From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (118 page)

Hooves, just like a bull would have, or a ram or
something, or like the feet of something much darker, something that at the time I didn’t even want to consider. At first I thought his feet had been cut off, and what I was looking at were the stumps, but in the thin shaft of light that shone on them from the doorway it was quite clear exactly what they were. I only saw them for the briefest of moments, and then he was gone.

They had beaten Joe up pretty bad. He could barely walk by the time I managed to untie and pull the ropes from him. He didn
’t say a word, just nodded at me and then stayed silent as I helped him back over to the Caff. I offered to take him to the hospital, but he shook his head. All I could do was take him up to his room on the top floor of the Caff, and help him into bed.

They hadn
’t broken any bones, or even cut him, but as I helped him take his clothes off and get into bed I saw that nearly every inch of his body had been beaten, and would soon turn bruised.

Joe didn
’t come out of his room for three days. I took food and water to him, making sure he was okay, but he lay there in the dark, with the curtains drawn, in silence.

When Joe finally came out a lot of the bruises had cleared up, but he looked pale, not his jovial self. He was still quiet, and withdrawn, and for a while he didn
’t say anything, just poured himself a large whiskey and sat just inside the doorway. When he did speak his voice was strained. Joe had a very distinct voice, and this didn’t seem like the same man.

"I just wanted to say thanks for coming over there."

"That’s fine, Joe. You would have done the same."

"No really, you could have left. You risked your life, and I
’m grateful."

I poured him another whiskey and placed it on the stool next to him.

"You’re welcome Joe."

And that was the last we spoke about it.

Joe closed the place up for a few weeks, and during that time I found myself a new job over at the leather-cutting factory, as a clerk, counting receipts and making out orders and such. Joe knew the owner, and to be honest I think he was glad to get me out from under his feet and replace me with a young lady from south London who he had taken a liking to.

After a while I stopped going to The Caff as often and spent most of my time between my new job and visiting the hospital where Marie still worked.

Isn't it amazing how your life just changes all of a sudden, sometimes? I don't know what prompted it, but that would be the last I saw of Joe Dean. I guess sometimes our lives just move on. Mine certainly did. I was seeing a lot more of Marie during those days. Some changes are joyous, and often unexpected, but sometimes things don't work out exactly as you had planned, do they?

It was 1923, and we had been married for three months and two days when we set off on our trip to Edinburgh. It was a very different place back in those days. Even though a lot of people were struggling just to get by, living on the poverty line, post war industry was booming.

We left London at ten in the morning, almost on the dot, aboard the Special Scotch Express train out of King
’s Cross station. It was a bitterly cold morning and the fog was starting to creep in. I remember standing in that station, a chill in the air that penetrated to my bones, marvelling at what advances in engineering had come to pass to see such an impressive piece of machinery let loose upon the world.

I was still a very young man back then, and I had only been on a train twice before in my life, and both times it was to a place a lot less pleasant than Edinburgh, and in decidedly less pleasant company, so I
was looking forward to that journey immensely.

It was one of the most extravagant things I ever paid for during my younger years, but of course, as I sat in that carriage with my new wife, watching the countryside go by at a leisurely pace, I wasn
’t to know at the time that I was to pay for that trip with more than money.

The train stopped at York for just a few minutes, to give the crew time to check the engine, and for the passengers to catch some fresh air. Then off we went again, thundering along the t
racks towards our destination.

My wife and I sat looking out of the window for most of the journey. You have to remember that although a lot of it looks the same, most of the countryside that we were passing was completely new to us. I commented to Marie t
hat we had watched the weather change at least half a dozen times in those few hundred miles. It seemed that the closer we got to Scotland, the brighter the weather was.

At six thirty in the evening we finally pulled into Waverley station, after a journey
of no less than eight and a half hours. That might seem like a long time to you. Trains back then didn’t travel at the lightning speeds they do today. But to a young man in the 1920s, the Special Scotch Express was a miracle of progress, and I was on an adventure never to be forgotten.

Stepping off that train, we were greeted by a whole new world - at least that
’s how we saw it. The differences between Edinburgh and London at the turn of the century were so many that only the sprawl of buildings made it the same. There was just as much squalor and dirt about the place, but the architecture was something completely different. I am by no means an expert at buildings, but I think you might agree that there is something in the architecture of a city that gives it its character, its personality. London always said to me ‘I’m busy’, whereas Edinburgh smiled and said ‘welcome’.

The next day we took a carriage and toured around some of the more tourist-friendly parts of the city, and then lunched on Princes Street. W
e saw the Scott monument, and the Ross fountain, and then finally, before we retired to our hotel, Marie suggested that we take a walk along the canal. It was still quite early in the day, and the weather was very fine, so I agreed.

That walk along the ca
nal was to be the last time I spent with my wife.

I noticed a change in the weather almost as soon as we stepped off the coach. There was a slight chill in the wind that hadn
’t been there all day, and for the first time in our visit I buttoned up my coat, and suggested Marie do the same. We agreed with the driver that he should meet us about half a mile along the canal. He said he knew a good spot to wait. We didn’t know the area, but there was only a single pathway running along the edge of the water, so it seemed a simple enough arrangement.

