DISCLAIMER:  The following is a work of fiction, intended as entertainment.  The use of usernames in various forms is not a form of political commentry or even satire (mostly), but rather a sort of very obvious Easter Egg.  The story contains scenes which some may find disturbing.  Reader discretion is advised.

The following text and images are copyright of their respective owners (Seraph, Imkihca) 2016.

Please do not post in this thread.  A thread for discussion can be found here. Enjoy!

*May not actually be published fortnightly.

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Prologue.

It was getting late.  The sun was rising, the dawn chorus was ending and very soon people all along the street would be leaving their homes to go work or school in descending order of either organisational skill or wakefulness.  Usually the first sign of a curtain twitching open would ring alarm bells in Connor’s head, reminding him that he too had to head to school soon and that he wouldn’t get paid unless he’d delivered every single paper, but today it was okay, because he had managed to get up earlier than usual, to feel awake and alive and have a spring in his step and, so, he had only one delivery left.

Glen road was a wide, tree-lined avenue of old detached townhouses and, like so many of the papers he distributed along it, this was one of those objectionable opinion rags his grandparents liked to read, the ones that tried to convince you that genetically modified foods were going to end the world, or that the most important thing happening in the country today was that Prime Minister was wearing a different coloured suit.  There were a few things about this last paper that were unusual, however.  Firstly, there was the address, 111.  It was one Connor had never had to deliver to before, which was extremely odd.  His boss, Mr. Kringle, ran a very small newsagents of the kind frequented by the same customers for decades, one where a single death in the area could result in a substantial drop in sales, so new customers were very rare.  Secondly, there was the name earmarked on the front page: Tsunamy.  Connor thought it might be Asian or something, but then again, it sounded too much like 'tsunami' to be a surname.  Did people name themselves after natural disasters?  Perhaps it was some kind of joke.  He made a note to ask Mr. Kringle about it later when he collected his pay and tried to focus on finding the address he was looking for.

It took a while.  He found 109 and 113 easily enough, but they were side-by-side on the street, separated by little more than a thick hedge.  Connor paced from one to the other, trying to see if he had missed anything.  He even checked the other side of the street, in case this was one of those weird addresses that didn’t obey the normal rules of numbering, but they were all the even numbers he had been expecting.

Back on the odd side of the road, he examined the two houses and their gardens once again.  They looked the same as every other pair of houses on the street: old, middle class, gardens full of roses and pansies.  The only thing even remotely odd about them was the hedge, which seemed too thick and unkempt compared to those in the other gardens around.  He stopped before it, peered closer and noticed something strange.  Right in the middle of the hedge, where it ought to have been darkest, he could see patches of light through the foliage.  He took another step closer, then another, until he was standing with his nose poking the privet leaves and he could see, plain as the ever-brightening day, a path on the other side.

What the hell? he thought as he followed the path with his gaze, all the way between the two houses to another garden and house right at the back.  It could only be 111, but how was he supposed to reach it?

He forced an arm through the thinnest part of the hedge and found that it parted reasonably well.  Perhaps there are really two hedges, he thought, and these have just become really overgrown at this end?  Although that raised the question of exactly why the rest of the path was clear, as well as why the current owner hadn’t done something about it.  There’s probably a back way in, he concluded, but a quick glance at his watch revealed that he was running out of time.  He really didn’t want to be late for school today.  His form teacher had promised detention if it ever happened again and he had football in the afternoon.

He made his decision and began to force his way in between the two hedges, holding his paper bag tight to his side as he did so.  It all seemed easy enough until, halfway through the hedge, he felt something sharp, like a thorn, stick into him from behind.  It hurt.  A lot.  With a cry of pain and tears welling up in his eyes he gave an extra push and threw himself through the last portion of the head to go tumbling along the gravel path on the other side, tripping once, then rolling across the ground to add a few bruises and a grazed palm to the butcher’s bill.

