Grisly Tales from Tumblewater

by Bruno Vincent

  ‘Many dead?’ asked one, but the man was unable to answer, and could only say, ‘Please, just come and help! Quickly!’

  Some people went running with him, and many more walked behind, hoping to see something dramatic. A call went out for the fire engine to be fetched, and three policemen ran through the crowd towards the fire station. There was muttering and gossiping in the street for a few minutes, but the crush of people kept coming from four directions, the rain lashed down even harder, the voices gradually lost among other voices talking of other things. There was hardly a mention of it in the air by the time a small boy walked cautiously out to the corner of the street. He stopped just outside the line of the pedestrians, but safely within the edge of the traffic, and stood there, looking out at the crowd with his vacant grey eyes, all lost and alone.

  Some time later a carriage pulled up at the other side of the street outside the doors of the gigantic Black Lamb Tavern, where Finbarr Vane had stepped down. From the carriage jumped a nervous-looking lad of about sixteen, just as the rain started to become quite violent. His satchel splashed him as it was dropped from the roof, and picking it up he rubbed a spot of mud from his cheek as he looked around him.

  It was me.

  How I came to know the story you’ve just read, I’ll have time to tell you later. But first I’ve got to explain myself, and what happened next in my own tale. So I’ll tell you.

  As I wiped the speck of mud from my face, I looked up into the huge and looming shadow of the Black Lamb. It was the day before my medical studies were due to begin, and I still had to retrieve a suitcase from the post office and find my lodgings before nightfall which, under the glowering thunderstorm, felt like it was already upon the city. During the last mile of my long journey, the rain that had been drizzling down for several hours had hardened into a furious shower. I called up to the driver through thundering rain: ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘Like what?’ he called back through the noise.

  ‘Like this!’ I waved my soaked arm around, but the rain came down so hard into my face that I couldn’t look up at him any longer, and couldn’t hear his response above the oily crack of the whip and the horses’ trudging as they moved on.

  I sheltered in the doorway of the tavern for a few moments with my satchel under my arm until I heard the lock being snapped shut behind me, and saw, inside, a shadowy figure retreating away from the glass. I grabbed the arm of a passer-by.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘where is the post office?’ The man shook my arm off roughly and glared at me from beneath the brim of his hat for a second before pointing down the hill. ‘Straight down, turn left, second right, first left and right again at the bottom,’ he snapped. ‘You’ll be lucky though. They close in fifteen minutes.’

  I thanked him, took a deep breath and ran out into the rain, which buffeted me like a strong wind. Because I had to keep looking up to see where I was going it was soon trickling through my hair, and over my face, and down my neck and through my clothes. Two carriages passed in quick succession, sending up splashes of muddy water. I instinctively shielded myself from the first splash, but the second I just let break over me in a wave, knowing it couldn’t make my clothes any wetter. At least I had a spare suit for my first day at the medical college, pressed and (in my imagination) warm, in the suitcase that had been sent ahead the previous day.

  Halfway down the third street I had been directed down, something alarming happened. The path became steeper all of a sudden, and the cobbled paving began to give way to lumpy mud. It became darker too as the houses on either side of the street crowded closer to one another, and yet somehow the rain had become even fiercer. I dived into a doorway for a moment to catch my breath and could see that the roofs above were so steep that the hundreds of gallons of rain falling on them gathered and hurtled downward in a spray of streams, hitting the cobbles so hard that they sounded like breaking glass.

  In my mind I heard the man’s voice again: ‘Fifteen minutes.’ I took a shaky breath and threw myself into the street, jogging over the stones as carefully and quickly as I could. As I reached the next turn I gasped, clutching at the side of a building, and my feet slipped from under me. This was the turning I’d been told to take, yet it was totally dark and incredibly steep. I couldn’t even see the bottom. There were no cobbles for my feet to grasp, just pure running mud so that even as I looked down with horror I slid helplessly forward.

  The mud ran over my shoes and under my arms, and all discomfort was overwhelmed by fear that I would smash into something and break my neck at any second. I tumbled over and over, and at last felt the ground levelling out beneath me as I slowly came to a stop. All around me were tall dark buildings, their windows boarded up, and as I dragged myself to my feet I glimpsed a single light, fifty yards away. Ignoring my disgusting appearance, I ran as fast as I could towards it (which wasn’t very fast, as I was weighed down by about thirty pounds of mud).

  The light came from an open door and inside was a tiny waiting room with a hatch in the centre of a shabby wall. Through this stared the face of a gloomy old man. I asked breathlessly whether this was the post office. He nodded. I almost collapsed on the counter in gratitude.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I’ve come to collect a package. It’s for Daniel Dorey.’

  The man observed me glumly for a moment before turning round to bellow my name into the back room. Over his shoulder I could make out a group of grubby little men gathered around a table, sorting methodically through torn paper and string and open boxes, surrounded by hundreds of objects, small and large.

  ‘Pot of jam …’ one man was saying in a bored voice, ‘and some pencils. Not much of a present for “dearest Lavinia” if you ask me.’

