XXI - Charlie
Charlie had run out of breath. He was standing at the end of a corridor facing a tall Georgian
window – the only feature in a perfectly prison-like dead-end. Blank walls stretched out behind him into
the gloom, a trail of echoing footsteps and breaths torn from the air. He was nearly doubled over; his heart
beating so fast that he would not have been surprised had it exploded within
him. He wondered what that would feel
like. His throat was raw, his eyes
burning; he could hear the rush of blood in his ears. He still wanted to run, but his body was screaming against it and
there was nowhere else to go.
Young lungs catch their breath quickly, young hearts
recover with ease, and Charlie was soon standing upright again, breathing stale
hospital air. The thick granite walls
were not proof against the December chill and there was a slight draught coming
up from the gaunt window frame. The boy
shivered in his pyjamas, drawing his arms up around himself. Suddenly he felt very much alone.
His panicked thoughts, as chaotic as the flight which
inspired them, trailed off into the unnatural silence. It seemed unimportant how the adults were
behaving now. It was dark, it was cold
and he now knew for a fact that there really were such things as monsters (whatever
the old man says), so priorities were shifting.
Maybe I should have stayed with Paige.
He bit his lip.
Charlie had difficulty developing attachments, especially
to adults. His turbulent relationship
with his father and the absence of his mother made him distrustful and unused
to any kind of tenderness or intimacy.
It had made perfect sense for him to run away when the adults had been
fighting, after all, he didn’t really know any of them anyway and so they were
as alien as the rest of his circumstances, but the same instincts that had led
him to his father, despite his most rational fears, now made him want to seek
whatever human comfort he could find.
Paige seemed the most likely.
She had tried to comfort him, at least, and whilst Charlie found that a
little unnerving, that was as much because it intrigued him as anything else.
Maybe I should have stayed.
There was a sudden groaning sound, like ancient,
straining metal, which echoed along the halls of the hospital, almost as if the
sound was deliberately searching for him.
He let out a yelp and there was an abrupt, blade-sharp silence.
I should have stayed.
I should have stayed! I don’t
want to be all alone.
Panic rose within him like a dark tide, stifling,
choking, drowning. Heart and lungs
alike were struggling as if he had never had the time to recover and he stood
there, shallow little breaths, the silent darkness mocking him with its
innocuous stillness.
Movement. He knew
had to start moving. The corridor
didn’t feel safe anymore. The hospital
didn’t feel safe anymore.
Is anywhere safe, now?
He found himself taking turns at random, feeling the
gaping darkness of rooms off to either side; rooms he had no desire to explore,
enter or even think about, but whose black-hole doorways sucked at him
relentlessly. His breathing seemed to
multiply along the corridors, as if there were others in the darkness, watching
and waiting, following less blindly than he was leading. His little footsteps sounded pathetic
against the pace of such imagined enemies.
Imagination itself was little comfort.
Another groan echoed around the building. Charlie could
actually feel the cold, linoleum-covered floor quiver this time, not in the
solid, dusty way of stone shaking stone, but in a way that was almost organic –
a shiver, a pulse. Strange sounds
clicked and squelched around him. The
floor became wet, sticky, slick. The
gaping doors seemed almost to have breath of their own, chill, but rank. Charlie heard himself whimper and broke into
a run. His feet slipped across the
floor and he nearly stumbled over the suddenly uneven surface. The silence around him was punctuated by
unnatural noises. He recognised the
sighs and moans from his room back in the apartment. He could hear drips and splashes and the sounds of peeling,
sliding movement. He was no longer alone.
His pace increased.
If he had run quickly before, now he was like lightning. He hoped, desperately, to find himself in
some semblance of normality, even to be surrounded by strangers, so long as
they were human.
I want to wake up!
Then, unexpectedly, the sibilant chorus of silence gained
another voice, one which wept hysterically.
It sent a shiver of terror through Charlie’s spine along with flashes of
memory; the days when his mother still lived with him and he would come running
to her, desperate to show off some new find or creation, only to discover her
huddled in a corner, tears leaking down her bruised face, arms defensive. The image had horrified him then and now he
was seeing it anew in the back of his mind as the monsters seemed to close in
around him. He could her wrenching sobs
and almost make out the words.
“Please stop!”
Now he saw images of his father, belt in hand, sending
lash after lash of searing leather down onto his mother’s bare skin.
“Please!”
He was finding it hard to breathe. The walls - sticky, burnt and oozing fluids
- seemed to be closing in. He could
feel the blows hitting him. He could hear
the screams, hers and his own. He was
suffocating.
“Why don’t you just stop you old harridan! Stop tormenting me!”
That wasn’t his mother.
Deep breath.
But he did know that voice.
Calm down.
Think clearly.
It was… Paige.
Paige!
“Paige!”
As he ran towards the sound of crying his voice seemed to
shatter the strange spell his surroundings had been under. Drips became echoes, slime became cool stone
and the uneven floor smoothed into tiles.
Oil lamps flickered on to either side at intervals and Paige’s voice
rebounded off bare, stone walls towards him.
“Please, just shut up!” she screamed.
“Paige! It’s
me!” He skidded around a corner and
found her huddled on the floor outside a series of cells with thick wooden
doors, blotched with the heads of cast iron nails, “Are you alright?”
She looked up at him, slowly, her grease-streaked face
becoming wide-eyed and full of wonder.
“She’s stopped at last!
You made her go away!” She
rose, stepped towards him and then her gaze wandered around the room they were
in, glancing off the intimidating-looking doors to each of the cells. Her expression dissolved. “Where the hell are we?”
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