by J. Thorn
As I stood there, all the memories of the place flooded through my mind, the times I spent serving drinks to familiar faces, playing cards out in the den at the back, and all the work me and Joe put into cleaning the place up at the beginning. I stood wondering to myself where Joe had wandered off to, and whether one day he would come walking back along the street.
Also I wondered what would become of the place now. There was no one to live in it, no one to keep the place from falling apart, and no one owned it apart from Joe. The Caff would probably sit empty for years, at least until someone discovered that there was no owner.
As I walked back along Casey Street, I passed the swimming pool. The alleyway along the side of the vast building, called Tinkers alley by the local folks, was, as ever, littered with refuse that was spilling over from the bins. Perched intermittently against the walls were the cardboard huts that had always been there, an ever-changing and shifting village of makeshift dens that the homeless of Gallowshill called home. About halfway down the track a group of ashen faced men stood over a metal bin, sparks of flame creeping out of the holes and licking up the inside as they fed the fire with bits of rubbish and wood. They were drinking from dirty bottles, probably some nasty homemade brew or industrial cleaner, and leaning on each other, blabbering their usual mindless drivel and arguing with no one in particular.
I had seen this scene dozens of times, and although the occupants of the alleyway changed over the years as new people drifted around and older residents died, the place always had the same desperate squalor. How close had I come to becoming one of those poor fools? How near had I already been a few times in my life to drowning myself in self-pity and foul-smelling liquids, just to dull the senses and ease the pain?
As I stood there in the middle of the road, gawking at the ugly scene before me, I noticed something else, something out of place, and it was only because one of the tramps hobbled over and stumbled to sit down on the broken wall that ran along the back of the swimming pool building, near the maintenance entrance, that I noticed a previously invisible part of the picture, that I noticed him.
At first I thought it was merely a pile of cloth, maybe a sack of rubbish that had gone unnoticed by the denizens of the alleyway.
Then I saw the blood.
Lying in the dirt, barely ten yards behind the burning barrel, where the tramps still continued their raucous laughing and drinking, was a body, and there was something strange about it that I couldn’t yet place, something familiar enough that I couldn’t just walk away, believing it to be just the latest death in the alleyway. The feeling was enough to make me change my direction and walk, for the first time, down into the nastiest and most dangerous lane in Gallowshill.
I made my way slowly along the track, 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 erupting 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 off 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 from 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 should 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 his 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 his 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 disappeared 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 minutes 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 from 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 knife 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 reason. 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 room 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.
But after a few moments, the tears were no longer born of pain and regret, they were tears of hopeful joy, born from the new knowledge I had gained speaking to the stranger.
You see, I hadn’t just found out who he was that last night on Casey Street, not in the least. The questions had gone on for hours after I brought him back that drink, and another a little later on, a double of whiskey that I found in the back of Joe’s office, with a pour of water from the tap.
He had coughed as he threw the whole drink back, and then I began to ask the real questions, the on
es that would give me answers I really craved, the ones that could change my life.
The stranger, Andre, had sat there on that bed, his wounds gradually vanishing before my eyes to become yet more scars on his already ruined skin, and as the night slowly passed, he listened patiently to everything that I cared to pour out at him, and he answered everything I asked him as best he could.
Every question.
He answered them all.
"There are other places aren't there? Places other than this world?"
"Yes, there are many."
"Is that where you followed Nua'lath, to another place?"
"Yes, I followed him to another world. I have followed him to many places."
"How do you go to those places? How could I go to those places?"
"You are a mortal, my friend. You could not open the way to other places without help. I am not one of your kind."
"You're not human?"
"I was human once, but not now."
"I don't understand."
"I said that you probably wouldn't. Let us just say that I was once like you, a mortal human, but I have changed. That is all I am willing to answer about this."
"Understood."
"My wife. She disappeared, just like that, years ago, right in front of my eyes. How could such a thing come to be?"
"Did she step through something visible? Was there a change in the air around her?"
"No, nothing, she just vanished."
"Then I would say that she did not travel to another place. I would guess that someone had a hand in her disappearance. Without more detail, I cannot help. But if you wish to find her, I would first try to discover who would want to teleport her away from you."
"Teleport?"
"It is a means of travelling from one place to another, instantly."
"But, I don't know anyone who would want to do that."
"Then you may have to accept that you might never discover this."
"This creature, Nua'lath. Could he have had something to do with it?"
"Very doubtful. Nua'lath would have very little interest in removing one individual. His activities are on a much grander scale."