  ‘Listen to this!’ shouted out another, holding up a letter, ‘“My darling Bertie! How I miss your kisses!”’ All of them broke out in a nasty giggling, before one of them, opening another envelope, shouted: ‘Here’s a pound note!’

  ‘That’s mine! I saw it first!’ they all shouted, and at once threw themselves into a pile of hair-tugging and nose-pulling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man gloomily, ‘they’re murdering each other again. Boys,’ he warned them, turning round. ‘BOYS!’ he shouted. Three of them had taken up position sitting on the fourth (who had managed to hide the pound note somewhere down his shirt), playfully punching him in the face as hard as they could. Now they stopped. ‘What?’ said the one on top.

  ‘Package for one Daniel Dorey’

  They stared stupidly at him.

  ‘Package for one Daniel Dorey!’ he repeated.

  ‘You mean he’s here?’ asked the topmost little man again, as the man at the bottom began to struggle for breath.

  ‘He’s actually come to collect it?’ asked the new owner of the pound note, who came round from being crushed to death to express his outrage. ‘All the way here?’

  ‘What else do you think I mean, you stupid little brutes? Fetch the thing!’

  In one sudden movement, all four men leaped up and began searching industriously through the piles of parcels, muttering my name over and over, and scurrying up ladders to inspect higher shelves.

  ‘When did it arrive?’ one of them asked absently, lifting a parcel above his head to peer to the back of a shelf.

  ‘It should have been today,’ I said.

  They froze.

  ‘Today?’ asked the old man, sounding rather awkward.

  ‘That’s right – this morning, I think.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll have to fill in this form.’ He rustled some papers below the counter for a moment and then thrust a sheet at me.

  ‘But it’s just blank paper,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Fill it in, please, with your name, your current address and your method of payment.’

  ‘Payment?’

  ‘Quite so. Storage is one penny’

  ‘But you haven’t even stored it overnight! It only arrived a few hours ago!’


  ‘Overnight storage would have been twopence.’

  I was by now so tired and cold that I simply didn’t have it in me to argue, so I filled in the form, signed it and handed over a penny. He rubber-stamped and signed the form before giving it back for me to sign again (at which point I gave him a very tired look) and writing out an entire copy, signatures and all. Behind him all this while I could hear the strained whispers of the funny little men. One of them kept saying, ‘Quickly, quickly!’ At one point something was dropped and there was the sound of glass shattering, after which they went absolutely silent for a few seconds, before returning to their hushed exertions. I craned my neck to see past the gloomy old man, but no matter how hard I tried he seemed to shift his shoulders so that I could not, without ever looking up from his paperwork.

  Finally, in a rather well-spoken voice, he said, ‘Your receipt, and your parcel. A pleasure doing business with you, sir.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said uncertainly as I looked at what he was handing over to me. It had been a neatly-filled suitcase when I had sent it. Now it was a bundle of possessions roughly tied together with five different types of string that bulged dangerously in every direction. I had no idea how to carry it except to thread my hand through one of the bits of string and hope it didn’t all fall apart. Not wanting them to see my disappointment, I went straight to the door without looking back, before realising that I still didn’t know where my lodgings were located, except that they were nearby. I turned round to see a closed sign being lowered over the counter.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I called through it. There had been the sound of people clearing up, but suddenly there was silence again. After a second a voice cautiously said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could you tell me where Proker Lane might be? It’s where I’m staying this evening.’

  Silence reigned again for a few seconds as one of the little men considered my question. ‘Where it might be? I can’t say for sure, but it might be at the top of the hill, just round the corner from the Black Lamb Tavern,’ said the voice. Then that same low giggling broke out among the men again.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said quietly as I walked into the street, pulling my muddy coat as close as I could and feeling the cold once more. City folk certainly seemed very odd, I thought, as I began my walk back up the hill.

  I won’t tell you in detail about that journey – the fear and trepidation of the shadows to a boy who’d never seen the city before, the tiredness, exhaustion and the cold. But after many wrong turns, and what felt like a whole day’s hard work, I reached the top, discovered the street and finally, with inexpressible relief, found a white door at the top of a set of scrubbed-clean stone steps. Behind it, I knew, were the rooms of the landlady who had been paid in advance for my first month’s lodging. By reputation my guardians knew her to be decent and respectable, and not too expensive. I knocked, and a few seconds later the door opened.

  The woman who answered was tall and stern in startlingly clean clothes; the insides of the house radiated a warm light and, it being dinner time, from behind her the comforting scrape of cutlery against plates was accompanied by the smell of delicious food.

  She looked at me for a second, said, ‘No thank you,’ and slammed the door.

  I knocked again, and called out, begging that she talk to me for just a moment. I peeped in through the letterbox and saw people eating in the dining room, and heard their laughter too. But for all I could tell she might be plagued with dirty young boys knocking at her door and begging for food. However unfair it was, I knew I might have turned myself away, seeing myself in this filthy condition.

  I gave up, and sat on the bottom step, resting my face in my hands, ashamed. There was nothing I could do, nowhere to go, no one who knew me in the slightest. Wondering miserably what would become of me, I shook with fearful sobs and, leaning against the railing, wondered if I could get away with sleeping here on the doorstep, even for a while …

  ‘You all right, lad?’

