Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Bonus Chapter: Garrick - Part One

The library was my fortress.

The great shelves towering high all around me were my battlements, impenetrable to even the most powerful foe. No battle ram, no army, no force could break through the row upon row of books that encased me, protecting me within their walls of paper and ink.

Here, I was the General. The King, even.

Here I threw off my armour. Here I could run my fingertips up and down spines, tracing gentle, soft patterns on tome after tome. Here I could lean in close and inhale deeply, feel comforted by the smell of old parchment that infused my soul almost as much as the words did. Whenever I opened a volume of something that caught my eye, letting my eyes caress the page, devouring sentences, paragraphs, chapters, I felt the power of this place that had become my castle.

Here, I could be myself.

Or maybe I could be someone else. I could be Stanley Kowalski. I could be Lennie Small. I could be Gandalf the Grey. Just for a brief moment in time I could be anyone that I wanted to be and go anywhere I wanted to go. I liked the idea of that. Liked the idea of escaping, of wearing somebody else's clothes and face, of doing anything that took me away from the back streets and knife fights and scrapping. Away from the bruises and the cuts and the desperate grubby struggle just to make something of myself, even though there was nothing much to make anything from to start with.

The library wasn't just my fortress. It was everything.

The large clock on the wall that hung above the double doors struck a dull almost-out-of-tune chime as it hit the hour mark and I looked up from where I was sitting, half-hidden down one of the nearby aisles, and sighed. Sometimes I hated that bloody clock. Even when I couldn't see it, the hourly chime seemed to taunt me as it resounded through the silence of the library, telling me that my time here was almost up. Stifling the growing frustration, I slouched down further in my seat and buried my head in George Orwell's 1984. Re-writing my history seemed like a good idea right then, wiping the slate clean and giving myself a new life – maybe even a new life where whiling away the hours in a library wouldn't make me a laughing stock among all my mates.

Reggie would have laughed if he saw me in here. In fact, he'd probably have pissed his pants if he even caught me within yards of the place. I could imagine him throwing back his head, spit flying from his mouth as it always did when he laughed, and that noise, like the hee-haw of an asthmatic donkey, right in my face.

A library? What are you? Some kind of fucking poof or something?

Then again Reggie couldn't read for shit, could barely even spell his bloody name right, so for him a library was for nancy-boys, girls and old people. It wasn't for the likes of us. We were meant to stick to the snooker halls and boxing clubs. We were meant to stick to the pubs and the streets.

Beer, brawls and birds, mate, that's all we bloody need, eh?

But the truth was I needed more and I knew that wasn't something Reggie would ever understand. It had always been just me and Reggie, you see, ever since first meeting as we found ourselves running together in short trousers and grey knee-high socks towards the Tube station shelter as the V1 engines screamed overhead. We'd huddled there, wide-eyed and dust-shrouded in the dark, damp tunnels as the sirens raged and the bombs had dropped, feeling every shake of the ground as if giants were pounding the earth with their great fists, desperate to rip and tear us all from our hiding place. Afterwards, emboldened by the fact the giants hadn't found us, we'd gone down to survey the remnants of the bomb sites down in Mile End, shared our first cigarette as we stared at the bones and the rubble and watched the mothers' tears streak their soot-covered faces as they clutched their dead babies to their chests.