Skin-Walker

Skin-Walker (Chapter 3)

It was an early start that day. I had only been allowed another five hours sleep before being rudely awoken by the maid. It didn’t take too long to get cleaned and dressed yet it still seemed a hellish task for me in my tired state.

I went for something of a dandy look that day; red waistcoat and cravat, bleached shirt, pristine trousers and polished shoes. No need for a jacket, I thought; the weather seemed milder than yesterday. My gold pocket watch completed the look. Anyone that spotted me would see that I was practically dripping wealth, secreting money from my very pores.

My father had changed his suit from last night yet he still appeared to be as fatigued as he had then. I wondered if he had even went to sleep after he left my room or whether he spent more time brooding. He stopped me on the stairs as I went to get breakfast from Smyth.

‘Ready to leave?’

I stared daggers at him. ‘It is half past eight in the morning. If he was at work now then I would have serious concerns about the state of his mind. Anyway, I’m in need of some food so if you don’t mind,’ I barged past him clumsily, ‘I’ll just get some toast.’

Toast may have been what I said I wanted, but I really craved a full English breakfast. I was starving, having not been fed since lunch the previous day. My mouth watered at the thought of eating bacon, eggs, maybe some sausage and mushrooms too. Unfortunately a bacon sandwich would have to settle me until lunchtime; that incompetent cook was running low on supplies in the kitchen. What in the name of all that is holy did he think we paid him for, his company? Lord no! It was to keep us well-fed and content! And I was only fractionally so of the former and certainly none of the latter.

I still had the book with me at the dining room table. I had flicked through the pages uninterestedly, reading up on how some Frenchmen supposedly slew a bogeyman of some variety in Avignon during the revolution and scoffed, nearly choking on a mouthful of bread. Either father was a gullible fool and believed everything written there or he had somehow been deceived into agreeing with it. It made no difference to my mind; either way it was idiotic of him.

No sooner had I finished my sandwich than father beckoned me to leave. Quite frankly I was glad to remove myself from reading; if it was something grander, say Shakespeare, Machiavelli or Dumas then I would have no objection, however even though it was my grandfather’s own writing it was far too common and poorly constructed for my refined tastes.

As we stepped out into Grey Street I was pleased to see how greatly the weather had improved from yesterday. Gone was the fog, replaced by a small cluster of minute clouds lingering in the great blue vastness above us, failing to suppress the Sun. At once I recalled why I thought this to be one of the more fantastic of Newcastle’s many avenues; it seemed not built by man but carved from the living rock itself by some divine force. The walls of the buildings reflected a pale mirror of the Sun back to us as we paced down the slick paving. A number of carriages darted across the road, varying in degree of quality from expensive to extravagant. Gone too were the huddled masses that clung to the fog; in their place were jubilant gentlemen and lavishly-dressed ladies soaking in what good weather we had been temporarily offered. Despite the sunlight, however, the temperature was still of that horrid coldness that usually grips the north.

One solitary man stood out, however. I spotted him further downhill from where we were, heading towards us. He seemed to have rounded a corner around the same position in the street as Jones’ office yet he did not appear to belong here with the wealthy and well-bred. He was a tall, stocky man, easily twice my stature, and his face was largely obscured by a thick blonde beard. He was dressed in a great dirty brown coat that seemed too large even for him, a tartan shirt and dark corduroy trousers. His boots were those of a shipbuilder; thick and weathered by the conditions at the sea-front and his hands, from what I could see of them as they were hanging from his pockets, were covered in dirty black marks and scars. As he approached slowly, shuffling up the hill with his back hunched slightly as though he were attempting, and very poorly at that, to hide himself, I was able to make out what few features of his face were exposed. He had the crooked nose of a boxer and one of his eyes was pointing slightly more to the left than the other. If I had to guess he could have been only ten years older than me at the most, but wrinkles were appearing around the corners of his eyes, presumably from squinting frequently.