Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) (2 page)

Chapter I

A Cry in the Night

Young William Dunning cautiously made his way across cobbled, fog-strangled Albion Yard in the Rotherhithe section of Bermondsey, south of the Thames.  Behind him, barely visible through the yellowish soot-laced mist, rose a forest of gaunt masts, tokens of unseen ships at the quays of the Albion Dock, resting from their argosies across the deeps and up the Thames.  Many of those barnacle-scraped hulls belonged to his family…

No, he thought, not without more than a little bitterness, they belonged to his brother.

If the Dunning Commodities and Trading Company could be viewed as a great ship that furrowed the seas of finance, much as Great Britain’s merchant fleets ploughed the ocean, then Sir Reginald Dunning was the captain, almost godlike in his realm, and William little more than some blackamoor cabin boy, dismissed if he was seen at all.  He would have been better off as that cabin boy, he thought ruefully, for then his fetchings and servings would take him across a ship’s rolling deck, beneath the flutter and snap of billowing white sails.  He would know the vastness and grandeur of the trackless sea, the thrill of unvisited shores heaving out of the blue distance, and the romance of exotic ports of call freighted with mystery and seasoned with hints of dark danger.  But the closest he ever came to those greyhounds of the sea was when he visited the Surrey Commercial Docks, inspecting cargoes, manifests and bills of lading.  Such mundane tasks had occupied his afternoon and evening, cargoes of exotic hardwoods from the jungles of Burma and Ceylon, grains from the northern lands and the Dominion of Canada.  But all those mundane matters were all, quite literally, behind him now, and he could rightly claim to be his own man, master of his own destiny, at least till he reported to the company offices in the morning.

He turned right onto Swan Lane, then left onto Albion Street.  There were no gas lamps along this commercial reach and the fog swirled like black tentacles.  Bleak brick warehouses and granaries rose sheer into the vapours, their empty windows like the staring eyes of dead men.  The faint tappings of his buttoned boots against the pavement echoed hollowly off the grimy walls.

It was a lonely noxious night, devoid of fellow travellers, and the claustrophobic vastness of the London fog worked upon his imagination, inhabiting the deep night with deeper stygian shadows and pale flitting silent forms, which uncomfortably brought to mind the so-called East End Ghosts so common in the more sensational papers for a month.  After several long minutes traversing the suddenly sinister street, he saw a dim illumination afar off, and was as glad to see the gas lamp in the darkness as a man would be to see an oasis in the desert.  When he finally came upon it, he fairly clung to it, at the intersection of Neptune Street, reluctant to set off again into the darkness.

He had intended to make for nearby Rotherhithe Station and take the underground through the Thames Tunnel into the more populated regions of the City, and from there take a hansom to his flat, but was derailed by a sound, then by a sight.  The sound was the faint gay plinking of an ill-tuned piano and slurred voices raised in a sea shanty he well knew:

                            “For broadside, for broadside

                            They fought all on the Main;

                            Blow high!  Blow low! And so sailed we.

                            Until at last the frigate

                            Shot the pirate’s mast away.

                            A sailing down all on

                            The coasts of High Barbary.”

The sight was a golden glow spilling against the fog though a double row of grimy diamond-paned windows, a merry repulsion of the night’s gloom.  And he suddenly understood why he had taken such a roundabout track to the nearby station.  It was, of course, the Neptune Tavern, a loitering place for toilers upon the sea, a public house to which he was often drawn when in the region and at loose ends.  Obviously he could not consider himself such at the moment, for it was quite late, he had to appear at the offices quite early with his inspection report, and his brother’s instructions had, as usual, been quite specific.

Nevertheless, he gravitated toward the Neptune as surely and inexorably as an iron filing is drawn to a lodestone.  He was quite helpless in the matter, unable to halt the motions of his feet.