“Shit!” he cried, trying his hardest not to sob as he staggered to his feet and then reached around gingerly to the still-stinging place where the thorn caught him.  His hand came away slick with thick, wet blood.

Oh God.  I need help.

He glanced back at the hedge, but could no longer see the cut he had made going through.  It seemed as thick and impenetrable as ever.  A glance in the other direction revealed the house and its overgrown garden.  There was nowhere else to go.

Feeling the pain in his back begin to numb a little, he stumbled forwards along the path, calling out as he did so.  “Help me!  I’m bleeding!”  His voice seemed to echo off the high hedges to either side and the gables of the houses beyond them, but there were no other sounds.  It was like this part of town had just decided to go back to sleep after all.  “Help me!” he called again, “Please!”

A light appeared in one of the front rooms of the house, though the curtains were still drawn and all the other windows were oppressively dark.  Connor took a few more desperate steps towards it and made it, at last, into the garden.  Here too were roses and pansies, but all had been dead some time, dried up and forgotten and choked by ancient weeds that crumbled to the touch.  In between, rusted lanterns sat becoming one with the earth, or hanging from sagging strings across the garden.  The doorstep of the house was only a few more feet away and the lights in the front room flickered as someone passed in front of them.

“Help me!  Help me please!” Connor called as he collapsed on the front steps, the wound on his back hardly hurting at all, but cold and numb and sucking the energy from every other part of him.  “I need an ambulance, I-”

The door handle above him turned slowly.  There was a click, a creak as the door began to open and then Connor found himself staring into the inky blackness between it and the door frame.

“Please,” he tried once more, his voice sounding fainter than it had before, as if the person saying it was a long way off, too remote to be of any concern to him anymore, “please can you call an-”

The darkness pulsed and a russet glow flowered within it.  Connor’s eyesight was blurring now, but there was something off about the colours he saw, about the way everything beyond the door was moving.

He might have felt the same about the tendrils of hyphae that emerged through the crack, feeling their way along the steps until they reached his body, wrapping themselves around his slender limbs to drag him inside, but by then he was already lost to unconsciousness.

He would wake once more, before the end; his last wish: only that he hadn’t.

(This post was last modified: 09-05-2016, 06:41 PM by Seraph.)

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Episode One.

It was another intolerably long Thursday.  It was pouring down outside and the store had that stuffy, damp, headachey feel about it, the coffee machines in the canteen had all broken down at once, the till drawer kept jamming and, even though it was only eleven o’clock, she had had to deal with three complaints already, including a particularly nasty one from Mrs. Belschaft who seemed to find something to gripe about on a weekly basis.  It was days like this one - especially Thursdays - which served to remind Pacifica (Pax for short) why she hated her job so much.  The only thing that made it bearable, really, were her colleagues.

Oh, sure, they had all ribbed her a fair bit for her name (My parents are kind of… New Age, was all she could manage by way of explanation) and even the nickname she had chosen had rather backfired (Pax will bag that for you!), but it was all good fun and she gave as good as she got.  And then there were the nights out, the wild, liberating release of tension they could bring; good times fuelled by good company and a few too many drinks.  It almost made the days worth it.

There was one colleague she just couldn’t get on with, however.  His name was Terry, he was slightly younger than she was, still a student and he had the infuriating tendency of taking everything so very seriously.  He rarely came with them to Imkihca or Drugged Monkeys or any of the other clubs they usually visited and when he did he usually just stayed for one drink, hardly spoke and left without even saying goodbye.  And to make matters worse he was the only other full-timer in her section, so she spent more time working with him than with anyone else.

A shift with Terry would just drag on so much.  There was something about the way he would answer any questions she had which would just annoy.  Sometimes she would go out of her way to avoid even asking him.  He did, however, have some positive attributes, she supposed.  He was kind and generous for a start, though it always left her feeling awkward if he gave her a pen or money to buy something from a vending machine at lunch.  And he was much the same with customers, going out of his way to get something done.  He was knowledgeable about all the products and good at his job.  And he always had time to help new starters find their way around the department and get to grips with the hundred thousand bolted-on systems they were forced to work with.  He was considered a ‘key employee’, which, as far as Pax was concerned, simply meant that there was no getting rid of him.

