A Semi-Anonymous Literary Endeavor Submitted to the Unexpurgated London Gazette, October 23, 1889

My cloak is freshly laundered and only slightly damp with the chilly drops of fog that have been blowing in off the Zee since noon. I found it hanging from a stile over a mushroom field on my first day out of New Newgate and decided to keep it. The name embroidered in white (now grey) silk on the hem was “Aspasia,” which I took as a name as good as any other and appropriate to boot with my smattering of the classics.

 

I run a finger over black wool and greywhite silk before taking the bottle from the cupboard and allow the sluggish, oddly mobile black liquid to crawl downward into two mismatched glasses that I found under the floorboards in a sorrow-spider’s web along with a marble-sized lump of glim and enough human eyelashes to make up several more spiders. As I move to light a candle resting in the center of the table the door swings open and my partner in crime enters. His own cloak looks to have once been either an old tent from Mrs. Plenty’s or the cover of some mysterious and stealthy black airship, but it seems to serve him well in the enterprise of prowling. In one green-grey mottled hand he carries a packet of sugar made from the beets planted by enterprising farmers in the highest and loamiest heights of the cavern and harvested by zeppelin. As he sits I procure a tarnished silver spoonful, lighting the liquor-soaked sugar with an ease born of performing the same motion countless times (albeit with the fee noire’s inferior vert sister) at the Singing Mandrake. The flames spit and turn strange, unhealthy-looking colors before guttering out. We clink our glasses and gulp down the contents, I with a discreet cough and he with a flinch reminiscent of the time he was stabbed by an enterprising and recently deceased Knife-and-Candle player.

 

It’s true that no one seems to know the origins of the traditional post-Black Wings prowling, but the compulsion to indulge in it after partaking suggests something altogether more sinister and inescapable, as if there were a shortage of such things in Fallen London. Heads turn as we skulk. The local Spittle-Flecked Harridan scribbles down an unflattering note on her memorandum pad. Cats watch us from the tops of buildings, half amused and half exasperated. My cloak catches on a nail, ripping the last “A” in “Aspasia” and causing the Rubbery Men we have been observing to scuttle off in alarm. The slightly blacker darkness of the night around us seems suddenly new and uncanny. Streetlamps shine oily-colored prisms at strange angles onto alleys which, never inviting at the best of times, loom around us like the intestinal loops of the cavernous beast that devoured London so long ago, and we huddle together, scrutinizing every shadow for the next clue the Black Wings hints at with each fevered whisper in the back of our minds. Soon the rocking of the horizon will become unbearable and creatures that might be the shades of urchins or devils’ children or souls thrown back by spirifers or any number of other things will squirm from the gaps left by the swaying, whispering things that were never meant to be heard or even later mused on sober as we flee silently into shadows that swallow us and our black cloaks totally.

 

Fortunately these things never linger and in the morning, woken by the sniffs of the proprietous individuals on whose doorsteps we have fallen asleep, the urge to repeat the experience is undeniable.

 

-A.R

Somewhere on the Zee…

I say, love, this is something of a fix.

“The zailor I asked said the tide was coming in hours later than this! How did I know his almanac was five years out of date?”

Tut, there’s no need for shouting. I suppose we shall have to weather the night on this rock. One of your petticoats must suffice as a tent.

“Yes, I suppose there’s nothing for it. You can have the green one; it’s seen worse. What are we going to eat and drink, though?”

I’ve enough water and Morelway’s in my canteens to hold us over if we ration it. As for eating, we would do well to consume the aquatic monstrosities before they consume us. This harpoon I liberated from the fishermen should serve admirably.

“And eat them raw? I haven’t got anything for a fire, and who knows what sorts of poisons have to cook out of such things before they can be eaten.”

H’m, that is a bother. For you, at any rate. I suppose libation must be postponed until our return.

“…At least we might recover some more glim?”

I don’t suppose you could throw down a pentagram and summon that young gentleman of yours to fetch us home.

“That would be rude. Besides, he’s calling on his mother and sisters at the Embassy tonight and I’m sure they would boil me alive if I interrupted their repartee.”

Take the harpoon and keep watch, then, whilst I scout out a suitable campsite. If anything appears that possesses more mandibles or eyes than myself, shoot it.

“(sigh) If only felinomancy treated more on the mastery of water than running from it in terror…”

-A.R