From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (120 page)

I made my way slowly along the tr
ack, weaving between the ghetto of cardboard cells, stepping over broken bottles and human waste, avoiding the rotten carcass of a dog that was long dead and almost unrecognisable. I skirted around the drunken tramps, who barely even registered my existence, and made my way over to the body.

From ten feet away I could see that whoever this person was, they were still alive, and still breathing. As I got closer I could see the rise and fall of the person's chest as it heaved, a hoarse, gargling noise eruptin
g with every desperate gasp.

It wasn
’t until I knelt by the injured man that I recognised who it was. The huge frame, the ragged black cloak, the young looking face covered in dried blood.

Well over a decade had passed since I last saw this man striding o
ff into the mist of the trenches, following the horde of dead men and their gaunt ghoul-like leader to god knows where, as I watched, terrified, from my hiding place in the bolt-hole.

I had known even back then that this man
’s task and his duties had to be of great importance for him to follow such a monstrous army alone. Where had they all gone? Where was he? Who was the demonic thing that took all those men from the battlefield? Who was he? Where had he come from?

On this warm morning as I walked away fro
m Casey Street for what I believed would be the last time, as I turned my back with the hope that by leaving it behind, I would also be letting go of the pain of my past life, a ghost from the past stepped back into the light.

I wonder sometimes if I shoul
d have turned away, left him to die, allowed the questions to go unanswered, but I always came to the same decision.

Fate.

Fate had put me there that morning. It had carved my path, from the trip to the bakery that I had never finished, to the strike on the head and the robbery that threw me into Gallowshill’s dark streets once more. It had all happened for a reason, every step of it leading me one step closer to standing next to this strange man who needed help.

He was barely conscious as I helped him to h
is feet, hauling his arm over my shoulder. I was amazed at his size. I think if I had been ten years older I wouldn’t have even been able to hold his weight. He was at least a foot taller than me.

We staggered, the two of us, him almost unable to control h
is own feet, and me struggling to bear his weight on my shoulders, back out of the alleyway and onto Casey Street. One of the tramps who was leaning against the broken wall, finished heaving his guts up and turned in time to see us pass. He struggled over to us and made a fumbling attempt to reach into the stranger’s pockets. I couldn’t stop him, so great was the stranger’s weight. I would have had to drop him to the ground. But as he began to lower his arm, he glanced upwards at the tramp, who slurred some drunken words while still trying to slip his hand into one of the deep pockets of the stranger’s coat. A moment later and the stranger's free arm shot up towards the tramp’s face with startling speed, his bloody, broken hand clenching into a fist at the last moment, just before the impact smashed the tramp's face apart.

I heard a sickening crunch of bones and watched, stunned, as blood, teeth and bits of bone sprayed out behind the man. The punch lifted the drunk an easy five feet off the ground. He disapp
eared behind the broken wall and crashed back down on top of a pile of rubble.

I didn
’t stop to find out if he was still alive. Instead I continued hauling the stranger out of the alleyway, his moment of violent clarity gone, and his consciousness drifting once more.

"I need to get you to a hospital," I said, but as I turned left to head towards the nearest hospital, he spoke.

"No, please, no doctors."

His voice was strange, and I couldn
’t place the accent. It was English but tinged with something that I had never heard before, a deep undertone that was no accent I recognised.

"You
’ll die if someone doesn’t fix you."

His chest heaved with the strain of talking, and fresh blood trickled out of his mouth, dribbling down his cheek as he coughed violently.

"No, I just need rest, please, hide me."

"You
’ll die if I don’t take you to the hospital."

"No, please, no doctors."

I found this odd, and my instinct told me to ignore him, to take him to Drake Lane Hospital, just a few streets away, near the river. But I didn’t. Instead I hauled him back down the street and into the only place I knew that I could hide him without fear of discovery. The Caff.

It took twenty mi
nutes to drag him along Casey Street, into The Caff and to Joe’s old room, and he was almost too big for the bed. I took his jacket off before laying him down, its massive bulk covering the chair that sat next to Joe’s bed. The jacket spilled over and hung to the floor, a mass of black leather and straps, buckles, weapon holsters, all of which were now empty.

I ran to the bathroom, hoping that the water would still be running, and it was. A few minutes later I got back to the bedroom with a pile of rags fro
m downstairs and a bowl of water. We had no bandages.

As I helped him off with his shirt, and started cleaning up the multitude of wounds, I asked him the first of many questions.

"So, mister, are you going to tell me what happened to get you in such a state?"

He was breathing heavily, but still conscious. I fed him some water and helped him sit up against the back of the bed. I noticed that as well as the wounds, his upper body was covered almost entirely in scars. They were long ones that looked like knif
e wounds, rows of aligned curves that could have been claw marks, bullet scars, burns, and some that I couldn’t have placed. Most looked old, but some were barely healed. Where his skin wasn’t covered in scars it was a mosaic of tattoos. His entire body apart from his head had been turned into some bizarre tapestry of images, all of them depicting strange glyphs and symbols of which I had no knowledge. Although this was unusual, and I had never seen anything like it before, it wasn’t the most disturbing thing about him. As I cleaned up each cut or hole and moved on to another one, I could see them healing. I mean actually see the blood drying and the skin knitting itself back together. One of the cuts on his chest, that I had cleaned first, was now almost completely gone, in just minutes. He was healing at a rate that defied nature.