So, of course, he was working that Thursday too, making his way around the department with a duster and smiling at the few wet and bedraggled customers who would slouch by.  Pax just tried to get some of her own work done on the opposite side of the section, up a stepladder, wiring in a new wall light whilst occasionally fending off ‘helpful’ male customers who assumed she wasn’t competent with a screwdriver.  She had to work really hard to restrain the part of herself that wanted to show them just how adept at using it she really was.

And then the phone call came.  She often kept the phone nearby when she was working, because, aside from Terry, not many other people bothered to pick it up when it rang and it was much easier to hand the phone to him than it was to be hunted down by him.  She set down her screwdriver, climbed off the ladder and picked it up just as it rang out.  It wasn’t something that actually happened all that often, but her immediate reaction was to shake her head and grumble about how “this always happens when I’m up a ladder”.  She set the phone down again and was about to climb back  up to her wall light when it rang again.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she said a little too loudly, earning her a stern look from somewhere within a passing raincoat and forcing her to smile and mutter an apology before she picked the phone up again.  This time, she hit the ‘answer’ button before it could ring out and raised the phone to her ear.  There was a strange hiss of static, like the person on the other end was calling from a mobile whilst travelling through a tunnel or something and then the line suddenly went crystal clear.

“Hello, you’re through to Pax in lighting, how can I help you?” she said robotically and, after a pause just long enough for Pax to think she needed to repeat herself and no more, a voice, quiet, barely more than a whisper, in fact, and with a hint of some odd, hard to place accent replied, “I want Terrence.”  There was a buzz of static with every word.

“You want to speak to Terry?” Pax clarified.

“I want Terrence.”

Great, she thought, another one of those customers.  “Can I ask what it’s regarding?” she tried.

“I want Terrence.”

“Can I get a name, at least?”

“Tsunamy,” the speaker said each syllable distinctly and separately and Pax wondered if he or she (she still couldn’t tell) was actually Asian.  It was a pretty weird name, regardless.  “I want Terrence,” they said again.

“Sure, okay.” she replied, giving up before she lost her patience entirely.  “I’ll just see if he’s available.”

“Yes.”

Whatever, she thought as she took the phone away from her ear and glanced across the department to see where Terry had got to.  He’s welcome to you.

She spotted him over by the lampshades and made a beeline across the section to reach him.

“It’s for you,” she said, barely suppressing a cruel smile as she handed the phone over to him.

“Thanks”, he said, setting down his duster and taking the phone to his ear.  “Hello?”

Pax turned away, eager to maintain distance, and returned to her installation.  She didn’t think anything more about it until she was done and putting away her tools.  It was heading into the dead part of the afternoon, quieter still thanks to the weather and she struggled to see a single customer on the floor as she put her ladder away and then started to tidy some shelves.  It took her a couple of minutes to notice that Terry wasn’t around.

He’s probably just nipped into the stockroom, she thought and continued to move along the wall, straightening boxes and making sure that everything faced forwards.  But Terry was still nowhere to be seen fifteen minutes later, by which time she had made her way around the entire perimeter wall.  She could still see his abandoned duster over by the lampshades.  She spotted Suzy, a colleague who worked in clocks, the next section over and went over to speak to her.

“Have you seen Terry?” she asked.  “I haven’t seen him on the floor for ages.”

“Nope,” Suzy replied, lazily writing her name in the dust that covered a wooden mantel clock.  “Has he maybe gone on his break?”

“Breaks were over ages ago, Suze and you know he never takes a minute more than he needs to.”

“True,” she replied, stifling a yawn.  “Maybe he’s tidying the stockroom  or something.”

“Maybe.”  It wasn’t outside the realms of possibility, but it wasn’t like him to leave one job unfinished to start another.  “I’ll go check, I guess.”

