From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (110 page)

The old man had risked his own neck just coming in after me, though I guessed he was much more used to moving around unnoticed than I was, because I didn
’t even hear him coming up the stairs. How he had seen me, I will never know.

"Boy," he said, though it sounded more like a dog's bark.

I spun round. My heart was pounding.

"Out, quickly. You can
’t be in here."

He turned and moved back towards the top of the stairs, glancing back at me several times with an irritated lo
ok.

"Don
’t just stand there gawping at me boy. If they find you in here it will be Breaker’s Alley for you."

I didn
’t know what Breaker’s Alley was, and by that name I wasn’t sure I wanted to either. I gathered my few things and rushed down the stairs after him.

We went out the back door and climbed over the wall. From the window upstairs it had looked small, but it rose at least seven feet tall at the very back, and there was no back gate. Fortunately there was a small stone shed that was part collapsed. I
copied the old man and jumped up on it, shimmied to the back wall, and hauled myself over.

Hands grabbed me out of the darkness, and pulled me through tall grass and thorns. I tried to cry out, but someone clamped their hand over my mouth. It wasn
’t the old man.

They let me go once they had dragged me through a gap in the huts and hauled me into a half stone, half wooden shed. I looked around at my captors. Two old men and a young woman, maybe in her late twenties, all dressed in layer upon layer of dirty
rags and scrap clothing.

I pulled my legs in close, ready to run if I had to.

"Are you trying to get yourself killed, young man?"

It was the woman who spoke. Her voice was soft, warm even, and the look she gave me reminded me more of a cross but amused mot
her than a stranger.

"No. I
’m sorry." I wasn’t sure what I was making excuses for.

"That building," she said, pointing behind me, "is a safe house for contraband, owned by The Breakers." She looked at me like she was expecting me to react in some way, like
I should have known what she was talking about.

"I
’m sorry. I didn’t know," I replied, lowering my head. At the same time I was looking for the nearest exit.

"No point saying sorry to us," she continued. "It
’s not us that will kill you if you’re found in there."

A door opened in the darkness opposite me, spewing in the light from one of the many fires that I had seen out of the window. The old man who had hurried me out of the house stepped inside the shed to join us, nodding to the others.

"All clear," he said. "No one about."

The woman turned back to me.

"You are very lucky, child. Now go," she said, indicating the still open door.

As I got up and headed towards the door, still nervous of the people around me, she called out.

"There is food over the way. Look for the big man with a huge beard over near the arches. Don’t worry, he is friendly enough."

So it was that I stepped out into the main street of The Running Ground for the first time, and to say that place changed my life would be an unde
rstatement. Ever since my narrow escape at The Warehouse I had been living day to day, struggling just to find something to eat. But here, amongst some of the strangest and most destitute folks I’d ever met, was a haven of sorts.

There must have been a th
ousand people living in that slum when I arrived. To this day I don’t know how long it had been there, but I heard one old tramp say once that he had been one of the first, and that had been before the turn of the century, before I was born. Huddled in makeshift huts, some of them even two or three stories high, were people from all over, and every walk of life. Don’t even ask how those things stayed standing.

It didn
’t take me long to find the food. I just followed the smell of cooking.

The Chef, as they c
alled him, was an Indian man, and he was one of the tallest men I have ever seen in my life. I think he was seven feet tall at the least, probably taller. I never did learn his real name, only that he had come to England with his parents when he was a child, brought by a family who owned a lot of land in his home country. His parents had died when he was even younger than I was.

He took one look at me and filled a metal bowl full of some hot stew from the barrel that he was cooking it in, tore off a chunk o
f dry, stale bread from a box next to it and handed it to me, pointing at a bench nearby where some other children were sitting, eating. I didn’t ask what the stew was, didn’t much care. It was hot and it filled me up. The bread was like eating a rock, but I didn’t complain. I was so hungry, and no one bothered me as I sat there, quietly stuffing my face as fast as I could.

When I finished the stew I took the plate back over to The Chef and asked him where I cleaned them. He just smiled, took the bowl, fill
ed it up a second time, and handed it back to me. I must have looked quite comical standing there with my jaw nearly bouncing off the floor, because he just laughed.

"When your done, you wash in the barrel," he said, in between his laughter. He pointed at
another barrel that was propped up against the arch wall a few feet away.

There were a lot of strange folk living on The Running Ground, but amongst them were a lot of good people too. Apart from the odd few, most of them stuck together, sharing everything
they got their hands on, which was mostly scavenged from bins, rundown houses, or scrap yards.

It turned out that most of the food that kept everybody alive was stolen from all over London, or pulled out of market bins. There were a lot of mouths to feed
, and anyone who was good at taking stuff without been seen soon found themselves pretty high up the pecking order.

I fitted in almost immediately. I was small, quiet, and fast. Within a week I was friendly with a lot of the folks who lived in that dingy s
lum. All I wanted most of the time was a full belly and some place to sleep. The first I could do myself, but somewhere safe to sleep meant I had to get things for other people.

It was easy enough to grab so
mething when the owner of a market stall or a shop wasn't looking, but soon they would start to wondert why you were hanging around, and most of them had been robbed enough times by street rats like me that they just sent you on your way even before you got near. I learned to do things a different way.

