Shore Leave

Following months at sea the streets and delights of old London are a haven for any sailor on shore leave. But is it excess, insanity or supernatural influences that are at work upon our protagonist?

It must have been late. Very late. I only say so because of the gas lamps. It was that dark that their flickering light barely radiated a foot away from their suspended thick, glass lanterns.  I don’t know what time it was either, nor when I left. All I knew was that I had been walking for some time, for what seemed like an eternity, through the dark, dank, salubrious streets of Shoreditch. As I stumbled on, my mind a whirl of blackened London brick and cobble, of biting cold and piercing wind, I thought back to the luxuriant warmth of the inn; the soothing, calming flow of social lubricant, the comforting greasiness of the oozing pie, the soft heat radiating from scarcely-hidden, corset-bulging flesh; the nonchalant groping, then the all-out fondle before a tight, taut thrust, a red rump smack and a puddle of vomit out the street by the back.

This is how it had been most nights since we docked, the bitter cold of smoky London, appearing welcoming and almost blissful after 18 months in the fetid stench and inescapable heat of the cabin. Plus there was the drink and of course the women. For many of us, starved of so much during our time away, it was heaven.

My mind returning from the haze of the earlier evening, I was once again confronted with the darker reality of where I now was. The tiny alleyways and thoroughfares of warehouses and tenements offering little privacy to the debauched deeds they were witnessing. I rounded one corner to see a thickset beast of a man casually leaving the heavy, open, wooden door of a warehouse, his hands full of new questionably-acquired purchases, and then another to see a tall, spindly character leaning against a wall whilst, a nubile redhead fishing for something in his trousers. I rounded one more slightly faster and tripped on an upended cobble, crashing to the ground with an almighty slap.

My vision whirling, I glanced up at the stars, gleaming and twinkling in the night sky. So bright they shone, picking out the intricate detail of the dust clouds of space, shining mauve, and violet and red. But as my vision focussed, I saw that these were not the heavenly fires, but bright lights shining high on the cranes of the docks and smoke billowing from the forest of chimneys that had grown to form a canopy over London.

I screwed my eyes shut, persuading them to return to my control and then, with the aid of the crumbling corner of brick warehouse near to which I had fallen, stood up unsteadily. My head, my arm, my leg throbbed with pain and my eyes returned to their state of autonomy. Knowing my lodgings must now be close, I wandered on, approaching a corner lit by a solitary gas lamp. It shone like a beacon and I flew to it like a moth, rounding upon the corner with surprising speed and turning it to be greeted with a dead end in the street. Down in the darker recesses of the dead end were some doors. I could only just make out their outline, wide enough for a carriage, but tall enough only for the shortest man. Above them was a loft hatch and a wooden crane just outside from which was suspended a precarious pallet of goods. The pallet was stacked high with hessian covered packages, left out on this cold November night. And above the pallet, its outline picked out by the non-celestial orbs in the sky, was a slender and pale naked, female leg. Arching perfectly out of one of the doors with pointed toes and a bended knee, it pointed skywards towards the black before bending seductively once again. From tip toe to broad and full thigh the leg, suspending from the loft hatch like some bizarre puppet, seized and maintained my undivided attention. I gazed endlessly at the alluring appendage, watching it bend and straighten for what seemed light decades before it vanished back into the hatch. I stood for a few seconds gazing at where the leg had been, its outline etched on my retinas. My mind, green with confusion, could not follow or find the train of logic that would have explained such an occurrence. Why was there a leg dangling from a warehouse at this time of night? All I knew was that there was a leg, and that I wanted to see that leg again. My gaze dropped to the wide and short carriage doors at street level and my own legs immediately decided to walk me towards them.

I placed my hand on the splintered wood of the left hand door, its peeling rust-coloured paint coming away in my hand. With the application of a small amount of pressure the door swung back into the building with a splintering crash as it hit the wall behind. I was left staring into an abyss of darkness, but for a small flicker of light at the far end of the room. It was a long way, maybe a ship’s length, but it beckoned enticingly.  And so I walked.  As I strode towards the light I suddenly noticed that I could see nothing around me. No boxes, no pallets, no crates or sacks and no walls. Just black. And just as I started to wonder what lay beyond my line of sight, just how many rats were lurking in the background and whether I should be frightened or not, my head hit something hard. I stopped dead.