“Sure, you do that,” Suzy replied and there was a look of mischievous glee in her eye that put Pax on the defensive.

“I just don’t want to be left on the floor by myself,” she said a little too quickly, “what if a flood of customers came in or…”

Suzy was giggling now and Pax could only turn away before her colleague saw her flushing bright red.  She hurried into the stockroom, then paused for breath.  It was ridiculous, really, she was just getting worked up over the suggestion, nothing more.  To think that her colleagues might think that she had a thing for Terry, well that was…

The stockroom was often overheated, but that afternoon it seemed to be more so than usual.  Pax could feel a bead of sweat forming on her forehead and threatening to drip down her nose.  It was also almost completely silent, with none of the usual sounds of air conditioning units or the goods lift to fill the vacuum.

Has everything stopped working?she wondered, but then she heard the one small sound that did permeate the silence, the gentle noises of someone crying and not wanting to be heard.

“Terry?” she called, trying to locate the source of the crying.  “Terry, are you in here?  Are you okay?”

The sound stopped dead, but Pax heard the sharp intake of breath beforehand and realised he was somewhere over in the aisle where the lampshades were stored.

“Terry, I know you’re in here,” she said as she started towards the aisle, “it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.”

Silence.  Nothing but silence.  Only silence.

And then the sound of something wet hitting the floor, like an old mop or…

“Oh shit!” Pax yelled as she leapt into action, running towards the aisle to skid through the dust [slipping through the blood] around the corner and-

“Ohgodohgodohgod, what have you done, Terry?  What have you done?”

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Episode Two. 

It was still raining. It plummeted from the leaden sky in torrents like stair-rods, striping the dark world with reflected light, drowning the streets and transforming the window panes into elaborate water features. Pax stared out through one such from her place at the Shark Pancake café, watching the world try to wash itself clean by moving the silt around. She played idly with her coffee stirrer and hasn't touched the drink itself. A slice of cheesecake sat, uneaten, on a plate in front of her. 

“Good morning,” came a voice from behind and Pax turned around to see her friend Izzy dripping on the floor as she flipped down the goods of her raincoat and offered up a smile as bright as the absentee sun. 

Pax merely raised an eyebrow in reply. 
“Well, okay, it's pretty rotten,” Izzy conceded, before taking the seat opposite, “but at least it's not snowing.”

That was Izzy, always positive, despite the weather, despite the endless parade of misery on the TV news channels, despite everything that had happened two weeks ago.

“Do you want some cheesecake?”

Izzy glanced down at the untouched slice and sighed. 

“How long has that been sitting there?”

“About as long as I have,” Pax confessed.

“Then you should eat it. I'll order something else.” She pushed the plate a little closer to Pax, who stared at it listlessly. 

“Oh, come on now, Pacifica, eat!” Izzy demanded suddenly, “it'll do you some good. Lord knows we all need it.”

Pax looked up. “And what does that mean?”

“It means that your constant moping is bringing everyone down. You need to cheer up, get over it.”

“Terry almost died,” Pax replied, showing each word out like a shotgun blast, “he stabbed himself in the stomach and cut his wrists with the frame ripped off of one of our lampshades! It was such a mess, I didn't think he'd live another minute, never mind the time it took to call an ambulance. I can't get it out of my head, so I'm sorry if I'm bringing the group down, but, actually, I don't much care.”

Izzy stared at her like she's just been slapped. 

“But it was two weeks ago. You can't keep thinking about it.”

“Do you think I haven't tried? That I want to be this way?”

“Well, he was your Resentine…”

“My what?”

“Your Resentine. The crush you resent, your reluctant Valentine, if you prefer.”

Pax just stared at her, not believing what she was hearing. 

“Oh, come on,” Izzy continued, “you can't pretend it's not true.  We've all seen the way you look at him when you think nobody's watching. Unless… you aren't even aware of it yourself, are you?”

