The White-Haired Gentleman by Samuel C Richards

Author:Samuel C Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: coach dog publications
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXXV

THE rising sun had touched nearly every building with its flaming tongues of pink, perhaps save but one; and, even the interior of that structure had taken on the appearance that it could not shake the night nor welcome in the light of day. That in a gloomy recess, a middle-aged man sitting with his heavy coat draped round him, a coat that had served him as his bed, and one which had hidden a terrible secret among so many seemingly less significant half-truths, and within its daily purpose. Had his head resting in bloodied hands, and these shrouding the new roughness of a nights-growth of beard, the Scissor-man slumbered as best he could, having spent the night cowering in the darkness of an ancient church, and freezing from cold air kept captive by deep stone-walls.

Haunted by past deeds and in a terror of a final punishment to end his evil ways, he listened cautiously to every sound, only to notice heavily drawn breaths filling the chambers about and echoing loudly as if the whole place were overrun by hostile spectres calling for the dead to rise. His viewing the many stained-glass windows in the church to pass the time, and before he had succumbed to a disturbed sleep, had only served as a reminder of his own insidious acts. The terrible images of the dead men’s skeleton-frames reviving and emerging from the abyss depicted only too well his inner thoughts. Certainly, the deep-blue and black imagery of Death towering over subdued sinners quickly became a sight that seemed to his worried and sickening eyes, one almost alive with real animation. So strong in this belief, he had forgot the passing clouds outside and also of the light that now occasionally struck through, to reveal minor movement momentarily in the normally-still cartoon of the fourteenth-day!

Only then, to understand the low moaning noises were his own, and here he sighed in a blend of wretched self-pity and strangled relief; all of which was later punctuated by numerous sniffs and occasioned by howling sobbing. His bosom heaving in this droning way, and his belly aching for lack of food, the twisted mind of Ridley Mirth or Breeches as he was mostly known: thought on, and desperately so, and as always for himself alone.

Struggling to his aching feet, his legs suffering cramp and locking under him, he howled in pain at the sudden sharp disablement, and recovered as he could, by limping about in pathetic dances formed of that condition. Eventually to land against the font, swearing crudely in derision of that sacred article and his ailing fortune. Rubbing his hands over and over his face to rouse himself, he rotated into the line of the font and dipping down into the water with his hands and head, banged the latter; and rose from the shallow water with several further curses and then held his lips in a last momentary concern for silence.

“Pah, who cares? I’m ungry any’ows, must be food somewhere, otherwise rats wouldn’t be as big as goblins — menacin’ critures.

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