Chapter One

Yorkshire Herald Tuesday 3rd February 1914

Increasing reports of ‘monsters’ appearing throughout the British Isles have been put down to the work of politicals, possibly Italian. The public are advised to disregard such anti-British sentiments …

Jonathan Wilberforce smiled to himself, flipping the pages of his newspaper over to make walking and reading a little easier, then shook his head. The press seemed to have nothing better to report these days than rumour and supposition – although he almost hoped that these new Gothic tales of half-men, half-demons running amok through the streets of York were true. That beautiful new rifle that Christina had bought him this past December would be just the thing for hunting, whether lions, bears or those creatures that had been dubbed ‘vampires’… he blamed that Dracula story. One man writes a slightly torrid novel featuring bloodsucking beasts with a human face and suddenly people are imagining themselves under attack from the creatures! He shook his head again at the gullibility of the lower classes. The whole event would probably turn out to be yet another escaped tiger from those circuses that constantly plied their tawdry acts around the open spaces, the brutes driven mad with hunger and confusion and forced to attack humans in order to feed.

‘Sir! Sir, please, would you help me?’

Startled out of his pleasant dream of shooting an enormous tiger ravaging the streets of his own city and being heralded a hero, Jonathan stopped walking. ‘Hello?’

‘Oh, thank the Lord!’ At the mouth of an alleyway stood a ragged but well-spoken woman, body hunched forward at the waist over a bundle which appeared child-shaped and sized. ‘Sir, please help me. My child, my daughter, she’s taken suddenly ill and I am at a loss …’

Jonathan had a sudden image of his own daughter, an infant, held thus in her mother’s arms, tiny arms and legs dangling, and his heart threw itself high in his chest. ‘What is it? What happened?’

The woman moved a step backwards, the darkness of the alley preventing him from seeing her face in true detail. Not that he was really looking; his attention was captivated by the deathly stillness of the collection of ill-assorted rags that she held.

‘It was here, sir, just here upon the ground, if you would care to look …’

‘Where? In the alley?’

‘She fell there, upon these cobbles, just slipped and lay so pale and still and now I fear she may have passed from us!’

He moved after her, two steps into the closed darkness, and the sounds and lights of the evening street he had walked down were blocked, as though by screens. Another step, following the huddled form, and he could hardly see his own feet moving over the slippery stones. One more step and he could just make out her figure bending down, dropping the bundle without care on to a pile of sacking and then straightening again to face him. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t understand what it is that you would have me do,’ he began, and then caught sight of her face. Even in this inadequate light he could see that she was beautiful, but her lips were drawn back to reveal teeth that had no right belonging in the mouth of anything human.

‘You need do nothing, sir.’ And her hand was upon his shoulder, her fingers like iron even through the fabric of his best evening coat. ‘Nothing at all.’

His final thought was of Christina and the children; dear God, let them never know what happened here …