“I…” Pax simmered.  “I…” It was like her friend hadn’t been listening to her at all.  “I…”  The entire conversation had been a waste of words, of good breathable air.  She stood up.  “I think I’m going to go now, Izzy.  You can finish the cheesecake.”


Pax stared at her sodden feet for much of the walk home.  She watched how they splashed through puddles, churned up the rippling surface patterns made by the never-ending raindrops: a peripatetic agent of chaos.  She wanted to focus on the details, on the weather, her environment.  She wanted her mind to stay outside of itself, because she wasn’t sure what she’d face when she finally let it head back inside.

Darkness awaited there.  The image of Terry lying, bleeding in the aisle, the ragged remains of a lampshade soaking it all up, turning the mustard fabric crimson black.  And the jagged wire.  In her memory it was always sharper, crueler than it could possibly have been in reality, as if it hadn’t just been snapped out by a young man on the edge, but whittled away over time by a keenness not born of human sanity, nor of instability, but of something much, much older.

And was he even ‘on the edge’?  She couldn’t understand it.  The Doctors said that he’d stopped taking his Rovain, that he had suffered from severe depression and that the withdrawal from his medication made suicidal thoughts that much more likely.  She knew that mental illness wasn’t always easy to diagnose, that the sufferers often hid what they were feeling behind barriers only a trained professional could break down, but at the same time, he had seemed so… Terry.  Stable, dependable, boring Terry.  Had that calm, controlled demeanour really been a cover for something so unhinged underneath?  Could Terry have really hated himself that much?  Pax was pretty certain that even she had never hated him like that.

Or…

Raindrops.  Puddles.  Splashes.  Keep to the outside, keep to dripping here and soaked-through now.  Don’t look up, don’t look in and don’t ever look back.  Take each step as it comes and don’t worry about where you’ve come from or where you are-

“Watch it!”

The voice was so sudden, so unexpected that Pax reacted without thinking, leaping back from the source and glancing up through the wet spikes of her fringe at the black anorak which swirled before her, only half concealing an elderly hand wrapped around a pile of boxes before the whole slick enterprise turned away from her and disappeared through a gap in the hedge.  

She blinked, as much to clear her eyes of raindrops as from the sheer surprise, then put her head down and started walking once more, continuing the battle to think about nothing.

So, it was a good few hundred yard before all the strange pieces of the encounter began to bother her.

The logo on the boxes was all-too familiar to her: the red and blue slashes of Feirmont Brothers Department Store.  The voice had been familiar too: strangely accented and monotone, despite the speaker’s obvious annoyance.  She could hear it muttering those three syllables once more, Tsu-na-my…

But the oddest thing of all was the hand.  She’d thought elderly in the instant that she saw it, but hadn’t been able to place a gender on the person who owned it.  But that wasn’t the strangest thing.  She could have sworn - could her memory be playing tricks, or was it this storm-light?  She was almost certain that the hand had been covered and threaded through with something bluish-green, like mouldy bread.

She turned around then, although she wasn’t really sure why.  Perhaps it was some humanitarian desire to get help for an elderly citizen, some sense of civic duty.  Perhaps it was just curiosity, or the dull, nagging ache of horror yet to fully dawn.  She retraced her steps to the hedge, paced along it in the rain to find the gap through which the old person had vanished, felt along the foliage for some way in.

And it was then that she saw it, fed through the interior of the hedge like a parasitic plant, a long twisted stretch of curved wire, pennants of silk still dripping sadly along parts of its length.  One end was cut sharply, jutting out into a small gap, the one the black anorak had stepped through.  Its point seemed rusted, but still looked vicious, more jagged than any accident could achieve.  She stared at it for a long, long time, comparing sight to memory, imagination to reality and then she let out a gasp and started running up the road.

For, of course, the point wasn’t rusted at all.

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Episode Three.

The first thing she did after she got in through the door of her flat was to reach for the phone sitting on a table in the hall and clumsily dial 999. An operator answered immediately.

