It wasn’t quite a ‘London Particular’, but the fog that rolled in from the Thames in billows and swags, bringing the stink of effluvia with it, was clammy and dense. Combined with the snow, it spared us the foulest details of Limehouse’s mean streets, transforming the area – packed with sailors’ lodging houses, pubs, marine stores, oyster shops and shipyards – into a maze that you might encounter in a dream. The fog blurred every outline, smeared every surface, muffled and distorted every sound. It seemed to turn our surroundings into a realm of ghosts, a place where time had slipped its moorings, and echoes from the past haemorrhaged into the present.
Although the fog compromised our senses, I had to admit I was grateful for it. Not only did it keep the majority of people indoors, but it also meant Hawkins and I could go about our business shrouded in a blanket of invisibility.
That worked both ways, of course. We might have been able to use the fog to cloak ourselves, but then so could our enemies – or any other threat that might come our way.
We stumbled across the gamblers just as we were beginning to lose our bearings; just as the fog was beginning to seem less a boon and more a hindrance.
We heard what was happening a few minutes before we saw it. Drifting from the fog came the high, crazed squealing of animals, the guttural cries and low, nasty laughter of men. Reverberating through the thick, white soup that swirled around us, the sound seemed – quite literally – hellish.
I halted and grabbed the sleeve of Hawkins’ overcoat.
‘Christ! What’s that?’
Unflappable as ever, Hawkins cocked his head one way and then the other, trying to tune in.
‘Something to be avoided,’ he murmured.
The sounds rose and fell again like a bad radio signal.
‘Where’s it coming from?’
It was impossible to tell. One moment the cries seemed to swoop down from above, the next they seemed to sneak up from behind. It was as if the billows of fog formed a series of reflective surfaces that bounced noise in all directions.
We had no option but to keep moving cautiously forward, keeping close to the walls, looking out for street signs. Even so, we were still surprised when we rounded a corner and suddenly a dozen men manifested in front of us, hunched forward, facing the wall in a rough semicircle. Their voices – all at once shockingly clear – barked encouragement or brayed laughter at something which the dark wall of their bodies concealed from view, but which squealed like an animal, or several, maddened with rage and pain.
Hawkins, a few paces in front of me, came to an abrupt stop, stretching a warning arm out across the front of my body. I stopped too, the snow crunching and scuffing beneath my feet. But it was too late. We’d been spotted.
The wall of bodies broke apart as the men turned towards us. Through the gap, dimly, I saw what their attention had been focused upon. Within a makeshift arena of wooden fruit boxes, a pair of rats had been set against one another. Squealing and thrashing, they were still locked together, claws and teeth sunk in one another’s flesh. On the ground by the men’s feet coins were dull, brassy pockmarks in the snow.
‘Well, well,’ one of the gamblers said. ‘And who might you fine gentlemen be?’
‘No one who need concern you,’ Hawkins replied, his voice considerably more cultured than the man who’d asked the question. ‘We wish only to pass along this street. Return to your sport.’
‘This street?’ said the man in mock surprise. He was a bulky silhouette threaded with tendrils of white fog. ‘Why, this street is our street. And there’s a fee to be paid for setting foot upon it.’
‘Then we’ll find an alternate route,’ Hawkins said, but before we could turn away the man sprang forward, arm upraised, the dull gleam of a blade in his hand.
‘I’m afraid the damage is already done, gentlemen.’ His cronies grunted assent behind him. ‘So I suggest you hand over your purses without further ado.’
I drew my howdah from my pocket and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘And I suggest you put that knife back in your pocket, chum, unless you want to be paid in bullets.’
Immediately the crowd of men shrank back, muttering. Their leader froze, then slowly lowered the knife.
‘No need for that, shipmate,’ he said. ‘We was only joshing with yer.’
Behind him the rats, ignored now, continued to tear one another apart. I kept my gun trained on the man’s head as he put the knife away, then raised his hands in a placatory gesture.
‘As you seem to know these streets so well, perhaps you can help us find our way through them,’ I said.
The man dipped his head in a half-bow. ‘I’m sure nothing would give me greater pleasure.’
‘We’re looking for an establishment somewhere near here – the Thousand Sorrows. Have you heard of it?’
The man’s head snapped up. His cronies froze, as if playing Statues.
‘I can see you have,’ I murmured.