Feeling around in the dark with my hands I felt what had hit my head and moving my hands further around, realised that it was in fact the ceiling. I looked to where the light had been and it was gone. Nothing surrounded me but black. And so I felt around further, moving quicker as panic started to set in. As I felt in front of me I felt a solid wall in the direction I had been walking, in front of where the light had been. I decided to follow the cold brick with my hands down to the floor, but before I reached the ground the wall disappeared and the light began to flicker once more in the distance. It was as though, out of nowhere, a tunnel had appeared in a front of me in a wall that previously did not exist. Seeing the light again I immediately pressed forward, crawling on my hands and knees across the dusty, dirty floor. I crawled for a long distance, my eyes never leaving the light as it got closer and closer.

As I did, my eyes began to make out an outline around the flame as the light danced off of whatever was holding the flame in place. As I crawled nearer to the light, I suddenly felt as though I could stand once more and, without raising my hands to check whether the tunnel had ended, I stood and continued towards to torch, walking. Squinting into the darkness, my eyes began to make out the shapely figure of a woman, and I could immediately see from her perfect proportions and slender build that this woman was the owner and occupier of the leg I had seen from the loft hatch. As I got closer, I saw that the woman’s legs were indeed bare, and as I followed her pale outline upwards I saw that she was completely naked. Above her long legs, was a head of long, thick and luxuriant brown hair hanging down around her full and pert breasts. My eyes leading down past her navel, I came to see her hands holding a flaming torch in front of her genitalia. She stared at me, almost through me. But as I approached further I came to see that she was not holding a torch, but rather than her hands were a torch. It was as if a pool of flammable oil had been poured into her hands and set aflame. But she did not look in pain, nor even that she was aware that such a flame was emanating from her palms.

As I got even nearer, to the point where I could see her fine, black eyelashes and the delicate lines on her thin but plump lips, she suddenly looked at me as though I had just appeared in front of her. Her look of surprise turned to delight as she grinned widely, her profoundly brown eyes smiling at me. I stopped just in front of her, gazing at her nakedness in front of me. We stood there for a few minutes, her face a picture of pleasure and mine delighted confusion.

After seconds lost staring at one another, the light of her torch extinguished itself. I immediately lunged forward to grab hold of her before she disappeared but it was too late. There was nothing there. I flailed around in the dark for a few seconds not knowing where I was going or what I was doing. Panic overloading my mind and churning vomit overloading my stomach, my heat beat with such an intensity I feared I would pass out. But then, breathing heavily I stopped. In the utter silence of the warehouse, my breath sounded heavy and wheezing. For a brief moment there, alone in the dark in the middle of the city I suddenly remembered how old I had gotten. You could hear, deep in my lungs, the rattle of old age and the wheezing breath of an ill man.  Then not knowing why, I stood stock upright.

At that moment, a light of an intensity I had never seen before blasted away the darkness from my left side. It was as though a star had just exploded within the room although with the light came no warmth. In fact I immediately felt a slight breeze on my skin across my body. As my eyes became accustomed to the bright light the figure of the girl started to etch onto my optical receptors once more. This time she was stood further back, naked still but for her hands covering her genitalia and staring intently at me. I tried to intercept her gaze but for some reason could not grab it. It was as though she was staring past me, through me, below the level of my face. I wondered who or what it was she might be staring at and glanced behind me to check that no one else had entered the building. They hadn’t. Behind me, the black of the wall above the tunnel reigned. I turned back to the girl, yet still she stared.

