Authors: David Pirie
The Night Calls (25 page)
But there was worse to come on Shad Thames itself. I was walking in the darkest part of the road between two gas lamps when suddenly a shape reared up from a doorway to my right and a hand clamped my arm. The old man had a crutch but his hand gripped like a vice. ‘You have pennies for me, sir,’ he muttered.
I was fumbling for a coin but his grip only tightened. There was a movement behind him and suddenly I saw other shapes as the glimpse of a blade flashed in the dismal light. My fear gave me strength and I managed to snatch back my arm and I ran. Fortunately nobody followed.
At last I reached the ale house, which was doing noisy business, and a few people sat drunkenly on the corner beside it. A sign on the side of the tavern pointed up the alley and read ‘Reheboth Chapel’. To this day I have never discovered exactly where or what the chapel was and sometimes wonder if it ever existed, except as a false reassurance of virtue in such a dismal place.
The alley was short but also very narrow, and soon I recognised the steps Sally had described, leading down under the light of a flickering oil lamp to a strange little maze of a building. Of course there was no sign. Years later when I used the den in a story, I called it the Bar of Gold but this was a romance for it was hardly the kind of establishment that boasted a proper title. The sailors and everyone else referred to it as Ah Sing’s or Sing’s, after a Chinese who had started it, but nobody of that name was connected to it now.
I ventured down the steps and, through the half-open door, into the darkness and silence. I was trying to take some comfort from Sally’s insistence that gentlemen from the more fashionable regions of the city had been known to make the pilgrimage here for a pipe. But in truth it was not easy to imagine, for the interior now was absolutely pitch black.
I called out with no result. Was there no one here at all? Then I heard a noise and a light became visible somewhere below me, an oil lamp which threw my own flickering shadow on the exposed wood and plaster behind me. I could hear the slosh of water from somewhere below and supposed there must be a way down to the river at the bottom of the place.
A figure shuffled up a flight of stairs. The lamp drew closer, at last reaching my level, and I glimpsed the face above it.
Of course I expected the face to be foreign, even Oriental, for Sally had indicated as much, but it was English and belonged to a small lean woman in a cotton gown which hung awkwardly over her sharp shoulders. Her skin was pale and tightly drawn.
‘You come for pipe, sir, you can,’ she said. ‘But my man is na here, he back soon.’ She spoke with an accent I have never heard before or since, an odd mixture of cockney and Chinese, for it turned out her husband was the Oriental and she had spent years in the East.
I took out some money and her eyes fairly gleamed. ‘I do not wish a pipe,’ I said, handing her a coin, ‘but I am in search of a friend who may be here.’
She took the coin eagerly. ‘A sailor, sir?’
‘No, a gentleman. English.’ She was about to shake her head but I caught just a glimpse of something else in her eyes and at once I felt a flash of hope. Of course they would hardly wish to lose a good customer so easily. Quickly I gave her another coin. ‘Please, it is very important. You will get a little more if I find him.’
I could see at once that I had been right for she fingered the coin and deliberated.
‘Business very bad. Few ships come, but we had a party of gentlemen last night, sir. All have left but one. And he is wanting another pipe soon. That is money in the bank for us.’
‘Show me,’ I said, taking out the largest coin I dared and holding it up.
That was enough. She led me along the dark, dusty passage, bearing her lamp high, until we ascended a few steps at the end of the corridor. Below I heard again a splash of water and saw another corridor running off to the right. I was only just starting to have some idea what a warren the place was as she opened a door.
The stench assaulted me at once. The fumes that wafted out of the room smelt like treacle melted with glue over an open fire and then flavoured with singeing horse hair. The one source of light was a glowing fire, but the woman held up the lamp and soon I was able to make out the interior. It was only about fourteen feet long and not much wider. There was a small table and three chairs, a few gaudy prints on the walls and a mantelshelf of Chinese ornaments.
But these were mere details for the only thing that really struck you was the bed. This was so large that there was but a yard or so of space between it and the fireplace, and it was covered not by a counterpane but by a huge breadth of fine Chinese matting with a long bolster, making enough room for three people to lie on it in a kind of horrible comfort.
That was the number before me now. The nearest was certainly foreign with thick matted hair, but his face was turned away so I could not make out much of him except that I felt sure he was a seaman. Past him lay a pale figure, tossing even as I watched, and as he showed his face to me I saw it was Martin, his eyes starting to blink in the light.
At once I turned to the woman. ‘This is the man, give me the light, I will wake him and we will be gone.’ I was already beginning to appreciate my luck in dealing with her, rather than her husband, and had no wish to wait for the man’s return. She started to protest but I handed her the coin and took the light and she muttered something and scuttled out.
Quickly I brought the light so it shone full into Martin Morland’s face. ‘Martin,’ I called. ‘Martin, we must go from here.’
He blinked more and stared. Now I saw he was covered in perspiration and he seemed frightened of me. ‘Who’s there?’ he muttered, obviously imagining he was in a dream.
‘It is Arthur. Arthur Doyle. I have come to take you home.’
‘Arthur?’ he said in wonder, and I could see he was coming awake. I seized my advantage and put the light down on the table, placing my hand under his and urging him to get up. He took a few moments but then he seemed to understand and started to do so, rubbing his eyes as he looked at me.
‘Is it very late?’ he muttered. ‘Is Sally worried?’
‘It is not merely late,’ I said. ‘You have been here a day and a night. It is Wednesday.’
I could see a wave of fear wash over him at that. He was properly awake, but now I could hear something on the floor below us. Steps. ‘Come, man, we must go now.’ I whispered. ‘This moment.’