‘Tell us what you know of the place,’ ordered Hawkins. ‘Quickly now!’
Despite Hawkins’ tone the knifeman chose his words carefully. ‘I’m not familiar with the establishment in person, you understand, and I have no interest in the business what’s conducted there – but if it’s the pleasures of the pipe you’re after I’d advise you to seek them under a different roof.’
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked. ‘What have you heard about the Thousand Sorrows?’
‘Stories. Rumours. No more than that.’
‘What stories?’
I could almost hear the man’s grim smile in his reply. ‘Stories that would make your flesh creep, shipmate. Stories that would turn your hair white.’
‘Don’t be obtuse, man,’ snapped Hawkins. ‘Give us particulars.’
The knifeman paused. Then he said, ‘Neither I nor the good fellows you see here would go within a mile of that place at night, and we’re not what you would call lily-livered. We shrink from no man, but it’s said there’s more than men walk the streets around the Thousand Sorrows after dark. People I know – reliable people – have heard things, seen things.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘As for the hearing – clanks and groans and creaks; voices speaking in ways that ain’t human. And as for the seeing – nightmares come to life: machines that walk; rats as big as horses; men that turn into shadows; a beast that moves from roof to roof, stalking its prey.’
I looked at Hawkins, who returned my gaze steadily. We were definitely on the right track.
‘We’ll take our chances,’ I said. ‘So if you’ll just point us in the right direction, we’ll leave you to your amusements.’
The knifeman shrugged, as if to say, It’s your funeral, then gave me the information I asked for. I thanked him curtly, then Hawkins and I went on our way, though I kept my gun trained on the dark, motionless shapes of the gamblers until the fog had swallowed them up. Bit by bit the shrieks of the rats grew fainter. We were about to turn the corner at the end of the street when the knifeman’s parting shot drifted out of the fog. Now he was no longer staring down the barrel of my gun his voice was again full of bravado.
‘May your God go with you, gentlemen, ’cos it’s a stone-cold certainty you’ll bleedin’ well need him before this night is out.’
His cackling laughter, and that of the other men, pursued us for the next twenty paces before dwindling to silence. When the only sound was again the soft crunch of our footsteps in the snow, I stopped and turned to Hawkins.
‘I really think I should go on alone. Like I said earlier, I have a feeling the Wolves want me alive for some reason – if they didn’t they’d have killed me by now. But I can’t say the same about you.’
Hawkins’ raised eyebrow was like a teacher’s response to a tiresome pupil.
‘Forgive my insubordination, sir, but the only way you’ll force me to leave your side would be if you were to shoot me.’
I was touched by his loyalty, but frustrated too.
‘That’s not fair, Hawkins. I don’t want your death on my conscience.’
Hawkins pursed his lips – another teacherly expression.
‘I believe I’m currently outside the contracted hours of my employment, am I not, sir?’
I sighed. ‘Yes you are.’
‘In that case, there is no reason why your conscience should be troubled. I am a responsible adult, and am accompanying you of my own free will. If I choose to place myself in danger, surely it is my own concern?’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ I said. ‘You’re as bad as Clover.’
The twitch of a smile appeared briefly on Hawkins’ beaky-nosed face.
‘Thank you, sir. I shall take that as a compliment.’
It had been a hell of a struggle getting Clover to stay behind. The only way I’d been able to dissuade her from coming with us was by convincing her that after what had happened that night there was no way we should leave Hope with only Mrs Peake and the girls to protect her.
Clover hadn’t been happy, but she had seen the logic of my argument. As we’d left the house she’d put her hands on my shoulders, thrust her face into mine and said fiercely, ‘Don’t go getting yourself killed, you prat. If you do I’ll never speak to you again.’
The knifeman’s directions proved accurate, and twenty minutes after leaving him and his cronies behind us in the fog, Hawkins and I were standing across the street from what I guessed was the Thousand Sorrows. It was exactly as the knifeman had described it: the last house on the left at the end of a narrow dead-end street, opposite a Chinese restaurant with a lantern-festooned display window, whose brick facade had been painted white and emblazoned with red Chinese characters beside a black and gold dragon design.
