IV - Paige
Paige had
never liked James street very much. It
had just never felt like a safe street to her.
It was always dirty and there was something about the shops which lined
its pavements which only added to that sense.
A woman walking along James street might not feel particularly welcome
as a person and perhaps too welcome as an object, especially during the night,
and so she had always done her best to avoid it. That she was walking down it now, through the fog with no lights
at all, and was not particularly afraid was an irony she could almost laugh
at. Almost.
She knew
she should be scared. She knew that, at
any second, something could happen which could endanger all their lives. Anything might be lurking in the fog, ready
to jump out at them, but what was missing – the lights, the sounds, the drifting
shadows of other people – lent the street a kind of calm it never had normally.
There was
more to it than that, of course. Part
of it was just tiredness. Paige was
tired of being scared, tired of running, tired of crying. She was sick and tired of the whole thing,
but there was nothing she could do about it, so she wandered on, almost numbed
to everything until the next crisis.
And then
there was the strange revelation Henry had just given them, putting the whole
evening into context. It seemed that
just knowing a bit more about what was happening made it slightly less
terrifying, which was not to say it wasn’t still mysterious and monstrous, but
it was no longer completely unknown.
Finally
there was that scrap of Bible she had remembered, remember to be strong and brave. The more she thought about it the more it seemed that she could
be strong, she could be brave, no matter what.
She tried to tell herself it was just a trick of repeating the same
thing over and over in her mind, but she couldn’t help but think it might have
had more to do with the implicit knowledge of the rest of the verse: for the
Lord your God is with you.
She was
still wondering about that. Could there
really be a God working out some good purpose in the midst of all of this
darkness? She wasn’t sure, but the
thought of such a being, the mere possibility, was something of a comfort and
she found her mind flicking back to that verse more and more often. She was tempted to talk to Henry about it,
but she felt embarrassed and, with everything else going on, it didn’t really
seem appropriate, or even possible, so she kept her thoughts to herself.
And so they
continued to walk on in silence through the dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment