redsand42
02-25-2011, 08:55 AM
This is the first half of a story I have been struggling with. All comments very welcome.
I have done as they asked. I have tried to write it all down. Only the last few days are left. They said I should continue writing, that I should keep going until I catch up with myself. They said that then I would be finished. I should hurry, the candle they gave me is spluttering, dying. Its conversation with the darkness has become erratic, it sways and bobs changing colour, one moment yellow then orange, then it will dance wildly firing blue. There are only a few minutes left I think.
Before they saved me I had wandered this world dazed and disorientated. I had struggled to understand how the world had become the way it had. I could not have told you how long I had been here. I could not have told you why I was alone. I could not have told you what had happened to my son, my wife, my mother, father, brother and all the other lost people. But that was before they saved me.
Time doesn’t follow the same rules here, its cuts a twisting, tangled path, stuttering, jumping. The past is confused, muddled and at times as difficult to discern as the future. I have felt as if I was coiled in the present unable to think backwards or move forwards, I feared that I would be stuck here, stuck now for…? But that was before they saved me
The darkness is drawing close. I can feel it reaching out to me. It’s warm. That’s strange isn’t it? The darkness bringing warmth. Then so much about this place is strange. But I must continue. I must finish. I can tell you about the day that they saved me. I can remember that day clearly. I remember waking, confused and alone in my room as usual, to a world bleached of colour, drowned in shadow, yes I can remember that day clearly.
I awoke and the world was sepia. The sky boiled black. I raised myself off the damp mattress into damp air. Somewhere there were tires burning, wisps of dirty smoke curled in through the broken window. As I walked across the room the windows discarded glass crunched under foot, unsettling the silence.
I suspected it was morning, although it was hard to tell. The day inhabited a perpetual dusk. There was never any sight of sun or sky, no sense of time moving. I had awoken many times before only to find the sky darkening and the world turning to night, leavening me disorientated, miserable and alone. I stood at the broken window, looked out over a view that was once so alive and so familiar, now it was a wasted landscape of slate less roofs and fallen chimneys, of crumbling spires and deserted tower blocks. In the distance a storm raged, its bubbling surface stretched from horizon to horizon. The storm was a permanent fixture, moving slowly yet inexorably closer, day by day, scouring the city. Even from this distance the air carried its roar; the buildings hummed its tune. It was an ever present edge to the world.
I moved through my house with care, testing the boards as I went, trying not to brush the walls or the doorframes. I could never be sure what would crumble, turn to dust at my touch; And I needed this house. Walls now blackened and burned still held memory. I had lost so much of myself, without these bricks, these angled spaces I was not sure who I would be.The stairs creaked and complained under my weight. My kitchen was a derelict shell, the floor an assault course of rotting boards and gaping holes. A few cupboards still hung from the walls, minus their doors, their emptiness revealed. In one corner of the room, a battered sink sat propped up on two bits of wood. I stepped carefully over the joists ignoring the drop into the darkness below. The water was thick and discoloured. The tap spluttered, expelling it reluctantly. I drank it anyway, cupping my hands and closing my eyes. My throat burned.
The terraced street was quiet, still. The houses sat like burned faces, lifeless and empty, their secrets given up long ago. I zipped up my jacket, pulled the hood over my head and set off. Everywhere the city was covered in paper. It sat inches thick like a layer of soiled snow. Loose pages littered the pavements and the roads, clung to walls and covered buildings, fluttered like dirty leaves ensnared among the branches of the trees. I waded through it all, kicking up great clouds as I went; they swirled around me choreographed by the wind.I reached out a hand grabbed at a sheet at random. It was a dirty A4 piece of lined paper, covered in a hurried elaborate hand. The writing was faded and indistinct. I held it up to my face, read what I could, mouthing the words silently
My name is Joanna Wright
I am 42 years of age. I have a husband, Matt, he is a good man, a good husband, a good friend, a good father to my children, to my children, to my children… I miss them. I miss them so much. I hope they are both well. Ryan my oldest was about to sit his exams before
I released Joanna Wright and grabbed at another page. The next page was also covered in handwriting, but this was a messy, sloppy hand, the angles sharp and aggressive, words and sentences where crossed out and rewritten. The page was covered in small ink ringed holes as if the writer had jabbed their pen into the paper as they wrote.
I have done many things of which I am ashamed, things that I know now where wrong. I didn’t know, how could I….. What the **** am I supposed to say. It wasn’t my fault. **** happens. I tried hard. I did my…
I grabbed at another. This page was a riot of marks and scribbles, it was covered on both sides in a childish script, in the margins little stick men fired full stop guns, kicked footballs and hacked at each other with little line drawn swords.
My name is Jamie Last
I am 8 yeers old
I like football an space man
My sister is good at football but doesn’t like spaceman.
I have only one mummy but two dads, only one is my reel daddy, mike is my xstra daddy, my mum says
I sighed deeply, discarded James Last and watched as the breeze shuffled him back amongst the crowd.
At the end of the street stood the corner shop, I remembered how magical it had always seemed to me as a child, shelves full of sweets, jar after jar of brightly coloured sugared treasure, the exchange of my few carefully counted coins leading to a mouthful of sticky sweetness. I had searched inside many times before looking for anything edible. I stepped in through the broken door. Newspapers grew in great untidy columns, their paper crumbling and discoloured their stories indecipherable. The sweet jars sat in a large pile upon the rubbish strewn floor, empty now except for the carcasses of trapped insects. I rummaged through them anyway.
My stomach complained, sending painful reminders of its emptiness through my body. I knew where there was food. Well… food of a kind. I had refused to consider it before; when I still held out hope that something else could be found. But I was starving and I couldn’t go on much longer surviving on dirty tap water. My body had begun to speak with a new and unfamiliar voice. I had hoped for awhile that I might find some forgotten vegetables, hidden in an allotment or an overgrown back garden, but all I had found was a tangled mass of thorny bushes, unforgiving on my foraging hands, and I was sure, poisonous to my stomach. Even the grass was hard and grey, like broken glass to the touch. All that grew was threatening and brittle.
Each street was like the last, empty and wasted. The trees stood suffocated, smothered by a veracious ivy, whose leaves where black and cold. The ivy, having devoured the trees, had begun to send probing tendrils into the street, over the faces of the houses. It had begun to search inside the rusting skeletons of the cars that lay scattered about the road. I was sure that when I listened carefully I could hear it growing, feeding.
There where times when I thought I was not alone. Thought I saw things moving in the shadows, eyes watching me from the dark. At first I was scared, fearful, my imagination painting all manner or horrors upon an unseen canvas. Later on I had taken to shouting, screaming, I would charge into the shadows cursing obscenities, chasing phantoms; attempt to flush out those who watched.
Later still I had come to accept that I was being paranoid. I had come to the reluctant and even more frightening conclusion that perhaps I was completely alone, that there where no people, no ghosts, no watchers. Only the memories of the cities inhabitants remained, imprisoned upon sheet after sheet of yellowing paper. Only the deserted tower blocks watched over me, their concrete gaze ever present.
I had seen no other signs of life, apart from the all-colonizing fauna. No dogs, no cats, no birds, not even any rats or mice. The only insects I had seen where mummified remains. There was death here, I knew that, I was counting on that.
I didn’t have to walk far before the stench of the canal began to assault my nostrils. When I reached its bank the smell was like a hot hand at my throat. The water where it could be seen was a deep muddy brown; it flowed quickly, far quicker than I had ever remembered. Most of the canals surface was a rushing mass of debris, a churning parade of rusting metal and smashed wood, the detritus of an abandoned city. In amongst the waste I spotted what I had come for. A bloated stomach bobbed upon the surface. The stomach was almost hairless, only the odd patch of stiff black fur clung on resolutely to the purple discoloured flesh beneath. I couldn’t tell what it was, perhaps a cat or a small dog. It had passed me by before I had time to hunt for a stick to hook it with. Once correctly armed I stood at the edge of the bank and waited.