It was the gaudiness of the restaurant – now closed and dark – which drew the attention. The small doorway in the scabrous brick wall on the opposite side of the street, illuminated by a single yellow lantern, was hardly noticeable by comparison. There was no sign above the door, and no number painted on the brickwork. Hawkins and I scrunched up to it through the snow. Even up close it was impossible to tell what colour the door was in the foggy darkness: grey maybe, or muddy brown.
Standing there made me think of the first time I’d stood in front of the door of Incognito, the pole-dancing club which Clover had owned in Soho before the Wolves of London had burned it down. Remembering what the knifeman had told us, I looked up, half expecting to glimpse a vast dark shape leaping silently from one rooftop to another.
But there was nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. The fog was like soundproofing, the silence so dense that the only sounds I could hear were internal: the crackle of my neck muscles when I turned my head, the faint rush of blood in my ears. Reluctant to break the silence, I looked at Hawkins and raised my eyebrows in an unspoken question: ready?
He nodded and I tapped on the door.
It opened immediately, as if whoever was on the other side had been expecting my knock. A hollow-cheeked Chinese man in his seventies or eighties peered out of the three-inch gap between door and frame, his thin, drooping moustache giving him a mournful expression. He wore a traditional Chinese-style shirt in blue silk over a pair of black silk trousers and slippers, a black satin beanie hat perched on his head. I wondered if he’d adopted the clichéd appearance purely for the benefit of the punters who came here. His gaze fixed on me, but he said nothing. Was he waiting for a password?
‘We’re looking for the Dark Man,’ I said.
There was no flicker of reaction on the Chinese man’s face, but after a moment he stepped back, pulling the door open behind him. Was he letting us in because I’d spoken the magic words, or because he’d assessed us and found us acceptable?
He turned and ambled away along a narrow, dimly lit corridor, whose walls, floor and ceiling were painted black. It was almost as if he’d forgotten about us, or as if, by opening the door, he’d done his job and couldn’t care less what happened next. I wondered what he’d do if we didn’t follow him, though as the only alternative was to hang around in the hallway, that wasn’t really much of an option. At the end of the corridor was a flimsy barrier, made of thin cloth or perhaps even paper, behind which burned a red light. As we followed the Chinese man, who I wasn’t surprised to see had a tightly knotted pigtail dangling down his back, the impression was of being inside a vast throat.
The smell of opium, sweet and pungent, grew stronger as we approached what I could now see was a thin curtain of white cloth. When the Chinese man pushed the curtain aside, his shirt turning a shimmering purple as he was bathed in red light, a smoky haze drifted out towards us.
I didn’t want to stick around long if we could help it, didn’t want to breathe in too much opium smoke and become too lethargic to do what we’d come here to do. Grabbing the flimsy cloth barrier as it swung back into place behind the Chinese man, I ducked into the next room, my hand reaching for the howdah in my pocket as I looked around.
The room was larger than I’d expected, and my initial impression was of people moving and breathing and moaning around me. Apart from the Chinese man, no one was standing up. They were lying on a haphazard arrangement of thin, low, cot-like beds, separated by diaphanous and slightly ragged drapes, which gave the place the look of a makeshift hospital ward – although lit like a bordello.
Almost at once I realised two things: one was that the occupants of the beds offered no immediate threat, and two was that they were moaning not in pain but satisfaction. My gun hand drifted to my side as I saw that each of them was either smoking an opium pipe or had one on a tray of paraphernalia beside them. Most of the men – all of whom, although they were in their shirtsleeves, looked reasonably well-to-do – were out of it, their eyes glazed, their mouths half open, though a couple were propped up by cushions, groggily drinking black tea out of delicate china cups.
The Chinese man halted beside an unoccupied bed and turned to face us. He looked at me and indicated the bed, and although he didn’t speak the gesture was obvious: you take this one.
I stepped towards him, shaking my head, my hand slipping inside my overcoat once more. I wasn’t reaching for my howdah this time, but my wallet. I opened it and took out a ten-pound note. The Chinese man looked at the money, his thin dark eyebrows coming together in a frown.
Aware that Hawkins was standing behind me, watching my back, I said, ‘We don’t want opium. We want information.’
The Chinese man’s face hardened. Did he understand me or was he just reacting to my refusal to take the bed? I held the money out to him. He stared at it, but didn’t reach for it.
‘We’re looking for the Dark Man,’ I said. ‘The Society of Blood. You understand?’
No reaction, though I sensed hostility coming off him in waves. The opium eaters around us seemed oblivious. Even the tea drinkers just stared into space, locked in their own worlds.