  A hand gently rocked my shoulder and I woke to find myself looking at a man who had crouched down to my level. He was tall and thin, and as shabby as I was. The grime on his face made it impossible to tell his age, but there was something gentle in his eyes, and he didn’t speak to me in a challenging way, but quite calmly, and before I knew what I was doing I had told him about the door being slammed in my face. He looked up at the house, snorted and said, ‘No great loss to you, that place, full of pompous types who think they own the world. Come along with me and we’ll find you more friendly lodgings in five minutes.’

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ I said. ‘Or not enough to …’ I felt dangerously close to tears again, and frustrated with myself.

  ‘Don’t worry about that for now,’ he said. ‘I know someone, a very kind woman called Nuala, who’ll be glad to put you up for the night in a lovely place called Turvey House, and who’ll let you set about paying her back afterwards. How does that sound?’

  I thought it sounded so wonderfully kind I could hardly trust myself to answer, and as he walked off I followed, dragging my ball-like sack of possessions with one hand and holding my satchel under the other arm. The rain had long since calmed to a steady drizzle, and the small favour this man was showing me made me as giddy as though I’d won a thousand pounds – or fifty pounds; either sum was unimaginably vast to me. (It still is, in fact.)

  He led me down a turning, away from the more respectable streets through a web of smaller alleys that stretched away behind, hundreds of little houses and shacks and huts thrown together with no thought or design so that the road twisted in a different direction every ten yards.

  ‘My name’s Daniel,’ I said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Shh,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a funny name,’ I said.

  He turned and came back to me. ‘Daniel, keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘There are people asleep all around us, not the sort who take kindly to being woken. And others too, who stay awake in the dark hours, with evil on their mind. My name’s not important right now. But people – well, people around here tend to call me Uncle.’

  ‘All right,’ I whispered back. ‘Sorry, Uncle.’

  He smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Just follow me carefully. It gets confusing at this point.’

  We set off again, and now the streets drew even closer together while the occasional lamps with their sickly orange light grew further apart. Although I hadn’t thought the houses we walked past were exactly enviable, these ones were in noticeably worse condition. The smell of the place was so terrible that we peered suspiciously where we trod, and the little houses were squeezed together so tightly there was hardly room to get through.

  Slipping momentarily and clutching at a barrel to steady myself, I ran to catch up and found the alleyway completely dark. I opened my mouth to call out to Uncle, but stopped myself in time and instead felt my way along a wall as fast as I could, my heart beating loudly, listening for his footsteps above the sloshing of my own feet. Hearing something, I moved faster, only for a dog to break out barking at my side. Against the silence of the night it was terrifyingly loud, and I ran as fast as I could with my parcel of possessions knocking against my back and the satchel against my side. I crashed against one wall and then another as the dog chased me up the path until its chain yanked it back with a cruel throttling noise.

  Desperate to escape before someone came to investigate, I took the first turning I came to, slipping down some half-visible lanes of cramped and decrepit shacks, fearing I heard the growl of a human above the dog’s painful roar behind me. I saw a low opening through a thick stone wall, so I crouched and ran through.

  I came out on the other side into a quiet cobbled lane that curved gently upward. It felt out of place in this slum of muddy streets, and I stopped to look around. A lamp post opposite cast light on the houses’ clean doors and windows. I breathed clean air, and felt the fine spray of the rain on my face. With dreamlike certainty I walked up the road unt
il a large house appeared on my right. For the first time since I’d entered the district I saw a property surrounded by walls and a gate, behind them the high and beautiful stone face of a powerful and imposing building. Something about it made me stand stock still.

  A light was on in an upper window and as I stood against the railings, the cold of the iron bleeding into my hands, a dark-haired woman appeared in the window. She moved so slowly that it lent her beauty a terrible sadness and, without knowing why, I was filled with dread. As she looked down from the window, a shadow appeared behind her.

  My heart jumped as the shadow resolved itself into the grey personage of a bleak-faced old woman. She uttered a few words and the younger woman’s gaze fell. All expression left her pale features. Then, before I knew what was happening, the old woman reached up and pulled a black cloth over her head in a cold, clinical movement.

  The beautiful young woman offered no resistance. I gripped the railings and shouted up at them as the older woman led her gently away from the window, and the light went out.

  I backed away, still trying to understand what I had seen, until I found the deep stone wall again and the passage through it. Emerging back into the filthy pas-sageways, I walked for a few minutes without thinking, letting my feet take me through the darkness, until at the end of a street I saw a lamp and spotted Uncle sitting beneath it. With a burst of energy, I was upon him in seconds, and found him looking up at me with relief. He made no remark about me getting lost, causing the dog to bark and nearly getting us both into trouble, but said he had sat himself down in this godforsaken spot to wait for me just in case I came his way again. He seemed so kind and patient that as he got up again and led me away I felt a reproachful pang of guilt for not telling him about the apparition of the girl that I’d seen. But there was something so mysterious about how awful it made me feel, that I wanted a chance to think about it first. I was harbouring another secret from him too, about my reasons for being in Tumblewater, but he would know the truth before too long.