V - Charlie
There was
a department store and a shopping centre at the end of James Street. Charlie still had a vivid memory of visiting
it when he was very little with his mother, sometime before his parents had
separated. It had seemed so huge to him
then, huge and full of adventures. He
remembered climbing under the clothes rails whilst his mother looked for a new
dress and finding all the forgotten size markers which had fallen off the
hangers. They were like buried treasure
to him, precious and exciting. More
than that, though, he had felt safe in the cosy darkness beneath the rail. It was another world and one far, far away
from his father.
Charlie
couldn’t see the department store now.
It was too dark and the fog was too thick. Normally at this time of year it would be all lit up against the
night and, during shopping hours at least, decked out with all the lights of
Christmas. It seemed like nowhere was
more Christmassy than the windows of that shop, but nowhere was less so than
the dark, foggy street they were walking now.
They were
probably about halfway along James street when they first heard. It was Josh who noticed first, of
course. He stopped still a few feet
ahead of everyone else and asked, “Does anyone else hear that?”
“Hear
what?” Paige asked, concerned.
“Oh god,”
Josh said and Charlie started to feel the hairs on his arms and the back of his
neck stand on end, because Josh sounded really scared and that could not mean
anything good.
“What is
it?” Henry asked.
“Don’t
you hear it? A sort of sound that’s not
a sound?”
They
listened and sure enough, there it was.
Charlie would have struggled to describe it had he been asked, but there
was something, an absence of sound that was entirely unnatural. It sounded slick somehow, and yet there was
no sound. After a moment Paige gasped.
“Yes,”
she said, voice quivering, “I remember hearing it too.”
“It’s
getting louder,” Henry added.
All
around them the fog seemed to be thickening, cutting their already limited
vision down to barely nothing. It was
getting hard to tell which way was which, although Charlie knew they hadn’t
moved and so they must still be facing towards the end of the street and that
unseen department store of treasured memory.
Josh was staring into the fog with wild eyes, his head flicking one way
and then the next, as if he had any hope of seeing anything to warn them of
where the thing was coming, but Charlie could see that they had no such hope
and that, really, there was only one thing they could do.
And so he
ran.
“Charlie,
no!” came Paige’s voice from behind as he ran forward, slipped past Josh and
continued to pelt down the street. A
few seconds later, however, he could hear their footfalls as they chased after
him and, despite the panic, despite the effort of running, he felt relief. As long as everyone was running, and in the
right direction, there was probably some hope.
The run
was confusing. Charlie could only see a
few feet in front of his face and, if he looked down, enough of the pavement to
know that he was still following the street and not cutting a diagonal. The no-noises that Josh had noticed first
were growing louder and increasing in intensity, suggesting more than one monster
making them. They seemed to be coming
from all around, but Charlie couldn’t see anything. He tried not to worry about what would happen if he ran into one.
Something
moved in the fog just to one side of him and he let out a shriek that
immediately had Paige shouting after him, but only seconds later and she was
screaming too.
“There
are dozens of them,” she screamed.
“What the
hell?” That was Henry.
And then
Charlie saw another, just ahead, that he had to slide past to avoid. It wasn’t so much a monster in the fog as it
was a monster made of fog.
Incorporeal and yet strangely solid in its vaporous horror, it appeared
to have a central mass on legs like miniature thunder clouds and tentacle
arms. One tentacle shot out towards him
as he ran past but missed by a narrow margin.
He felt the clammy coolness of it brush his skin.
Behind
him the others were running and shouting and screaming, but he couldn’t worry about them. All he could do was keep running and hope
that the department store was as much a place of safety as he remembered it.
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