I guessed I had been standing there for several hours. Perhaps I wasn’t as starving as I had thought. Each carcass fished from the water had been returned to the water. Each gift refused, they where all long dead, most thick with drowned maggots. After awhile I gave up, retreated to the thin strip of park that acted as a border between the canal and the concrete of the city. I moved through the park slowly, grabbing randomly at handfuls of paper, plucking them from the bushes and the trees. Most were torn, tattered and unreadable. Occasionally I would find a page that was intelligible. I would stop, read what I could before releasing it to the wind and moving on.
In the beginning I had spent hours, days, reading the pages by the hundred, by the thousand; one after the other, hoping I might discover someone that I knew, connect with those who were lost. Then I had read on hoping I might find some answers, some clues to my own predicament. But I had found nothing, nothing but a litany of clumsy confessionals and disjointed memories, autobiographical blind alleys that had left me feeling even more confused and empty. I had begun to question my own life, my own memories; I was becoming subsumed within the confusion of strangers. Several days ago I had forgotten my sons name, only for a minute, but that minute had reduced me to tears, left me in a mad panic, racked with guilt, suffocated with loss, until finally the name had resurfaced and I had greeted it like a physical reunion, grabbed hold of it, squeezed and caressed it, promised not to let it go again. My head was full of dead ends and buried paths.
The park came to an end. In front of me the canal was edged by empty warehouses, they rose up, great Victorian brick cathedrals to a once glorious past when the water way was worshipped and revered. They now stood battered and crumbling their gods long since fled through windows like gouged eyes. I searched them for several hours but found nothing, as I knew would be the case.Through the windows of one the tallest building I could see that I was close to the storms edge. It towered above the houses and factories; a black border to the world, rising up to swallow the sky
I made my way back towards the canal and continued down stream. As I got closer to the storm the sky darkened, the noise grew steadily louder and the wind fierce. The atmosphere became close and charged. The hairs on my arm stood upright. I spat the taste of iron from my mouth. I rounded a bend in the canal passed under an arched bridge and in front of me the world had descended into chaos. I was shocked to find myself suddenly so close to the storms edge. Before me, on either side of the rushing canal, sat a rubble strewn wasteland it surface broken and pitted. In the distance, perhaps a mile and a half away the world was simply being torn apart; buildings where being shredded and sucked upwards, cars swam through the turmoil like enraged insects. The very earth itself was being shattered and consumed. Flashes of lightening played incessantly, great branching arms of fire dancing through the ferment.
I stood and stared, mesmerized by the destruction of the world. To the left and right of me I could see that the storm pulsed in great waves as if it was sticking out its tongue to lick the land before devouring it completely. The wind had began to rush passed me so fast that I had to steady myself, for fear of being swept off my feet and carried towards oblivion. But I continued to stare, hypnotised by the devastation.
I had no idea how long I had stood there but the air had grown thicker, my breathing laboured. My eyes ached, my skull sang in my head. I put my hand up to my nose and my fingers came away sticky with blood. I suddenly realized that I was in real danger of being caught within the storms embrace. I turned, put my head down and began to struggle back the way I had come.
The air around me had become a blizzard of rushing paper and debris. Fists sized clumps of earth and grass, broken branches and rubbish of all kinds swept passed me. I looked up just in time to see a child’s tricycle come tumbling along the path, its wheels spinning furiously as it bounced once in front of me gaining speed. I ducked as it bounced again heavily then sailed over my head and disappeared hurtling towards the storm.