At that moment, I glanced downwards and was shocked at what I saw. Immediately I realised why the girl was staring. For I too was now entirely naked, my body completely exposed. At first I felt embarrassed, staring down and wondering how this had happened. But as I stared longer, I realised that this was not my body. I was old, yet this body was young, tanned, and muscular. Below my toned chest led a trail of hair across my stomach down to my phallus, hanging amongst a virulent tuft of dark black hair. I glanced up and saw the girl staring down at my appendage, before she finally glanced at my face. We exchanged a glance for a few seconds as I took in her beauty. Her naturally full yet thin lips, her long, feminine locks of hair, her round, taut breasts. As I gazed at her she moved her hands and exposed the small black triangle of hair between her legs. As I looked at her I saw her eyes suddenly snap back towards my member as I felt it fill and grow, her eyes bulging.

Before I knew it we snapped together. I cannot remember physically what we did, but I know that it felt good. In a whirl of lights, knees and backs grazed, blood sucked against skin and clasping we pressed ourselves into one another before falling apart against the cold, hard, dusty, dirty floor. I lay there, wheezing for a few moments before closing my eyes and drifting into a swirling sleep of nothingness.

Sometime later, I woke the bright lights of before replaced once more with the softer flickering of the torch, although this time the torch hovering above me as if suspended from the invisible ceiling. My mouth was dry and sickly and I felt entirely dirty. I immediately recalled what had just happened and shot a glance down across my body. I was still naked, my cold body, or rather the much younger, toned body I seemed to have acquired, was lying on the floor and my flaccid member lying against my stomach. As I prepared to return my gaze upwards, there, from out of the darkness, slithered the girl like a snake. She slid up in between my legs and laid her head against my inner thigh to smile at me. Seeing her there, I immediately started to stiffen again and she saw and moved her head above my phallus. She looked at me and grinned, grabbing my member with one hand and pressing her lips against it.

From then on I cannot remember any more from that evening. From that moment, all of my senses seem to have shut off as though a switch in my head was flicked or some fuse deeply wired in my brain, blew and cut all power.

I sat there for some time. I have no idea where there was. Presumably somewhere in the warehouse. I could never muster the motivation to move and look for the tunnel back to the street. I just sat there. I don’t know why but it felt as though I was waiting for something. Something I had been waiting months for. Something I’d done perhaps? I can’t remember. I could hear someone nearby, but I had no idea who they were. I could hear their muffled groans and it sounded as though they are in some pain. I often thought about going and seeing if they were OK but I was never really that fussed. Besides, it was quite comforting to hear the sounds of someone else in more pain that I was. One thing I did know is that I was still naked. I had felt my body with my hands once, right at the beginning, and could feel that I had yet to find my clothes from that first night. Hardly surprising in the oppressive darkness of this place.

It was during my time sat on the floor in the dark in the warehouse that suddenly there was a sound, like a large wooden door, scraping across the stone floor of the warehouse.  I heard the sound of hooves and suddenly could feel the breath of a horse on my face. Slowly the lights faded in and staring at me was the long face of an enormous stallion. I froze in fear.

Now at this stage I was more than aware that as evenings go, this was quite an odd one. The warehouse, the woman, the horse. It was not your average land leave. And it hadn’t been for a while now. What I should probably explain is that the events that I have just detailed had happened before. In fact they had happened every night since we arrived in London. All 27 days of shore leave so far had seen me go through the same thing over and over again. Never an explanation of the woman, never an explanation of the horse. And never an explanation of how I get from the warehouse with my snakelike mistress to my lodgings the next morning.

Every morning, I would wake up, fully-clothed and feeling well-rested after a solid night’s sleep, despite knowing that every evening I had gone to the same tavern and drunk several tankards of ale. The room was tidy, the door was locked and there was no hint of any disturbance. What’s more when I asked the landlady she was adamant that she had not seem me come in at all after having gone out for supper about six o’clock. In short, the entire affair was a complete mystery to me.

More confusing than any other aspect of this sordid plot however was precisely how I came to be in that particular tavern every evening. I couldn’t even remember its name. The only thing that stuck to mind was the sign on the warehouse opposite that I could see from the window in which I always sat: “Richard George Fowler & Son”.

