by J. Thorn
I never did tell her what I saw a few nights before we said goodbye, as we huddled together in a doorway on a particularly cold night.
It was bitter cold. The wind was howling down the alleyway, and the best that we could do was to huddle close together in the doorway of the run down building. I looked through one of the windows, hoping that it might be a good place to break in and sleep for the night, but I saw rats. Marie was so tired that we couldn't keep looking.
She fell asleep, leaning on my shoulder, after just a few minutes, but I was wide awake, I just couldn't seem to drop off. We were hidden well enough behind the bins that were propped up in front of the doorway, so the chances of anyone finding us were quite small, but that wasn't enough for me. I only felt safe if we were tucked away in the dark, at the back of a room in a building.
I think it was about an hour after Marie fell asleep that I saw them, and I would say that there were a dozen of them at least. Dark figures, dressed in robes of some kind. They didn't look like they were even walking along the alleyway. They just kind of drifted along. I couldn't see their feet underneath all those long robes.
My hackles went up immediately, and I instinctively put my hand down to my knife, still tucked in its holder at my waist, but they either hadn't noticed us, or they chose to ignore us.
Until the last one passed us by.
She walked by at least a few feet, and then stopped, turned slowly around to face us, and pulled the hood off.
It was one of the dead prostitutes, the ones who had been killed in that alleyway. Except she wasn't dead anymore, no way, she was standing there as alive as she had been just before the man with the gun shot her in the head.
I didn't know what to do. The others stopped as well, some of them just standing still, some turning to face us. It was then that I realised that there was something very different about them, something that sent a chill to my bones.
Their skin was as pale as a dead man, eyes as dark as night, and not one of them had any white to their eyes, just an endless darkness, like shiny black orbs, glowing fiercely in the moonlight.
The dead prostitute looked at me, and then she looked at Marie, who was still fast asleep on my shoulder, then she smiled, and I saw something else that had changed.
Fangs.
That's right. She had what I can best describe as fangs. Two long and pointed incisors that had no place in a human mouth, at least not naturally.
I thought we were about to die, but I was wrong. She simply nodded in Marie's direction, smiled at me again, turned and carried on walking off.
The rest of the group continued on their way, leaving me with my heart beating like it was about to explode, and Marie still sleeping on my shoulder.
That was what I never told her about.
I really wish that I had.
I've often asked myself, why didn't I just stay in Gravesend? Why didn't I just stick around there for a while? I sure would have liked to have spent more time with Marie, but you know, I was a dirty street boy, and once she was all cleaned up and healthy again, well, I don't think her folks would have been keen on her hanging around with my type, if you know what I mean.
There was also something about Gravesend that didn't fit with me. I did take a wander around there before I walked back to London, and I decided that there just weren't enough places for me to hide.
Today a gentleman named Alexander Winters has come to join me in the hospital. He isn't as old as I am, but I like to think he looks older. Seems he may not be a permanent resident though, and has been through most of what I have been through already, except he appears to be on the road to recovery. He used to be a cobbler, or at least that's what he says. I don't know what they call shoe workers these days. Probably something like a Footwear Operative or a Leisurewear Executive or something like that. They do seem to like their names these days, don't they?
He is a genial enough old boy, likes to talk a lot, which is good, since I don't. I think I'm getting used to this Dictaphone though.
It's good that it doesn't answer me back.
That name.
Winters.
That takes me back a long, long time. I had a friend with exactly the same last name once, though he was a much bigger man. I keep meaning to ask if Alexander might be related to him, but when the moment comes I don't know how to put it into words. Such a long time ago to remember some of these things, yet they all seem to me like they happened only yesterday.
After I left Gravesend, and Marie behind me, I headed straight back into London, though not back to The Running Ground, no, I could never go back there again, not unless I wanted to get myself, and maybe others, killed.
For the next couple of years, I wandered London. Sometimes I found myself a home in one of the workshops or the hovels that spread across the city during those days, and other times I ended up back on the streets and homeless again, spending my time hanging around on street corners amongst the throng of other folks left useless and hungry. Those were the worst times, scraping to make it by, to even find enough food to eat. But there were ways to survive in a city that big, if you knew where to look and you weren’t too fussy about what you had to do to get there.
My life through those years was not pleasant by any means, but I have nothing to tell you about that time that is much different to anybody else who was alone and frightened in London during the early years of the twentieth century. That isn’t what I need to talk about at all.
Throughout most of my years I was haunted by a face, a vision that I saw in the early years of the First World War. It took a long time for that face to disappear from my nightmares, which it did eventually, but it has never completely left me.
When I was fifteen years old I was caught stealing in Soho, London, it was just a few things to eat, and a newspaper for a man who I had been doing some labour work for. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but my face was remembered around those parts for committing similar offences the year before. I was locked up in a cell and told that I was to face a trial soon, when they got round to it.
