The Society of Blood

by Mark Morris

  ‘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 satisf
action. 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?