“Emergency. Which service?”

“Police.”

“I’m connecting you now.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line as the operator, a very efficient-sounding lady, did as she said. Pax felt each second stretch out long and desperate, then,

“Can I have your name, please?”

Water dripped from her hair, down her face, down the handset, all down her clothes and onto the floor.

“Pacifica Sutherland.”

The sound of a hurricane of keys pinning her, letter by letter, into a form.

“Address?”

Pax answered the operator’s questions as quickly and calmly as she could, though the horror of what she had realised threatened to burst out of her at any moment. All these details seemed irrelevant in contrast, but she guessed that even emergencies couldn’t stop the wheels of bureaucracy turning, not even if all it achieved was to kick up mud.

“And what is the nature of the emergency?”

“I want to report an attempted murder.”

She gave all the details she could and repeated them, twice to the detective to whom she was eventually transferred. He made no attempt to hide his incredulity throughout and it was with great reluctance that he promise that someone would begin to investigate it the next day.

When she finally hung up the phone, Pax felt exhausted. She peeled off her still-sodden clothes, slipped under her duvet and was asleep in moments.

She woke hours (days?) later to the sound of her buzzer going off. It seemed a tremendous effort to get up, drag herself into a dressing gown and make her way to the intercom and when her enquiry of “Who is it?” was answered by a policeman, her sudden relief was tempered by trepidation and weariness.

“The door's open,” she said as she pressed the button once more, “but please wait in the living room, while I get dressed, okay?”

When she finally emerged in some hastily pulled-on, mismatching, but dry clothes, there were two police officers shooting in her cluttered living room, a man and a woman, who looked up at her and offered the most official smiles she had ever seen. A slight twisting of the corner of the policewoman’s mouth told her, right away, that all was not well.

“Please take a seat, Miss Sutherland,” she said, gesturing somewhat redundantly at Pax’s own armchair.

“What have you found?” Pax asked, ignoring the request, “Did you check out the house with the hedge on Glen Road?”

“Well, that's the thing,” said the policeman, glancing at his partner as if for moral backup, “we went all along that road and found no evidence of the hedge you spoke of. There are no unusual gaps between the houses, the hedges are immaculate with no room for anyone to walk through between the plants, and there was no sign of the bloodied wire you described.”

Pax took a defensive step backwards.

“That makes no sense, it was there this afternoon, I swear! They couldn't have covered up a hole in a hedge that quickly!”

“That's precisely what we concluded,” the man continued, “which raises the question: did you really see what you think you saw?”

“Yes!” She couldn't believe this. How incompetent were the police these days? It had been a little hard to spot the gap in the hedge, yes, and perhaps she wouldn't have noticed had that old man or woman not slipped through it, but it was definitely there and any close examination ought to have uncovered it.

“It was exactly where I said it was! How could you not find it?”

“I assure you, Miss Sutherland, we have searched the whole road very thoroughly. There is nothing like what you described.”

“Are you saying I made it up?”

“We're not saying that at all,” the policewoman replied with what Pax could only assume was a standard issue ‘soothing manner’, “but there's no feeding you've been under a lot of stress lately, since your friend's accident and-”

“One, it wasn't an accident and two, how the hell do you know anything about what I've been through for the last two weeks?”

“We've been speaking to your colleagues,” the policewoman said in what was half answer, half continuation, “and we think you Night night have post-traumatic stress disorder. We'd like to refer you to a counsellor.”

She laughed then. It was ridiculous, after all. They had to be joking!

And yet the look on the policewoman’s face said that laughter was the wrong response, so she tried anger instead.

“That's it! Get out! I don't have to listen to this and you certainly can't make me to go some therapist because I made a legitimate call. If you're not going to help me, then fine, but get out of my living room!”

The police officers stood as one.

“You're right,” the policewoman said as they stopped, briefly, by the door, “we can't make you do anything. Not yet. But take this as a word of advice. You should get help now, before things get worse.”


