Hands, I once considered, are eminently useful things. They allow a limitless increase in the faculty of men, and further the breadth of pastimes no end. It is to this end that I took to using my hands to craft things. Not paintings, because to my eye one thing is much like another, and if it is beautiful enough to paint then why bother dulling it with oil? Nor did I put my pen to paper, with the exception of this short recorded. I have no talent for creating from words things that people other than myself would find in the least interesting. I put my most useful of limbs to a different use, taking it upon myself to perfect the art, or I must confess to inventing the art, of playing a part with light and shadow as my actors. Please understand, I am not one of those so-called thespians. Such types stir my blood with their strange addiction to pretence. No indeed, I used ethereal, universal and abundant resources to play parts that I saw fit. I was company, director, playwright and theatre to each one of my plays. But I am forgetting my manners, and also that people reading enjoy a certain structure to that which they read. So I shall begin again, from where I looked upon a curtain.

My name is Henry Wainwright. I am a resident of the great city of London and it is the year of our Lord 1895. I have a room in lodgings on the banks of the river. North side, of course. I can’t abide the Saaf types. Far to close to mother earth for me, thank you very much. I have a job in a firm, and business is steady if a little tedious. These are the facts of my life, as far as they go. I did of course make full use of the four and twenty years preceding this account, but those events have faded now to memories of pigeons and the smell of porridge on an open fire.

From the window of my lodgings, which is on the uppermost floor of the most precariously balanced building in all of London, I can see the rooftops for miles around. I can on most nights sit and watch the smoke and birds and the clouds over St Paul’s. I say most nights, because no doubt you, being educated, will have heard of the infamous Pea-Souper. If not, I will fill you in. Pea soup is a strange recipe to use the old peas and make them by volume edible, creating stodgy green goo. The mixture has as one of its many virtues a definite opacity. Its other virtues are somewhat harder to prove. The fog that rolls in from the Thames shares this quality, hence the name. It seems strange now to think that we could, with a little more imagination, have been walking about at night in what could be known as anything from stone to a leg of mutton. Still, a Pea-Souper it was.

I was sitting in my bedchamber, reading the works of Abraham Stoker before I retired for the evening, when threads and fingers of the fog crept though my window. I put aside Count Dracula and closed my window. There was no superstition in this action, but my nurse always said I’d catch my death sitting beside an open window. I doubt she meant that a vampire in mist form might access my room and murder me for my blood, but it was wise advice nonetheless. Through the closed window, and also through the fog outside, I saw a square of hazy yellow light. Mesmerised by the sparkling diffraction in the vapour I stood for longer than was decent by the window. Suddenly a silhouette moved into the square of light. It floated with such grace, such fluid action, that I watched still. I realise now that my action was not far from that of a certain Peeping Tom, but I assure you dear reader that I was seeking no illicit pleasure. Though I could see nothing more than a shadow, a blacked out phantom of the person, I watched intently. The movements were as a ballet played to the music of a flute, the grace of a swan’s supple neck arching this way and that. As I said, I am no poet, and these similarities are crude in their accuracy. There was a sunrise in the movements, a moonlit stream in the stillness. These reasons I labour because they held me spellbound. With nothing more to see than a dark shape across a foggy street I was awe-struck. As I remember it, suddenly the light was doused and I was looking at the dark, eyeless wall of a house. I have to qualify this, because on reflection I expect it was not sudden at all, being not totally unaware of the time a woman spends freeing herself of the day. The time spent felt sudden, like the waking from a dream to see flashes of that dream before they fade like shadows in the sunlight.