by Mark Morris
Within seconds we were completely enshrouded by swirling, pus-yellow fog. No, not fog, I suddenly thought. Smog. Back in London’s industrial past the combination of smoke from coke-based fuels and factories belching out pollution had meant the city was often coated in blankets of smog so thick and pungent they became known as pea-soupers. They were a thing of the past now, so how come Clover and I were currently stuck in the middle of one? Unless this was something different – a chemical attack perhaps, like the one on the Tokyo subway back in the nineties.
I touched the heart in my pocket, willing it to throw a protective bubble around us or something, but it was cold, unresponsive. Holding my breath, I zipped up the hoodie under my jacket all the way to the top and pulled the front of the collar over my nose and mouth, holding it in place with one hand. It helped a bit, enough to allow me to breathe without choking my guts out. I blinked my streaming eyes, then reached for Clover’s hand in the murk. Behind her hazy form was a dark shadow, a shape. I thought it was the wall, or… something jutting from the wall. But then the shadow loomed towards us, became more defined, and I realised it was a man.
My first thought, that it was a fellow passenger, was quickly dispelled as the man came into blurry focus. Dressed in a long grey coat, checked waistcoat, knotted neckerchief and a bowler hat that looked as if it had been trampled underfoot then punched back into shape, he was not just dirty or grubby, but filthy. His hair jabbed from beneath the rim of his hat like matted, mud-clogged straw, and dirt was ingrained into the many creases and scars of his lumpy, pustule-pocked face. One of his eyes was milky and bloodshot, and between his thick, chapped lips I saw a mouthful of teeth so black and rotten it looked as though shards of coal had been embedded in his gums.
I took in these details in a split second, and then my attention was diverted to the hand he was raising towards me. It was as filthy as his face, smeared with dirt, black grime clogging his fingernails. However it was not the hand itself that concerned me, but the tarnished, jagged-bladed knife jutting from it. The man grinned, revealing even more of his blackened teeth, and then before I could react, he stepped smartly up behind Clover and slashed the blade savagely across her throat.
Her eyes and mouth gaped in horrified disbelief as every molecule in my body clenched in a sick, freezing spasm of shock. I saw the flesh of her throat part in a ragged tear and blood gushed out of her, the arterial spray so violent that it hit my chest like a hot, fierce punch. Her eyes rolled up and her head lolled backwards, and suddenly she was all blood – her entire front, her hands, were red with it. I was covered in it too, and so was the floor. It splashed against my boots and spread out in all directions, creeping and growing like something alive.
As Clover’s body went limp and her feet began to kick and jitter, the man laughed, wrapped an arm around her waist and dragged her into the smog. Her jerking heels scraped through the blood, briefly forming white runnels in it, which were quickly filled as the edges oozed back together like the lips of a healing wound.
It was only now – far too late – that shock loosened its grip on me. Desperately hoping there was still time to save Clover, whilst knowing in my heart that there wasn’t, I croaked, ‘Hey!’ and sprang forward. Though the cut-throat and his victim were receding rapidly into the murk, I could still discern them as a dark, diminishing blur. As I plunged forward in pursuit, however, another shape loomed out of the smog to my left. I was so surprised that I skidded on Clover’s blood and my right foot shot from under me. Caught off-balance, I snatched no more than a glimpse of yet another filthy man – this one taller and thinner, and dressed in a long, ragged blue coat that looked vaguely military – before he stepped forward, exuding a rancid, pig-like stench, and shoved me hard in the chest.
This time both feet shot from under me and I crashed on to my back with enough impact to knock the breath from my body. For a moment the pain was so excruciating I felt sure I’d broken my neck or spine, and could only lie there, my mouth open in soundless agony. My brain was raging at me to move, to shake off the pain and leap up in pursuit of Clover’s attacker, but it was another five or ten seconds before I was finally able to rise, groaning, up on to an elbow and then, slowly and painfully, to my feet.
