A Problem at the docks.
Chapter 0.
I woke suddenly, the dusty corridor dark around me.
How did I get here? Where was Garrety?
I staggered to my feet, my legs were unsteady, my left knee a ball of pain.
There, ahead of me.
That door.
We had been standing by that door, constables were right behind us, we had a judge’s warrant.
Then we heard the scream, a girl, loud, just behind the door.
A terrible scream.
Garrety kicked the door open while pulling his revolver from under his jacket; I covered him, he always went in first.
Where were the men, the constables had been right behind us on the stairs.
Garrety stepped in and suddenly he was gone, jerked forward like a puppet on strings.
I had jumped forward to help him and then I woke in the corridor.
I limped to the open door, the lock torn out of the cheap wooden panels.
The room was shadows and darkness, the shapes of furniture and nameless lumps on the floor.
There.
One of Garrety’s shoes, he always wore dress shoes, always polished and clean.
Where was my revolver, my holster was empty. No I had drawn it; I must have dropped it into the darkness.
Where were the constables.
A ripping sound. Cloth and something larger and wetter.
Movement within the shadows, a dark form, massive, shoulders far wider than mine. Strange shadows and shapes. Almost like horns and scales.
One shadowed arm moved and something came into the light from the corridor.
A body, a human body, head gone, a dark suit soaked in blood, a big pocket watch, tarnished silver, just like mine.
I checked my waistcoat pocket, my watch, big, tarnished silver, from my grandfather.
I stared at the hands, hours, minutes, seconds. Nothing moved.
My watch had stopped.
When I died.
~
Chapter 1.
Normally I never notice myself waking up, I am just awake. But sometimes, if I am very tired or hurt I wake slowly. The world comes into focus from nothing to a blur and then to clarity.
This time it was taking forever, my body felt distant apart from the dull throb of heat and pain that was my left knee. There were sounds but they were so far away. The light around me was dim and I was surrounded by shapeless forms of white and black.
The strange dream had faded away and was quickly forgotten.
There was a noise, something, getting louder and closer.
Someone was muttering, I could just make out the words.
“I’m sorry chief Inspector; he took a blow to the head. We have treated the wound but he could be asleep for hours yet.
Yes of course. I will have a nurse keep an eye on him. Yes Chief Inspector I will send word when he wakes.”
One of the dark blurs moved away and out of sight. Then the other blurs moved around and I drifted back to sleep.
This time I woke up normally, bright sunlight, a plaster ceiling above me going a bit grey with age.
The smell of flowers and something sharper that stung my nose.
The rustle of movement, cloth and something else. Something rigid or starched rubbing against itself.
The nurse leaned over and smiled. Her freshly starched uniform bright in the morning sun streaming through the window beside my bed.
I was so thirsty my voice was no more than a croak but she knew what I needed and held a glass to my mouth, I tried to gulp the warm water but she took the glass away and told me to sip.
I nodded and she bought the glass back allowing me to take a number of sips.
Once I could speak again I thanked her, my voice barely recognizable. She put the now empty glass on the small table and left, slipping out of the door past the short but stocky figure in a ill fitting police sergeants jacket.
I waved peck into the room wondering yet again how he had ever become a constable, he was several inches below the height limit but more than made up for that by being the toughest man I had ever met.
“Come in sergeant” I croaked as I gestured to the one chair in the room. While he went for the chair I lifted myself up in the bed and winced when sharp pain stabbed through my left knee as I moved it.
As he dragged the chair closer I caught the faint smells that came from him, coal, rotten wood, smoke, oil, dead fish.
“A Problem at the docks sergeant Peck?”
~
Not long after dawn and the docks were busy, newly arrived cargoes were unloading, goods to go out with the tide were loading. Crewmen, dock workers, merchants and passengers were everywhere.
Steam driven cargo cranes lifted nets full of crates and sacks from dock to ship or ship to dock.
Twenty years on the docks, five years as a crane man and still Samuel Sutton was amazed at how stupid people were. He had no sooner cleared a spot on the dock by lifting a cargo net full of barrels than some idiot passengers had decided that would be a good place to stand. Women in cheap colourful clothing, men in cheap brown suits.
He dropped the cargo net safely on the deck of the ship that would carry the barrels off to some distant country. The ships steam engine already belching grey smoke into the sky as its crew tried to race the tide, no doubt cursing how slow the dockers were working.
While the net was being unloaded on the deck of the ship Samuel took a minute to lean over the edge of the platform where he worked, twenty feet above the ground at the point where the crane rotated. He shouted at the bloody fools to get out of the way before he crushed them flat with his next load of cargo. For emphasis he used a few of the more colourful words he had picked up working with the Irish dockers.
