VIII
Charlie didn’t like the
streets. He never had, truth be
told. There were too many older boys
ready to point and laugh, or wade in with punches at the ready. Too many men like his father, with their big
staffie-dogs and their wide swaggers.
Even the women he saw on the streets seemed cruel and hard most of the
time, the girls with their make-up-plastered faces and their fake tans, the
older women with mouths shrivelled tight.
It seemed a cruel world for a sensitive boy to wander in alone.
But these streets felt
different. These streets were not the
same streets he had walked in even a few days ago. They were not the streets he passed on the bus when he went into
the city centre, or was taken by his father (dutifully, grudgingly) to see his
mother. These were not the streets of
yesterday, but something new and yet, Charlie thought, also something terribly
old.
They looked the same, right
enough. The terraced houses were the
same size, shape and colour as he remembered.
They were all in the same places.
There was the cherry tree he always loved to see in bloom in the spring,
there the trampoline he had so envied when he saw two children playing on it
once in summer, there the street lined with sycamores which burned red in the
autumn. There was no reason to think
that the streets were any different, but they were. Charlie could feel it.
Perhaps it was the fog. It still rolled over everything, preventing
them from seeing more than a few feet ahead most of the time, although at other
times it seemed to stretch thin so that they could see the distant outlines of
the city centre. It was like no fog
Charlie had ever seen before. Devara
often experienced thick haars coming in off the North Sea, but they were short
lived and consistent. This fog almost
felt, alive, the tides and eddies of its movement almost like breathing. So, yes, perhaps the strangeness of the
streets was just the fog. Or perhaps
not.
The feel of the streets was
more than in just their eerie appearance through veils of mist, Charlie
concluded. They felt older than they
had before and more sinister and every dark window pane seemed to hide a secret
which it never had before. It was
impossible to walk down a street without constantly looking toward the left and
the right at those gaping glass-covered holes of darkness and fearing who might
be watching from within. Charlie
thought he could feel the stares prickling across his skin. Were the monsters inside, he
wondered, like the ones in the apartments?
Like the one in the vision in the hospital? Yes, he realised, for there were monsters
everywhere. Hadn’t his father taught
him that?
He held tight to Paige’s hand
as they walked, pulling her ahead slightly as he tried to keep up with Josh who
walked in the lead. Behind them, the
old man, Henry, lagged. He still looked
very confused and for some reason that helped Charlie to feel brave, but he
still didn’t like the streets, or the fog, or the windows of the houses. He wished he could be anywhere else, but
somehow he doubted the city centre would be any better.
When they reached the first
blockage, however, he knew it would only be worse.
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