I could see what he was after, and so answered: 'No, no — we already have Titus Crow's origin in Lord of the Worms.' But Paul's questions had been sufficient to set the wheels turning in my head, and damned if I could stop them! I became immediately caught up in the new story, so much so that the novel I was writing had to wait. It waited for three days, at the end of which time I wrote Finis — a very satisfied Finis — on Titus Crow's beginnings.
December 1916. One week before Christmas.
London, in the vicinity of Wapping, an hour before dawn...
Mist-shrouded facades of warehouses formed square, stony faces, bleakly foreboding with their blind eyes of boarded windows; Dickensian still, the cobbled riverside streets rang to the frantic clatter of madly racing footsteps. Except for the figure- of a man, flying, his coat flapping like broken wings, nothing stirred. Just him ... and his pursuer: a second male figure, tall, utterly silent, flowing like a fog-spawned wraith not one hundred yards behind.
As to who these two were: their names do not matter. Suffice to say that they were of completely opposite poles, and that the one who feared and ran so noisily was a good man and entirely human, because of which he'd been foolish...
And so he fled, that merely human being, clamorously, with pounding heart, tearing the mist like cobwebs in a tunnel and leaving a yawning hole behind; and his inexorable pursuer flowing forward through that hole, with never the sound of a footfall, made more terrible because of his soundlessness.
London, and the fugitive had thought he would be safe here. Panting, he skidded to a halt where a shaft of light lanced smokily down from a high window and made the cobbles shiny bright. In a black doorway a broken derelict:sprawled like a fallen scarecrow, moaned about the night's chill and clutched his empty bottle. Coarse laughter came from above, the chink of glasses and a low-muttered, lewd suggestion. Again the laughter, a woman s, thick with lust.
No refuge here, where the air itself seemed steeped in decay and ingrown vice – but at least there was the light, and humanity too, albeit dregs.
The fugitive hugged the wall, fused with it and became one with the shadows, gratefully gulped at the sodden, reeking river air and looked back the way he had come. And there at the other end of the street, silhouetted against a rolling bank of mist from the river, motionless now and yet full, of an awesome kinetic energy, like the still waters of a dam before the gates are opened —
The guttural laughter came again from above, causing the fleeing man to start. Shadow-figures moved gang-tingly, apishly together in the beam of light falling on the street, began tearing at each other's clothing. Abruptly the light was switched off, the window slammed shut, and the night and the mist closed in And along the street the silent pursuer once more took up the chase.
With his strength renewed a little but knowing he was tiring rapidly now, the fugitive pushed himself free of the wall and began to run again, forcing his legs to pump and his lungs to suck and his heart to pound as desperately as before. But- he was almost home, almost safe. Sanctuary lay just around the next corner.
'London' . . 'home' . . . 'sanctuary' Words once full of meaning, but m his present situation almost meaningless. Could anywhere be safe ever again? Cairo should have been, but instead, with the European war spilling over into the Middle-East, it had been fraught. Paris had been worse: a seething cauldron on the boil and about to explode shatteringly. And in Tunisia . . . In Tunisia the troubles had seemed endless, where the French fought a guerilla war on all sides, not least with the Sahara's Sanusi.
The Sanusi, yes — and it was from the secret desert temple of an ancient Sanusi sect that the fugitive had stolen the Elixir. That had been his folly — it was why he was a fugitive.
Half-way round the world and back their Priest of the Undying Dead had chased him, drawing ever closer, and here in London it seemed that at last the chase was at an end. He could run no further. It was finished. His only chance was the sanctuary, that secret place remembered from the penniless, friendless childhood of a waif. It had been more than thirty years ago, true, but still he remembered it clearly. And if a long-forsaken God had not turned from him entirely. .
Wrapped in mist he rounded the corner, came out of the mazy streets and onto the river's shoulder. The Thames with all its stenches, its poisons, its teeming rats and endless sewage — and its sanctuary. Nothing had changed, all was exactly as he remembered it. Even the mist was his friend now, for it cloaked him and turned him an anonymous grey, and he knew that from here on he could find his way blindfold. Indeed he might as well be blind, the way the milky mist rolled up and swallowed him.
With hope renewed he plunged on across the last deserted street lying parallel to the river, found the high stone wall he knew would be there, followed it north for fifty yards to where spiked iron palings guarded its topmost tier against unwary climbers. For immediately beyond that wall at this spot the river flowed sluggish and deep and the wall was sheer, so that a man might easily drown if he should slip and fall. But the fugitive did not intend to fall; he was still agile as the boy he d once been, except that now he also had a grown man s strength.
Without pause he jumped, easily caught the top of the wall, at once transferred his grip to the ironwork. He drew himself up, in a moment straddled the treacherous spikes, swung over and slid down the palings on the other side. And now - now, dear God - only keep the pursuer at bay; only let him stay back there in the mist, out of sight, and not come surging forward with his rotten eyes aglow and his crumbling nose sniffing like that of some great dead nightmare hound!
And now too let memory stay sharp and serve the fugitive well, let it not fail him for a single moment, and let everything continue to be as it had been For if anything had changed beyond that ancient, slimy wall . . .
.. But it had not
For here, remembered of old, was his marker - the base of a lone paling, bent to one side, like a single idle soldier in a perfect rank - where if he swung his feet a little to the left, in empty space above the darkly gurgling river -
- His left foot made contact with a stone sill, at which he couldn't suppress the smallest cry of relief. Then, clinging to the railings with one hand, he tremblingly reached down the other to find and grip an arch of stone; and releasing his grip on the railings entirely, he drew himself down and into the hidden embrasure in the river's wall. For this was the entrance to his sanctuary but no time to pause and thank whichever lucky stars still shone on him; no, for back there in the roiling mist the pursuer was following still, unerringly tracking him, he was sure. Or tracking the Elixir?
Today, for the first time, that idea had dawned on him. It had come as he walked the chill December streets, when patting his overcoat's inside pocket, for a moment he had thought the vial lost. Oh, and how he'd panicked then! But in a shop doorway where his hands trembled violently, finally he'd found the tiny glass bottle where it had fallen through a hole into the lining of his coat, and then in the grey light of wintry, war-depleted London streets, he had gazed at it — and at its contents.
The Elixir — which might as well be water! A few drops of crystal-clear water, yes, that was how it appeared. But if you held it up to the light in a certain way . . .
The fugitive started, held his breath, stilled his thoughts and brought his fleeting mind back to the present, the Now. Was that a sound from the street above? The faintest echo of a footfall on the cobbles three or four feet overhead?
He crouched there in the dark embrasure, waited, listened with terror-sensitized ears — heard only the pounding of his own heart, his own blood singing in his ears. He had paused here too long, had ignored the Doom hanging over his immortal soul to favour the entirely mortal fatigue of bone and muscle. But now, once more, he forced himself to move. Some rubble blocked the way — blocks of stone, fallen from the low ceiling, perhaps — but he crawled over it, his back brushing the damp stonework overhead. Smallfurry rodents squealed and fled past him toward the faint light of the entrance, tumbling into the river with tiny splashes. The ceiling dripped with moisture, where nitre stained the walls in faintly luminous patches.