The water was darker along this stretch of canal than I had seen elsewhere, and the trees cast shadows over the water that moved with the ripples. It was slightly cold, but we soon warmed up when we started walking.

I remember vividly that all along the edge of the canal was a mass of bright blue flowers, all no bigger than a few inches tall, and the flowers very small, but the area they covered spread out along the water's edge like a huge blue lawn. I also remember thinking how pretty they were, and how unusual it was to see them grow along the edge of the canal, and remain untouched. No one had seen fit to clear the area. I wondered what those flowers were called. Marie had a name for them, but I can’t recall it now. It's strange how I have forgotten that.

We were about halfway along the walk when it happened, and I
’m still not sure to this day if I can explain any better to a stranger than I could to the local police, and then after that the local magistrate.

It was q
uite simple really. We were talking about what our plans would be when we got back to London. I had decided I would take up an offer that had been made to me, to work as a training accountant for one of the big city lenders that a friend of mine was a worked for. I wasn’t so keen on the idea, but I knew the work would be easy and it would pay well. Most men coming back from the war wouldn’t be quite so lucky.

Marie was walking just behind me and to my left, just a little further away from the canal. The mas
s of blue flowers had spread out thicker along that small stretch of the bank, and she insisted we didn’t step on any of them, so we walked single file for about fifty yards. Or we would have done.

She had started telling me how she thought that she would
do well to go to work in the ladies' hair salon that was just around the corner from our home. At that moment we were about ten yards from the end of our single-file walk, and she disappeared, just like that. One moment she was there, and the next, she might have never existed.

I had seen her from the corner of my eye, and every few yards I glanced back just to check that she was okay. I was turning my head towards her, to do just that, when she simply vanished right before me.

There was nowhere for her to have fallen, nowhere for her to have quickly ducked behind to hide if she had wanted to play a little fun with me, and there wasn’t even the slightest of sounds. All that was left behind was her scarf, the one I had bought for her from the market in London a few weeks ago. It had been wrapped tightly around her shoulders at the time, but now it drifted slowly to the ground to settle upon those blue flowers.

It took me a little while to comprehend what had happened. Well, maybe c
omprehend isn’t the best of words, because I don’t think I ever really understood what or why. I guess I mean that it took me a while to realise that she hadn’t simply hidden somewhere. She was gone.

I ran the distance left between the spot and the driver,
not thinking to pick up the scarf on the way, and came back with him scurrying along behind me. He was an overweight man, and it was quite clear from the way he was sweating and coughing his lungs up that running was not something he was used to.

The scar
f was still there, and there was still no sign of my Marie. Even her footprints in the grass ended with her right foot forward and nothing in the other direction except the trail of her footprints that led back in time to the moments before, when she had been here, walking beside me.

We raised the alarm, called in the police to find out what was going on, and they arrived quite quickly
…in droves. By six that evening I was in a cell at the police station, and by eight I had been officially accused of murdering my wife. They expected to find her when they dredged the canal. I tried to point out to them that she had only been gone a short while, but I got the impression they didn’t believe a word I was saying.

As I sat there alone in that cold damp cell at the
police station, waiting to hear something from the search, I was almost hoping they would find something. Had I just not heard the splash as she had fallen in the river? I don’t believe that was it. She had been at least three yards from the edge of the water. But if she turned up dead in there, then I at least would know it was just a moment where I missed something.

They never did.

Not a single shred of evidence was to be found to say she had fallen in the canal and they searched nearly three miles of it. They tore up those beautiful blue flowers, and dug over the area, but there was nothing to be found of my Marie.

So they released me. One of the officers in charge of the investigation wanted to charge me with wasting police time, and suggested that Mari
e had never even been there, but the driver of the coach accounted for her, and there was very little else they could do. Except give me back the things they found at the spot where she had vanished.

The scarf was the first, then a gentleman
’s pocket watch, a small key ring with a pretty silver dolphin inscribed on it, a wedding band made of gold, a single brown leather glove, and a half-empty packet of cigarettes with a flint cigarette lighter stuffed into the packet as well.

Does that list sound strange
to you? No, you might believe they were just some of the other things she might carry with her, except Marie never smoked, not once in her life, and she didn’t much like the fact that I did either. She also didn’t like leather, and she carried her keys in her purse, never on a key ring, and the wedding ring that I had bought for her was plate silver. We just couldn’t afford something as extravagant as a gold ring.

And what about that watch? Well, the time had stopped at four fifteen, which could well have b
een about the time that she disappeared, except that the watch was rusted and damaged beyond repair. I know this because I took it into a repair shop, back on the Prince Street, and they told me the thing was at least forty years old. The company that made them went out of business twenty years ago. I wouldn’t even be able to find the parts to fix it without paying a fortune to have them hand-made.

Do you see where I
’m going with this? Well if not then let me spell it out to you. That place where Marie disappeared, I went back there two weeks later, and I went back there again for days after that, searching, always searching for that lost lady who should have been by my side.

Do you know how long it took me to find something? It took me two years. Two long
years of hunting the streets of the city and walking the canals to find any sort of lead on what had happened. Oh I knew what those other things that were found insinuated, but I had to find something else. And then I did, right on the spot where she had disappeared in the first place.