Short Story: The House on Wycherly Lane
In the soot-choked alleys of Victorian London, some doors are better left unopened. The House on Wycherly Lane is a brutal, blood-spattered tale that peels back the lace curtain of the East End to reveal something far more feral beneath.
Set in 1886, this story drags you into a world of flickering gaslight, whispered rumours, and the kinds of predators that don’t just wear fangs, they wear your skin. It’s about hunger not just for flesh, but for something deeper, darker. What begins with a man seeking warmth quickly becomes a reckoning, as the hunted turns hunter in a house that has feasted too long without consequence.
The House on Wycherly Lane
London, 1886. The fog clung to the cobbles like a second skin, thick as pipe smoke and just as choking. Beneath the gaslamps of Whitechapel, shadows moved with purpose; not all of them human.
At the far end of Wycherly Lane stood The Velvet Veil, a three-storey brothel housed in what had once been a vicar’s home, a final joke played by the devil on God’s architecture. Painted red as dried blood, it leaned into the street like it was listening to secrets.
People whispered about the place. About the mysterious bordello owner Madam Morwenna, the girls with moon-pale skin and glassy eyes. About the men who walked in and were never seen again. But whispers mean little to a man like Elias Crabbe, ex-soldier, opium-dabbler, and gutter poet, fresh from his latest adventures in Asia and far-flung Europe – adventures that had almost cost him his life.
He needed shelter, and something more. Something warm, something to bury the gnawing thing inside him.
He pushed through the door.
Inside, the air was thick with perfume and sweat, lit by chandeliers dripping with cobwebs and rust. The parlour smelt of roses, but something beneath that, coppery, iron, it made the back of Elias’ throat tighten.
A woman approached, “You’re new,” she said. Her voice was low, musical, with an accent he couldn’t place. Eastern European, maybe. Her name was Lilith, of course it was. She wore a bodice that clung like wet silk. Her skin was too pale, like milk turned. Her eyes were wide and watching, dark as spilled ink. Her outstretched hand offered a glass of red wine
“I don’t drink,” Elias muttered, shaking his head at the offered glass.
She smiled. “That’s quite all right. I do.”
A cold finger traced the vein on his neck.
Upstairs, the house changed.
The wood creaked differently. The walls seemed closer. There were too many mirrors, but none gave proper reflections. Elias felt watched, like the house was alive and breathing slow.
The girls drifted through the halls like ghosts: red lips, black eyes, teeth white, so white.
Lilith led him to a velvet-curtained room lit by candlelight. A bed loomed in the centre, vast, old, and carved with scenes too worn to read.
She undressed him with slow precision. Kissed his chest, then lower. But when she looked up at him, her eyes were not eyes. They were pits. She opened her mouth.
And that’s when Elias saw the fangs.
He shoved her back, hard.
She hit the wall and snarled – not like a woman, but like a beast. Her face contorted, veins bulged black beneath her skin, her jaw unhinged.
Another girl stepped into the room, then another, three, four. Eyes shining, nails like claws.
“Why do you struggle?” Lilith asked, voice ragged. “You’re already lost.”
They lunged but Elias was faster.
Steel flashed. A hidden blade, the kind he’d used in India, it sliced clean across one girl’s throat. Blood sprayed the walls in dark arcs, thick and slow.
The second girl leapt. Elias caught her mid-air and bit her throat clean out.
She gurgled, choking on her own black blood. The others froze.
Lilith stared, wide-eyed. “You’re not…”
Elias stood naked, dripping and changing.
His bones cracked, his flesh tore. He dropped to all fours as his spine stretched, skin splitting down the back like peeling bark. Muscles rippled, hair erupted from sweat and bload soaked skin.
His face twisted, lengthened, jaw expanding. Fangs of his own tore through gums.
He howled with a sound that split glass.
Lilith ran.
The Velvet Veil exploded into chaos.
Girls screamed, not in fear, but fury. The house came alive with snarls and shrieks. Upstairs, the walls shook as monsters burst from locked rooms. The whores were vampires, yes but Elias was something older. Something raw, a seething, walking nightmare.
He tore through the brothel like fire. Limbs flew, heads rolled and blood splashed the wallpaper in black fountains.
A vampire whore lunged from the stairwell, screeching but Elias simply caught her mid-air and ripped her in half and her guts hit the floor with a wet slap.
Another tried to sink her teeth into his neck. He grabbed her by the scalp and slammed her skull into the wall until the bone cracked and splintered and then caved in.
They didn’t scream like women. They screamed like animals.
The house groaned. It had fed well for years. Dozens of men, drained nightly, bodies burned in the basement furnace but now the feast had teeth.
In the parlour, Madam Morwenna waited. She was older than the others. Eyes like old oil, and a voice like midnight rain. She stood beside the grand piano, calmly lighting a cigarette with a bloodied match.
“You think you’re the first wolf to stumble into my den?” she asked.
Elias, now fully transformed, circled her breathing heavily – not from fatigue but from pure animalistic fury, foam dripped from his jaws. His claws gouged grooves in the floorboards.
Morwenna didn’t flinch, “I’ve killed stronger than you, Wolves. Demons. A cannibal priest once.” She inhaled deeply, eyes flashing. “But none of them made such a mess.”
She dropped the cigarette. The room ignited – gasoline!
Flames whooshed up the drapes, crawling across the ceiling.
Morwenna’s skin cracked and peeled, revealing something beneath. Something slick and black, like a centipede made of bone and blood. Her limbs extended. Her mouth split in four.
The vampire madam attacked.
They collided in a blur of teeth and claws.
Elias tore into her with fur flying, flesh ripping. She shrieked, sinking hooks into his back. Blood poured freely as the smoke thickened. They rolled through fire.
He bit deep into her throat and she stabbed him through the ribs with something jagged and silver. He roared. The fire fed on blood.
They crashed through the parlour doors, locked in a death spiral. Vampires burned behind them. The house screamed, wood cracked and walls collapsed.
In the front hall, Lilith staggered from the shadows half-burnt, flesh peeling, eyes wild.
She watched Morwenna and Elias thrashing on the floor. Watched her madam, her queen, dying.
With a final lunge, Elias bit through Morwenna’s skull. Bone shattered. Brains spilled.
She went still.
Lilith was silent for a momet, in shock, then screamed.
Elias stood over the corpse, smoke rolling off his matted fur. The fire licked the walls. The brothel was collapsing. He looked at Lilith. She ran.
By dawn, The Velvet Veil was ash.
Men came to fight the fire and then sift the embers but found no bodies. No survivors, Just blackened timbers and the stench of death.
They found claw marks, bits of bone, a melted chandelier in the street and one charred, silver brooch in the shape of a rose – the sign of Madam Morwenna’s house.
Of Elias Crabbe, there was no trace.
But in the slums of Bethnal Green, the girls whisper still of a man with eyes like a dog and teeth like a devil. Of how he walked into a vampire’s den and tore it down.
Of a brothel that drank men dry until it invited the wrong beast inside.
And somewhere, in the dark belly of the East End, a wolf walks alone. Burnt, bleeding but breathing.
And very, very hungry.
© Colin Lawson 2025
© Colin Lawson Books