The Half Killed

Chapter Four

The street is shrouded in darkness, pushing out the glow from the various shop fronts until all that's left is a faint lightening to the gloom. Small half-circles and distorted rectangles of white and yellow edge the pavement, but the shadows rule this silent byway, hiding away all manner of humanity and leaving them to live and breathe the sharp tang of the city's underbelly—like toadstools taking up residence in the shadow of a rotted log.

A brief touch on my elbow, enough to make me flinch, and Chissick lowers his mouth until it is a few inches from my ear.

"Best stay close, Miss Hawes. Until we're in better company."

I look down at his hand, still hovering near the vicinity of my arm. After a moment, he takes it away, but the tension remains in his fingers, in the way he holds his wrist and elbow. And when I stumble over a large crack in the pavement, his reaction is instantaneous, one hand returning to my arm, the other on the small of my back, prepared to catch me should I fall.

"Thank you," I say, and he accepts my gratitude with a quick nod. His attention, however, has already returned to the darker shadows of the alley, his eyes narrowing as if to better identify an unsavoury figure that might be lurking in the dusk.

Though "unsavoury" might not be the best word to use here. "Suspicious" might be more precise, or perhaps I'm doing the inhabitants of this neighbourhood a disservice. There's nothing to distinguish these men and women from the people I pass every day—on broader avenues, streets well-lit by sun and flame and even a spark of electricity. It's the darkness that establishes their characters here, before they're given a chance to prove themselves as harmless individuals. I glance at a few of them now, sheltered in a doorway, their heads wreathed in a foul-smelling smoke that refuses to dissipate. Their shoulders are rounded forward, as if bending beneath the weight of this abominable darkness. All faces are turned away from the light, leaving me with nothing to examine but smudges and shadows, broken only by a blaze of flame when one of them strikes a match and cups the flickering fire between his hands.

And because my imagination is so prolific today, I look away from the man's features, exaggerated to those of a ghoul's by the sputtering light of his match. But curiosity emboldens me to take a second look, and this time, all the familiar traits of humanity are erased. Or perhaps the human face was a mask, and now that it's stripped away, I'm permitted a glimpse of the beast that resides beneath. But another blink, followed by a few puffs of smoke, and he's lost to the fog that hovers and dips below the eaves of the house.

"Through here, now," says Chissick, leading me towards an open doorway, indistinguishable from the dozen or so others in my line of sight.

"Stay close." His hand seeks out my wrist, but worse than that, I feel his thumb brush over the damaged strip of skin between my sleeve and the frayed edge of my glove. I move my arm, and momentarily thwarted, he settles for closing his hand around my fingertips. It's a gentle pressure, I notice, not pulling me along, but holding onto me, as if he fears I'll be snatched from his grasp the moment he lowers his guard.

A quick stumble as I put my foot down on the front step, and I glance down at the impediment, a man sprawled across the stoop, groaning at the unwelcome contact between my shoe and his rib cage. Any apology I could make is forgotten as Chissick steers me inside, through another door, and there's a brilliant light, so bright I'm forced to squint and shield my eyes with my hand. The noise is there, too. A regular cacophony of every tone and accent, squalling and laughing, every swear and curse imaginable, until I'm convinced there won't be this much sound until Judgement Day, when the trumpets sound and every soul congregates outside the gates of Heaven.

But I have every hope that Heaven will smell nothing like this.

It's a long, low room he's led me into, lit by a fire and streaming gas lamps that put out enough heat to fool me into believing I've stepped into a furnace. And there are the people, dozens of them, lounging along the walls, tapping out their pipes on the tops of narrow tables, tripping over benches as their balance deserts them. They talk, and they laugh, and they spit—yes, even spit—onto the floor, onto the walls, great gobs of dark brown tobacco juice shooting from their mouths with all the regularity of breathing. And so the walls are decorated with the effluvium of the room's inhabitants, spit and sweat and blood and piss and shit, a portrait of life in this part of the city, one I've only ever suffered the misfortune of visiting in my mind.