Yellow smog still hung heavily around me, like wet sheets on a washing line. Stifling a cough, I tried to swipe it aside in an effort to see more clearly, but it was no use; there was neither sight nor sound of the two men. I stumbled in the direction that Clover’s attacker had disappeared, still stunned by what I had seen, my mind refusing to relinquish the belief that she was not yet beyond saving. After only a few steps, however, I encountered the tiled wall of the tube station, and at the same time the smog started to disperse. Within moments I could see the dark shapes of people standing further down the platform, their collective stance and rising chatter suggesting they were oblivious to what had occurred.
It wasn’t only despair that surged through me this time, but also rage. ‘No!’ I screamed, scrabbling in my pocket and pulling out the heart. I glared at it, clenching it so tightly that my knuckles turned white. ‘Fucking save her!’
The heart simply sat there, stubborn and smug. ‘Save her! Fucking save her!’ I yelled again, half-aware of heads turning in my direction, of a few nervous giggles, of a partly amused ‘You all right there, mate?’
Drawing back my arm, I smashed the heart against the wall, half-hoping it would drill clean through into whatever dimension the cut-throat had dragged Clover. Aside from the jarring impact that shuddered along the bone all the way up to my elbow, however, all that happened was that I dented the tile. Grimly I drew back my aching arm and smashed the heart against the wall again. And then again. And again.
It was the fifth impact that did it. No sooner had the heart connected with the now chipped and cracked wall than the cold black stone in my hand seemed to detonate, engulfing me in a blaze of blinding white light. I had once seen a TV documentary in which a war photographer had described the experience of stepping on a land mine. It had sounded something like this: an almost out-of-body experience of light and heat and weightlessness. I was vaguely aware of my head snapping back, my spine bending like a bow, my limbs going rigid. I opened my eyes and mouth wide as heart-energy poured out of me.
And then I was floating. Spinning. Falling.
I was not aware of losing consciousness, but the sudden transition from tumbling through space to bone-jarring pain was like falling out of bed after a dream about flying. For the second time in minutes I found myself on my back, though this time I was staring up into a night sky pin-pricked with stars. The ground beneath me was hard and bumpy (cobblestones?) and wet; icy liquid was oozing through my clothes and spreading across the flinching skin of my back and buttocks. And there was an awful smell. A stench. Raw sewage and something else. Something rank, animalistic.
My gorge rose yet again and I sat up, swallowing, willing my stomach to settle. No such luck, and for so long that I began to think it might never stop, I retched helplessly, my empty stomach attempting to turn itself inside out as it tried to expel contents that had already been expelled earlier that evening.
By the time my stomach had stopped convulsing I felt utterly wretched – weak, dizzy, my flesh tingling and sensitive to the touch, my innards full of a rough, raw soreness, as if they had been scoured.
I wondered if I was bleeding internally; wondered if my pounding brain was about to haemorrhage. There was no doubt that using the heart was fucking me up, that it was taking a gruelling physical toll.
When the ability to focus returned to my hot, smarting eyes I looked down at my hands. Were they a little more twisted than before? Were the knuckles swollen? Certainly they ached around the joints. I thought of Barnaby McCallum, the heart’s previous owner. True, he was an old man, but had the heart contributed to the near-deformity of his twisted bones, his emaciated state? When had he acquired the heart, I wondered. When had he started using it? If only latterly, then I might well b
e putting myself at serious risk of an early death. Perhaps by using it so frequently – albeit largely unwittingly – in the few days since it had been in my possession, I had already dangerously exceeded my tolerance level.
With these worrying thoughts circulating in my mind, I looked around, taking in my surroundings. I appeared to be in a yard of some kind, surrounded on three sides by blackened walls of crumbling brick inset with filthy, narrow windows. Many of the windows were broken or simply unglazed; only a few were framed by grubby strips of colourless cloth that served as curtains.
I might have thought the buildings were abandoned, even condemned, if it wasn’t for the candlelight flickering in some of the windows. This, at least, provided me with a modicum of murky illumination.
As my senses returned fully, I realised not only that I was lying on wet cobblestones, but also that the cobblestones were covered in filth. Scattered about were clumps of muddy straw, gnawed bones and other bits of unrecognisable organic matter – some of it rank with decomposition.
