A Place Of Strangers Read Free Page B

is fear in her eyes.
Something is happening, something full of dread. Dark figures flee through
cramped alleyways below the verdigris cupolas of great baroque churches and
across the ancient bridge above the sly waters of the Vltava. Its stone saints
look down upon them, powerless in the face of the coming enemy. A clock face
moon and sun spin in their orbits and a clashing of metal hammers signals the
end of time. All colour drains from Bea’s world. A column of troop carriers
grinds over the granite setts of the sepia streets, guns snouting for prey. The
hot breath of cavalry horses condenses in the chill air and soldiers in
greatcoats, rifles raised, march where only trams once rumbled by.
    Still the mechanised invaders come, drilling across the
martyred square until, in one final balletic movement, their weapons all point
at her head and her eyes are drawn into the infinite blackness of their
barrels. As this image dissolves, so Bea hears the droning of bombers and fire
begins to fall to earth from a molten sky. Then she is running, running through
empty medieval cloisters, past campaniles ringing with muffled death... running
so hard her lungs feel full of powdered glass. A door is opened and she is
suddenly within a walled yard with tall iron gates. And in the icy street
beyond stands a human tide of shadow men, each sewn with a yellow star, eyes
wet with weeping, wide with terror, soft with pleading.
    Help us... save us... help our children.
    Who are these people? What is she to do... what can she do?
She sees one man, alone... one among so many. His beautiful, agonised face
implores her like Christ’s on the cross. Bea goes to him, takes his
supplicating hand and leads him away as she knows in her heart only she can do.
    And as she does, so the engines of destruction start up and
the black gas begins to seep through every street and house, over the green
fields and silver trees and into all of God’s holy places for there is nowhere
this poison cannot reach.

 
    Chapter Three
     
    McCall woke. He thought someone was crying but with the gale
outside, he could not be sure. It was a wild night. He needed to pee so crept
along the landing to the loo. As he passed Bea’s bedroom, he heard her
muttering. He opened the door quietly and saw Bea slumped by the bed in her
favourite dressing gown, the one patterned with irises. She seemed to have no
idea who he was.
    ‘Get out, get out. They’re up at the castle.’
    ‘Who’s up at the castle?’
    ‘The Nazis – Hitler, all of them.’
    He tried to lift her but she resisted, suddenly made strong
by fear.
    ‘No! Can’t you see their guns?’
    ‘There’s no one here, Bea. It’s a nightmare.’
    ‘I’ve got to get away.’
    ‘Come on, you’ll be catching cold like this.’
    ‘Leave me alone! They’ll find me.’
    ‘No one’ll find you if you’re back in bed.’
    ‘I’ll be tortured.’
    ‘Why would anyone want to torture you?’
    ‘To find him, of course’
    ‘Find who?’
    ‘They mustn’t do that.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because they’ll kill him. They want him dead.’
    Francis was nowhere to be found. McCall struggled to
manoeuvre Bea back into bed on his own. He pulled the covers up to her chin and
she lay rigid until whatever was in her head passed and she lapsed into an
uneasy sleep. She looked as pale as her pillows, so vulnerable without the
artifice of cosmetics and deathly still, too.
    It was a strangely transfixing moment – an affecting image
of her mortality he had never had to confront before. Something once so solid
beneath his feet was giving away and he had hardly noticed. He could only stare
at what she had become and remember how she had been.
    McCall held her hand and thought what a terrifying place the
subconscious could be.
    *
    Some frames of memory get frozen, others fade to
black. But what if all which had been lost could not be found and cut together
again? Who will ever make sense of what has happened?
    Show us the pictures in