The entrance of the pub was flanked by deeply carven images of the sea lord on mast sections taken from the deck of an ancient merchantman.  Above the doorway, attached to a projecting beam, was a wooden placard emblazoned with a colourful image of the ocean’s monarch, seaweed-entangled locks aswirl and regally brandishing his trident.  So strong were the emotions stirred in Dunning’s mind by the nautical images suddenly looming about him that he could almost feel sea spray against his face and smell the tang of salt air in his nostrils.

Just as a ship is helpless before a great wave pushed across the deeps by the Hand of God, Dunning was swept through that maritime embellished doorway and into the boisterous smoky interior.

The place had first been called The Blue Mermayde, built when the present system of Surrey Commercial Docks were little more than shallow ponds, when most ships either pulled up to jutting boards or unloaded directly on the muddy banks. The Neptune on this foul night was filled with such noise and laughter as would have been scandalous in The Prince’s in Piccadilly or The Café Royale in Regent Street.  The air was blue with smoke, thick with the burning weeds of a dozen lands, but still sweet compared to the toxic soup that now flowed through London’s chartered streets.  The weathered rafters were thick with a black patina of years.

Many of the old tars abiding within the Neptune took one look at the newcomer and quickly judged him just another slumming toff tired of West End certainties, anxious for those ambiguities of life which were the essence of being east of Charing Cross and south of the River.  With the measured disdain and peculiar snobbery of the lower classes they noted his curly-brimmed top hat and high-buttoned boots and spats, his starched winged collar and spotted bow tie, his brocaded frock coat and waistcoat, his narrow trousers and tightly furled umbrella, and imperiously decided he was not one of them. 

But what most of these people might think of him did not matter to him one whit!  They saw only the outward man, the mark made upon him by the world in which he lived, as a master might brand a valued and useful animal, touching only the skin and penetrating the heart not at all.  A few regulars knew him as a good listener to their yarns, as a man good for a few rounds during the course of the night, but even they did not know his dreams of mysterious deeps and of coastlines brushed by spice-laden trade winds, for he was always a private man, even when sojourning among those rough men whom, under different circumstances, he might have called mate.

He nodded to a few casual acquaintances as he took a pint of dark bitters from the barkeep and made his way to a table of bragging salts.  He received several salutes and snaggle-toothed grins from those whose own funds for drinking were running low.  None of these men would have met with his brother’s approval, anymore than Sir Reginald would have approved of the establishment itself.  Nor would he have approved of his brother drinking common ale, or doing anything at all not dictated the his own standards of decorum, wealth and breeding.  But Sir Reginald never visited the ships himself, and he was too preoccupied with clubbing in Pall Mall and seeking the acquaintances of all the right people  to keep track of his younger brother’s questionable activities; so, young William Dunning thought, quaffing his heady mug of ale, what Sir Reginald thought about anything mattered not a battered farthing!

The men told stories of the mysteries of the sea, of which a few might have actually been true, especially that Marlowe fellow who spun his yarns in such oblique and roundabout ways.  And they spoke of the London, the city of lights and shadows, of illuminations and mysteries.

“A Chinky mate o’ mine heard a demon howl in the river.”

“Seen a drowned man crawl up at the Copenhagen Dock.”

“They’s been passing strange things seen in the sewers,” declared one old hand.

“You gots to watch what you pass in the sewers!” another quipped, laughing at his own cleverness.

“White shapes in the darkness been seen,” insisted the first man.  “Me brother seen such in the dark what can’t be called human.”

“Maybe ghosts,” offered another.  “London’s an ancient town, it is.  Think what of all the people dead and buried here.  Digging down in such fleshy soil, you got to be caring ‘bout what you disturb.”

“Like the Ghosts of the East End,” Dunning said, thinking  not only of some wild stories he had read in the back pages of some of the less discerning newspapers, but of the quickening of his own heart during his sojourn through the mist.  “They say people have reported such pale ghostly figures floating through the fog, and have been seen vanishing into the ground.”

