XXIII - Henry
I’m
running out of breath.
Henry
couldn’t have said for how long he had been running. It felt like hours, days even, although that firm, rational part
of his mind knew he couldn’t be more than a few minutes, if that. His legs ached. His lungs felt like they were on fire. His body just couldn’t cope with the strain of such exercise, or
the stress of the fear itself. [Is
that monster still behind me? It
couldn’t have been a monster/It couldn’t have been anything else!] Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty, forty years
ago he would have found it no trouble at all, but now – he was just too old for
this sort of thing. I should be
sitting at home, reading a book, not chased through a ruined factory by some…
some…
He
couldn’t take it any longer. He
couldn’t take it at all. He wanted the
nightmare to end, to be back where he belonged [In hospital/At home] and
no longer part of some freak show. Oh
but my body is tired. I just want to
sit down and take a breath but what if… [that creature is still behind me] He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop he just… just… couldn’t.
“Oh!” he
gasped, as some pain, some indeterminable ache became deeper, sharper, longer
than all the others, “Oh, I… can’t… go… on.”
The wall
was deliciously, perfectly cool; as cool as a fresh glass of water on a sunny
day in June, as cool as cotton sheets, as cool as cucumber; as cool as waking
up at three am screaming, as cool as aging blood, as terror. He clawed the slick paintwork as if it might
have handholds, as if finding one would make the slightest difference. His knees his the concrete floor like ten
tonne boulders, cracking as they went, though the pain was not so sharp as the
sound. He knelt there, gasping, gasping,
gasping.
When he
had caught his breath enough to realise where he was, what he was doing, his
head snapped around on instinct so that he might stare back down the corridor
towards the factory hall he had been running from. He fully expected to see the creature there, dripping, snarling
at him, but the corridor was empty. He
was alone.
“Ha!” he
shouted in terrible relief, “Ha ha!”
He
sounded mad and he knew it, but in that moment he didn’t care, after all, there
was no one there – who could hear the mad old man laughing away to himself,
still half out of breath on the floor of a ruined factory building in the
middle of the night. Who would care?
“Ha, ha,
haa!” he let his voice echo back towards the machine hall, “You couldn’t keep
up with me you-” and here was the decision point, how would he describe his
pursuer, the source of all his fears “-you little…” He sounded feeble,
pathetic, old.
“I’m a
pathetic, scared old man,” he said to no one but himself, “and I don’t know
what’s real anymore.”
Tears ran
down his cracked face, pattering against the dusty concrete, feeding the weeds.
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