The Survivor by James Herbert

Author:James Herbert [Herbert, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Thrillers, Suspense, Horror & Ghost Stories, Fiction - General, etc, Mystery, Mystery & Detective - General, Mystery & Detective, Literature & Fiction, Aircraft accidents, shipwrecks, Survival after airplane accidents
ISBN: 9780330376167
Publisher: Pan
Published: 1999-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The people of the town were nervous. They gathered together in small groups, their apprehension growing with each new hushed conversation. Only in the public houses did their voices rise above normal conversation level when a drink or two helped quell their rising trepidation. The women met in shops and in the High Street, infecting each other with their own personal fear, the men discussed the peculiar happenings at their desks or work benches, many scornful of the suggestion that some evil was afoot in the town, but admittedly perplexed by the sequence of events. Yesterday, a young boy from the College had been struck down by a train, his head and feet sliced from his body. On the same day a couple had fallen from a window into the High Street, the man's naked body curiously emaciated, as though he had been through a long illness. The couple, husband and wife, had kept very much to themselves, but the woman had been a life-long resident of Eton and had run the antique shop for many years. They had always appeared to be a pleasant, if conservative, pair, their lives quiet and orderly. For them to die in such a bizarre manner was disturbing to say the least.

Then there was the Reverend Biddlestone, found unconscious on the floor of his church and kept under heavy sedation since. There was the girl who had been found in a car on the other side of the field, still unable to give an account of what had happened to her. Her boyfriend had been traced and questioned by the police; his story was that a face had appeared at then-car window and that the car itself had been lifted completely off the ground. He had run away in terror but the girl had refused to go with him. Naturally, the police were holding him for further questioning. A man had been found dead by the river the following morning. They said the cause was a heart attack, but it was rumoured, because of the frozen look of fright on his face, that the heart attack had been induced by fear. He had literally died of fright.

Constable Wickham sensed the growing unease, and he shared the apprehension. He'd had the feeling for several days now: a building-up of tension that was fast reaching a peak. There was a pregnant stillness in the air that would eventually break and somehow he knew the consequences would be dreadful when it did. The guarding of the field had been an uneasy duty for him: he sensed its brooding sullenness, its indescribable coldness - not the physical chill of winter, but a deeper, forbidding coldness that tormented the imagination. As he looked across at the twisted, torn fragments of the wreck and at the silver shell that had been a burning tomb, he could almost hear the shrill screams of panic, the terror of imminent death. His mind's eye saw those hundreds of frightened faces; he heard the crying, the praying, the pleading, the wailing.

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