Against The Odds

Prologue: A Tale of Two Worlds

There's a place in London where empty souls go to decay. Smog lingers fitfully around the ankles of pedestrians, perpetually swirling and shifting.

The devil stalks these streets. Don't believe me? Ask the desolate, the degraded and the damned. The lunatics have seen him in their waking dreams. Whores emerge from shadowed doorways to greet him as an old friend. The cadences of their deadened voices fall like coins from the hand of a drunkard into the palm of the landlord.

Misery and sweltering depression are everywhere, save for the gin-houses and opium dens where lost souls go to disappear, vanish even, as if part of some idealistic magician's act at the music hall.

But there's no magic here - only cruel illusions and mirages that whisper sweet nothings in your ear as you down another bottle.

The tall buildings that lean inwards to meet each other, bridging these narrow streets, obscure the view of the sky so even those who crane their necks the furthest and strain their worn-out eyes the hardest can't see a way out.

Far, far away, yet somehow painfully close, is another world. No low-lifes or sinners there. Perish the thought. Only church-goers, businessmen and old governesses who are named for the virtues they should possess. Instead, scandals are thinly yet masterfully veiled from the eyes of prying neighbours who have a tendency to watch you from between the curtains of row-upon-row of terraced houses that look identical and stretch as far as the eye can see.

A sparrow comes to a rest on the roof of one of these tall, sand-coloured buildings. If you were to look up, now, this very second, you would see that its feathers are matted and damp with mire and excrement. It sings a song that seems to sigh of the journey across the city that it has undertaken, from one world to another. You finally glance upwards, but it's gone. It came here to escape the devil of the London underworld, but no one's safe here.