Mersey Dark

by Michael Whitehead

  The voices were as unaware of his presence as the old man had been. They spoke to each other in happy, carefree voices. Even from upstairs he could smell them. Their perfume mixed with the scent of innocence, and on the part of the man, lust.

  He had fought with himself, trying to remain calm. Both sides of himself wanting to finish his prey, longing for the yearning inside to be ended. One half wanting to rush down the stairs and tear them both to pieces, the other warning that he had no idea how strong the man might be. He had paced the room, a silent internal struggle boiling in him.

  From below, the sounds changed, the scent of the people altered, they became aware of him. His pacing had warned them of his presence. He heard one of them, the man, climbing the stairs. He waited, alert and ready to attack. Hiding in the darkness of the bedroom, he watched the shadow appear in the crack of lamplight below the door.

  “Is anyone there?” the man asked from behind the closed door. The words meant nothing but the voice that carried them sounded weak and scared.

  He waited in the shadows and remained silent. The door swung silently open and the figure of the man was silhouetted in the light of a single lamp. He watched as the man stepped into the darkness, not seeing the blood on the floor until he stepped in it. He lifted his foot to see what was sticky beneath his shoe. It was his last conscious act.

  His claws tore through the man’s flesh like the knife he could no longer hold. His teeth ripped at his muscles, separating them from bone. Blood poured onto the floor, mixing with that of the old man. This one died easily, he was weak and untested, his had been a privileged life. There was nothing privileged about his death.

  It was over in moments. He left the body on the floor, knowing there was nothing to stop him now. His prey was below him and he could already feel her getting closer. She was climbing the stairs, and with every step the animal part of him growled and raised its head a little higher to smell the air.

  He could have rushed her, taken her where she stood on the stairs drenched in terror. He could have finally ended his hunger but something made him wait and let her come to him. The animal inside laughed at the weaker, human half. It understood that the fear would make her blood taste sweeter and make her flesh a little more tender.

  She stopped on the landing and he began to move toward her, letting her see him. He had hidden in the darkness for so long that it was almost a relief to allow her to lay her eyes on him.

  She stood petrified, frozen to the spot and unable even to scream. Her weakness excited and repulsed him in equal measure. This was too easy after the days of hunting and yearning. The hollow, bottomless part of his stomach roared at him to be done with her but still he waited.

  He leaned toward her, almost touching her with the whiskers that had been granted him in the changing. He drank in her scent, relishing it and sickened by it. Her breath fast and hot, she sipped in her last few gasps of air. She closed her eyes and mouthed soundless words.

  The animal in him took over, leaning back on his powerful new legs. She opened her eyes and looked at him one last time as he leapt toward her and tore at her throat. A single strong pulse soaked his face in her hot blood, but her heart must have stopped almost at once because the second wave was no more than a trickle.

  The growling hunger in him was silenced as soon as the woman died. He held her for a moment, staring into her eyes though she did not look back at him. Her gaze was locked on a photograph on a nearby table. He watched as the life left her eyes and felt the need in him diminish.

  He waited for the triumph, the ecstasy. After the days of waiting and longing it must surely come, but there was nothing but a hollow, guilty numbness. Nothing replaced the need in him, no reward for his suffering, no recompense for all he had lost.

  The animal that had dominated him since his change was silent. More than that it was gone. He was left, a diminished and helpless victim of the possessing force that had abandoned him. A twisted and ugly thing with no reason for being.

  He stared in mute horror at the blood and corpses he had created by his own twisted hands. Staggering, he moved into the bedroom, feeling the stickiness of the drying blood beneath his feet. He moved to the dresser, splashes of blood streaked the mirror but he stared through at his own face.

  The man he had once been stared back at him but the features were grotesque and twisted. He covered those eyes with hands that were now claws, feeling the sharpness of them against his hair covered skin.

  The time between then and now had been spent hiding from the world in mute agony. His mind had not returned to him, he was half a man. Words meant nothing to him, he could not speak them or understand them. If he could, what would he say? Who could he turn to in order to tell them of his agony?

  He hid from the world, sleeping and eating among his victims. He understood they could not hurt him, even if they haunted his dreams and taunted his waking hours. The remains of the old man still shared his nest, mocking him and grinning at him.

  Hunger had driven him from the house when he could no longer eat the flesh of the dead. It repulsed him. He had tried to search the house but the cupboards and packages eluded and mocked his claws. He had managed to scrape a little spilled food into his mouth from the floor but it was raw and inedible. Eventually he had been driven from that place in desperation, hoping to find anything to eat.

  Light had caught him away from home. His survival instincts had died with the host who had abandoned him. He had scuttled across the roofs and found his hiding place once more but it had been invaded. Men had come, they had seen what he had done and now they would hunt him. He had run, panicking and terrified.

  Now he cowered in the dark places, the underground places. Hunger eating at him, all hope lost. Death was close at hand now and that was good, it was right. There was no place in God’s world for a creature such as him. He was a cursed thing, a damned monstrosity.

