Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Cravings XII (Paige)


XII

Paige stopped and felt a chill run down her spine as she heard the old man’s voice behind her.  It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it.  He sounded so old, so frail!  It was almost as bad as the way he had sounded at the hospital when he was still losing blood.  For just a second it made her wish he was still blustering about how much nonsense everything was.  She was almost afraid to turn around, but she did.

“Henry, what is it?”

He was standing in the middle of the lane, staring at a patch of the factory wall, his mouth working wordlessly.  Somewhere behind her Josh must have turned around, because the circle of torchlight flashed back across them both.

“What’s the hold up?” he called back to them.

“It’s Henry,” Paige replied, “he’s… I don’t know.”  She took a few steps towards the old man.  “Henry, is everything alright?”

His eyes flickered towards her then.  They seemed to be all whites in the torchlight, full of terror.

“The… the wall… there!” he stammered, pointing to the spot he had been staring at before.

“What’s there, Henry?  What’s frightened you?”

She suddenly realised that she was speaking to him like he was a child, or older than he was.  She felt a flush of embarrassment, but she turned to look at the patch of wall he was talking about.  Without the torch shining on it, she couldn’t make out what he wanted her to see.

“I can’t… I can’t make it out.”

“It’s there on the wall, damn it all!”  That was more like him; angry, a grumpy old man, but the fear was still hidden in there.  She could hear it at the frayed edges of his voice.

“I’m sorry Henry I don’t see what you mean.”

“It was in the light.  Get that boy to shine his bloody torch over there instead of into my eyes and you’ll see it it.  You’ll see it!”

Paige looked over her shoulder.  Josh and Charlie were standing side by side a little ways further down the alley.  She couldn’t see their faces.  The light from the torch was too bright.  The fog behind them seemed to form a dark, impenetrable wall.

“Josh, can you bring that torch over here?  Henry wants to show me something.”

The circle of light swung down, marking a path along the tarmac road as Josh approached.  Stray tendrils of fog caught the light at unexpected moments and Paige found herself thinking about ghosts.  She shivered.

“Where do you want me to shine this, Henry?” Josh asked as he came to a hlat beside Paige.

“There, on the wall.”  He pointed once again.

“Okay,” Josh replied and immediately turned the torch to illuminate the place where Henry had indicated.  There was nothing there but a fragment of graffiti.

“Is that what you wanted me to see?” Paige asked, trying to sound soothing.

Henry shook his head.  “No, that wasn’t it, it was…” he scanned along the wall for a moment, then, “try there instead.”

Josh obliged and the circle of light skipped across the crumbling red brick wall until it came to rest over a patch where there was no graffiti at all.

“No, not there either.  It was there somewhere.  You hit it twice before just by accident.”

Without saying anything Josh began to sweep the light up and down the wall, moving slowly from left to right, covering the whole section that Henry had indicated.  There was plenty of inane graffiti, some lichen and a great many discoloured bricks, but nothing that Paige could see that justified Henry’s terror.

“There’s nothing there,” Josh said at last.

“But I saw it,” Henry replied petulantly and suddenly Paige wondered if talking to him like a child wasn’t more appropriate than she’d thought, “for the love of God, I saw it!”

“What did you see?”

“It was… it was…” he seemed to stop himself, took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.  When he was done he seemed a lot less frail and a lot more like the crotchety old man Paige was used to.  “It was nothing,” he said, full of confidence, “forgive me.  I’m seeing things again.”

And with that Henry marched past them all, on down the lane.  Paige gave Josh a brief glance, then the teenager turned and followed.  Paige lingered a little longer, staring at the wall which had, if only for a little while, got Henry so terrified.  What did he see, she wondered, but could find no answer on her own, so at last she turned and followed the others.

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