The Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Hill, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Thirty-five

There was a blackness, but in the centre of the blackness was a swirling mass like a whirligig. Sparks came out of it now and then and she tried to hold on to those, but they always sputtered out and then there was just the blackness again and she was drowning in it.

When she came round the next time, there seemed to be some light at the edges of the blackness and after a few moments she recognised this as good. But there was also pain, at first so much part of her whole self that she could not separate it as being pain from here or from there, it was simply pain, a heavy, burning pain. She had no sense of time, but in between the bouts of swirling blackness and the moments of light, she began to sense that the pain was centred within the blackness, behind her eyes, around her head, inside her head, in her neck and chest. She thought about the pain. She was aware of her legs and feet then and the pain did not seem to belong there.

But they were cold. She was cold. Only the pain was burning.

There was no time but there had been darkness and then there was light, then darkness again and a terrible thirst that was part of the pain.

Suddenly, she opened her eyes and there was the sky. She moved her arm and then her hand and beneath the palm of her hand was cold and damp and slippery smoothness. She moved her hand and the cold and damp moved with her. Moving her hands took a long time and she slept again, dropping down exhausted into the black pit.

The next time she woke there was no light, but darkness again, and she was colder. The burning pain was better for a moment, then worse.

She moved her legs. They moved easily at first but then her foot wedged against something, and she could move no more. She moved her hands and the coldness was still underneath them. Cold. Damp. Slippery.

Slowly, hour after hour, perhaps day after day, she spent longer awake and less time down in the blackness, longer moving her hands and her legs, longer feeling the cold and then the burning. Slowly, she began to think that she could move. She did not know where she was or why but she wanted to move. It seemed urgent that she should move, but from where to where she did not know.

She moved. The pain did not affect her legs, so she moved them again, but if she tried to move the upper part of her, the pain burned her up and she had to stop.

Slowly, slowly. It was like learning how to move. She wept the first time she dragged herself an inch forward, before collapsing back again onto what she now recognised as cold ground. But the next time, she felt something new, a determination, a will, and she dragged herself further, an inch or

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