Pax lay on the sofa for a long time afterwards, just staring at the ceiling, watching the grey day turn dark and the orange glow of the street lamps cut in through her uncurtained windows. She knew she should move, that there were jobs to do, not least of which was hanging up the wet clothes she had shed earlier, but she couldn’t find the energy.

They thought I was going mad. It was a single, uncomplicated thought, but it seemed to echo around her head in a million different, tangent-spawning variations. And always the refrain: And what if i am?

Because the gap in the hedge had been there and so had the bloodied shade-wire. She was sure of it! But if the police hadn’t been able to find any of it just a couple of hours later…

It was after eight when her phone rang from the bedroom. She had to fish it out from a still-damp pocket and wipe the screen before she could answer it, although, seeing who it was made her reluctant to put that much effort in.

“Hello, Izzy,” she answered drily as soon as the phone was to her ear, “I don’t suppose you’ve called to apologise?”

“What? Pax, what are you on about? This afternoon? That was… look it doesn’t even matter.” Izzy’s delivery was unusual, hurried, panicked even. Attention grabbing.

“What’s happened?”

“Well, you know I’m friends with Georgia, Terry’s sister, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“She’s just messaged me. He’s out of hospital.”

“That’s… that’s great, I guess.”

“No, Pax, it isn’t!”

“Whyever not?”

“Because he wasn’t discharged, you idiot. He just left! Didn’t even get changed into his own clothes or anything. He’s out there in the rain in nothing but a hospital gown and… and… Georgia said he was still… unstable?”

“What? What does that mean?”

“He attacked a nurse, or something. The police are looking for him. It’s just… it’s crazy, you know. You never expect things like this to happen to people you know and… Pax, are you there Pax? Pax?”

Pax pressed the end call button without saying anything. She knew what she needed to do and it didn’t involve listening to her ‘friend’ prattling on about things that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

She needed to find Terry before the police did, but that was okay, because she was starting to realise that she already knew where he was going.

She shoved her phone into her pocket, flung her still-damp coat over her i shoulders and stepped out into the dripping darkness.

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Episode Four.

The weather had not got any better with the progress of the day. That which had merely been wet, was now submerged and the rain which had been torrential, now felt like the spray of a mighty waterfall in the heavens. The wind had picked up too, so that merely having a waterproof jacket with a hood did not prevent the rain from being whipped up into your face to sluice down the back of your neck. It was a wild night to be out and the streets were deserted, save for one lost soul, trudging along the length of affluent Glen Road, looking for a wire in a hedgerow.

Pax was miserable. She honestly couldn't remember a time when she was more wet or more cold. Her hair was matted to her skin, her jeans clung tight to her hips, thighs and calves to chafe with every step and though she peered into the deep darkness of the storm, she could see little but the raindrops being hurled into her blurred field of vision and the cold glare of sodium lighting reflected off slick, soaked concrete.

But she didn't stop, for she knew, despite the evidence, that she was not alone in the storm. Somewhere in the merciless night, Terry had wandered, half naked and out of his mind, on some madman’s errand. Pax was sure she was the only one with any hope of finding him, because the police wouldn't believe the connections she'd made. Even she didn't understand them. She just knew, with a certainty that defied all logic, that Terry had left the hospital in search of something and that thing could only be found on the other side of that hedge.

But which hedge? She thought she remembered the spot where she had seen that elderly creature pretty well, and yet, as she retraced her steps in the night, it seemed the dark and the storm had changed everything and nothing was familiar at all. It didn't help that not all the streetlights were working. The one above her right then, for example, was flickering on and off at such intervals that it was mostly pitch black except for occasional stutters of light. It made it even harder to see what she was doing and look for any irregularities in the hedgerows between the houses.

Except it wasn't some of the street lamps which weren't working, Pax realised as she surveyed the street ahead and behind. It was just this one. Everywhere else the sickly orange light flooded the wet world and reflected off the low cloud above, but not here. In this one spot, and this one alone, the light was erratic, unsafe and, quite frankly creepy as hell.