This particular morning, the morning of my twenty-eight day in London and of my forty-eighth birthday, I got up from bed and sat at the rickety wooden table in my room, just across from the bed. Still in my nightwear, I stuffed my pipe and picked up the matches that had been neatly left on the side from the evening before. I sat in silence for a few moments, it might have been longer, and decided to ask myself some questions in order to get to the bottom of everything.

The first question, and one that I couldn’t really answer, was why I had not done anything about this up until now. Twenty-seven days this had been going on and yet I had not so much as given it a second thought as to why it was all going on. That appeared strange to me. The second question, and probably the most important, was how I was going to solve this problem. This was more difficult. I sat, staring at the wall where a long list of rules had been pinned by the landlord. No smoking, no drinking, no illegal items or contraband on the premises, no prostitutes.

Whilst looking at the list I decided that I had to go to the tavern. Ask the owner some questions. Find out if he had any answers.

I changed into my deck clothes and put on my trench coat before leaving the lodgings with a slam of the door, the fragile wood and glass of the windows precariously balancing in the crumbling brick and, like me, shuddering in the biting cold of another freezing November morning. My boots slipping slightly on the glacial cobbles, I marched out towards where I thought the tavern and the warehouse would be, purpose in every step. Round crumbling corners once more, avoiding slumped bodies of the sick and homeless in the street, their souls perhaps already stolen by this most bitter of winters. Again, the hours ticked by, and I found nothing. Purpose waning with every footstep in the now rapidly-falling snow, my pace slowed to a trudge. Past fish merchants and coopers, blacksmiths and fruiterers I walked until, overcome by hunger and blinded by the blizzard blowing, I sat on the edge of a frozen water trough at the side of the street.

Gasping for breath, my lungs battling with the howling wind, I stared with a blurred gaze at the muddy, white snow underneath me, wincing with each inhalation. I sat for a few minutes before readjusting my gaze to street level. Across the street a barrow boy hurriedly moved some crates back inside for shelter, his light, woollen clothing clearly no match for the plunging temperatures of London at this time of year. As I watched him work my eyes were caught by the sign above his head. “Richard George Fowler & Son”. I almost fell from the trough as I span to look at the building behind me. But as I turned, my feet sliding in the newly-fallen snow, I did not see what I was expecting to.

For in the place of the tavern was a building, built of new red brick, its walls standing proud amongst the crumbling tenements and warehouses of Shoreditch around it. It was tall; very tall. My eyes widened as I followed its silhouette further and further into the sky where it tailed off with a long, cylindrical chimney, puncturing the low cloud of the dark November with a tower of black smoke. Where once there stood a small, convivial heart of the community, there now stood this industrial muscle of a global trading empire.

In seeking answers to questions, I had raised yet more. Where was the tavern? Where had it gone? Why was this factory here? What was my involvement in this?

The wind blew up and I felt lightheaded and so sat once more on the trough, suddenly overcome by the confusion of everything I had seen. Still unsteady, I lowered myself to the floor and rested my head against the hard stone of the trough for support my eyes snapping closed almost as soon as I had done so.

It was voices that I heard first. Shouting, laughing, screaming and crying and singing. Then it was the howling of the wind, knocking at the rattling windows and doors as if begging to be let in. Then it was the sound of glasses clinking. Then my eyes opened and a blur of red and golden light burst into my brain, forcing my irises closed as my brain adjusted to this sensory overload. As my eyes adjusted the interior of the tavern came into view, the stained, red carpet and dark, stained bar. Then the people.

I was propped up in a chair, slightly slumped owing to my being unconscious, with a blanket draped over me and a pint of frothy ale in front of me. The hunger and the thirst from earlier instantly rushed back to me and so before I could help myself I took hold of the tankard with unsteady hands and tipped the contents into my throat. It had clearly been there for some time, its warm almost thick consistency catching on my throat as it went down causing me to splutter. My mind whirling as it struggled to comprehend everything that went on, it did however take some solace in the fact that here, in the tavern, it felt comfortable and happy.

