by Matthew Owen Jones
in Issue 144, January 2023
Jurgen walked through the maze of rain-soaked streets that he knew so well.
The driving rain poured from the tiled roofs, bleeding into the gutters, across the cobbles and narrow alleys of the dock district.
Few people would wander out in such weather without good reason, especially in this part of the city known as ‘The Shambles’. Tonight, he had such a reason. All the patient years of careful bargaining had led him to this place and this night.
From beneath the hood of his tattered cloak, he could see the warm glow of light from the windows of ‘The Embers’ inn. His feet felt heavy as he approached.
Jurgen paused at the entrance, his hands lingering upon the thick, rain-slick door. Twelve years had passed since he had last crossed this threshold. The memories the place evoked were still painfully raw. The building was constructed from the same stones that had once been as familiar as old friends. Now, it served a different purpose from the home he had known.
His fist hammered on the door. A wooden slat was drawn back to reveal the tattooed face of a brutal looking man with a broken nose. The hard brown eyes met his own in recognition.
As the door opened, a wave of warmth and sound engulfed him. Raised voices and raucous laughter washed over him along with the smell of ale and sweat. The faint odor of tar permeated the place from the warehouses above.
Jurgen moved inside and the large tattooed man closed the heavy door behind him. Easing his way through the jostle of people and pipe smoke, Jurgen found a place in a corner close to the hearth and pulled up a stool beside it. His pauperclothes were drenched and the warmth was welcome. Around him men and women talked and laughed, enjoying the cheap ale and cooked meat, while sheltering from the storm outside. The people around him looked upon his appearance with disdain. A few of the closest patrons shied away from the beggar in their midst. The bald innkeeper frowned at Jurgen’s ragged appearance, as he slid a flagon of ale across the bar to a rough-looking customer.
He was used to being ignored, after years on the streets, he preferred it that way. A beggar was no one of importance, easily forgotten. Concealed beneath his rags, he was an unnoticed observer, his keen eyes catching the details that often escaped the notice of others.
His gaze swept the room, inspecting its crowd: a mix of dock workers, day labourers and tradesmen, with a few women mingling among them. The Shambles was in the heart of the poor quarter of the city, riddled with crime and disease. Those unfortunate enough to live there had hard lives.
The room itself was long and narrow, with a low ceiling supported by heavy wooden beams. It was cramped like every other building in the vicinity of the docks. There was always a pressing demand for new warehouses among the tangle of structures.
So much had changed, it felt nothing like the place he remembered. Aside from the fire, the only light came from a few lanterns hanging from the beams. His eyes came to rest upon the blackened stone hearth of the fireplace itself. The realisation shook him that it was the same fireplacehe had built with his own hands. Though blackened, it had still endured. The rest had been claimed by the fire when it had all burned down. It was here he had taught his young son how to play chess on a hand-carved board.
“We don’t shelter vagrants.”
The unwelcoming voice came from the innkeeper who now stood over him.
“You’d better be on your way.”
Seated, Jurgen did not look up at the man, instead he produced a newly minted coin of silver. He watched as it glinted in the firelight and heard the man’s grunt of surprise beside him.
“I will trade you this coin for the warmth of your fire.” The silver coin was a generous sum for the humble request. “Such a little thing …but so desirable,” Jurgen tossed the coin to the man and returned his attention to the fire. He felt the innkeeper hesitate before turning away.
“Bring me some water, please,” added Jurgen. The man paused again, before shuffling off into the crowd. Jurgen was thirsty and it would be a long wait.
Men were easily persuaded by coins. Money could buy almost all things. Years living in the streets had taught him that even life and death were cheap in the Shambles.
At first, when he had found himself with nothing, he had begged and gathered twisted copper coins, scooped from fountains in the better part of the city. He had hoarded them like the most precious of things. The rare silvers, he kept secret and hidden, reluctant to part with even a single one. He would eat scraps, wear rags and spend his nights counting his slowly growing purse.
He began to understand that the true value of coins was not counted in bread and wine, but in the influence they wielded over people.
He became a money lender to the desperate, and so his money grew, and he put it to a more interesting use: exchanging coins for promises and favours. He had found they had far more value. A door left open or a guard distracted, a rumour started, a private letter shared, a petty crime overlooked: These insidious little deeds could destroy lives, or just as easily save them.