“The Vanishments,” a man whispered.  “People taken in the night by no human hand, what are never seen again.”

“Yes, I’m sure they all have something to do with each other!” Dunning exclaimed, his voice loud with excitement and ale.  “The East End Ghosts, and people being spirited away – there must be a connection of some kind.”

“Sure there are spirits in the East End,” quipped the joker.  “Gin!”

Dunning joined in on the resulting guffaws and snorts of derision, but he did so uneasily.  The papers, even the respectable ones, the ones his brother read at his clubs as he smoked Havanas and sipped ancient Frankish brandy, carried stories of the so-called Vanishments.  Although the mysterious disappearances had occurred mostly in the poorer sections of London, those regions of the East End, such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where were also reported outbreaks of ghosts or demons, some were rumoured to have happened in other less desperate boroughs about London, such as Kensington and Holborn.  Dunning suspected there were many more cases occurring than were being reported in the news, that their true scope was being hushed to prevent a public panic.

He did not press the subject with these men when it was obvious they wanted to leave it alone, to abandon the terrors of the land for the mysteries of the sea.  In their eyes was a certain desperation he had not before noticed, and they laughed too loudly, and lingered even after their coppers had vanished, accepting, almost begging, the generosity of others, not for the sake of the free drinks but because it meant a delay in slipping back into the night’s embrace and the noxious vapours shrouding the City.  Dunning shuddered at the thought of what madness might lie hidden and unsuspected beneath the greyish pall, but he hid well his revulsion lest these rough men of the sea suspect a landlubber’s heart beating within his breast.

As the night wore on, Dunning drank and sang sea shanties and listened to barnacled tales until his ordered, ledger-bound life in the City seemed but a dim-recalled dream.  He drank and caroused till the ebb of the morning, when he could distance himself no farther from that life of soul-thronged streets and metal-framed business bags, of desperate men and flying hansoms swiftly going nowhere. Then, filled with the bitterness of regret and frustration, he began to slip back.  He yearned for endless voyages upon golden caravels beneath tropical bronze suns, but he could not escape the steel trap of his appointed life.

Finally, with a world-weary sigh, he stood unsteadily from the long table, pushed his top hat to a defiantly rakish angle, and bade his tippling companions a most very good morning.  He settled his bill with the keep, gave up trying to count his change and made for the doorway.  Even as he gripped the handle, he hesitated, wanting to go back to the light, but it was too late, and he pushed on out the door.

The fog was just thick as when he had first sought refuge from it, perhaps thicker now in the lee of the morning.

With the light and life within the Neptune now irretrievably behind him, he felt grasped by a bitter melancholy.  He would never know the life for which he constantly yearned, never as long as he remained a marionette to his brother’s social aspirations.  He was naught but another’s puppet, and those controlling strings were quite unbreakable.

There were no hansoms or growlers prowling the foetid darkness of  Rotherhithe on this April morning.  He suddenly realised he had walked some distance away from the Rotherhithe Station, his intended destination, but he was not concerned, for he knew if he continued southward along Neptune to Lower Road, walking between the edge of Southwark Park and Saint Mary’s Workhouse, he would within a few minutes come within sight of the Deptford Road Station; there he could either catch an early train or indulge in the luxury of a cab, or at least pass the remainder of the darkness in relative comfort and security.

He trekked through the fog-bound night south along Neptune until the avenue emptied into Lower Road.  He found himself strolling along the eastern limits of Southwark Park, sixty-three acres of unmitigated blackness behind the nearly impenetrable fog. Opposite him was the brooding lightless bulk of the workhouse. He did not like the loneliness of the region, the desolation of warehouses and ramshackle boarding houses for foreign sailors, any of which could easily have been a front for slaving rings or opium dens. Although he had a romantic turn of heart which his brother would never understand, he was not so foolish to remain ignorant of the dark ways of the world, or the evils of the human soul.