XXVIII - Henry
He didn’t
know what to do. It had been a long,
long time since he last had a young woman sobbing at his feet and he had
forgotten how to respond. It felt like
his emotional responses had all dried up years ago, the same time he had lost his
faith in God, on the day he had lost his wife.
Her name
was Irene and she had been beautiful.
He had met her when he was first training for the ministry at the
theological college in Dingwall and they were courting not long after. They married within the year and as he
graduated and took charge of a small parish on the outskirts of Devara, she
became the perfect minister’s wife. She
was always able to fill in the gaps in his ministry. If he had never been very good with people, it didn’t matter, because
Irene was always so caring, so fond of everyone and she always knew what people
needed to be told. She had led the
women’s prayer groups, was always in charge of teas and fancy pieces and
somehow just made the whole church a better place to be. Henry had loved her more than anything in
the world, indeed more than he had loved God.
When she was diagnosed with
cancer he took it hard. She of course
was just the same as she always was. ‘Whatever
God wills will be,’ she had said, ‘and if I go now it will be to a far better
place’, but as Henry watched the illness take her, making her seem to shrivel
up and lose all her perfect beauty, he wondered how God could be so cruel. On the day she died he decided that he didn’t
care to believe in a God who would take her from him and his conviction that
there was no God grew from then. He
took early retirement from the ministry within the year, cut himself off from
his parish and moved to the small apartment where he had lived ever since. He had written a little, kept a little extra
money rolling in and it had seemed enough to get by on, but it was never the
same.
In a way, his life had ended
with Irene.
And now, here he was, decades
later, wishing Irene were there with him once more, because she would know what
to do to help this woman. She would
know the words to say. But she
would tell her to seek her God, he thought bitterly, but what comfort
has he ever brought me?
Still, he knelt down beside her
and tried to think of how Irene might have approached her, the tone she would
have used, her posture.
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to
sound calm, soothing, “it’s okay, just tell me what happened.”
It took Paige a few attempts to
get it out, but eventually she managed to explain about Josh with enough
clarity for Henry to get the gist. He
felt a chill as he thought about the scream he had heard from down the corridor,
but the rational part of his mind decided that it was time to take over
again. There was no sign of Josh in the
courtyard, so that meant that whatever had happened to him, he must have gone,
or been taken, elsewhere, which meant that the ought to try to find him. Who knew what they would find, exactly, but
they had to try and maybe, just maybe, there was some hope.
“Come on,” Henry said gently, “let’s
get you to your feet and then we’ll see if we can try and find Josh and Charlie
together. They must be around here
somewhere. There have been a lot of
strange things going on tonight – I admit that now, but I don’t believe they’ve
just vanished into thin air.”
Paige nodded through her
tears. Henry found her staring a little
disconcerting. It was as if she wasn’t
entirely sure he was the same man. Maybe
I’m not, he thought, maybe I’m changing, but who knows what into. If only Irene were here. She’d know…
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