  He looked out across the water from his hiding place. Ships marked the dawn-lit horizon. Their skeletal frames patterning the first purple light of day. Deep in his memory, he felt rather than saw a time when his father had taken him to see the ships. He had been a child, full of wonder at the places the sailors had been to, and the things they had brought to these shores.

  Now those ships would be the last thing he saw. If he had been given the choice, he might have chosen it to be so. He had a family, somewhere, but he could not let them see him like this. He would have no last goodbye, no last taste of their warmth. Instead he had this final memory, of a father who had loved him. It was so distant, so faint, but in the darkness it was enough.

  Chapter Nine

  Billy Gerrard huddled in the darkness and listened to the sobs and cries of the people around him. The cage in which he sat was larger than the biggest room in his mother’s house, with thick wooden beams that stretched from floor to ceiling.

  From around a distant corner, faint light was reaching them from a lamp. Billy had been in this cage long enough that his eyes had become accustomed to its distant hue. He knew there were others in the cage, men, women and bigger children, but nobody had spoken for hours, each trapped in their own personal hell.

  Billy did not know how long he had been trapped down here, the passing of hours or days had little meaning in the constant dark. Close by, water dripped, slow and regular. It did little to ease his suffering, instead stretching the time almost unbearably. The constant drip, drip, drip, making the minutes seem like hours and the hours an eternity.

  The three boys had dragged him from their leader, pulling him along even though Billy had put up no fight. The streets above were full of bullies, boys who made their way in the world by picking on those who were weaker than them. He was used to dealing with those kind of boys, but not like this. Down here he was powerless to stop what was happening to him.

  “They will come soon,” a girl’s voice whispered in his ear. He spun around startled, he hadn’t known there was anyone so close. He could just make out the fa
ce of a young girl, about the same age as him. She was dirty and her hair stuck up, as if it hadn’t been washed or brushed in weeks. She scratched at something on her head, absently.

  “Who will?” he asked, keeping his voice lower than a breath.

  “The men who brought us here. They have been coming for a couple of people every day for the last few days. It’s always after they’ve fed us. They’ll come soon,” she answered.

  Billy had eaten the food the men had brought. His pride had told him not to, he had wanted to show them that he didn’t need anything from them, but hunger had ever been the stronger force in a young boy’s life.

  It was little more than a few stale lumps of bread and scraps of meat. They had come, with a lamp that had blinded them after the hours in the dark, and thrown the food into the middle of the cage. They had laughed as their victims had fought for the meagre offerings. Billy had managed to grab a couple of loose scraps, keeping away from the men and bigger boys in the cage. When the lamp had been taken away he had eaten, quietly in the dark.

  “Where do they take them?” Billy asked his new friend.

  “I don’t know but sometimes there are screams and they never bring them back,” she said, her breath was warm in his ear as she spoke, so close they might be in love.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said, scared.

  “They’re lazy, they take those nearest the door,” she said, taking his hand in the dark. “Come with me.”

  He allowed her to lead him across the floor of the cage, the stone was hard on his knees as they crawled toward the back. Nobody stopped them, they were just more shadows in the darkness. She led him to the far corner of the cage, where the wooden beams were fixed into the rock. There they lay, their backs against the stone and began to talk in more whispers.

  “My name is Bird,” she whispered in his ear. Billy might have looked surprised at the unusual name but she wouldn’t have seen it in the darkness. She must have been used to people asking though, because she explained. “It’s not my real name, my name is Mary but my dad used to say I was so small I could fly away. He used to call me bird.”

  “Used to?” Billy asked.

  “He died, so did my mum, there was a fire.” Bird didn’t sound sad but Billy reached out a hand and took hers in the darkness.

  “My name is Billy. How long have you been down here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know but longer than most of these people. The scary man wasn’t happy when they brought me here, he said I was too small, but they couldn’t let me go.”

  “What are they doing?” He asked but at that moment a light began to grow brighter in the distance, a group of people were coming toward them. A number of shadows were cast on the walls that soon resolved themselves into four men carrying a lamp. They walked toward the wooden cage and placed the lamp on the floor, the two people nearest the door, a ginger haired man in a donkey jacket and a woman with long dark hair, began to back away.

  “You can’t run very far,” one of the men said to the woman. She began to cry and mutter something under her breath, Billy thought it might be a prayer.

  The speaker produced a heavy looking key and turned it in the lock. There was a loud click and the door swung inward. People began backing away as the three men who had not spoken stepped into the cage. This hid Billy and Bird from the view of the men, but also stopped them seeing what was happening. Billy craned his neck trying to see, without getting himself noticed

  As Bird had predicted, they moved to take hold of the two people who had been nearest the door. The long haired woman put up no fight, instead she cowed on the floor and cried, reminding Billy of his younger brother when he had a tantrum. One of the men took hold of her wrist and dragged her unkindly to her feet. He pulled her from the cage and stood waiting for his companions. He allowed her to drop back to the floor, still holding her wrist so that she dangled like a puppet.