There were some busy streets in London, and if you were small you could disappear into the crowd and be barely noticed, so long as you didn't stink too badly. That certainly made a difference. So here is what
I would do. Once in amongst the crowd you just start walking along, up and down the street, changing direction every now and then to stay with the flow of folks, and you would keep your hands busy. Into this pocket there, or this bag over here. Most of the time those pockets would be empty, or you would put your hand into a bag and come out with nothing useful, but if you carried on, eventually you would swipe something good. I had watches, purses, lockets, a whole lot of keys, jewellery. The list was endless.

I was an extraordinary pickpocket.

Did I ever get caught? Well of course I did, but if you are fast, like I was, you just kept walking when the shout went up, and you dropped whatever it was that you had just taken. You never, ever, ever kept everything you had taken that day on you. Oh no, because when you got caught you had to be carrying nothing, and of course you had just dropped whatever it was that you took, so when folks started looking around, it usually turned up and whoever was shouting about thieves looked stupid themselves.

I used to stash my finds somewhere nearby, somewhere out of the way and hidden, like a hole between some bricks, in an alleyway, anywhere that wasn't going to be disturbed, that I could go to without being watched.

There were at least a dozen shops hidden away in back streets that would take whatever you stole and hand you a few coins. I knew every time I sold something that It was worth a lot more than what I had just been given, but it didn't matter, those few coins bought me the food from the shops that I might have stolen from at one time.

I never sold my knife.

It was always tucked into its little holder, hanging off my belt under my jacket.

I used to keep hold of some of my "finds" and take them back as gifts to folk
s I liked on the Running Ground, or I'd hand out a few coins. That bought me a bed in nearly every shack in the place, but mostly I slept at the back of Chef's place.

One very hot day in 1912, about four years after I first started living at the Running Gr
ound, some policemen came by. They were looking for someone, someone who it seemed had been poking around in the buildings that ran along near the street, like the one that I had snuck into to sleep in.

They roughed up a few people, and even gave Chef some grief, but in truth, nobody knew who it had been. One of the old boys said he had seen a bunch of young men, street folk, hanging around the front a week or so before, said they hadn't been back since.
He gave the policemen a description of them as best he could, before they beat the crap out of him anyway, and threatened him with the Breaker's Alley. Then they went on their way.

I never did like the police, at least not those ones. I'm sure that lots o
f policemen were doing their job and were good people, but those ones, they were as bad a bunch of men as could be. Evil I would say.

After they had gone I sat near the old boy they had harassed.

"What did that man mean by the Breaker’s Alley?" I asked.

He
turned and frowned at me, like I was intruding somewhere I shouldn’t have been, but then his expression softened.

"It's just what they call it," he said, "though that isn
’t the name on the street sign."

"Then why do they call it that if it
’s not the name of the street?" I asked.

He just looked at me solemnly and told me that it was where people got broken.

"What do you mean they get broken?" I asked.

"Just trust me son, you don
’t want to find yourself in the Breaker’s Alley at the wrong time. Don’t want to find yourself in there at any time really. Some things are best not seen."

"So what
’s the street really called?" I asked.

"Hemley, I think," he said, "Hemley Alley."

"Strange name for a street." I said.

"Tis indeed," said the old man, with a half-hearted
smile.

I was going to ask more, but I could tell that I was irritating him. The policemen had scared him, scared them all pretty badly, and I thought he just wanted to be left alone to his whiskey.

About two weeks after that I discovered for myself what the Breaker's Alley was. I didn't mean to, and I never ended up there on purpose.

As I said before, I was a great pickpocket, and it hadn't gone unnoticed amongst the Running Ground folks. Unfortunately, it seemed that the same bunch of thugs that had broken
into the store houses and stolen from the Breakers had also spotted me going into a pawn shop, just down the street. I would guess that they had been watching me as well, without me noticing them until it was too late.

I was making my way home when they j
umped me. I left the same shop one evening, just as it was getting dark, and turned into the alleyway at the back.

There were five of them, none of them as fast as me, but they were strong, and they had me surrounded.

"What you got there lad?" said one of them. He was shorter than the rest, and had a mouth full of missing or rotten teeth. He smiled at me and I could tell there was no friendliness in that smile.

"Nothing," I said, trying to judge the gaps between them, see if I could make a run for it.

"Oh, I don't think you've got nothing," he said, "I think you've got a pocket there full of coins, and I think you're going to hand it to me."

He stepped forward and grabbed me by the shoulder, pushing me against a wall, pinning me. He went through my pockets
but couldn't find anything. He stopped smiling at me, and didn't notice as my hand slipped to my belt, my knife out of its holder.

"Where are they son?" he asked, through gritted teeth. "You best hand them over now or I'm going to smash you up."

He reached forward again, grabbing me by both shoulders and pushing hard.

It was only the second time I had used the knife. I'd taken it out a couple of times since that night at The Warehouse, but I'd never actually had to use it on anyone since then. I don't think
he even noticed the blade jab up into his arm, not for a few seconds. It was as far as I could reach with my shoulders pinned. Then he started screaming, and blood was pouring out of his arm and going everywhere. He let go of me and stumbled back, just enough for me to dart by him and run for the gap between two of his thugs. The first of them was too distracted by all the blood spurting out of RottenTooth's arm, but the second one made a grab for me. One hand shot out towards me and snatched the back of my jacket. It didn't stop me running. I lashed out at his hand, and then just kept on going, glancing back quickly as he also started screaming.