‘Sir,’ Hawkins murmured, and gave my left elbow a tap to indicate I should turn that way. When I did I saw that two more Chinese men, one in red, the other in black, had appeared from behind a set of filmy, overlapping drapes in a shadowy area on the far side of the room. They carried no weapons – in fact, they had their hands crossed almost demurely in front of them – but from the way they stood, legs apart like policemen, and the intensity with which they regarded us, their intentions were clear.
I held up both hands, the big white ten-pound note still clutched in my right like a flag of surrender.
‘We don’t want trouble. We just want to know where we can find the Dark Man. I can pay you for the information. Even more than this, if you like.’
I extended the note towards the man in the blue shirt, but he scowled and wafted his hands at me: go, go.
As if my gesture had been provocative, the two men on the far side of the room began to move towards us, weaving almost casually between the maze of beds.
I briefly considered drawing my howdah, forcing them to talk to me – but I rejected the idea just as quickly. I had no argument with these men. They weren’t my enemies. I wasn’t even sure whether they understood what I was here for. Maybe they just thought I was a troublemaker who needed ejecting as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘all right.’ I held out my palms to the two men and wondered whether it was too late to take the empty bed that the Chinese man had offered me, whether sticking around and indulging in the ‘pipe of poppy’ was the price I ought to pay for getting what I wanted.
No. Desperate as I was to get Kate back, I wasn’t prepared to put myself in such a vulnerable position. I was already feeling lightheaded. If I fell under the spell of the opium who knows where I’d end up? Okay, so maybe by coming here I was willingly, even foolishly, walking into the lions’ den, but at least I was doing it with my wits about me, and I wanted things to stay that way.
Hawkins was obviously thinking along similar lines.
‘I believe our wisest course of action might be to make a dignified exit, sir.’
I nodded and we backed away, me with my hands still raised. The Chinese men came to a halt, their arms folded; they clearly wanted nothing more than for us to leave with as little fuss as possible.
I wondered what our next move should be. We’d learned nothing here. Despite looking promising, it seemed this lead might now peter out like all the others I’d followed in the past three months. I felt the familiar despair creeping over me. I thought about making one last plea, calling out to the room in general, asking whether anyone had heard of the Dark Man or the Society of Blood. I was still thinking about it when I felt my trouser leg snag on something. I looked down, expecting to see a stray jag of wood or metal sticking out of some low item of furniture – but instead I saw a hand had snaked out from the bed I was passing and had clutched the material of my left trouser leg just above the knee.
The hand was attached to an arm, which belonged to a sweaty-haired man with a plump, shiny face. The man was staring at me avidly with bloodshot eyes. Beads of sweat glittered in his rust-coloured moustache.
‘Outside. Ten minutes,’ he hissed.
Before I could reply, he released my trouser leg and rolled away from me. Was he aware of what he had said or had it been the drugs talking? There was only one way to find out.
Hawkins and I were standing in the doorway of the Chinese restaurant, stamping our feet against the cold, when the door of the Thousand Sorrows opened ten minutes later. The top-hatted figure that emerged, blurred by the fog, was clothed entirely in black: astrakhan coat, sharply creased trousers, boots with spats. Once the door had closed behind him, he paused to light a cigarette with his black-gloved hands and then he looked around. It was only when we moved out of the shadows of the restaurant doorway that he spotted us. He stiffened warily, then relaxed.
‘Fifty pounds,’ he said. His voice was husky, but with a clipped, upper-class accent.
Sometimes you only need a moment to form an opinion about someone. The instant this man spoke I detected a sneering arrogance about him, an untrustworthiness, which made my skin crawl. It was there not only in his voice, but in his glittering bloodshot eyes, in his plump whiskery cheeks, in the curve of his fleshy lips. It was there in his bearing – the set of his shoulders, the position of his feet, the lazy, almost dismissive way he held his cigarette.
‘What do you know?’ I asked.
He waggled his fingers. ‘The money first.’
I paused, held his gaze. He looked raddled with over-indulgence, his face pockmarked and pouchy. I’d have guessed him to be an unhealthy forty, but he might have been even younger than that.
‘How do I know you won’t run off with it?’ I said – a joke but with a hard edge.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Please! Do I look like a common footpad?’
