Tom Slemen - The Pellew Street Horror & Other Strange True Tales

Content copyright Tom Slemen. All rights reserved

Published in the United Kingdom

First ePublishing July, 2012

On the Friday night of 5 January 1968, a West Derby man in his early twenties named Martin Whyte was driven to Birkenhead via the Queensway Tunnel by his Uncle Ron, who lived in Tranmere. Ron had spent Christmas and New Year at his sisters house in Liverpool, and was now returning home. He dropped his nephew off near Conway Street around 7.30pm and drove home. Martin met up with a friend named David at Hamilton Square, and the two young men went in search of a good club. What they found instead was quite bizarre. In a turning off Cleveland Street the lads came to an archway, where psychedelic music was heard. Two smiling girls, aged about 17 or 18, stood by a door, and they beckoned Martin and David. The lads stepped forward, and the girls put silken black blindfolds on them and guided them into the club. At the end of a very long passage the blindfolds were removed, and under a vast arched ceiling, there was an enormous space, possibly the interior of an old warehouse. Around three hundred men and women danced and writhed, and many were naked. A dim red ceiling lamp illuminated this Pompeian scene, and the walls, which glistened with perspiration, were adorned with pentagrams and drawings (in chalk and paint) of goat-headed figures. Through the heady atmosphere of aromatic vapour mingling with cigarette smoke and alcoholic odour, a middle-aged woman of striking beauty with unusually dark eyes and long red hair danced up to Martin and set about seducing him. David was similarly beguiled by a thin teenaged girl in black with hypnotic green eyes. With a solemn look on her elfin face, she shouted, I will liberate you, but her words were barely audible over the musical din. David smiled and danced the night away with the girl, whose name, she seriously maintained, was Immaculata. Martin, a virgin who had never had a girlfriend, was a nervous wreck, and he felt very uncomfortable by the attention he was receiving from his mature admirer. He learned her name was Lucinda. She plied him with a fiery ruby drink that tasted like sweet rum until his mind whirled. All through that night, Martin kept asking where David had gone, but Lucinda would stroke his hair and caress him. The atmosphere was hot and oppressive, and several times Martin made a break from Lucinda and looked for a way out the club, but there wasnt a doorway to be found. He walked the perimeter of the wall and found a narrow opening that led to a stinking room used by both sexes as a toilet, but he couldnt find a way out of the accursed club. He asked several people how to get out and they never answered. What felt like tortured hours of time passed by, and a silhouette appeared on a stage where musicians had been performing. It was a man with horns! Through the blue haze of tobacco and marijuana smoke, Martin squinted with stinging eyes at the surreal figure on stage. The horns were really attached to his forehead, and could not possibly be stuck on like some Halloween accessories. Martin went cold. Everyone cheered, and the devil-like stranger spoke in an echoing yet gelid voice. Martin closed his eyes, made the sign of the cross, and prayed for God to deliver him from this satanic club. When he opened his eyes he saw the long passage hed walked down earlier when he was blindfolded, and he rushed through it, out into the cool night air. He wandered the freezing night streets of Birkenhead, too afraid to return to Cleveland Street, to that archway. He walked to his Uncle Rons home in Tranmere and told him what had happened, but Ron assumed his nephew had simply visited some Bohemian club. Martin slept at his uncles home, but all throughout the night he suffered recurrent lucid nightmares of Lucinda swooping down on him from the ceiling.

On the following day in the afternoon, a fog enveloped the region, and Martin boarded a ferry home to Liverpool. As the ferry left the landing stage, Martin thought he heard a womans voice call his name. He looked around and saw only a handful of people on deck, and the voice obviously hadnt been uttered by any of them. Then Martin casually gazed into the grey icy waters of the January Mersey, and his heart jumped into his mouth. A womans face was moving through the waves, following the ferry. He pointed the eerie spectacle out to an elderly passenger, and he gasped and said someone must have fallen overboard. Martin leaned over the safety rail and stared in horror. It was Lucinda. Her long red hair trailed in the icy waters behind her. No normal person, no human could swim in the River at that speed in such cold temperatures. Others saw that face, and Martin told them who she was but the ferry passengers couldnt comprehend his claims. Martin ran to the front of the ferry in terror, expecting her to come on deck. Once again he said a prayer with his eyes clenched, and as soon as the ferry docked at Liverpool he ran off, homewards into the fog. He kept glancing back as he ran up the landing stage bridge, which was angled at a steep incline at that time because the tide was out. Martin reached the bus terminal at the Pier Head, out of breath and shaking, trying to make sense of the what he had seen. After a wait of fifteen minutes, his bus arrived, and he was only too glad to get away from the waterfront. At his home on Leyfield Road, Martin sat in front of the open fire in the parlour with his hands cupped around a mug of tea. He told his mother what had happened, and she wondered if someone had drugged her sons drink and made him hallucinate the things he described. Martin told his mum he was concerned about David, and had a feeling something had happened to him in that club, and Mrs Whyte said shed use her next-door neighbours telephone to phone Davids house and see if everything was okay. Around 5.15pm Mrs Whyte went next door and her neighbour kindly allowed her to use the phone to call Davids mother. It turned out that David was fine, and had come home drunk and covered with lipstick kisses around four in the morning. Martin eventually calmed down when he learned his friend was alright, and by 6pm he was watching his favourite show on the telly - The Monkees, featuring Americas answer to the Beatles.

Martin went to bed around midnight, and sat up listening to his old Dansette radio. He dozed off to the whispers of Radio Luxembourg as the medium-wave station drifted slowly back and forth on the tides of the ether. At one point in the wee small hours, Martin groggily opened one eye, reached out to switch off the bedside lamp, and then attempted to turn off the radio, but clumsily nudged the tuning dial to a dead band of faint white noise that was punctuated with random clicks and static.