From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (119 page)

It was a cold morning in December, and for some reason I decided to walk the same route that we had taken that day, all around the sights that we had visited that day. I even had lunch in the same cafe, and took a carriage ou
t to the canal, telling the driver to meet me down the road. Everything just as it had been back then.

In the two years that had passed a lot of the area had grown over again. The police had stripped it all in their search, but it hadn
’t taken long for the same plants to push their way up from hiding, including those blue flowers.

I knew exactly the point where I had lost my Marie. I felt the same chill down my spine that I had felt the second that I had seen her disappear. I stepped over the spot where two
years ago her footprints had ended, and into the space that she never reached. And I found something.

Lying amongst the flowers, almost out of sight, was a single hair pin. Just like the ones that my wife used to wear, only this one was a little more eleg
ant and expensive than one that she could have owned.

Once more I noticed a set of footprints in the mud, ending at exactly the same spot that Marie
’s had. And I knew my worst thoughts were right. Someone else had gone to wherever it was that my wife had gone, just as those other people had, each one leaving something behind, maybe something given to them recently, that hadn’t been theirs long enough to stay with them.

I know exactly what you are thinking, and don
’t you think I tried following her? I walked backwards and forwards on that spot for hours, and for the first few months I came back there day after day. And now my suspicions were confirmed. I did all that over again, just hoping that the door was still open, that I could step through, and follow those footprints, even though I had no idea where they might lead.

After two years I was at the very edge of my sanity, and in the end I broke on that canal bank. I had lost everything I owned in pursuit of Marie -
the rent on the flat in London had run out, and the job that I had been offered was given to someone else. I had the rest of our money sent to Edinburgh, and as each day went by, the funds grew smaller and smaller.

When I eventually stood up and walked aw
ay from the canal bank for the final time, I walked away carrying everything I owned - Just the clothes I was wearing, my empty wallet, and a single return ticket to London that I hoped was still valid. There was a time for searching for Marie, and there was also a time to stop, but I didn’t recognise it until I had lost everything in search of the impossible.

I caught the next train back to London, and I have never been back to Edinburgh since.

The second time I returned to Gallowshill was in the summer o
f 1926. Joe’s Caff had shut down months before, and I hadn’t seen anything of him for a long time.

Over the years following the war, Gallowshill had turned from a thriving new community into a den of thieves, homeless people and thugs. Everybody who had no
thing seemed to end up there, taking from others around them who had just as little. Poor soldiers came back from the war, and with nowhere to go, they looked for places to work, and often found themselves in Gallowshill. It deteriorated over just a few years and had gradually become one of the last places you should be at such a late hour.

I didn
’t intend to be walking through for more than a couple of minutes. But that was enough.

I was just coming off the bridge and walking into Gallowshill on my way to the baker
’s house along the Thames when it happened. I wasn’t paying attention, and by no means should I have been walking down that alleyway at that time of the night by myself. Maybe in central London I was safer, but not there. I guess I still hadn’t learned that many lessons, and was still a little naive.

I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head for just a moment, and then everything went dark. I awoke what I believe was a cou
ple of hours later, with my boots, coat and hat missing and my wallet, even though it was empty, taken too. I had bled quite a lot, and was lucky to even still be breathing.

Struggling to stand, my head thumping from the pain, I staggered round the corner,
along Casey Street, to the only place nearby that I thought I might be able to sit in peace for a moment: Joe’s Caff.

It was closed, but the key to the back door was where it had always been left, in the guttering just above the back window.

The lock was stiff, probably rusted, but with a bit of effort I forced it open and staggered into the darkness of the old smoking room.

Where once the room had been plush and tidy, filled with oak tables and old leather chairs that Joe had bought cheap from a pub that
was closing down a few streets away, there was now just a pile of rubbish and broken bottles. The door into the front shop had fallen off its hinges at some point, and now lay in the middle of the room, a wide split down its centre.

The place was a mess, a
nd I stood there for a few moments, shaking my head, unable to believe that all of the work we did all those years ago, tidying up, cleaning, laying tiles and decorating, had all come to this, to nothing but ruin.

Pulling the door shut behind me, I hunkere
d down on one of the few remaining chairs. It sat legless on a pile of mouldy carpet just to the right of the entrance, the leather torn and frayed, cotton stuffing spilling out onto the floor.

When I came back from the war with Joe, I had high hopes for a
life that would change, and for a few years they had. Joe had his coffeehouse, his Caff, and I had my Marie. All of that had gone now. Here I was sitting in the ruin of both of our dreams, with no boots, no wallet, nothing, and everything that I had of importance in my life was now gone.

I stayed in the Caff for a couple of days, quietly trying to get my head together, trying to decide what I was going to do. Gazing out at the street, or up at the noose which hung from where once there had been a chandelie
r.

I don
’t know who had put it there. I can guess that maybe in some moment of his life Joe had decided that he'd had enough, and hung it up there, ready to say his goodbyes.

He hadn
’t hanged himself, though. I could see that. The noose was untouched, still a fresh knot where the rope was wound around itself just above the hoop itself. The rope wasn’t compacted like it would have been if it had been used. So what he had decided in the end I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it took him out of that place and along another road.

I contemplated the very same things as I sat there that evening, and I think, I hope, that I made the same decision that Joe had - to start again. I wasn
’t finished fighting this world yet.