I sat for a few minutes, taking my surroundings in, before standing and walking to the bar. The landlord was a tall man, almost crouching to peer through the heavy, wooden shelves laden with glasses and tankards that were suspended over the sticky, varnish of the bar below. He wore a crumpled grey shirt and darker grey corduroy trousers and seemed to wear a permanent frown in his long face, accented with flecks of grey and white in his previously dark hair. As I walked over, he glanced up and took me in. He did not look surprised to see me, nor did he look as though it was of any consequence to him at all. But as he saw me approach he came closer to the bar to hear what I had to say.

The first question I asked, and I don’t really know why I estimated this question to be of paramount importance, was the name of the tavern. The landlord squinted in my direction, as if wondering why on earth I hadn’t noticed upon coming in before he said in a deep, rumbling but quiet voice “The Tricorne”. The next question was more difficult to find, but I eventually spluttered “how did I get here?” The landlord squinted yet further, his hand dropping the dirty, sodden cloth he carried onto the bar in exasperation. “You walked in”, came the sarcasm-tinged reply. “Asked me for a pint and then fell asleep in the corner there”. This was of course not possible. I had passed out in the street beforehand, that much I was sure of, and so someone must have brought me here.

Grasping at words in my head I struggled to find another question. I couldn’t or perhaps I wouldn’t. After a slight hesitation I nodded my appreciation and then slipped away from the bar towards the door. Peering outside should at least give me some idea as to where the tavern was and what had happened to the factory I had seen earlier. I opened the door with a creak and looked out onto the street. The snow was still there, the blizzard almost unaltered and the warehouse of Richard George Fowler was still across the road. I wrapped my coat around me and wandered out into the snow-filled street towards the warehouse opposite. I turned, to where hours before the factory had been, and saw nothing but the warming lights of the tavern, shining through dusty, chipped windows. No chimney, no smoke, no factory.

Never in my life, even after almost 35 years of being at sea, had I ever felt so lost. Here I was, on dry land, in the city of my birth, not 30 minutes’ walk from the very home that my mother lived in, yet I felt as though I had been left adrift on the ocean to India. I leant against the warehouse behind me and heard the sound of crumbling brick impacting into the soft snow below. Tears welling in my eyes, for my mother, for my home, for some sort of human companionship that I had for so long gone without; tears streaming down my cheek and freezing on my skin for feeling so lost and so insignificant in this ever changing world of shifting sands and storehouses.

My vision blurred by sorrow, I watched as the bright lights of the tavern swirled and refracted through the water in my eyes. And through the swirling mix of light and dark I heard the noise of a door creaking open and gently closing and a figure appearing from the centre of my vision. I instantly recognised the figure, winding her way out of the door, although appearing much more human this time. It was the girl from the 27 nights previous. Blinking to clear my vision I looked at her. She seemed to be leaving with purpose as if she was going somewhere. I could only assume to the warehouse. She was clothed this time of course, in a long, green skirt that hung down to her ankles and a stone coloured blouse and cardigan, her long blonde hair flowing halfway down her back.

Without thinking, without any premeditation into what I was going to do, I marched after her down the street, moving over to her side of the thoroughfare and walking behind her, paying attention to placing my feet in the footsteps she left behind in the snow. We walked the length of three or four streets through the maze of Shoreditch. It was then that she saw me glancing over her shoulder to see who was following her. Immediately her pace quickened and so I quickened mine. Faster and faster we moved through the blizzard until, after turning a corner slightly ahead of me, I caught sight of her running, her long skirt held up in her hands as she went. I ran too, gaining on her despite her surprising speed. Round four or five more corners we slipped and slid until I saw that familiar lantern at the end of the street on the corner. I slowed to a walk, knowing that a dead end lay beyond. Sauntering through the snow I grinned, knowing that I must be on the verge of getting to the bottom of this.