There was shit too, both animal – horse, dog – and what looked suspiciously like human. And among all this shit and rubbish was rustling, twitching movement. I peered at a particularly active mass of shadow and saw a fat-bellied rat, and then a second, dart from one patch of darkness to another. The thought of one of the creatures scuttling across to check me out was all the encouragement I needed to scramble to my feet. It was only as I winced at the sick, bone-deep pain in my back and put my right hand down to take some of the weight that I realised I still had the heart – cold and unresponsive again now – clutched in it. I dropped it back into the inside pocket of my blood and filth-smeared jacket, and then, groaning with effort, I stood up.
Where the fuck was I? And how had I got here? Crazy though it seemed, I could only assume that the heart had enabled me to teleport or something, like they do in Star Trek. As for where I was, I supposed I must be close to where the cut-throats had taken Clover. Unless I had damaged or angered the heart by bashing it against the tube station wall and it had deposited me somewhere completely random.
Once again I peered up at the slum-like dwellings that surrounded me. They appeared to be leaning towards me like a trio of giants perusing a tasty morsel. Were the cut-throats inside one of them? And if so, how would I find them? By bashing on doors like a lone copper doing house to house? And what if I did find them? Clover was surely beyond help by now.
I wondered why she had been killed and not me, why the cut-throats had made no attempt to grab the heart. Had they done it to isolate me? Break my spirit? Draw me here? Or had they killed her simply because they could?
More questions. Nothing but questions. Confusion and despair washed over me as I thought about the awful abruptness of Clover’s death and how lost (in every sense of the word) I was. I shook my head, knowing that I couldn’t give in to it, knowing that I had to think practically, constructively. My first priority was to find out where I was. Feeling stiff and achy and sick with guilt and grief, I trudged towards the only side of the yard that wasn’t lined with buildings.
Stepping out of the shadow, I found myself in a narrow, cobbled street lined with yet more grotty-looking buildings. There were no street lamps to be seen, and even out here, where it wasn’t quite so enclosed, the stink of rotting sewage was so thick it felt as though it was forming a slimy layer in the back of my throat. Somewhere to my right I could faintly hear a swell of chatter interspersed with an occasional burst of raucous laughter. There was the suggestion of light coming from that direction too, enough to cast a slithering orange reflection on to the surface of the filthy pools of water collected between the cobblestones.
I trudged towards the signs of life, my stomach fluttering with nerves. Wherever I was, I had seen enough to realise this wasn’t a salubrious neighbourhood. In fact, the place was a slum, far worse than the run-down estate where I had grown up. At least there the housing, grim, grey and box-like though it was, had been modern and relatively sturdy. But these buildings were not only old but horribly dilapidated, some of them seeming to lean against their neighbours or even out over the street, as if about to collapse. They reminded me of Victorian rookeries, like the ones you see in Charles Dickens adaptations on the TV.
And then I stopped dead, struck by a terrifying thought.
Frank had said I’d saved his life during the First World War, which, impossible though it seemed, suggested that the heart had the ability to transport me through time. Although I hadn’t disbelieved his story outright (I’d seen enough in the past few days to half-accept anything was possible) I suppose I’d still only been able to process it as an abstract concept – because being told something was true, however much you might be prepared to accept it, was a hell of a lot different to experiencing that truth for yourself.
But looking around now, and thinking about the two men who had emerged from the smog in the tube station, caused unease, even dread, to lodge in the pit of my stomach. Was it beyond the realms of sanity to suppose that I might, actually, be now standing in a Victorian street and breathing Victorian air? I barked a brief, shrill, hysterical laugh, which I immediately smothered with my hand. My thoughts began to race, my emotions to hurtle dizzyingly from disbelief, to wonder, to sheer, unadulterated terror. I felt a ridiculous urge to burst into tears, and even to find somewhere quiet and dark to hide, where I could squeeze myself smaller and smaller until I disappeared.