  The man in the donkey jacket was bigger than he had first appeared. As the remaining two men tried to take him from the cage he swung a punch toward the nearest face. It connected and sent the man sprawling back toward the door. He recovered quickly, wiping a hand across his face, smearing his own blood. He moved back in to see his friend throwing a fist into their victims stomach.

  The man in the jacket seemed to brush off the blow. He kicked out at the jailer who had already taken one of his punches. This time there was no surprise about the attack and it didn’t land. The two captors came back at the man in unison, and after a bit of a struggle managed to get his arms pinned. He still struggled, kicking out at their shins and earning himself a backhanded swipe across the face from his bloody-faced jailer.

  They dragged him from the cage and forced him roughly to his knees. The man who had unlocked the cage had, until this point, been nothing more than a bystander as his men had fought to bring the ginger haired man under their control. Now he turned to the cage door pulled it to him and locked it, then turned to the man on his knees. He produced a billy club from inside his jacket and spun it neatly in the air. He strolled slowly backward and forward in front of the two captives, looking down at them as they kneeled before him.

  “My men are going to let go of your arms in a moment,” he said, in a thick Lancashire accent. “If I see you do anything at all, except kneel and wait for your hands to be tied, I will beat your brains to mush with this.” He spun the billy club once more for effect. The jacketed man looked up briefly then allowed his eyes to drift back toward the ground.

  The men let go of his arms, still obviously weary of the kneeling figure. They then produced lengths of thick twine and bound his hands. The woman was still crying and muttering to herself. She was pulled to her feet, without having her hands tied, evidently they were not so worried about her as they were about the man in the jacket.

  With the two prisoners subdued the leader of the gang turned back toward the people who remained in the cage. He stood a few inches from the wooden beams that made up the bulk of the cage.

  “New rule,” he began. “If anyone else fights when we come to get you, I will beat someone else to death as punishment.”

  There was a low round of muttered complaints from the captives that elicited a harsh laugh from the man.

  “Look where you are,” he said, holding his arms out. “Nobody can hear you. Shout as loud as you like about how unfair it all is.” When he finished speaking there was silence, he let it hold for a moment. “Nobody knows where you are, nobody will save you, nobody cares.”

  A boy, older than Billy but still not a man began to cry. He put his hands to his face to hide his tears but his shuddering breathes escaped, making the man with the billy club smile.

  “You’re a monster!” a woman shouted at him. She seemed to regret her words as soon as she said them but held firm as he stared at her. They locked eyes for longer than Billy could stand, he waited for the man to unlock the door and beat her. Instead he pointed a grubby finger through the wooden bars.

  “When I come back, you’re next.” With that said, he turned his back on them all and led his men and prisoners away down the tunnel, leaving them in darkness once more. The distant lamp no longer allowed them to see, after their eyes had become accustomed to the light.

  “We need to get out of here,” a man said in the darkness. Billy didn’t know who he was or what he looked like, but his voice made him sound quite old.

  “How?” a female voice asked. “We can’t break out of this cage without them hearing us.”

  “I’ve been digging around the base of this beam,” another voice said, he sounded like a much younger man than the first. “Just a little, it feels like the rock here is made of sand.”

  “Let me feel, where are you,” the first voice asked again. There was a few moment when nobody made a sound, they were all waiting for the verdict of these two men.

  “It’s sandstone, alright. It’ll take some serious digging to get us out of here, does anyone have anything to dig with?” the older ma
n asked. There was silence for a moment, broken only by someone coughing. After a time he said, “Somebody must have something, anything metal at all.”

  “I have a key,” a young sounding woman said, eventually.

  “Good pass it along,” the first voice said. There was the sound of shuffling as people moved about. Billy waited in the darkness with his eyes closed, hoping to return his eyes to their previous state so that he might see what was happening. Beside him Bird took his arm and wrapped herself around it.

  From the far side of the cage, there came the first sound of scraping. It was harsh and loud in the darkness, the man stopped it almost as soon as he began. They had no way of knowing how close the first of their captors might be and how far the sound might carry in these stone tunnels.

  “It’s too loud,” a woman said, saying what they were all thinking.

  “It is working though,” the man said. “I can feel where I’ve scraped some of the sandstone away. It’s quite damp and soft.”

  Billy’s mind drifted away to Christmas time. He had a memory of snow on the streets and people moving about the shops, buying food and other things. He remembered the smells of baking potatoes and chestnuts from fresh ovens.

  His father had been gone almost a year by then, and his mother had been deep into a bottle. His brothers and sisters hadn’t eaten in two days, and Billy was wondering if it might finally be time to knock on the workhouse door. It would mean a miserable Christmas, and the possibility of having his youngest siblings taken away from him, but it was better than starving.

  He had been walking the streets, hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. The wind had been cutting at his exposed knees, and one of his shoes had been letting in water.

  Around the back of a shop he had seen a chicken in a wooden crate. It had been left their by the butcher who owned the shop, ready for killing and stripping. The crate had been far too big for Billy to carry and would be too noisy to break open. He had looked at the bird with longing, wishing chance had given him better circumstances in which to take it.