I turned the corner under the lantern and was immediately greeting with the wide and low carriage entrance, the left hand door slightly ajar. Above the doorway was the loft hatch and the crane, although this time no pallet of goods hung there, only the slightly-frayed rope, blowing wistfully in the wind. I quickened my pace slightly, not wanting to lose her in the endless dark. And it was dark. As I entered the warehouse, the light from the lantern on the corner stayed outside as though scared to come in. I crept through the blackness listening for the slightest sound of movement, feeling into the darkness with my hands as I went. Suddenly there was a scuffle. I lunged in its direction and grabbed hold of a clump of hair I felt moving past me. There was a scream and I remember striking her to make her silent. I felt bad and immediately wanted to take her someone safe and lie her down. I remembered the tunnel and found my way to it, dragging her deadweight behind me and then through it. At the other end of the tunnel I laid her down in the dark and lit a match so I could see. The flame provided very little light but I could make out the wall and so I extinguished the way and felt my way to place her upright against the cold stone.

I lit another match and went to look around the room further. Contrary to what I had thought the room was not empty. At the far end were stacked boxes and on top of and around those boxes were a whole host of strange and exotic items. Ivory from the west coast of Africa, skins and furs from far flung trading posts and a couple of grotesque, taxidermied giraffe and wildebeest heads.

At that moment there was a loud bang following by the sound of splintering wood in the distance. My whole body jerked around to where the noise had come from and I stood, twisted in silence, for any further sound. There was a pause and then with a crash far greater than that that had come before, and a flash of light from outside, a carriage door that I had not seen before on the other side of the room burst open, framing a horse momentarily before the great beast fell into the room with a terrified whinny and the sound of scraping horseshoes. I stood in shock before it writhed on the floor for a few seconds and then got back on its feet unsteadily. Again the horse let out a frightened screech as foam flecked from its mouth and it galloped at full pace in a maddened rage further into the warehouse directly towards the unconscious girl. In a tangle of limbs, hooves, bestial muscle and human flesh the horse ploughed into the wall and into the girl falling once again to the floor with the snapping of bones and the tearing of cartilage. I averted my eyes as the scene unfolded, sensitive only to agonising groan of the semi-conscious girl and the every growing noise of the horse.

At this point, whilst the scuffling in the corner continued, I crawled back through the tunnel and into the first compartment of the warehouse entirely in darkness. I cannot explain how but I knew the way somehow. I paused just inside the ajar open door, looking out into the snowy street, the blizzard having calmed significantly since I entered. For the first time since my arrival in this smoky town, the moon peered down upon its terrestrial neighbour from high, radiating a warming and welcoming light that shone across the snow in through the door and onto a rickety, wooden staircase to my right. Without knowing why I walked towards them and then, again without hesitation, upstairs.

The stairs led to a raised ledge at least twelve foot above ground level from which the loft hatch peered out onto the street below. I walked over to the hatch, gazing out across the warehouse and tenement roofs that stretched forever into the distance. Far away further into town, the looming mass of St. Pauls was almost completely concealed by the smoke that billowed even through the night from the factories of the East End. Chimneys rose from almost everywhere. With my eyes I followed what I thought were the roads back towards the tavern. I double checked the route time and time again but each time I reached the same place in the distance. There was the sign of Richard George Fowler’s warehouse, picked up for a single lantern hanging just to its left. But opposite was no pub or tavern, but a great looming factory, belching the blackest smoke of any on the horizon.

I thought about the past month. About what I had done time and time again. About the tavern, about the ship I had left, about my lodgings, about my landlady, about the lantern on the corner of the street, the carriageway doors, the horse, the snow, the blizzard, the girl.

It was the girl at which I stopped. Her transformation from snake like beauty to lifeless corpse had been caused by me. My hands feeling suddenly heavy attracted my attention and, raising them into view, I saw that I no longer had hands but instead a pair of iron-shod hooves, running red with blood. I glanced once again at the city, I felt a coarse fibre around my throat and then I fell sharply, stopping after six or so feet. Stopping after 28 days. Stopping it ever happening again. But still the snow fell as I felt the coarse rope burning around my reddened flesh soften begin to feel soft, almost like a quilt.

 

Author's Note

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