From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (111 page)

I'd cut off four of the fingers on his hand.

I ran and ran, as fast as I could, through the alleyways that I thought would lead me to the Running Ground, and they followed me, I could hear them not far behind me, and I could hear the bellowing yells. I was normally good at disappearing into these alleyways, but somehow I just couldn't shake them. They knew this place as well as I did.

Then I turned a corner, and ran headlong into two men blocking the way. They grabbed me and threw me to the floor. I hit the ground hard, stunned, opened my eyes and loo
ked down the alleyway. Behind me I could hear RottenTooth's gang come round the corner and soon there was shouting, but I wasn't paying attention to that. It was nothing to the horror that I saw before me.

There were at least a dozen men in the alleyway, m
ost of them moving past me quickly, joining in the fight that was going on behind me. Just a few feet away, was a body. I didn't recognise her, but I knew by the way she was dressed that she was a street prostitute, now lying dead in a pool of blood that was gradually spreading. Behind her was just one man who was holding onto a girl I recognised.

She was tied up and gagged, but I could still see her eyes. It was the girl from The Warehouse, the one who I had dreamed about for so many nights after.

Next to the man was another prostitute, and she was standing against the wall holding her head. I could see she was bleeding from a cut over her eye.

She was looking around, dazed, but then something happened, I think maybe she got her senses back for a mo
ment, and saw that only one man was between her and escape. She launched herself at him, kicking him and punching him. The girl fell over as the man struggled with both of them, but then he reached to his waist and pulled out a gun.

The noise was so loud t
hat it left my ears ringing, but I knew I didn't have time to wait. I had to react now.

I ran forward, my knife still in my hand. The prostitute hadn't even hit the ground when I rushed forward and stuck the blade straight into the man's throat. I don't th
ink he even saw me coming.

I stumbled as he fell backwards, dropping his gun and hitting the ground, gargling. I hissed at the girl to run. She was gagged and tied by the hands, but her feet were still free, so we took off up that alleyway as fast as we co
uld, only stopping when neither of us could run another yard. We collapsed in the doorway of a boarded-up building. I had no idea where we were, but it was dark and there was no one around.

I helped her take the gag off, and removed the ropes from her hand
s. We sat there, breathing heavily, both too shocked to say a word.

"I'm Reg," I said, when I finally got my breath back.

"I'm Marie," she said, looking at me through those huge, stunning, frightened eyes.

She was the same age as me except for a couple of
days. She told me all about how she had been bought by the owner of a brothel in London's East End. She was still too young to ply that trade, and had not been the most cooperative girl that the owner had bought from The Warehouse. Fortunately the man's wife had taken a shine to her, and set her to work in the kitchen and the wash room. The owner, a man called Norton, had insisted that there were customers that would have paid a lot of money to spend time with Marie, but his wife had insisted and he eventually gave in.

That night she had been heading over to the brothel, taking some clean sheets and clothes over for some of the girls, when the Breakers had caught them.

"They were going to kill us," she said, "and I don't know why."

Marie knew the name of the
town just outside of London that she had come from, even gave me a detailed account of how she had been snatched one day. It was a place called Gravesend. I said I had to go back to the Running Ground and tell Chef what had happened, but then I would help her get home.

Chef listened quietly while I told him all about what had happened, everything from how I'd got caught by RottenTooth and then ran into the Breakers by accident.

"You hide up here, and stay quiet," he said, and then went off to have a word around, to find out what was happening.

He came back about an hour later and told me to get my things together fast. It seemed that one of the Breakers had recognised me, and now they were looking for me and Marie.

"You have to go," he said. "The man you stabbed, well, he is dead, and he was their leader, and they are out for blood. They will find you if they come here, and kill you both. They are looking now, and it will not be long before they come here. "

"But they'll hurt folks when they come here." I s
aid.

Chef smiled and ruffled my hair.

"You don't worry too much about us. You get yourself away now."

I bit back the tears as I quickly said my goodbyes to folks. Then Chef walked us to the edge of the Running Ground and shook my hand as he said goodbye.

"We will see each other again Reggie boy, we will. I have a good feeling about that," he said, hugging me so hard I could barely breathe.

"I hope so," I replied.

It took us a week to get to Gravesend. Not that it was far, but neither of us knew how to get there and I was too wary to ask anyone we passed for directions, just in case the Breakers were somehow trailing us. The last thing I wanted was to get Marie back home, only to have them turn up.

It was a week that I will always remember fondly. We spent most of our days travelling around the south of London, looking for street signs that might help us. At night we would sometimes find an abandoned building and break in, other times we just slept
under a bridge or in a dark corner in some alleyway. Two young kids wrapped up in rags could disappear quite easily in all the litter and junk that was piled up in the alleyways.

It was a beautiful sunny day when we eventually walked into Gravesend and foun
d the street that Marie used to live on. Along the street, right outside the house that she had lived in was the same horse-drawn cart that her father had owned back when she was taken.

We stood holding each other tight for a long while before I eventually
pulled away and told her to go. It was nice that she was reluctant to do so, but I could see that her eyes were sparkling with joy as she said goodbye and ran up the street.

"I won't forget you ever, Reggie," she said, before she ran to the house.

"I won't forget you either," I said quietly. I don't think she heard me.

She stopped at the gate and looked back, waved, and ran to the front door. A moment later and I heard cries of joy coming from inside the house. I smiled, turned away, and started walking ba
ck towards London.

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 hudd
le 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, lea
ning 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, dre
ssed 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 s
he 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, exc
ept 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 ta
kes 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 agai
n, 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 an
ybody 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 W
ar. 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.