Now years later, he had a network of eyes and ears across the city. People that owed him, and had their debts to settle.
Jurgen watched the flames lick at the blackened stone, as the noise of the inn washed over him. A serving girl approached Jurgen carrying the flagon of water in both hands. She set it down beside him, before kneeling to tend to the fire. Jurgen supposed she was attractive in her own way – young, dark-haired, and with a fondness for trinkets evidenced by the silver necklace around her throat.
She seemed aware of his scrutiny and hurried to finish the task, and with a retreating glance slipped back into the crowd. He closed his eyes as he tried to remember a different life, when the raucous sounds of laughter were softer and the building had been a home.
An hour passed and the crowd began to thin and drift off, returning to the drudgery of their lives.
Jurgen felt a cold draught as the door was opened and a tall, rough looking man with a heavy jaw entered the Inn. The man paused to scan the remaining patrons before he approached the bar. Jurgen recognised him immediately as a sergeant of the city watch, called Morten. He was a man who had some unsavoury habits, which included taking bribes. Jurgen knew he had arrived here tonight in the promise of a rather large one.
Morten’s gaze swept over him without pause. He looked for a man that would never show. Jurgen sipped his water and wondered how Morten would react when the others arrived.
The tattooed doormanshoved two drunk men out the door, staggering into the darkening, rain-soaked night. Before the door had properly swung closed, he saw another man enter. Despite the years, Jurgen vividly recalled the hatchet-like face of Patrician Arnoldt Köhler.
Köhler removed his rain-sodden cloak and cast a disdainful look at his surroundings. It would have been several years since he had spent any significant time in the Shambles District. He had married into land and title, and was now a man of considerable influence.
The innkeeper offered to take Köhler’s cloak, and ushered him toward the warmth of the fire where Jurgen himself sat. Jurgen lowered his head, hiding within the hood of his cloak. if Köhler somehow recognised him, everything he had carefully planned for so long could be endangered. Many years had passed, but the memory of the man’s face lingering above his own as he and the others left him to die, remained etched in his mind.
Before he reached Jurgen and the fire, a voice stopped Köhler in his tracks.
“Well…haven’t you done well for yerself?”
“Morten…?”
Köhler turned to regard the sergeant. Jurgen was amused to see the surprise warring with displeasure upon his face.
“Why are you here, Morten?”
“Meetin’ someone,” Morten grinned, showing his rotting teeth. “Buy an ale for an old friend?”
Köhler hesitated before moving to the bar with the sergeant, where the innkeeper poured them drinks. The two men withdrew to a table in a dark corner to talk. Jurgen could clearly see Köhler’s displeasure at running into his old acquaintance.
Jurgen heard the timbers above him creak. Men were seemingly still working in the warehouse above the inn. He watched a trickle of sawdust spill down from a gap between the planks. His eyes flicked to the remaining customers, but no one else seemed to notice.
Outside, the weather lashed against the thick glass windows. They were reinforced with bars of iron to secure the premises from intruders, a sensible precaution in the Shambles. The fire slowly burned down to the embers, as the last of the logs was eventually reduced to ash.
He did not have to wait long for the last of the three. He appeared after the crowd had thinned further when only a dozen customers remained and the noise had fallen away. The large man was garbed in a heavy cloak that almost hid the hem of his priest’s robes. Ludwig had grown fatter since he had last seen him.
The priest strode over to the serving girl as she cleared a table by the door, he grasped her wrist making her gasp in shock. She tried to pull away but the larger man held her firm, whispering vehemently.
Jurgen could not make out the words, but he did not need to. He knew Ludwig would be questioning her about the letter he received this afternoon. A letter that she knew nothing about, one that threatened to expose his affair with her to the church, unless he made her his wife. Jurgen had arranged the letter himself, from a forger that was indebted to him.
The sound of laughter from the back of the inn made Ludwig look over to see Köhler and Morten looking back at him. Morten had a wide grin as he witnessed the discomfort of his old companion. Beside him, Köhler did not seem to share his amusement.