"I lost a fight."

"I’ll say. You are lucky to be alive."

"I
’ve lost before."

Silence.

I finished cleaning up the last of the wounds. A big slash that split his shoulder muscle on his left side clean in two was closing up as I watched. The warm water seemed to aid the speed of healing. I think he could sense my unease, sense my questions waiting.

"You would be safer not knowing," he said, looking me in the eyes. We stood there for a
moment, eyes locked. He had that same serious, cold expression that I had seen through the mist those many years ago.

"I
’d like to know."

"Why?"

"Because I have wondered about you every day of my life since that day in the trenches, wondered about who you were, and who that terrible creature was that you followed. How those dead men rose that day, and where they all disappeared to."

"You may wish you had never asked. You may not be able to understand
…"

"I would take that risk gladly."

"You do not know what you ask."

"I do, mister. I have seen some damn strange things in my life, most of which went unanswered, unexplained, and most of which still plague me in my dreams at night."

I sat down on the side of the bed and looked away, out of the window, the edges of the broken glass jutting out like teeth, just like those razor edges that had lined the split in that man's face in the trenches, that demon thing whose image woke me up most nights. He watched me, the stranger, as I sat there, his expression calculating. I guess he was wondering whether telling me anything was worth his time, not that I would presume to know what this strange man was thinking.

"Mister, I have never met anyone like you," I continued, "and I probably never will again
. And since I’m helping you, rather than leaving you to die in the road while other folks around this way would have just robbed you and cut your throat, since I’m doing that for you, maybe you might consider helping me to rid myself of my nightmares."

He
nodded.

"I will be gone by the morning," he said, shifting his weight so that he was leaning on his side. "That is all the time I will need to heal. I do not need to sleep. As you have helped me, I will help you. You have until the dawn. Ask your questions
."

What do you ask first when you are faced with a man who might know the answers to all of the questions in your life? Where do you start? Suddenly I realised that I couldn
’t think of half of what I wanted him to tell me about. So I just started where it seemed simplest.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Andre."

"Andre? That sounds what Russian, Polish?"

"Let’s just say I’m Russian, that’s close enough. I was only born there. My path changed when I was very young."

"I see, yes, okay, well, what were you doing in the alley, what happened to you for you to get beaten up so badly?"

"My enemy, the one who I hunt, beat me in a fight. I thought that I was prepared and that I had him off his guard, but I was wrong. He had help. I had to flee, and barely escaped with my life. I was foolish to attempt to defeat him alone."

"Who is he? This enemy? The thing with the scar down his face?"

"He is called Nua’lath, and he is an old one, one of the few that remain awake, an ancient evil."

"Awake?"

"Most of his kin are long dead, or in a coma."

"Nua
’lath, is he some sort of a demon or devil then?"

"That is the closest that I would describe him to you, yes, but that is not what he is. For your understanding I would say he was a demon."

"The dead men, the ones that rose from the ground, in the trenches that day, how did that happen? Why didn’t they just stay dead?"

"Nua
’lath raised them, though they did not have to be dead for him to do so. He merely exerted his will upon them, and relieved them of their souls, so that his minions could take the bodies. You are lucky he did not do the same to you."

"Why did it not happen to me?"

"I do not know."

"You don
’t know why he chose not to?"

"He may not have chosen. There may have been some other r
eason. Were you there when the men fell?"

"No."

"Then that may be why. You must have arrived just after he absolved them."

"Absolved?"

"Absolved their souls, destroyed them utterly."

"But they move still, they talk."

"They are but a shadow of what they once were, and twisted beyond recognition. Once their souls have been absolved they become minions to his will, and his evil permeates through them."

"Would you like a drink? I think I need one."

"Yes."

As he had promised, when I awoke the next morning, after
hours of questions, and many answers, he was gone. I had slept after we talked, without waking once, on a spare mattress that I found. For the first time since those days in France, I had a night of sleep without interruption.

All that was left behind to
prove to me that he had been here were bloody rags, all heaped in a pile on the chair, and strewn across the floor, and one other thing. One more item he had left behind, something that I don’t know if he intended to leave. Or if he did, then his reason for doing so was beyond me.

It was a knife, and it had a wicked-looking blade, and a bone handle. The curve of the blade was unmistakable, the small, curved serrations unique, and it was still as sharp today as it had been all those years ago.

It was the knife that I gutted Eddie with when I was eight years old, and all that was missing was the leather holder.

How had Andre come upon this knife? I have no idea, and you know the irony of it was that after an evening full of questions and answers, he managed to leave me with something burning in the back of my mind. Had he been in The Warehouse that night? Had he
seen what I had done? Had he recognised me after all this time? Or had some bizarre twist of fate had that knife fall out of his pocket to be left to me once more?

It didn't matter.

It was mine again, and I sat there on that blood-soaked bed for what seemed an age looking at the thing. It brought back all my memories from that difficult time in my life, the Holcrofts, the other families I had lived with, right back to my aunt.

In a ro
om in the middle of a place that I hated to call the closest thing to home, on a street that had a history as long and dark as the alleyways that ran through it, I sat and cried for the second time in my life. The first time had been for Marie, whom I had lost, and now I cried for everyone else.