‘More to the point, how can we be sure the information you possess is worth such an amount?’ Hawkins asked.
His tone was mild, courteous, but I’d known Hawkins long enough to detect the undercurrent of distaste in his voice. I wondered if the man could detect it too. He appraised Hawkins with guarded disdain.
‘You’re looking for the Society of Blood, are you not?’
‘What do you know of them?’ I asked.
The man smiled. Instead of improving his appearance it made him look even more repellent.
‘I know where they are. I can take you to them.’
‘If this is true, Mr…’
‘No names,’ said the man. ‘It’s less complicated that way.’
‘All right. That suits me very well.’
The man took a drag of his cigarette and blew smoke out the side of his mouth.
‘So? Do we have a deal?’
‘Perhaps. But first answer me this: how do you know about the Society? Are you one of their number?’
The man barked a contemptuous laugh. ‘If I was, do you think I’d be speaking to you?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Hawkins. ‘If the Society wished to bait a hook with a wriggling maggot.’
The man glared at Hawkins, then at me. ‘I’m not sure I like your retainer’s tone.’
I shrugged. ‘It was just a turn of phrase. I’m sure he meant nothing by it.’
Hawkins said nothing.
The man scowled. Now he looked like the sulky, pouting schoolboy he must once have been.
‘If you don’t trust me, then don’t accept my offer. I really couldn’t care less. It means little to me one way or the other.’
‘It means fifty pounds to you,’ Hawkins said drily.
‘Fifty pounds?’ The man snorted. ‘Loose change to a man in my position.’
But the way his gaze flickered away belied his words.
My guess was that he was a young man from a good family who had fallen into bad company, or perhaps simply bad habits, and was now struggling to make ends meet. Perhaps he’d been disinherited by a disappointed father. Or maybe he’d already inherited the family fortune, and then had promptly pissed it away on opium, gambling, women and booze. There might already be no way back for him; he might be hopelessly addicted, or crippled by debt, or riddled with syphilis – or all three. I’d seen desperation in that eye flicker; desperation and hopelessness. Our new friend might claim that fifty pounds was nothing but loose change, but I doubted that very much. What I reckoned was that, to him, fifty pounds constituted a much-needed lifeline.
Did that make him less or more trustworthy, though? Impossible to say. It certainly made him someone to be wary of – but I’d already decided that about him anyway.
‘Let’s stop fannying about, shall we?’ I said and handed him thirty pounds.
He took it from me, but curled his lip. ‘What’s this? I said fifty.’
‘You get the other twenty when we reach our destination.’
He looked about to argue, but then with a childish ‘hmpf’ he turned and stomped away. In the fog and the snow, which was beginning to swirl lazily around us again, his back view made me think of old Jack the Ripper movies: the looming, top-hatted silhouette.
For the next ten minutes no one spoke. Our nameless guide trudged ahead of us through the deepening snow and Hawkins and I followed. I tried to keep track of where we were, but the snow, coming down more thickly with each passing second, blew in our faces, obscuring our surroundings and making it impossible to memorise the route.
After a while, beneath the polystyrene creak of our feet in the freshly fallen snow and the whistling moan of the wind, I started to hear another sound, faint at first but gradually getting louder. Feeling uneasy, I strained my ears. Was it breathing? The deep, liquid respiration of something vast and inhuman?
Then I almost laughed out loud. Of course not; it was water. Waves slapping gently against what I guessed was a harbour wall. Which meant we were close to the Thames.
Over the next couple of minutes the gradual thickening of the fog, rolling in with the chill from the river, confirmed that fact, as did the garbage, oil and briny mud stink of the river itself.
The ground beneath our feet changed, the pavements giving way to cobbles, the bumpiness of which I could feel beneath their covering of snow. I looked around uneasily, but could make out even less of my surroundings now than ever. Even so, I got the impression the buildings around us were vast and, at this time of night, unoccupied. I guessed they must be factories or warehouses. One of them we trudged past seemed to possess a huge set of gates barring its entrance; another stank of fish.
We passed through a stone tunnel beneath a bridge or viaduct, the slimy walls, half obscured by fog, giving us a couple of minutes’ shelter from the snow. When we emerged from the other end the slapping of waves and the stink of the Thames ambushed us. But despite being close to the river, we still couldn’t see it. Ahead of us was simply a solid wall of fog, across which swirling snow twitched and flickered like static.
