XXVI - Henry
Henry lay
where he was, cold and miserable, weeping softly by himself. The entire evening seemed to be replaying
itself in his mind, from the hallucinatory fire in his apartment to everything
that had happened in the hospital, from the blocked streets to this deserted
ruin of a factory. He was re-evaluating
everything and asking the same question over and over again: Am I mad, or did those things really
happen?
He had
toyed with the first idea often enough during the night, although he had preferred
to think more of himself as ill. That
appealed to a certain hypochondriac streak he had always harboured and for a
while it had seemed to make the most sense.
Now, however, in this dank old factory, he was thinking again. Is there even the tiniest grain of
possibility that all of this could actually be real?
The
problem was that he had denied it all years ago. The day he decided he would retire from serving the Church was
the day he renounce all belief in the supernatural. He made it clear to everyone he spoke to that he was leaving
because it was a hollow career serving a shadow cast by Man’s own
weakness. There was no God, there were
no demons. There was just Man and his
infinite capacity for self-deception.
But was
that all strictly true? Certainly he
had no reason to believe on the basis of the nights events that there was any
kind of benevolent God watching down on them, but what if there were other
forms of supernatural life? What if
there really were demons? What if the
stories his father and grandfather had told him were all true? What if all of this was happening because he
had given up a fight simply because he had never believed it to be real? What if the papers he had held onto with an
ironic religiousness told true accounts of historical events?
Oh!,
he thought with a sudden, cold realisation, I left all those papers in the
hospital… All my father’s notes, all the things I never believed… If he finally accepted the truth of it, how
would he be able to do anything about it without the facts of the matter in his
hands? If he was going to go down the
path of the irrational, then he wanted to be able to be rational about it.
But I
can’t go back to the hospital, not now…
And that
was when he heard the noises coming down the corridor towards him; first a
banging sound, like someone slamming into a door, then a rattling, then
shouting, although he couldn’t quite make out the words.
Is
that… Josh and Paige?
He didn’t
feel like he had any energy left, but he knew he ought to move, to go see
them. Gradually he lifted himself up
onto his hands, then his knees, then, with agonising, creaking slowness, up
onto his feet. How can I help anyone,
he wondered, I’m so old… And yet
he took a few steps forward, then a few more, and then he began to half run,
half shuffle down the corridor towards the noise.
It didn’t
take him long to reach the junction and by then he could hear that someone was
screaming and that it must have been Josh, because he could also hear Paige
shouting at him.
“I’m
coming!” he tried to shout, but his voice came out hoarse and weak and he had
no idea if anyone could hear him.
And then
everything fell silent, save for the soft sound of a woman crying.
Oh
God, what’s happened?
No comments:
Post a Comment