The Sun Far From Rising

Contains mild treat and violence: The Sun Far From Rising.

For me it was as the youngest of two siblings, left alone to face a world devoid of care and guidance, that as a child no more than the hight of a grown man's elbow, I’d naturally had less time to hone my skills in the family business of survival no matter the cost than my older brother had; whom out of plain familial love and necessity, as well as a somewhat grudging admiration, I had since the age of two years old always had to rely on. And giving him his due, he had never let me down. My belly, while not ever full, seldom rumbled with hunger for longer than a day or two.

He had always seemed to naturally know the way of things better than I my brother, and not merely through having lived and struggled his way in the world for longer than I even when there had all to briefly been adult guiding hands attempting in vein to make our world a happier place. Therefore, it made sense in my young head that I gave in when he always appointed me lookout and gave strict instructions that I was not to move a single inch “No matter what!” under any circumstances, until he told me otherwise. But there are somethings in this world, a Darkness which I have since come to know, that even my brother through his fourteen years of struggles in this world could not have even thought to have imagined.

It was my adherence to sticking to his rigid order to not follow him, that one night, with the Sun far from rising, I found myself crouched in the dark, alone save my dog, Hound.

The back tenement at the foot of Lady Stairs’ Close had until then lain undisturbed in its darkness. Following custom, the alley had been termed a Close, and named after its most illustrious inhabitant of whom I knew nothing. Being no more than a child at that time the eponymous Lady Stairs’ achievements warranting the honour of having the finest alley in this bedraggled old town named for her were of no interest to me, and to this day remain so. The Darkness however, which lived huddled and hidden amongst the worn cobbles and the soot-stained bricks, that made up my world would soon enough make itself fully known to me.

The only information my brother had deemed worthy enough of passing on to me before he abandoned me was the usefulness of Lady Stairs’ Close in its darkness and proximity to the back tenement building, which stood proud and promised the richest of pickings. I watched as a storm lantern belonging to my elder kin and colleague in thievery, was placed at its small, six paned mean attic window. I watched the light come and go, diffused and flickering, as my brother searched for what he had guaranteed would be, “enough coin to be the making of us ma wee lass!”, while in my own humble opinion as lowly thief’s apprentice the back tenement now stood akin a lighthouse, with his torch shining bright atop for all to see as if a warning of the dark and stormy sea ahead. That, was when Hound howled, in a fashion I had never witnessed prior to this night. ‘It’s a’ right Hound.’ I said attempting to reassure him. ‘Quiet, my good boy.’. Generally, they minded their own around here. But it would not be long before someone would come looking, nosing

And then I saw what Hound had sensed. Our doctor with lodgings in the attic of this tenement had turned down the close. At no great age our doctor, neither was he young it was no great task to see that something had happened since last I saw him, something had altered his confident, exuberant gait. Naively young and curious I stepped out from the shadows of the close but as he passed, he paid me no heed. Hound though now quiet, strained at his tether as I scratched behind his ears. Hound’s muzzle in the crook of my arm, ‘There, there. Ma gid boy. There, there.’, we matched the doctor’s steps. We three reached the lodgings together and in an attempt to return the attic window to darkness, I raised my cupped hands to give the crow’s cry which had been agreed when the good doctor, this Doctor Jekyll, would step under the front door’s lantern. But it was a shuffling, wreck of a man who appeared before me.

I saw that it was not merely the doctor’s gait which had changed, and struck with the sense that this figure was in fact a harbinger of doom I forced the cry from my throat out to the other Closes and Wynds beyond, somehow known to me that nothing or no one could stop this...this creature, returning to its lair. There was none who could aid my brother now.

‘Hey! You. There!’.

I turned toward the Main Street, in the direction of the yell, a good ten or twenty yards from the close, while behind me the door-latch clicked down the creature returned within. ‘Hey! You, lurking where you got no business lurking!’.

I called back to the darkness, ‘My dog’s doing its business. That’s all.’. In my young life thus far, my experiences with the Turnkeys had taught me that I would never be believed, so I turned, making a pretence of ‘being off’, though somehow knowing the situation helpless.

That evening was the last I would see of my brother, the thief trapped with such a creature. That evening I came to know the way of things. I came to know a Darkness that would never wain, a Sun that for me at least that would never fully rise again, for I came to know Darkness itself, in this Doctor Jekyll – or what was left of him, a’bed at the foot of Lady Stairs' Close.