Halfway between us and the river our guide came to a halt and started peering about. There was a crust of snow on his shoulders and the brim of his top hat.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
He answered without looking at me. ‘Blyth’s Wharf.’
I was none the wiser. This wasn’t an area of London I knew well, not even in my own time.
‘For what purpose?’
He turned and strode back towards me, holding out his hand.
‘The rest of my money, if you please.’
I scoffed at him. ‘For what? You’ve brought us to the middle of nowhere. You said you’d lead us to the Society of Blood. So where are they? In a secret base beneath the Thames?’
‘They’re here,’ he said. ‘This is where they… congregate.’ He glanced about nervously.
‘Have a caution, sir,’ Hawkins said, making no attempt to lower his voice. ‘I smell a rat.’
Agitated now, the man pointed to his left.
‘Twenty paces that way you will come upon a docking bay, from which a ramp ascends to a manufacturing warehouse. Ascend that ramp and you will find what you are looking for.’
I shook my head, as much in pity as denial.
‘You expect us to believe that?’
‘It’s true!’
‘Then lead the way.’
Our guide looked not just nervous now, but scared.
‘Why should I? I have no wish to become involved in your dispute.’
‘Who said anything about a dispute? For all you know, we and the Society are the best of friends.’
‘Clearly he knows we are not,’ Hawkins said conversationally, then he turned to fix the man with one of his penetrating stares. ‘How much did they pay you to bring us here?’
A few moments ago Hawkins had said he smelt a rat; now the man looked like a trapped one. His eyes darted about as if looking for an escape route. Then he changed tactics, gave a sudden cringing smile.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’
Hawkins sighed. ‘Then the opium must have addled your brain. Did you believe we didn’t mark you as a wolf in the fold from the outset? And know that you were leading us into a trap?’
For a moment our guide seemed caught out; then he began to bluster.
‘If you suspected a trap, why did you follow so willingly?’
‘Because sometimes,’ I said, ‘to get what you want you have to take risks.’
I gave him the biggest, craziest grin I could muster. I’m a tall, thin, moody-looking bloke, and I’ve been told in the past that when I flash my teeth in a smile it can sometimes be alarming. The man standing in front of us certainly seemed to think it was. He took a couple of stumbling steps back, his expression suggesting it was starting to dawn on him that maybe he was out of his depth.
‘You’re mad,’ he muttered. ‘Stark staring mad. I want no further part in this.’ He rooted in his pocket, pulled out the three ten pound notes I’d given him and tossed them on the snowy ground. ‘Keep your money. I don’t want it. I don’t n—’
The attack came without warning. It was so brutal, so swift, it was nothing but a blur.
What I saw – what I thought I saw – was a huge black tentacle, attached to something above and behind us, come lashing out of the murky sky with the speed and ferocity of a whip. It must have been ten or fifteen metres long, and thick too – thicker than a man; too thick for my hands to have met if I’d wrapped my arms around it. Although I only caught a glimpse of it, I got the impression the tentacle was tipped by a flat diamond-shaped appendage edged with long, curved spines. Before our guide could finish what he was saying, even before he could scream or widen his eyes in alarm, the razored appendage had sliced him clean through.
The top half of his body, his hat still attached to his head, was scooped into the air by the force of the blow and flung to one side, trailing a streamer of blood and innards and the tattered remains of the astrakhan coat.
Even after the fog had swallowed the top half of the body, the lower half, the legs, remained standing for a moment, as if startled to find themselves left behind. Then they folded at the knees and collapsed like a faulty deckchair, a bright red froth of blood and guts spilling from the waist and fanning out across the virgin white snow.
I was so stunned by the abrupt, savage death of a man I’d been speaking to only a moment before, that for maybe ten seconds I couldn’t move, think, even breathe. All I could do was gape at the grotesque sight in front of me while my mind replayed what I’d just seen. If I’d had to defend myself at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I was like a bird I’d once seen on a garden wall with a cat stalking towards it, so immobilised by terror it looked like it had been frozen into place.
I don’t remember seeing the tentacle retract; don’t remember anything else until Hawkins touched my arm and said, ‘Sir.’
It was his touch and his voice that snapped me back to myself. I turned my head to blink at him, and that was when I heard them.
