This excerpted from my short story, Secrets in the Mist

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5 May 1861 - Liverpool

She moves quietly through the streets, this lady of the night. Few occupy the streets after sunset, except for those spilling from the pubs, seeking a bit of comfort for a short time. She can provide that, and it puts food on the table. She steps across the broad, cobbled street and takes her usual spot.

The sun, reluctant to give up its feeble reign, hangs stubbornly for a time in the west. Shadows—long and foreboding—blend silently with the coming night, reaching skeletal fingers out from the waterfront toward the city as the fiery orb, now barely visible, slides behind an uncertain, hazy peach colored horizon. A man, cloaked in black, head covered with a broad-brimmed hat, hobbles along on crooked legs, poking at lamps atop posts with a long pole, a timid flame at its end. Once a slave to the Jenny Lind, he is now a slave to the Liverpool lamps. He doesn’t mind, though.

She left me here with me mangled legs—whilst she went off to die on the shoals, she did. Wahll, good riddance, I say....

He chuckles quietly to himself about the irony that landed him in his current predicament and scurries along in a sort of sideways shuffle like a small crab in an effort to stay ahead of the coming mist. The fog, creeping in on cat’s paws, stalks him, swallows him, dims the lamps thus lit—covers all in wet beads trickling together. He never wins his race but remains undaunted. Tomorrow he will do it again, just as he has for ten years now.

The hour of midnight approaches. The streets are hushed still under a canopy lit to a dull gray by a pitifully thin crescent of the moon. Otherwise, they are utterly dark save for the feeble glow of the lamps’ stuttering, sputtering flames, and a few candles dancing faintly in kitchen windows of some Irish immigrants’ homes along the far south and north ends—customs that cling, brought to their new surroundings a score years ago. The cobbles glisten under a wet scum. A mix of mist, grime, salt, and soot. The rounded and worn stones reflect what little light the lamps afford, tiny yellowed diamonds twinkling weakly.

A coach passes by the darkened storefronts, pubs and shops lining the eastern side of the street, a ghostly black and gray image smudged, lacking detail, a tiny light on each side flickering wispy haloes. Sacked hooves and iron-banded wooden wheels thump and clatter against the broad street laid in a strip along the waterfront. The sound dies quickly in the dense mist.

The coach slows—stops beneath one of the lamps where a young woman stands as if waiting. She leans toward the coach and speaks quietly to the lone occupant for some time. The coachman, covered in a glistening oilskin cape, its hood drawn tightly about his head and dripping the night from its edges, does not look down. The woman combs back strings of wet red hair with her delicate fingers, fingers capped with dirty nails. The door opens and she steps in.

A quick snap of the reins and a click of the driver’s tongue. The horse responds and the coach disappears in a swirl of gray mist and dim light. Moments later a muffled, terror-strained shriek ruptures the silence. It does not last long and is muted in the mist. No one hears.

Moments later, a flash of blue-white light in an alleyway between warehouses lining the Albert dock pushes a dome of brightness and something else, something solid, upward into the quiet of the shrouded night. For an instant, a dot of yellow-orange light, growing more red as it retreats, can be seen hurtling skyward by anyone who looks, but there is no one to look. Then, it too is gone. Only the lazy clanging of a buoy’s bell, the plaintive, deep groans in the rigging of mighty merchant ships at the docks as they roll slowly in their berths, and the glare from the Black Rock Light down the Mersey interrupt the silence and gloom.