The body at the steps was barely moving as we exited the house. Heaving hoarse breaths escaped from its huddled form. Periodic tiny coughs gave hint to bloody aspiration that was confirmed by one prime example, yielding in a small spray of red floating out of what must be its mouth, hitting the steps and dripping down to mix with the slight drizzle that had started half an earlier. While Gabriel looked to the body, I, with my equal skills and youthful vigor, began to keep one eye on the surroundings and the other to see if I could determine where this unhappy occurrence had happened. A trail of blood was apparent, though it was starting to drift towards the drains, which made me much happier when I saw Stefan round the corner with the hounds. Once the footmen returned from securing doors, I left them to continue with triage while Gabriel, Stefan, and myself began to trace what happened. It wasn’t even a block from the front gate before I realized there was an uncharacteristic quiet to the cobblestone street which should have at least had the sounds of shopkeepers preparing their wares even at this hour. There was no sound, no dogs barking, no cocks crowing. There was only furtive figures, always on the edge of sight, always in the corner where the eye plays trick on mankind.
Using a puddle underfoot, while the dogs were realigning themselves with their diminishing prey, I made as if to retie my boot and peered around with god’s own mirrors. Not ten feet behind us was a man who must have appeared from nowhere as there were no doors and no alleys for him to have emerged from. A tall man, slender in build, wearing a suit more fit for a undertaker than decent company. I could not see his face beneath his wide brimmed hat, but he appeared to have a thick beard, a black tendrilly mass that waved unnaturally in the wind. His hands were hanging slack by his side, neither in a threatening manner nor passively. When I whipped my head sharply up to see if I could discern any features before he turned away, I was not incredibly amazed to find him gone. For the rest of our hunt, we all remarked on the singular way that we felt as if we were not being watched. The lack of watching was maddening in that we knew that our whereabouts were being noted, someone knew where our path went, but almost like they were following our lack of presence versus our corporeal selfs.
The path led through alleys and walk-ways until finally ending in a fair pool of spilled blood outside of clock-maker. The door of the shop, once tested proved to be unlocked even though the interior was silent. We entered; a feeling of dread begining to steel upon us with the absolute lack of life outside in the street and now no person at work in the shop. There was no overturned furniture, nor broken displays, but the foreboding tension was still building. It was at this time that Gabriel called “The clocks!” when it became clear what was wrong. For an shop to be uninhabited with the door unlocked was strange, but that all the clocks had stopped showing the same time of a quarter past five was terrifying. From the grandfather clock, to a pocket watch in the clamps where it looked to be getting its last polishing before being returned to its owner, there was no sound of gears, no clicks of springs in the shop. We followed the hounds, though there reluctance to chase this particular scent was growing obvious, up the back stairs to the apartment of the watch maker. The door at the top of the stairs, which had probably only been shut once in this last year, was locked and barred for all the good it had done. While the doorframe was intact and the deadbolt held firmly in the jam, through the center of the door there was a man-sized hole as if a company of firemen had broken through. Stepping through the hole, we saw scaprs of dark red fabric, maybe a velvet, as if someone had crawled though, or been dragged through. Beyond this small amopunt of evidence, there was no sign of life, nor that anyone had ever lived there. The room was bare with a fairly high amount of dust piles in the corners looking like the sand dunes of mysterious Egypt. The kitchen was empty, no dishes in the sink, no ash in the hearth. Searching for half-an-hour, for something, anything, we left empty handed. Making note of the apparent point of conflict as well as the path taken we returned to the house to find who the victim was and perhaps determine what fate had befallen him.