XXII - Henry
Silence. The
television screen was blank and the overhead fluorescent strip lighting was
working as well as could be expected for the NHS. The dripping smiley face on the window shed a few more tears to
mar its complexion. Henry stood up.
He surveyed the room thoroughly. Apart from the papers strewn across the
floor it looked like any other drab hospital room. The fact that it had been a nightmare just a moment before didn’t
change its ultimate reality now. Putting
aside the question of what the experience he had just had might mean about his
sanity, Henry was relieved. Rationality
had won through.
He paced the room, stepping closer to the TV and
revelling in its innate inertness, before approaching the doorway and peering
out into the deserted hallway. There
was no sign of any of the others, not even the faintest echo of their
activities in the rest of the building.
He sighed, turned round to face the scattered papers and resumed tidying
them up, paying no attention to the details scrawled across them, or the order
they were put in. He told himself that
the details didn’t matter because it was all nonsense anyway and his eyes
skimmed past the words hurriedly, even fearfully.
A shadow passed over him. He flinched, pausing in his haphazard filing to look over his
shoulder.
There was nothing there.
He shook his head, turned back to the papers and stared across at the
window, the bed, the TV, the door. He
blinked, silent, hands shaking. Still
nothing.
I’m imagining things again.
He returned one last time to the pile of papers and
didn’t stop until every last one was picked up and returned to the folder he
had been carrying them in. The
sensation of shadows moving in his peripheral vision didn’t dissipate, but he
did his best to ignore them. It was
paranoia, understandable really, especially with his companions so ready to
believe in monsters and with the city so silent. Silence breeds a kind of madness, he had always thought so. It was in the silent moments of his life
that he had most believed that his old calling had been anything more than a
signpost to nowhere and that there really was a God listening to his words.
All that had been proven a delusion years ago, so the
silence was the obvious cause.
Once all the papers were together he stood up, dusted off
his knees and then ventured out into the corridor, wondering where Paige,
Charlie and Josh had gotten to. He
would have expected to have heard from them by now.
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