The bridge was only a few meters in front of me now, it had begun to shake great clouds of dust and render into the air. I only became aware of the bricks that had begun to rush passed me when one of them impacted painfully with my shoulder. Then another struck me in the stomach. I doubled over and put my hands around my head to protect myself as the air surrounding me became a horizontal hail of bricks and masonry. I was unaware of the brick that must have struck me on the temple and I was unconscious by the time I connected heavily with the ground.
I awoke in the dark. I was lying on my side. I sat up, held out my hand in front of my face but could see nothing. The blackness was absolute. Dizziness gripped me. Panic began to bubble. I hurriedly felt my body, patted my arms, my legs, felt the ground upon which I lay. I tentatively reached out into the darkness, slowly sweeping my arms around me, nothing. I didn’t dare stand. I could hear rain, torrential rain, hammering against a roof high above. I focused on the sound, on the solidness it offered. I listened carefully, tried to work out the distances, translate the acoustics of the space. A sudden flash of lightening saved me the trouble. I was in a large warehouse, similar to those I had searched earlier. The lightening lit up the space repeatedly, flash after flash illuminating a large football field sized room, perhaps three storeys high. The top of which was open on all sides with a continuous metal framework of broken windows. The space was alive with dancing ghosts. Great rusting machines rose up around me, tubular monstrosities that filled up whole sections of the room. They cavorted menacingly, changing shape with each explosion of light.
My skull burned. I felt the wound. The hair on one side of my head was hard and matted. Blood had stiffened on my neck, on the collar of my shirt and jacket, fused them together. One side of my face felt puffy and swollen. I tried to think. The lightening began to lessen in intensity. I realised that there where no answers to be found in the dark, within in or without. I would wait until morning.
The rain had stopped. A reluctant half light stalked in through the windows of the warehouse, strangling the shadows. I awoke with a start; around me the machines lay still, exhausted. I had been right. I was in one of the warehouses I had searched the day before. As my eyes became acclimatised to the light I also realised that I was not alone. A figure sat hunched over in the shadows half hidden behind one of the machines. Bright blue eyes watched me through a tangle of pipes and cables, not more than fifteen feet from where I sat. I stayed completely still. My heart raced.
I have done as they asked. I have tried to write it all down. Only the last few days are left. They said I should continue writing, that I should keep going until I catch up with myself. They said that then I would be finished. I should hurry, the candle they gave me is spluttering, dying. Its conversation with the darkness has become erratic, it sways and bobs changing colour, one moment yellow then orange, then it will dance wildly firing blue. There are only a few minutes left I think.
Before they saved me I had wandered this world dazed and disorientated. I had struggled to understand how the world had become the way it had. I could not have told you how long I had been here. I could not have told you why I was alone. I could not have told you what had happened to my son, my wife, my mother, father, brother and all the other lost people. But that was before they saved me.
Time doesn’t follow the same rules here, its cuts a twisting, tangled path, stuttering, jumping. The past is confused, muddled and at times as difficult to discern as the future. I have felt as if I was coiled in the present unable to think backwards or move forwards, I feared that I would be stuck here, stuck now for…? But that was before they saved me
The darkness is drawing close. I can feel it reaching out to me. It’s warm. That’s strange isn’t it? The darkness bringing warmth. Then so much about this place is strange. But I must continue. I must finish. I can tell you about the day that they saved me. I can remember that day clearly. I remember waking, confused and alone in my room as usual, to a world bleached of colour, drowned in shadow, yes I can remember that day clearly.
I awoke and the world was sepia. The sky boiled black. I raised myself off the damp mattress into damp air. Somewhere there were tires burning, wisps of dirty smoke curled in through the broken window. As I walked across the room the windows discarded glass crunched under foot, unsettling the silence.
I suspected it was morning, although it was hard to tell. The day inhabited a perpetual dusk. There was never any sight of sun or sky, no sense of time moving. I had awoken many times before only to find the sky darkening and the world turning to night, leavening me disorientated, miserable and alone. I stood at the broken window, looked out over a view that was once so alive and so familiar, now it was a wasted landscape of slate less roofs and fallen chimneys, of crumbling spires and deserted tower blocks. In the distance a storm raged, its bubbling surface stretched from horizon to horizon. The storm was a permanent fixture, moving slowly yet inexorably closer, day by day, scouring the city. Even from this distance the air carried its roar; the buildings hummed its tune. It was an ever present edge to the world.
