hated that man who had done this to me. How I hated my family, that bastard who killed Adrian and all those who flaunted their normality at me while I watched them through the red hue. ‘I must feed, kill, destroy.’
It was time I needed to go. I ran down the stairs but slowed my descent as I could feel that the monster within me wanted to burst through the door and rip the world asunder. I had to rein this demon in. I could sense that the street was empty, so I moved the table aside, slipped out and closed the old door before starting to hunt.