The Complete Journey - Complete
The Voice from the Depths
Scene 1 of 3
Scene 1 of 3
The River Fleet swallowed Silas's boots.
Waist-deep water pressed against his thighs.
The rusted toshing iron dragged through murk, seeking lost value.
Brick archways curved overhead.
Moss slicked every surface in black-green.
The gas lamp flickered from its iron bracket.
Shadows danced across the tunnel walls.
Twenty years he'd walked these depths.
The underground was his refuge.
His church.
His tomb.
Silas's thumb rubbed his palm.
The iron was familiar weight in his grip.
Tonight the water felt different.
Not the usual gurgle of sewage.
Something else.
A whisper rose from the polluted surface.
"Silas."
His hand froze on the iron.
The voice echoed through brick tunnels.
A voice he knew intimately.
Elara.
His sister.
Gone twenty years.
Vanished into the Great Fog of 1888.
Eight years old.
She'd gone to fetch coal.
The yellow haze had swallowed her whole.
He'd searched until his lungs burned.
Until the toxic air choked him.
She was never found.
The guilt rose in his throat.
Bitter as bile.
He'd failed her.
"Silas."
The whisper came again.
Clearer this time.
Not madness.
Not the tunnel's acoustics playing tricks.
Her voice.
Here.
Trapped in the waters.
The Fleet held more than lost coins and broken debris.
It held souls.
Silas's heart hammered against his ribs.
He dropped to his knees in the water.
The sewage soaked his trousers.
He didn't care.
"Elara?"
The word cracked.
Twenty years of grief compressed into syllables.
Ripples answered.
Not just one voice.
Many.
Whispering through the currents.
Women who went missing from Whitechapel.
Prostitutes.
Servants.
Factory girls.
The forgotten.
Their voices wove a pattern.
A trail of disappearance.
All pointing to one place.
Madame Vora's Séance Society.
Silas pressed his palm to the water's surface.
Cold.
slick.
Alive with whispers.
He would return.
With a glass spirit lantern.
Its flame burned blue when spirits were near.
The underground would reveal its secrets.
The forgotten deserved justice.
Truth emerged from the darkest places.
He would bring it into light.