Christopher Cantrill's Halloween Horror Compendium

March 1893- hail batters a dank inn on the North West coast of Britain. The wind howls down the cobbled lane, black with years of feculence and squalid dealings between scallywags and vagabonds. A young girl holds her shawl to her tightly and in vain, the West Yorkshire wind piercing her frail, shivering bod. A man stumbles out of the inn. Reeking on gin and his own vomit, the greasy yob holds onto the wall to keep himself on his feet. His attire labels him correctly. A man at the very bottom of Victorian England's harsh society. He sways towards the young girl. "'Ow much for a quick one, luv?" he leers at her bosom. "A shillin'll get ya a ride down't alleyway m'Lord" she replies. The man fingers a filthy shilling and places it in the girls hand. His black tongue whets his chapped lips. The girl turns and walks down the alley alongside the inn. A old drunk is already curled up in one corner, the other is occupied by a dead cat that is already been half-devoured by a band of rats. The alley itself is truly the last pit of hell amongst the Dark Satanic mills that cover Yorkshire's once green land. Thick with years of grease, smog and death no light penetrates the gap in wall. The pair disappear into the black. Any gentleman passing that alley, perhaps on his way home, hat and scarf tight around his head, would have heard over the roar of the winter wind a guttral grunting, a whimper from a girl older than her years and then finally, a minute or so later, one sad moan as the shilling, and the gutter wretch, is spent. The Cantrill lineage begins. If you can witness the culmination of this illicit relationship, 120 years later, I would, if only to see how far a man can come from such lowly beginnings. Cantrill takes the stage not like a street urchin from Bradford, but like a 30-year old man who owns his own leather chair, an Oyster Card with about £12 on it and has been gainfully employed in lower-level retail management for more than five years. A sight to behold.