I moved through my house with care, testing the boards as I went, trying not to brush the walls or the doorframes. I could never be sure what would crumble, turn to dust at my touch; And I needed this house. Walls now blackened and burned still held memory. I had lost so much of myself, without these bricks, these angled spaces I was not sure who I would be.The stairs creaked and complained under my weight. My kitchen was a derelict shell, the floor an assault course of rotting boards and gaping holes. A few cupboards still hung from the walls, minus their doors, their emptiness revealed. In one corner of the room, a battered sink sat propped up on two bits of wood. I stepped carefully over the joists ignoring the drop into the darkness below. The water was thick and discoloured. The tap spluttered, expelling it reluctantly. I drank it anyway, cupping my hands and closing my eyes. My throat burned.
The terraced street was quiet, still. The houses sat like burned faces, lifeless and empty, their secrets given up long ago. I zipped up my jacket, pulled the hood over my head and set off. Everywhere the city was covered in paper. It sat inches thick like a layer of soiled snow. Loose pages littered the pavements and the roads, clung to walls and covered buildings, fluttered like dirty leaves ensnared among the branches of the trees. I waded through it all, kicking up great clouds as I went; they swirled around me choreographed by the wind.I reached out a hand grabbed at a sheet at random. It was a dirty A4 piece of lined paper, covered in a hurried elaborate hand. The writing was faded and indistinct. I held it up to my face, read what I could, mouthing the words silently
My name is Joanna Wright
I am 42 years of age. I have a husband, Matt, he is a good man, a good husband, a good friend, a good father to my children, to my children, to my children… I miss them. I miss them so much. I hope they are both well. Ryan my oldest was about to sit his exams before
I released Joanna Wright and grabbed at another page. The next page was also covered in handwriting, but this was a messy, sloppy hand, the angles sharp and aggressive, words and sentences where crossed out and rewritten. The page was covered in small ink ringed holes as if the writer had jabbed their pen into the paper as they wrote.
I have done many things of which I am ashamed, things that I know now where wrong. I didn’t know, how could I….. What the **** am I supposed to say. It wasn’t my fault. **** happens. I tried hard. I did my…
I grabbed at another. This page was a riot of marks and scribbles, it was covered on both sides in a childish script, in the margins little stick men fired full stop guns, kicked footballs and hacked at each other with little line drawn swords.
My name is Jamie Last
I am 8 yeers old
I like football an space man
My sister is good at football but doesn’t like spaceman.
I have only one mummy but two dads, only one is my reel daddy, mike is my xstra daddy, my mum says
I sighed deeply, discarded James Last and watched as the breeze shuffled him back amongst the crowd.
At the end of the street stood the corner shop, I remembered how magical it had always seemed to me as a child, shelves full of sweets, jar after jar of brightly coloured sugared treasure, the exchange of my few carefully counted coins leading to a mouthful of sticky sweetness. I had searched inside many times before looking for anything edible. I stepped in through the broken door. Newspapers grew in great untidy columns, their paper crumbling and discoloured their stories indecipherable. The sweet jars sat in a large pile upon the rubbish strewn floor, empty now except for the carcasses of trapped insects. I rummaged through them anyway.
My stomach complained, sending painful reminders of its emptiness through my body. I knew where there was food. Well… food of a kind. I had refused to consider it before; when I still held out hope that something else could be found. But I was starving and I couldn’t go on much longer surviving on dirty tap water. My body had begun to speak with a new and unfamiliar voice. I had hoped for awhile that I might find some forgotten vegetables, hidden in an allotment or an overgrown back garden, but all I had found was a tangled mass of thorny bushes, unforgiving on my foraging hands, and I was sure, poisonous to my stomach. Even the grass was hard and grey, like broken glass to the touch. All that grew was threatening and brittle.
