by Ed Zenith
He had done it.
He had escaped.
He let the words sink in.
After a few moments he leapt up with a primal, guttural cheer. He, the lowly Ashton Keynes, who all his life had been told he would never amount to anything, had escaped, only the second person ever to make it to freedom. He ran and jumped and inhaled the air around him. It was the same air he had breathed all his life in the home, but it now tasted different. This air was free, not owned by the Bishop, not acrid from the smoke and steam of the factories, just…pure. As he looked around him, touching the moss and heather, he glanced at the horizon and saw the fruit of his handiwork.
The Great Western Home for the Unruly and Damned stood on the landscape, a tad less proud than before. A giant cloud of grey smoke rose from the centre where the roof had caved in. The windows were in darkness, all the gaslights having been knocked out in the explosion. As he watched, a chimney stack buckled and collapsed.
Not only had he escaped from the Home, he had destroyed it.
He decided to make a run for it. He was weary after his escape, but wanted to put as much distance between him and the Home as possible before darkness fell. Any feelings of hope and happiness had been replaced by fear and dread, when he realised he was miles from anywhere, with no food, no shelter, no idea where he was going and presumably a lot of angry guards on his tail. Trying to calm himself, he ran off in the opposite direction of the Home.
He was tired, dragging his feet and the rolling Marlborough Downs seemed to spread out for miles around him, with no sign of civilisation near. The sun was now touching the horizon and soon it would be dark. He had been running for hours, pausing only to sip at water from a stream, when he turned to look at the smoke cloud from the Home on the ever-darkening horizon. Just one more glance at my victory, thought Ash, when his ankle turned underneath him and he tripped and fell.
He fell heavily, no energy left to stop himself and his head hit the ground with a curious metallic clanging sound. His vision faltered slightly, the world around him dropping into shadow. His body was trying to shut down with shock and exhaustion, but he dared not let it. He felt around his heal and touched cold metal. Metal. On the downs?
Rails, he thought. He’d found the disused railway tracks, which must lead to somewhere. His body however was going nowhere and his mind had decided to let it. As he prepared himself for a sleep under the cold black sky, he heard a sound. The rail under his head trembled.
He forced his eyes to open and then wished he hadn’t.
As the pain ran through his head and the taste of blood appeared in his throat, he looked up. A shape in the darkness, larger than he would have liked. Just then, the clouds above him parted and a crescent moon shone. Moonlight radiated down on the object in front of Ash, giving it form and shape. Ash gasped as he saw in front of him something that he had only read about in stories and only seen once, in a smuggled penny dreadful comic.
Oh, scrag, thought Ash. A steam train.
Coming down the line at forty-one miles an hour was steam train, its plume of smoke trailing behind it like a wedding dress. Ash’s vision swam and he swore at himself as he felt himself faint.
The last thing he heard as he slipped out of consciousness was the squeal of brakes.
Want more?
The Crimson Blade continues in
Episode II: The Rail Pirates
by Ed Zenith
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