Chapter Text
I didn’t pay much attention to the voices at first if I’m being honest. In London if you drop everything to spy on whatever gaggle of drunks stagger past your window you’d never get anything done. Plus, being in the attic room, as I am, there was considerable distance between myself and the street.
Really, it’s a surprise I heard anything intelligible at all.
I think it was the mention of a betrayal that first piqued my interest.
Or was it a theft?
Yes, that was it. One of the voices in particular was really quite loud and kept going on about a theft and I got up from my bed to have a look and see, hoping that if my sleep was going to be disturbed then I might as well get some entertainment out of whatever drunken brawl was sure to start outside my window.
There was a small gathering on the other side of the road. They seemed quite a merry lot, in the euphemistic sense of the word if you catch my meaning. At first glance I took them for homogenous, all older, well-dressed gentlemen but then I noticed the odd one out in the middle of the group. He was dressed in the livery of an officer of Her Majesty’s Army, surrounded by the other men and gesticulating wildly.
I could just about make out his face barely illuminated as it was by the streetlamps. It didn’t mean anything to me then, I didn’t even realise I’d seen him before around the neighbourhood until Harjit showed me his picture months later.
He must have been pretty far gone. He was slurring his words but his voice was raised enough to just carry through the thin glass of my window. He seemed agitated to me, even beyond what is usual for soldier in his cups and he kept talking about needing to warn everyone, about darkness and bats.
Wait.
Did he mention bats? Or have I just invented that out of whole cloth, linking an unrelated event to the catastrophe that happened only a few days later. He definitely talked about a disaster I remember that much, but that needn’t have meant the Fall. Much more likely it was some personal tragedy. The kind that to a drunk mind seems as monumental as the world’s end but turns much more manageable in the sober light of day.
I was just about to retire back to bed as I was, and I am ashamed to admit this knowing what I do now, bored at the lack of action when the group turned on the young officer. They picked him up about his armpits as one of them unlocked the door to the tenement across the road and carried the now struggling lad off through the threshold and into the darkness of the house. That was the last I saw of them.
It may have been the last I saw of the house come to think of it.
I’m told it disappeared during the Fall or sometime shortly after, replaced by a similar building that for months I took to be the original. Terribly unneighbourly I know, not to notice an adjacent property up and vanishing but I must confess I was somewhat out of sorts in the months following our decent through the earth’s crust.
Black dog, if you must know.
Still this all happened a few days before the Fall. The lad could hardly have been in the building when it disappeared, he wasn’t so drunk it’d take days to sleep off the hangover. And if he was? What that would do to a person? Well, that doesn’t bear thinking about now does it?