Of course we were part-way through the war at that time, and while I was waiting to attend my trial, a man in a uniform showed up at the prison, checking each of the cells in turn. I remember his face very well, He was tall, and healthy looking, but there was something in his eyes that said he was tired, tired of living and tired of the worries. He had a large brown moustache, and was wearing a long army coat. I had seen many of those coats in London over the last few years, but very rarely saw the same faces twice.
He looked down at me as I sat on that cell bed, glanced at the prison warden who was accompanying him, and nodded.
"He’ll do," he said, and then moved on to the next cell, where Larry Raymuss had committed suicide the night before, and lay cold and dead on his bunk, still waiting for somebody to come along and discover him. Poor Larry had problems of a mental kind, he was what they called "touched" and had cried himself to sleep nearly every night, mumbling constantly and incoherently, before he finally silenced himself.
When they discovered Larry he was drained of every drop of blood in his body, after cutting his wrists on the jagged metal edge of his bunk. That might not sound so strange, and it wasn’t uncommon to see folks end their lives deliberately in the cells, except there was very little blood on the floor or on his bed. No, Larry had cut his wrists and painstakingly written, for everybody to see, the sins of his life, across the walls and the ceiling, even under the window, in his own blood, line after line of detailed accounts of the crimes he had committed, and of those that had been committed against him. I never saw it myself. I only heard the warden and the guards shouting about it as I lay on my bunk, quietly contemplating what was to become of me.
That Larry wrote what he did was an amazing feat in itself, but what was more worrying wasn’t the details of the crimes, it was the other stuff, the unreadable stuff. For written in among his confession Larry had scrawled some strange script that no one could recognis
e. Not even the language professor from the big university that they called in could make any of it out.
That professor clearly didn’t want to be down there in those cells with all the scum of London. I could see through the bars of my cells just enough to make out his face as he looked into Larry’s room. He stood there for a minute or so just staring in horror at the room. Then he tried to read it all, not just the stuff written in English, but the other writings. He said something about it looking archaic, or something along those lines, but he swore he couldn’t decipher it.
The prison warden didn’t look convinced, but eventually he let it go, and let the professor go. That man scrambled out of the prison faster than a dog chasing a rabbit, nearly tripping over his own feet as he bolted up the stairs. I wouldn't be surprised if that man never answered to a similar call in his life after that.
And do you know what else I think, I think that those mumblings that Larry made during the night, that incomprehensible chatter, I’m damn sure that was what he wrote, and to someone it would have made sense, though I would never have wanted to meet that particular someone, not at all.
My military visitor had signed over my fate to the war, or so it seemed for me and for a number of other prisoners in that block. We were marched out to the yard and told that we would be leaving that afternoon.
I was much younger than the draft age, but sometime during my stay in the cells someone had changed my age on a document to say I was five years older. They showed me the papers, smiling wickedly as I fumbled through them. They must have presumed that I couldn’t read, and of course I could. There on the page was a scribble mark and the new number '21' under the age of offender.
Now I don’t know if that military gentleman believed it when he saw me, but he must have had some reason to decide I was to go, because he glanced at me for a moment, with an almost knowing look, said his few words that sent me out of that block and into a whole other world of chaos, and then moved on to the next cell, not even looking back, and I don’t think he once considered what he had just signed me over to. He probably hadn’t a clue himself.
Why did he let a young boy, years from a drinking age, go to probably die in the trenches? I don’t know. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the answer to that question.
So at the age of only fifteen I was shipped off to a training camp, where at least I got fed properly for a few weeks. From there it was onto a boat across the Channel. I had never been on the sea, and I spent the first half an hour marvelling at the view of the ocean, and then most of the remaining trip hurling my guts up over the edge. By the time I stopped being sick, we were near the coast of a whole other country.
We travelled across France for many miles, and you know, apart from the dirt and stench of war, it wasn’t that much different to being in the country back home. Okay, the war had torn apart some of what might once have been civilisation, there were ruined buildings all over, but the odd time we crossed a place that hadn’t seen fighting for a while, I might as well have been back home.
But eventually I found myself hunkered down in a trench, dodging bullets, and dreading the moment we would have to go over the top.
One day in June there was a major offensive, a push that we were told could change the war. I think it was just a pep talk that they tried to give us, with a genuine expression on their faces, before they told us we were to climb up and head over the killing ground to die. That day was the last for many of the men I had grown to know, and many more I would never have the chance to speak to. It was the day of the gas attacks, and also the day that the world ended for thousands of men. For the very first time I began to suspect that everything you see in life is not always clear.
I had made friends with a couple of the older soldiers in the months that I fought in those trenches. There was old Looky, an aged man who had been the army for most of his life, and he loved to smoke his pipe when he could get some tobacco.
There was also Winters, another older soldier who it seemed had taken a shine to me early on. He was from the north of England, and at the start I found it hard to understand him, but I got used to his strong Yorkshire accent eventually.