The bald innkeeper used the distraction to lead the serving girl into the back room. Jurgen could hear the muffled sound of the man’s angry voice as he scolded her for bringing her personal problems to his doorstep. He watched the large doormandiscreetly close the door behind them, muting the raised voices and leaving the now mostly empty room in silence.
The doorman returned to leaning beside the entrance. Jurgen wondered if anyone other than him could see the tension in the man. Tension was understandable, in a man that was about to commit murder. Jurgen himself felt only a cold satisfaction.
The tattooeddoorman had a wife that was very ill, and Jurgen had been paying for her treatment that they could never afford. The doorman had been only too grateful to accept his bargain.
The fat figure of Ludwig walked over to the dark corner where the other men sat. As the three of them talked, he heard the tone of amusement fall away from Morten. The three men began to talk more quickly, in rushed angry tones.
“This is no coincidence!” Köhler’s raised voice cut through their bickering.
Jurgen rose to his feet and turned away from the embers of the fire, toward the front door. He savoured the emotion in their voices, listening as their arrogance and confusion changed to fear. He had manoeuvred them here, like pieces upon a chessboard; Bishop, Knight and King.
The large doorman held the door open expectantly, waiting for him. Jurgen lingered upon the threshold, hesitant to leave. He didn’t know what kind of life waited for him beyond the door now. Perhaps the man he had become deserved to remain.
He turned back, picturing their faces as things used to be. His wife smiled back at him, as his son sat pondering his move over the chessboard at their hearth in their home, as it used to be.
“You, Beggar!” The voice cut through his memories like a knife.
Jurgen turned at the words that addressed him, to see the three men realise they were alone in the inn.
Jurgen turned back and stepped out into the rain, slamming the heavy door firmly shut behind him. He knew his men on the floor of the warehouse above, had been waiting for the sound of the door as their signal.
The muffled shouts and cries from inside the inn were audible even above the rain. The downpour soaked him in the darkness of the night, and he welcomed it, knowing it would conceal any cries of alarm.
He heard the sudden, violent pounding on the door behind him. Jurgen waited a long moment, before sliding back the wooden slat to look back within the inn.
The panicked face of Arnoldt Köhler was pressed against the slat. Behind Köhler, he could see the glistening threads of tar pouring through the cracks between the planks of the Inn’s ceiling, seeping slowly into the chamber of the inn.
“Who are you? I am a wealthy man, I can pay you!” The thick black tar coated Köhler’s face and shoulder. The desperation in his voice did not give Jurgen the satisfaction he had thought it would. The tar behind him continued to trickle in thick, liquid strings coating everything it touched.
“Why are you doing this?” Köhler’s face contorted in anger and fear.
Jurgen leaned his face close to the gap in the door, recalling the last time their two faces were this close, twelve years ago when he had left Jurgen to die.
“This Inn used to be a home. My home. It wasn’t much, but it meant a great deal to me.”
He heard the crack against the glass as one of the men tried to break a window to escape. Jurgen knew the windows were reinforced with iron and would not break before it was far too late.
“I wouldn’t sell it. When I was not moved by your threats, you left us for dead and burned it down.”
Jurgen saw Köhler’s eyes widen as he finally understood.
“Twelve years ago you took everything from me, my wife, my son.”
Jurgen pulled back his hood, revealing a face that was a grotesque patchwork of scars. The flesh and lips had burned away leaving the teeth visible in a constant grimace. Jurgen’s clear blue eyes gleamed in the darkness from the ruin of his face.
“I was a father and a husband. You made me a monster.”
Behind the wooden slat, the inn burst into light, as the embers of the fire ignited the tar, and the flames engulfed the chamber. The cries turned to screams.
Jurgen pulled his hood up and walked into the cobbled streets he knew so well, with the tattooed doorman following in his wake. In the growing firelight, his shadow lengthened and distorted, filling the narrow streets of the Shambles.
©January 2024, Matthew Owen Jones
Matthew Owen Jones is an English writer living in Canada, who continues to be inspired by the rural Cornish coast, that was his home for so long. He loves to write of lonely characters in vibrant worlds. Matt has published previous stories with Creepy Podcast, The NoSleep Podcast and the ScareYouToSleep Podcast among others, his latest story is coming soon with the British Fantasy Society. His book, The Shepherd, is now available on Amazon.