All at once I realised they were all around us, closing in, clicking and whirring and buzzing, slithering and scuttling and blowing out steam.
I whirled, looking around, but I couldn’t see them in the fog and the snow, not clearly anyway. They were smears of approaching darkness, suggestions of nightmarish forms. They were coming from all directions; there was no escape.
Surely, though, this was what I’d wanted? To find the Wolves, confront them? It’s ironic, isn’t it? I spend all my time and energy trying to track my enemies down, and when I do finally manage it my shock and horror kicks in, and my only instinct is to turn tail and run. Maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t seen a man killed in front of me as casually as anyone else might kill a fly. Or maybe it’s just human nature to blunder blindly into a potentially lethal situation and not think about the possible consequences until it’s too late.
Although I’d previously convinced myself that, for whatever reason, the Wolves, or the Society, or whatever they called themselves, wanted me alive, right now, with the guts of a dead man steaming in the snow at my feet and monsters coming at me out of the fog, that theory seemed as flimsy as tissue paper.
It was for this reason that instead of waiting to confront the Wolves I grabbed Hawkins’ sleeve and screamed, ‘Run!’ It was for this reason too that I ran in the only direction it was possible to run – towards the impenetrable blanket of fog on the far side of the quay, from beyond which came the rhythmic slap of water against stone.
With Hawkins beside me, I ran as fast as I could, until suddenly, sickeningly, the ground was no longer beneath my feet. Arms and legs pedalling frantically, I felt myself plunging into fog and blackness. If I hadn’t known primal terror before that moment, I knew it then: the sense of being out of control, of feeling I might fall forever – or worse, that my fall might be broken not by water, but by stone or steel, by something that might smash and rip my body apart.
But my fall wasn’t broken; it was simply cancelled, mid-plunge. I was plucked from the air like a cricket ball – though at first, when the vine-like tentacles curled around my chest and limbs like a dozen writhing fingers, I thought it was the tightness and coldness of my own fear; thought it was my nerves, my thoughts, my consciousness, shrivelling inwards, retreating into themselves, bracing themselves for impact, for pain.
Then I was rising, going backwards, and I realised with a new horror that something – presumably the same monstrous creature that had killed our guide – had snatched me from the sky, and I was now being pulled back into the nightmare.
However much I writhed and screamed, there was no escape. I had been captured by the Wolves of London, by the Society of Blood, and nothing and no one could save me.
Even as I was being reeled in, I spared a thought for Hawkins, my friend and companion – and faintly (although it might have been my imagination) I heard a distant splash. Then the air was rushing past me with such speed and force I couldn’t breathe. And the next thing I knew I was lying on the hard, cold, wet ground, and the tentacles around me were loosening, retracting, snaking away.
So they did want me alive.
But for what?
I was aware of movement around me. Sound. I had a vague, horrifying sense of being in the middle of a web as monstrous creatures scuttled around me. Then my jangling senses started to stabilise. I realised snow was falling into my eyes. I blinked it away and looked up.
A face loomed over me. Long and white, puckered with scar tissue, its hair burned away. Its eyes were glass discs that seemed to reflect nothing but fog. Its lipless mouth was wide and red and wet.
Tallarian.
The doctor who’d given Hope her metal arm; who’d created a menagerie of sickening horrors in his basement. As a man he’d held me captive three months ago, until, with Hawkins’ help, I’d managed to overcome him. And as a part man, part machine – perhaps a product of his own hideous experiments – I’d encountered him twice in the future, once in Incognito, and once in Queens Road Cemetery, when Benny Magee had betrayed me and Frank Martin had rescued me from his clutches.
This was a different Tallarian again now, though. This was a Tallarian who was partway between the two. He’d clearly been rescued from the fire that had destroyed his laboratory, although not without cost.
We can rebuild him, I thought crazily. We have the technology.
I heard a ratcheting whirr and something moved into my field of vision. It bisected Tallarian’s ruin of a face as he held it up to show me.
I realised it was one of his fingers, from the tip of which projected a syringe full of some yellowy-orange liquid.
‘You see what I’ve become, thanks to you?’ he said, a hissing buzz underpinning his voice, as though it was a recording on an answerphone.
‘Fuck you,’ I said – or tried to. I’m not sure the words actually left my mouth.
Before I could say it again I felt a sharp, quick pain in the side of my neck, and that was the last I knew for a while.