Each street was like the last, empty and wasted. The trees stood suffocated, smothered by a veracious ivy, whose leaves where black and cold. The ivy, having devoured the trees, had begun to send probing tendrils into the street, over the faces of the houses. It had begun to search inside the rusting skeletons of the cars that lay scattered about the road. I was sure that when I listened carefully I could hear it growing, feeding.
There where times when I thought I was not alone. Thought I saw things moving in the shadows, eyes watching me from the dark. At first I was scared, fearful, my imagination painting all manner or horrors upon an unseen canvas. Later on I had taken to shouting, screaming, I would charge into the shadows cursing obscenities, chasing phantoms; attempt to flush out those who watched.
Later still I had come to accept that I was being paranoid. I had come to the reluctant and even more frightening conclusion that perhaps I was completely alone, that there where no people, no ghosts, no watchers. Only the memories of the cities inhabitants remained, imprisoned upon sheet after sheet of yellowing paper. Only the deserted tower blocks watched over me, their concrete gaze ever present.
I had seen no other signs of life, apart from the all-colonizing fauna. No dogs, no cats, no birds, not even any rats or mice. The only insects I had seen where mummified remains. There was death here, I knew that, I was counting on that.
I didn’t have to walk far before the stench of the canal began to assault my nostrils. When I reached its bank the smell was like a hot hand at my throat. The water where it could be seen was a deep muddy brown; it flowed quickly, far quicker than I had ever remembered. Most of the canals surface was a rushing mass of debris, a churning parade of rusting metal and smashed wood, the detritus of an abandoned city. In amongst the waste I spotted what I had come for. A bloated stomach bobbed upon the surface. The stomach was almost hairless, only the odd patch of stiff black fur clung on resolutely to the purple discoloured flesh beneath. I couldn’t tell what it was, perhaps a cat or a small dog. It had passed me by before I had time to hunt for a stick to hook it with. Once correctly armed I stood at the edge of the bank and waited.
I guessed I had been standing there for several hours. Perhaps I wasn’t as starving as I had thought. Each carcass fished from the water had been returned to the water. Each gift refused, they where all long dead, most thick with drowned maggots. After awhile I gave up, retreated to the thin strip of park that acted as a border between the canal and the concrete of the city. I moved through the park slowly, grabbing randomly at handfuls of paper, plucking them from the bushes and the trees. Most were torn, tattered and unreadable. Occasionally I would find a page that was intelligible. I would stop, read what I could before releasing it to the wind and moving on.
In the beginning I had spent hours, days, reading the pages by the hundred, by the thousand; one after the other, hoping I might discover someone that I knew, connect with those who were lost. Then I had read on hoping I might find some answers, some clues to my own predicament. But I had found nothing, nothing but a litany of clumsy confessionals and disjointed memories, autobiographical blind alleys that had left me feeling even more confused and empty. I had begun to question my own life, my own memories; I was becoming subsumed within the confusion of strangers. Several days ago I had forgotten my sons name, only for a minute, but that minute had reduced me to tears, left me in a mad panic, racked with guilt, suffocated with loss, until finally the name had resurfaced and I had greeted it like a physical reunion, grabbed hold of it, squeezed and caressed it, promised not to let it go again. My head was full of dead ends and buried paths.