It's here somewhere, Pax thought as she glanced along the hedgerow beside the pole of the street lamp. There was no reason why the light and the gap in the hedge should coincide and yet she knew that they must. Something about this whole situation had her making connections where no normal person would check twice, and perhaps that meant she was losing it and ought to be locked away, like one of the straight-jacket-wearing cartoon animals in that weird Nickelodeon show, Professor Hen’s Funny Farm. She almost smiled at the thought. Almost.

No. It made no sense at all, but this was real and she was as sure that she would find the gap there as she was that Terry would be somewhere on the other side, and that this Tsunamy, whoever he or she was, was somehow behind Terry’s apparent suicide attempt. She was willing to bet everything on it.

And so she turned towards the long, flickering shadow of the hedgerow, watched the ephemeral pattern of light as the streetlamp painted each slick leaf a dirty orange, and saw the gap at once, tiny though it was. I can do this, she thought as she stared it down, trying to build up courage in the face of a sudden, inexplicable terror.  I can do this, her mantra continued, because I have to.  Because no one else is going to find Terry.  Because I’m the only one who knows and no one will believe me.

She took a few steps towards the gap, felt around for the stripped-down shade wire and, carefully, oh so carefully, pulled it free of the tangled branches.  I can do this, she thought for the last time as she put in first an arm, then a leg, then let the hedge swallow her whole.

It was just too dark on the other side, without even the inconstant light of the flickering street lamp to illuminate anything.  There were half a dozen points in the undergrowth where a dim, intermittent glow could be seen and even similar spots of light hanging in mid air, but none of it was enough to navigate by and only the dark shadow of the house, hints of coloured radiance leaking out from within, served as any kind of landmark.  Pax took a few steps and almost immediately stumbled over something hidden in the overgrown garden.  She landed face-first in the wet grass, her shin aching even as the objects she’d kicked rolled past her.

Sitting upright, she leant over to examine one of the things she had fallen over.  To her surprise and disgust, it was an old, rotted lampshade, the silk hanging off its frame like cobwebs.

Who lives here, she wondered, some kind of lampshade fetishist?

But it didn’t matter.  She knew she had to get inside the house.

Carefully, she staggered to her feet and, with a slight limp, made her way more cautiously towards the house.  Every couple of metres her foot would touch something else and she would recoil out of instinct, before kicking whatever-it-was aside and moving on.  The rotting lampshades littered the ground to such an extent that to Pax it felt like she was wading through a field of them, as if they had grown there and been left past harvest, left to rot.  The mouldy solar lanterns - for that is what the dim lights around her must have been - flickered ember-esque at the edges of the garden, like dying fairies.

And then her foot hit something wooden and unyielding and the shadow of the house towered before her and she knew she had reached the porch steps.

She climbed up and felt surprise at the sudden dry silence, the rainfall now pattering impotently behind her as her clothes dripped onto the woodwork.  And in that semi-silence, that endless muted drum-roll, she became aware of the deeper silence of the house itself, the true silence that lay within, and though she knew she had to step inside, that surely Terry would be beyond the heavy black door, suddenly it seemed as if the rain itself was a kind of shelter, its heavy susurrus a way to drown out the hungry, waiting silence.

Without touching the door, without even stepping closer, she opened her mouth and tried to call out.  “Terry….” the word died on her lips, came out like a thin wheeze and even that seemed suddenly much too loud layered upon that heavy hush.

“Terry…” she whispered carefully,  as if enunciation might make up for lack of strength, “Oh God…”

She watched her hand stretch out before her, as if pushing through a fluid more viscous than water, and press, palm first against the wood.  She knew some part of her was controlling it, knew it was what she must do anyway, but it seemed an alien action to her: impossible.

And yet, the door creaked slowly open and, as if guided by a will other than her own, she took first one step, then another, and then she was inside.

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