The three of us stuck together, which often meant I tagged along behind, following them for guidance. Both of those old guys had been in the war from the beginning, and Looky had been over the top at least a dozen times. He said it was all about luck, but I knew otherwise. Those two old soldiers had a way about them, call it a karma - they just kept on going, and fate followed them every step of the way. There was something they were meant for, I guess something like what I think I was meant for, to witness, to be there when something happened, and to be there to take notice. After my experience in that slave shop in London all those years ago, seeing those faces that came back to haunt me every night when I slept, I think I was ready when it finally happened, when the next strangeness reared up and waved its hand at me.
I had been over the top only once, and it was a very short distance into a trench that was barely defended. Don’t get me wrong, I had my share of near misses just being there, but the one time we had been given the order to move, we met very little resistance. So when we moved on the hill that afternoon I was little prepared for what I was to see.
Across from where we had found our little hole to bed down in for the few weeks that we held the trench at the bottom of the hill, was a stretch of land that had seen a lot of fighting in the months prior to my arrival. Winters told me that nearly a whole battalion had been lost in those few hundred yards. I occasionally took a moment to spy out across that stretch of land, much to the annoyance of my new guardians. But being young and stupid, I had to look. Morbid curiosity is a natural human trait that I had accepted a long time ago, it’s never been a thing I denied. Everybody has it. I think that it's part of our make-up.
The nearest and most visible one sat bolt upright barely twenty yards across the run. He was leaning against a twisted, splintered stump that might once have been the most majestic of trees. It was nearly ten feet across, and perched on our side of the stump was Harold. I don’t know why I named him that, but it was soon taken on by everyone in our trench. Old Harold sat there with his shoulders proud and his rifle leaning against the stump, still held firmly in his hands. What he was missing was his head. He could have been anybody, looked like anybody and come from any place in the world and you wouldn’t have known.
He was the first marker, the guideline for where death started. Up on that hill they were so bedded down that not even the artillery had managed to make much of a dent.
The guns had been sounding for three days almost constantly, a never-ending din of deep, ground-shaking thuds as they sent their payload roaring up into the sky to come crashing down on the entrenchments that circled again and again. Each time a bombardment finished we waited, and waited, and each time our enemies took to their mud walls again and answered with their own guns.
They didn’t have any of the massive artillery emplacements that sat behind us, but what they did have was enough to shower the ground between the lines with a deadly thunder.
We would duck down to avoid any fragments from the assault, and be glad that our trenches were just that bit too far for them to reach. Old Harold would sit through all of it, somehow managing to stay upright and proud, while the land around him erupted in a deluge of fire and mud. I think if he hadn’t lost his head, his chin would have been raised to the skies in defiance.
When the call went up that last time, before we took to the killing ground to make our assault, I somehow knew it was coming. There was a chill in the air. Fog had descended over the fields, and the top of the hill was masked from sight. At that moment following the shrill pierce of the whistles that signalled our time to advance, just on the edge of visibility I saw for the first time that Old Harold had moved. No longer did he hold his weapon upright, and no longer was his back straight against the rock. He had slumped forward as if finally giving in.
So it was
that on that cold afternoon, with the sun blocked by mist and the skies grey, the guns went silent one last time.
We poured out of those trenches like ants stumbling out into the light to face some unknown giant. Winters was the first over the top, followed quickly by Looky. I fumbled to climb the broken ladder, and I was easily ten feet behind them when I finally leapt over the escarpment and began running to catch up with them. I glanced to my side and it seemed we were the fastest out of the trench, but within seconds the killing ground was a mass of bodies rushing for the slope of the hill. Four hundred yards away, past the slumped body of Old Harold, through an abandoned trench, the barbed wire twisted and torn from the constant pounding it had received from both sides, and over a stretch of ground that was pock marked with craters, mud and body parts. That was where we had to reach. The bottom of the hill and the cover that it would give us.
The trench was surprisingly easy to cross. That barbed wire was so damaged that I didn’t even slow down when I reached it, I followed Winters and Looky’s example and just leapt up, out and down into the drop, landing heavily. One foot sank deep into the mud, missing the rocks that Winters and Looky had used with such agility to reach the other side. The other foot crunched straight down on the head of a dead soldier, one of ours by the looks of it. I saw his pale wide-eyed face for a moment before my weight sank the only part of him that wasn’t already submerged into the mud.
It was just as I reached the top of the trench and started running out across the open ground, that the silence ended.
The hilltop guns unleashed their fury down upon us.
They were firing blind, but I was pretty sure that they had heard the whistles that signalled the assault, because the guns spoke heavier than they had from the trenches. Maybe it was just my imagination, and my being in the middle of the killing ground when the bullets started to hit.
Winters and Looky were easily ten yards ahead of me now, and all I could do as the whistling sound of deadly fire began to flash by my ears was put my head down and charge like a bull across the ground, hoping that I could make it to the other side. Behind me, I heard the telling sounds of the carnage that was to come as the first screams of men began to sound in their hundreds across the length of our trench lines.