The park came to an end. In front of me the canal was edged by empty warehouses, they rose up, great Victorian brick cathedrals to a once glorious past when the water way was worshipped and revered. They now stood battered and crumbling their gods long since fled through windows like gouged eyes. I searched them for several hours but found nothing, as I knew would be the case.Through the windows of one the tallest building I could see that I was close to the storms edge. It towered above the houses and factories; a black border to the world, rising up to swallow the sky
I made my way back towards the canal and continued down stream. As I got closer to the storm the sky darkened, the noise grew steadily louder and the wind fierce. The atmosphere became close and charged. The hairs on my arm stood upright. I spat the taste of iron from my mouth. I rounded a bend in the canal passed under an arched bridge and in front of me the world had descended into chaos. I was shocked to find myself suddenly so close to the storms edge. Before me, on either side of the rushing canal, sat a rubble strewn wasteland it surface broken and pitted. In the distance, perhaps a mile and a half away the world was simply being torn apart; buildings where being shredded and sucked upwards, cars swam through the turmoil like enraged insects. The very earth itself was being shattered and consumed. Flashes of lightening played incessantly, great branching arms of fire dancing through the ferment.
I stood and stared, mesmerized by the destruction of the world. To the left and right of me I could see that the storm pulsed in great waves as if it was sticking out its tongue to lick the land before devouring it completely. The wind had began to rush passed me so fast that I had to steady myself, for fear of being swept off my feet and carried towards oblivion. But I continued to stare, hypnotised by the devastation.
I had no idea how long I had stood there but the air had grown thicker, my breathing laboured. My eyes ached, my skull sang in my head. I put my hand up to my nose and my fingers came away sticky with blood. I suddenly realized that I was in real danger of being caught within the storms embrace. I turned, put my head down and began to struggle back the way I had come.
The air around me had become a blizzard of rushing paper and debris. Fists sized clumps of earth and grass, broken branches and rubbish of all kinds swept passed me. I looked up just in time to see a child’s tricycle come tumbling along the path, its wheels spinning furiously as it bounced once in front of me gaining speed. I ducked as it bounced again heavily then sailed over my head and disappeared hurtling towards the storm.
The bridge was only a few meters in front of me now, it had begun to shake great clouds of dust and render into the air. I only became aware of the bricks that had begun to rush passed me when one of them impacted painfully with my shoulder. Then another struck me in the stomach. I doubled over and put my hands around my head to protect myself as the air surrounding me became a horizontal hail of bricks and masonry. I was unaware of the brick that must have struck me on the temple and I was unconscious by the time I connected heavily with the ground.
I awoke in the dark. I was lying on my side. I sat up, held out my hand in front of my face but could see nothing. The blackness was absolute. Dizziness gripped me. Panic began to bubble. I hurriedly felt my body, patted my arms, my legs, felt the ground upon which I lay. I tentatively reached out into the darkness, slowly sweeping my arms around me, nothing. I didn’t dare stand. I could hear rain, torrential rain, hammering against a roof high above. I focused on the sound, on the solidness it offered. I listened carefully, tried to work out the distances, translate the acoustics of the space. A sudden flash of lightening saved me the trouble. I was in a large warehouse, similar to those I had searched earlier. The lightening lit up the space repeatedly, flash after flash illuminating a large football field sized room, perhaps three storeys high. The top of which was open on all sides with a continuous metal framework of broken windows. The space was alive with dancing ghosts. Great rusting machines rose up around me, tubular monstrosities that filled up whole sections of the room. They cavorted menacingly, changing shape with each explosion of light.
My skull burned. I felt the wound. The hair on one side of my head was hard and matted. Blood had stiffened on my neck, on the collar of my shirt and jacket, fused them together. One side of my face felt puffy and swollen. I tried to think. The lightening began to lessen in intensity. I realised that there where no answers to be found in the dark, within in or without. I would wait until morning.
The rain had stopped. A reluctant half light stalked in through the windows of the warehouse, strangling the shadows. I awoke with a start; around me the machines lay still, exhausted. I had been right. I was in one of the warehouses I had searched the day before. As my eyes became acclimatised to the light I also realised that I was not alone. A figure sat hunched over in the shadows half hidden behind one of the machines. Bright blue eyes watched me through a tangle of pipes and cables, not more than fifteen feet from where I sat. I stayed completely still. My heart raced.