I must have stood in the same spot for at least a minute as the stew of thoughts and emotions swirled inside me. Still shuddering, I slipped my hand into the pocket of my jacket and gripped the heart. Although it didn’t respond, its presence soothed me, and after a few moments I felt myself becoming calmer, my panic subsiding.
Finally, like a dog shaking water from its coat, I gave a final shudder and started walking again. I felt hollow and slightly spaced out, but generally okay; ready, at least, to face whatever I might come across.
It turned out the noise and light was spilling from a corner pub, The Princess Alice, a squat, red-brick building with soot-grimed windows. I stood about fifteen metres from the entrance, half-concealed in the shadow cast by a wooden hand-cart stacked with hessian sacks. Dressed as I was, and spattered with Clover’s blood, I was loath to go in. I imagined stepping through the door and the place falling silent as the pub’s patrons turned to gawp at me. I decided my best bet was to wait to see who came out, and then, if they looked approachable, to sidle up and speak to them.
I was so intent on the front of the pub that I failed to notice who or what was behind me. I almost jumped out of my skin when a gruff voice said, ‘What kind of man are you?’
I spun round. Standing in the gloom was a portly man in a baggy, coarsely woven black suit, a shapeless cap perched on his head. He had ruddy, bulbous features and a thick white moustache that gave him the appearance of an elderly, bad-tempered walrus. At his feet was a white dog so stocky it resembled a barrel with legs. It had a square, blunt-snouted head, its muzzle criss-crossed with scars.
‘Hi,’ I blurted, and only realised my mistake when the puzzled frown on the man’s lumpy face turned to startlement. ‘Er… hello, I mean.’
Instead of returning my greeting the man eyed my filthy jacket, hoodie and jeans. Then he asked suspiciously, ‘What’s your business, mister?’
‘Nothing,’ I floundered. ‘I mean… I’m lost. I was looking for someone.’
‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘And who might that be?’
I hesitated before replying, and then decided to take the plunge. ‘Two men. One of them’s got a white eye and a scarred face. The other’s taller and thinner. He wears a blue coat. Like a soldier’s coat.’
The man said nothing. He continued to stare at me, his expression wary, hostile.
‘I don’t suppose you know them, do you?’
‘What’s your interest in ’em?’
‘Last time I saw them they were… with a friend of mine,’ I said, reluctant to say more.
/> ‘What friend?’
‘A girl.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘A girl, is it?’
‘Her name’s Clover,’ I said. ‘Clover Monroe.’
The man was silent a moment longer, then he seemed to come to a decision. Clicking his fingers, he said, ‘Snap, watch him.’
The dog sprang to attention. Its sharp little ears pricked up and it scurried towards me, barking furiously. I stumbled back, half-turning to run, but the man growled, ‘I wouldn’t do that, mister. Stay still and Snap’ll leave you be. But try to run and she’ll sink her teeth to the bone.’
Although every instinct screamed at me to flee, I forced myself to stand still, raising my hands placatingly. Sure enough the dog came to a halt in front of me, its hackles up and its mean little eyes staring unblinkingly into my own. It growled menacingly, its muzzle quivering over sharp yellow teeth.
‘Look,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘You just stay still, mister,’ the man said again, then he pushed past me and plodded towards the pub.
I looked over my shoulder and watched him go inside. Deprived of its master’s control, I thought the dog might lose its discipline and fly at me, but it remained where it was, the blood-curdling growl continuing to rumble in its throat.
‘Good dog,’ I said, but that only made the creature stiffen in anger, the volume of its growl rising a further notch. I wondered whether the heart would defend me if the creature attacked, and whether I would want it to.
After a few minutes I heard movement and gruff voices behind me and looked over my shoulder. The white-moustached man was clumping back towards me, accompanied by four others. One was a skinny, slope-shouldered youth of about seventeen with a rat-like face and a black club in his right hand. Another was a man in a battered top hat and stained red waistcoat, whose bushy grey beard was matted with clumps of filth. The other two were the men I had seen earlier – the one who had killed Clover and his taller, skinnier companion in the blue military-style coat.
