48 by James Herbert

Author:James Herbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - Horror
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

I’D CLEARED THE STREET. This was the last carcass. Any others were out of sight, inside the buildings. Like they say - said: Out of sight, out of mind. Only they weren’t; I could still see them in my mind’s eye, slumped in chairs, sprawled across tables, curled up on floors - dried-out, feather-light shucks, dusty, brittle refuse. My mind could always see them inside shops, restaurants, offices, dwellings, factories, stations, vehicles … Christ, the list went on forever. But I couldn’t take them all. As Potter had remarked: ‘There were too bloody many …’

I lifted the bag of bones onto the back of the truck, oblivious to its shrivelled eyes, like black raisins above its yawning, meatless mouth, and it slithered down at me from the pile, a reluctant evacuee. Its bony fingers snagged against my sweatshirt as I pushed it back and I was too tired and too seasoned to feel any revulsion. When the desiccated corpse was settled, I picked up my jacket lying on the kerbside and the rifle leaning against the truck’s rear wheel, then climbed into the cab.

Once this had been an ordinary city street, its houses untouched by Hitler’s worst, the corner pub still open for business; but weeds now grew between the cracks in the pavements and vehicles rusted away in the road. But it was the silence that got to me. After three long and lonely years, I still hadn’t become used to that eerie hush, not in undamaged streets like this where everything seemed so normal.

It was as if the place was … well, haunted. I thought of Muriel’s ghosts back at the Savoy and got angry with myself.

Slamming the truck’s door after me, I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat and settled the rifle in the footwell on that side, its muzzle leaning against the open window opposite, pointed away from me but within easy reach. The girl had been wrong, she was haunted by memories, not by spectres. Even I’d imagined the sound of voices, laughter - music, too - drifting up to me as I’d lain awake nights in that grand rotting mausoleum. Couple of times I’d even gone to the door and listened, opening it when I was sure there really was something going on downstairs, the noises always vanishing the moment I stepped out into the corridor. Just night-notions, that’s all they were. Dreams when I hadn’t even realized I’d been asleep. Muriel would soon get to realize that imagination had a way of playing tricks on you when you were in a low frame of mind. They weren’t just dreams either, they were wishful dreams, dreams you hoped would be true, cravings for life to return to normal, to the way it had once been. Daybreak always put things right again; as right as they were ever gonna be.

I turned on the engine, took one last look at the deserted street out the side window, and drove off. Although weary from my labours

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