Fortunately the other, nearest, sleeper was still utterly stupefied as Morland staggered to his feet. ‘Wednesday? How can it be Wednesday? I had taken some ale with a few people I met, we decided to come here. Oh, Arthur, for God’s sake tell me it is not Wednesday.’
‘We will have time to discuss it, but now we must go.’ And I took him by the hand and pulled him to the door.
We opened it and, fortunately as it turned out, found ourselves in total darkness. I had quite forgotten to take the light but there was no time for it now. I heard a voice somewhere below, a thick guttural voice raised in anger and another voice, the woman’s, protesting.
‘Follow me,’ I said, gripping Morland’s hand and moving as quietly as I could down the few steps. To my great relief the conversation came not from this level but down the stairs from where the woman had first appeared. I knew the light would have attracted attention at once and was glad to be rid of it. Our only hope now was to get out without being heard.
Gripping his hand with my left and using my right to grope my way back in the direction of the door, we made a little progress. I remembered the corridor was straight, and some way ahead I could make out shards of light which I took to come from the doorway to the steps leading up to the alley. Below me somewhere I heard the sound of coins flung down and suddenly there were voices again, only louder. The first was the man’s I had heard before, and now I realised it was Oriental. ‘Why we only waited for him to take a few pipes more. Why did you not call me?’
The woman’s came back shrill, but she was interrupted by a new voice, one I liked even less. It was hardly more than a whisper with a touch of the West Country, yet there was a power about it. ‘Come, the box is warm. And two’s good.’
Then I heard footsteps on the stairs.
There was no time to grope our way now – I was sure I could make out the light of the alley ahead. I pulled Morland along behind me even as I saw someone carrying a lamp coming rapidly up the staircase. In itself that told me where the door was and I reached it, pulled it open and faced the steps. ‘Now run,’ I said.
I held on to him as fast as I could as we stumbled up those steps. Morland nearly fell twice and I could hear him gasping. Thank heaven they were not so steep and we reached the top, but there was shouting behind and I felt no safer.
I pulled him on down the alley and soon we were by the Lord Lovat. Fortunately there was light and quite a number of people were milling about here. Some were seamen but there was also a group of workers from the warehouses, who must have just come off their shift, and who looked at us curiously. I was glad of their curiosity for I doubted even our charming hosts at Sing’s would take on both of us in full view of all of them. So I risked a glance back.
Sure enough two men stood in the alley, having mounted the top of the steps that led up from the den. They stared in our direction but did not look as though they meant to follow. One was Chinese with a pigtail, old but strong. The other, no doubt the owner of the West Country voice, unnerved me more. He was a large man, with big limbs, and yet his face was small, active and intelligent in a way that reminded me of a gargoyle on a church I had once visited in Southsea. And now that face was staring directly at me, not with menace, which I might have preferred, but with a small smile, the smile of a man who pats you on the back and sticks a blade between your shoulders. As I watched, he said something and turned away and I saw a mark on his neck which was long, red and ugly, a rope burn presumably for I had seen similar marks among sailors. And then the two of them went back down the steps.
Morland and I did not take a hansom. Finding one might have proved difficult in any case, but I judged that he would be far better to walk. We kept to the main thoroughfares, finally reaching London Bridge and starting to trudge back along Upper Thames Street. I could only thank heaven for my timing. If I had arrived when he had just taken a pipe, I could never have got him home without help. But, as it was, the exercise quickly returned blood to his cheeks and energy to his limbs and by the time we had travelled less than a half a mile he was walking well and talking like himself.
It transpired he had got himself in debt, had been forced to accept charitable loans from some philanthropic society and now found himself unable to repay them. Sometimes, he told me as we walked, when he thought of the happiness of his early marriage and the worry he was inflicting on his wife, he found the burden of guilt unendurable. It was at such times that he had recourse to drink and on rare occasions to the pipe. But he insisted that he would never have gone back to the den if he had not already been intoxicated and in the wrong company.
It was hardly my place to lecture him. I could understand his emotions all too well, so I merely observed that I thought Sally was better able to bear the difficulty of debt than she was to bear the agony of his absence. He agreed with this and even shook my hand vigorously, for his strength was fully returning. ‘I am so grateful, Doyle. I long to be home.’
To keep up our spirits on that long tramp I turned the talk to other matters, notably London, for Morland never tired of the subject. And it emerged he had a fund of stories about the den and its customers. ‘I will never go back there,’ he swore, ‘but I tell you, Doyle, there is a whole folklore to that dockside and you would be amazed by some of the things I have heard.’
‘But they are the fantasies of the pipe, I take it?’
‘Oh, I do not mean merely from the opium smokers, but others. Some of it is very strange.’
Of course I told him I was interested in such things and asked him to continue. Many of the tales he recounted were familiar: sea serpents and ghostly ships. But one was not and it certainly intrigued me.
‘There is talk,’ Morland said, ‘of a man down the docks, who keeps something quite horrible which gives him power. A head that has been severed.’
I nodded. ‘Shrunken heads are not unheard of.’
‘No, not shrunken,’ said Morland vehemently. ‘I thought so at first, but it is nothing like that. The thing is said to be large and it is alive. Some talk of it as a female head.’
This was certainly something different from the usual legends, and he was very animated.
‘But there is more,’ he went on. ‘The mouth has a sting in it. That is always repeated. But one touch and its victims may live for ever.’
It was an odd tale. ‘The idea of living on after death?’ I said. ‘Perhaps these stories come from the Penny Dreadfuls.
Varney the Vampire
and such like. In those, corpses are revived and live.’
Varney the Vampire
and such like. In those, corpses are revived and live.’
‘I do not think it is the same,’ said Morland. ‘It may well be folly, but it is frightening, for I have spoken to people who genuinely believe in the thing. One woman said she had seen it but absolutely refused to talk about it.’
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