It started off as just a way of making enough money to buy food every day, clearing up other people's rubbish. I slept in the same bedroom above the Caff every night and pretty much made the place my home. What with Joe no longer around and the Caff closed, I didn’t see the harm in turning the place into my little workshop, my storage room and shop front for selling junk. It all began with odds and ends, mostly scrap collected from the alleyways that I normally would have taken to the junk yard down Choke alley. But the very first time I hauled a cartload of metal down there to trade for a few coins, I found it closed.

Tad from over the road came over occasionally, and he said that the police had caught the old owners dealing guns out of the back yard, and busted the lot of them. He hadn
’t seen Joe since the night he closed the Caff up.

Over the next few years, Gallowshill started to change, yet again. Where there were empty tenement buildings with boarded-up windows, folks were rebuilding and tidying up the neighbourhood. All kinds of new businesses
started to fill the old ruined storefronts along the main stretch, even right up to the Caff. As folks moved in I came along and offered my services. With the help of a few young men who were all ex soldiers like myself, I would completely strip out and clear up an old building. Furniture, junk, broken glass, everything, and of course while we did that, we picked up a hoard of other junk. Quite often they were things that folks might buy if they were cleaned up.

The Caff, which I renamed The Old Caff Trade
Shop, was filled from wall to wall with it. Bicycles and bicycle parts, disused sinks, chairs, sofas, books, even window frames and doors. Anything that could be cleaned up and put up for sale, was.

By the time I hit thirty years old, I was wealthy enough
to invest my money into buying my own place.

So the Old Caff Trade Shop became The Old Caff Trade Company, and it had a massive store frontage with tenement flats above it, just around the corner from Merriwether Avenue, not far from Piccadilly. I also bou
ght the huge plot of land just at the back of the building. It was quite a substantial plot that was run down and disused. I think the local councillor was glad to be rid of the land, since he said that vagrants used it as a hangout, and I didn't really mind them, in fact, most of them cleaned up pretty good and worked very hard in the scrap yard that I put there.

Everything that I couldn't renovate and sell in the shop went out on that land, where the ex-vagrants ran it for me like any other scrap yard. Yo
u know, one time we even had a bus sitting on that land.

Yep. A genuine London bus.

A guy named Meril found it. It was abandoned about two miles away, which was dangerously close to The Running Ground for me, but whoever put it there had left the keys in the ignition, so I just jumped on in that seat and drove it across London, right into the yard, and tucked it away in behind a huge pile of bicycle and vehicle scrap.

At one point I was going to put a building up in the middle of that yard, you know, build
myself a house there and clean up the area around it. I even got the yard boys to put up some scaffolding, right where I was planning to build. Well, you know things are. That house just never got built. I think I changed my mind and decided that I didn't want to live in the middle of a scrap yard. It makes me laugh really. I don't know how long that scaffolding stood there, because it was still there when I eventually sold up. Could still be there for all I know.

Even though my business was thriving, I sti
ll missed The Caff. It had been strange leaving it behind. I remember standing outside for about an hour after boarding up the windows, just standing in the dirt and dust of the road looking up at them. The place looked so forlorn when you covered up the windows.

As I stood there, all the memories of the place flooded through my mind, the times I spent serving drinks to familiar faces, playing cards out in the den at the back, and all the work me and Joe put into cleaning the place up at the beginning. I st
ood wondering to myself where Joe had wandered off to, and whether one day he would come walking back along the street.

Also I wondered what would become of the place now. There was no one to live in it, no one to keep the place from falling apart, and no
one owned it apart from Joe. The Caff would probably sit empty for years, at least until someone discovered that there was no owner.

As I walked back along Casey Street, I passed the swimming pool. The alleyway along the side of the vast building, called Tinkers alley by the local folks, was, as ever, littered with refuse that was spilling over from the bins. Perched intermittently aga
inst the walls were the cardboard huts that had always been there, an ever-changing and shifting village of makeshift dens that the homeless of Gallowshill called home. About halfway down the track a group of ashen faced men stood over a metal bin, sparks of flame creeping out of the holes and licking up the inside as they fed the fire with bits of rubbish and wood. They were drinking from dirty bottles, probably some nasty homemade brew or industrial cleaner, and leaning on each other, blabbering their usual mindless drivel and arguing with no one in particular.

I had seen this scene dozens of times, and although the occupants of the alleyway changed over the years as new people drifted around and older residents died, the place always had the same desperat
e squalor. How close had I come to becoming one of those poor fools? How near had I already been a few times in my life to drowning myself in self-pity and foul-smelling liquids, just to dull the senses and ease the pain?

As I stood there in the middle of
the road, gawking at the ugly scene before me, I noticed something else, something out of place, and it was only because one of the tramps hobbled over and stumbled to sit down on the broken wall that ran along the back of the swimming pool building, near the maintenance entrance, that I noticed a previously invisible part of the picture, that I noticed him.

At first I thought it was merely a pile of cloth, maybe a sack of rubbish that had gone unnoticed by the denizens of the alleyway.

Then I saw the blood.

Lying in the dirt, barely ten yards behind the burning barrel, where the tramps still continued their raucous laughing and drinking, was a body, and there was something strange about it that I couldn
’t yet place, something familiar enough that I couldn’t just walk away, believing it to be just the latest death in the alleyway. The feeling was enough to make me change my direction and walk, for the first time, down into the nastiest and most dangerous lane in Gallowshill.