The men below were surly, the women shouted back with a few things that were new even to a hardened docker like Samuel. One woman in particular was clearly an immigrant, half of what she said sounded Italian.
Still they moved out of the way so the matter was done.
As Samuel turned back to the metal saddle that served as his seat up here on the crane he glanced down to the water by the dockside and something caught his eye. Something bobbing up and down, a shape like a keg or small barrel but wrapped in cloth.
He shouted down to the crew that loaded his nets, pointing as he did so. A few of them wandered across to the edge of the dock and looked down into the water.
One crossed himself, others swore or started to shout. All across the dock people stopped what they were doing. People along the dockside shuffled away from the water, ships crews stood as if on guard, eyes watching the waters around them.
A whistle was blown at the far end of the dock, then another further away. The great steam whistle at the dock office blew, once, twice, three times, summoning senior dockers to the manager’s office.
Another victim of the monster.
~
What was left of the body had been pulled out of the water and left on the dock side. The closest ships had pulled out as soon as they were loaded and the whole section was being left empty. Incoming captains saw the police everywhere, the sheet of canvas covering a misshapen lump and decided to wait for another space to become available.
Constables were taking statements from the few who wanted to talk; most of the crowd were standing back as if the body was contagious or that the monster would leap from the water to claim another soul in broad daylight.
Sergeant Obadiah Peck of Her Most Britannic Majesties Bristol Constabulary had just arrived on the dock, more than a dozen Sergeants available, two already standing on the dock and they still sent for him.
Damn that case, African cultists, a bunch of mad men doing ungodly rituals and sacrificing girls kidnapped from the poorest streets. Peck and Inspector Thorn had worked on that one, found the hideout and gone in with a dozen constables. It had ended with the two fighting back to back. Thorn using his revolver to hold back the cultists while Peck used the heavy wooden club he had snatched from the hands of the cult leader to fight. Something.
Most of the constables had been wounded, three killed, they all saw. Something. They talked as coppers do and Inspector Thorn and Sergeant Peck had become the men assigned when the really weird stuff turned up. Inspector Thorn would have been given the case but he was still in hospital after whatever the hell had happened in that cheap hotel yesterday.
So the dockside monster had struck again and it was send Sergeant Peck, it didn’t matter that he had just finished a night shift and was going home, no, the chief inspector himself had said “Send Peck”.
Bollocks.
Sergeant Peck walked over to the bodies, ignoring the stares of the crowd and the looks of relief on the faces of the two sergeants who found themselves suddenly relieved of the case. Unnatural things happening, Peck had arrived, his problem.
Peck pulled back the canvas sheet and grunted as he looked at what was left of a man. Right arm gone at the shoulder, left arm missing from the elbow. Both legs missing below the knee and the upper legs looked as if something had torn great chunks out of the flesh. The head was still on this one, the face was gone, just blood and bone at the front, the last one had been a bloody stump at the neck.
Still wearing a jacket, now stained black from blood and water. The torso on this one looked intact, the shirt was undamaged across the chest, the other two had both been disembowelled.
Peck dropped the canvas back across the body and walked across to the pair of sergeants who had watched all this from a good twenty feet away.
It took only a few minutes for the two to bring Peck up to speed on the case then both left hurriedly, neither looked back at the body, the dock or Peck. When Thorn and Peck were given a case it was because it was weird, bizarre, ungodly or worse. No copper wanted to be any part of those cases and both sergeants got themselves to be out of eye sight as fast as they could.
~
It took over an hour before the sawbones arrived and the body was put on a stretcher and into the back of a horse drawn police wagon. Both horses spooked as soon as the body was carried close to them and the driver was nearly thrown as he fought to stop them bolting.
Peck watched this from a short distance away, someone standing close to him might have seen the slightest expression cross his face. Or perhaps they simply imagined the look of a man who was thinking of another day when police horses had been spooked, outside a warehouse being used by demon worshipers.
With the body inside the rear compartment the horses calmed down and the driver was able to turn the wagon around and leave the docks, as he did so the crowd and the constables pulled back leaving a wide area for the wagon to pass by.
The driver hunched down in his long coat, between his up turned collar and his hat nothing was visible apart from his eyes which were dark and squinting in the morning light.
The wagon left the docks, turned onto the street and vanished in a clatter of horse shoes on cobbles.
Peck dismissed the last of the constables and sighed to himself, he would need to file this which meant it would be mid day before he got home.
He finished his last comment in his battered old note book and put it back in his breast pocket then turned to walk back to the station, a thought came to him as he left the docks. From the docks to the station he was only a few minutes away from the Hospital where the Inspector had been taken.
He could check how the inspector was doing. For the lads at the station mind you, Garrety had been from down town, working the murders, his death was another nicks problem but Thorn was theirs and him dying would set everyone in a black mood.