IX - Henry
Henry just wasn't as fast as
the others. He had been slower to
notice what was going on in the fog, slower to react and was slower on his feet
once he got going. As the others
disappeared into the blind vapour and the chaos of shouts and footfalls and
that horrible sound which was not a sound, he had managed to get turned around
and wasn't sure exactly which way the others had run. He panicked and the fog closed in around him.
As the noises grew louder he knew
he had to run, but he had no idea where to.
He began stumbling around in the dark and the mist, half running, half
staggering, taking sudden, jerky turns as he though, just for a moment, that he
knew which way was right. Shapes moved
to either side of him. Like monsters of
the deep they could be determined only from a flicker of movement, a sense of
something sweeping by. Their true
nature and scale was obscured.
He began to pick up speed and
tried to keep to a straight line, though he still veered left and right now and
then, unable to hold his resolve.
There was a sudden, silk-slick
silence to his left and he was suddenly knocked sideways by a tendril of fog as
solid as stone. He staggered a few
steps then fell over his own feet, landing with a sharp pain in his hip.
Oh god, oh god, please don't
let it be broken.
He pushed against the ground
with grazed hands, trying to regain his feet and was relieved when his legs
began to take up the effort as well. He
brought himself up to full height, wincing at the pain in his side and then
started running once more.
There were more of them now, he
was sure of it. He could feel them
moving past him like mighty dinosaurs made of cloud, though he now knew that
they were more solid than they appeared to be.
Every step felt precarious, a dance between the legs of giants and he
felt he needed to be careful. Panic
made him clumsy, however, and if it was, indeed, a dance, then it was a drunken
one. He stumbled from place to place,
narrowly sidestepping rippling walls of fog, at one point even putting his
hands out to bounce off some part of a monster before ricocheting between the
legs of another.
It was chaos. It was outside of his control. It was terrifying.
And then he collided with a
wall.
It took him a moment to realise
what he had run into and another moment to regain his senses enough to try to
take stock. He couldn't see very far in
either direction, but he could see enough of the building he had reached to
work out which storefront it must be.
By that he was able to judge that he was about two hundred yards further
down James Street than he had intended to be and that if her followed the wall
to his right he would reach the department store.
His relief was tempered by the
sounds all around him, reminding him that the creatures were still there and
though they did not seem to be actively pursuing him, they were a very real
danger nonetheless. He took a deep
breath and, with one hand tracing the granite of the wall to his left, he made
a dash for it.
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