Odd Man Out by F.L. Green

Author:F.L. Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

PART II: JOHNNY

I

When Johnny recovered consciousness in the shelter into which he had run, he could not recognize his surroundings. The short November day had passed to twilight. Darkness was falling, and the shelter was so cold and so dark that at first he imagined that he was sitting on the floor of the prison cell from which he had escaped earlier in the year. The air was harsh with the odour of brick and cement and dampness. He was so sure that he was in the prison cell that he made no effort to rise, but allowed his thoughts to move slowly of their own volition.

They began to assemble about a strange dream whose details recurred vividly and whose atmosphere had so impressed him that all his sub-conscious mind was still possessed by it. Thus, he remembered the smell of the office into which he had gone to plunder the safe, and the sounds of shrill voices, and the motion of the car, and the face of the mill manager who had been in the hall, and the warm weight of the cashier’s body when the two of them had rolled down the steps of the mill. And the smell of the pavement. And the sounds of the revolvers. And much more.

‘Yes,’ he thought, with sudden clarity. ‘In the dream I killed him and he wounded me! He plugged me in the left arm, and the pain was so bad I could not get into the car with Pat and Murphy and Nolan.’

He felt an impulse to laugh at the absurd dream. At that moment he heard the thunder of traffic reverberating in the earth and rising from the stone floor on which he was sitting.

‘It is traffic in the Crumlin Road, outside the jail,’ he thought. Then the volume of his thoughts returned once more to the dream which he had experienced; and again and again the terrible events recurred to him, not in an ordered progression but in a rapid presentation of confused detail. And now he remembered as well how he had sat around a little table with Dennis, Sean, Seamus, Pat, Murphy, Nolan and others and planned a raid on the mill. Also, his mind presented recollections of the journey in the car to the mill; and he remembered the strange weakness and baffling sense of detachment which he had felt throughout the journey, and in a heightened degree when he had left the car and entered the mill. He recalled, too, the curious fact that a certain quality of fear had been absent from his mind throughout the whole time which he had spent in the mill. And yet, now, when he remembered the part of the dream during which he had grappled with the big cashier and toppled down the steps with him and fired at him and been fired at, he experienced not only intense horror but fear as well.

‘What an awful dream,’ he mumbled aloud. And he tried to expel it from his memory.

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