Danny spun quickly around, mouth already opening to issue a challenge. No one. He swallowed, licked strangely dry lips, looked up and down the narrow gap between the tall buildings. He was completely alone.
“Hello?” His voice sounded childish, fearful. He felt five years old and that in turn made him angry. “Who’s there?”
Of course no answer came, and Danny huffed a short grunt of annoyance and carried on along his way home, walking at a determined pace. He stepped out of the claustrophobic alley and turned left along Southampton Row, heading for the bus stop and the night bus that would take him slowly through the brightly lit city toward his home in Shepherd’s Bush. Traffic moved along the busier road, the comforting signs of life altogether more obvious, and the quiet pursuit in the alley became an instant memory, some strange dream moment trapped between the waking hours of Danny’s life.
He shook his head, put the earbud back in and began nodding to the opening strains of “Heaven Beside You”. As he passed Catton Street on his left an arm shot out of the shadows and grabbed him. The man hauled hard and Danny staggered, unable to prevent the motion, and stumbled into the shadows under a stand of unhealthy city trees. Cars crawled by not ten feet away, their drivers and passengers oblivious as four angry-looking men thrust Danny up against the worn, grubby trunk of a tree. They wore blacks and grays, faces partially concealed by hooded jackets casting deep shadows.
“What do you want?” Danny asked loudly, his voice high with panic.
“Just stay calm,” one man said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Danny drew breath to scream, to yell for help, but the cry stuck in his throat. Who would hear him anyway? Who would help if they heard?
The man stepped forward, his fingers digging painfully into Danny’s arm, and another man took hold of the other side. They spun him around, pressed his face up against rough bark. A series of rapid, terrifying thoughts rushed through his mind, horrible possibilities of what they might be about to do to him. He thrashed, desperation breaking through the bonds of fear, and yelled out. “Get off me! Leave me alone! Help!”
Someone cuffed Danny across the temple. Dizziness swept his brain. His knees buckled and he probably would have gone down if the two men weren’t holding him up. A third set of hands grabbed at the back of his jacket and hauled it up, along with his shirt tail. Cold night air swept across the bare skin of his back. Despite his giddiness, Danny thrashed again and drew breath to scream, when the man said, “Yep, he’s the one.” He let the jacket drop back down.
Confusion killed Danny’s cry before it even began. “What is this?” Something cold and wet slapped over his face, covered his nose and mouth. His eyes went wide, real panic setting in as a sharp, cloying chemical odor flooded his senses and then everything closed to a dark tunnel and went black.
Chapter 2
“As you can imagine, many mythologies and superstitions have arisen around birthmarks over the centuries, from the comedic to the malevolent. They have been considered marks of luck and of evil, of witches and of prophets. As with many things slightly to the left of what most would consider ‘normal’, there are almost as many varying stories surrounding them as there are people to tell those stories.
“Take this human skin, for example, preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and recently on loan to this special exhibition. That birthmark is unusually dark and some consider that it might be the reason why the body was interred in such an extravagant grave, that perhaps the mark gave the person special standing in their ancient society.”
Jake Crowley zoned out while the museum guide continued her monologue to his class of fourteen-year-old history students. He let his gaze roam the “Blue Zone”, the Human Biology section of the Natural History Museum. A giant model of a human cell, a journey through reproduction, birth and growth, all kinds of interactive displays. He loved this place, had since he was a kid. The building itself mesmerized him, a mixture of Gothic Revival and twelfth-century Romanesque-style architecture, in line with Museum founder Sir Richard Owen’s vision of creating a ‘cathedral to nature’. Inside, the exhibition spaces were wonderfully high, serried arches and vaulted windows, bright skylights, wide staircases and shining marble floors. And the museum’s contents were truly mind-expanding. Taking his classes on field trips here was probably the most satisfying part of his often thankless job.
The group shuffled forward and Crowley’s eyes returned to the museum guide as she continued her guided lecture. He drank in her shining black hair in a neat bob, her smooth, lightly ochre-tanned skin. She was clearly of East Asian extraction, but Crowley thought maybe half-Chinese and half-white European. He enjoyed guessing the heritage of people and was right more often than not. She stood a little taller than he considered most Chinese, though several inches short of Crowley’s firmly muscled six-foot frame. And she looked fit and strong, lines of muscle clear on well-formed arms, hard calves showing beneath a straight skirt. She was quite a stunner, and clearly as smart as any university lecturer. Her delivery was alive and passionate, far from the rehearsed speeches so many guides went through in robotic fashion day after day. Then again, this woman wasn’t just a guide, but an employed historian at the museum, taking time out from a busy research program now and then to talk to interested groups. Crowley was pleased his students might benefit, perhaps absorb some of her enthusiasm for the subject. Then again, maybe not. Teenagers had a strange resistance to things they might learn from unless it was something they chose to investigate. History rarely fell into that category.
Crowley permitted himself a moment’s fantasy, imagined walking arm-in-arm with the beautiful historian, a fine contrast to his perpetually pale skin and slightly angular features. As the thought drifted through his mind, her eyes locked with his for a moment and he had the strange sensation she could hear his inappropriate desires. His cheeks flushed hot and he thought he saw the slight twitch of a smile on her mouth as she looked away, not breaking stride with her lecture for a moment. She was saying something about fertility rites and one of his less focused students, Maxwell Jenkins, made some ribald remark about the rites he was planning to take out on some poor hapless female classmate. She snapped a justified obscenity at him and Maxwell’s perpetually obsequious friend barked a dutiful laugh. Neither lad realized Crowley stood directly behind them until he clamped a hand to each of their shoulders and steered them away from group.
Sometimes Crowley wished he was still in the army, so he could slam them down and give them fifty push-ups on the spot, while he yelled at them about respect and not being smartasses. But as a teacher, main force was not an option. His military training often helped. The voice he had developed along with his impressive physical presence meant he had a much easier time keeping his students in line than many teachers did. And there were other ways he could make these two boys suffer later on.
“Aw, Sir, I was just joking,” Jenkins complained, his outrage slightly marred by the cracking of his puberty-stricken voice box.
“And you know very well I won’t stand for that kind of talk, in class or out of it,” Crowley said. “When we get to rugby training after school this afternoon, the three extra laps of the pitch and subsequent push-ups will be down to you. You’ll be kind enough to let the rest of the squad know that, won’t you?”