Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [53]
He’d left her - and she had never understood why. Nobody had ever been able to tell her. They’d tried: but she’d never listened, because it hadn’t been right. He’d left her, and that was it.
She’d been playing hide-and-seek with him as they trekked through the glen. She’d hidden in some trees and giggled as he called for her. She’d waited until he’d gone over the rise and then she’d slipped out of her hiding place, still giggling. She’d picked some daisies beside the stream and sat in the sun making a daisy chain, and the cries of her father had grown first more anxious, and then more distant. Just like the mother of Flip the penguin in the storybook she’d read the year before. And that was when she stopped making the daisy chain and leapt to her feet, feeling suddenly scared. Flip had hidden from his mother because he wanted to carry on sliding through the ice, even after it started to get dark. His mother had called for him, waddling over the ice floes, and Flip had hidden. Then his mother had stopped calling and Flip could play all he wanted. Then it got very dark and Flip was alone. And scared.
Just like little Charmagne was now. Except Flip’s mother had come back for one last search for her son and the little penguin was no longer alone. And little Charmagne...
Little Charmagne had already lost her mother to a traffic accident. she didn’t want to lose her father too.
So she skipped over the bridge, scanning the moor for any sign of the old man, and of course there was nothing but the crofter’s hut with its impenetrable windows smeared with cobwebs.
Daddy was inside. That’s where he was hiding. she swayed over 128
the bridge while the brook sang sweetly beneath her feet, and then she was across and traipsing up to the buckled wooden door.
Little Charmagne reached for the handle. She pulled it down and pushed the door open.
She saw her father sitting inside. The room was bare apart from the plain wooden table and the plain wooden chair, and cobwebs: So many cobwebs, like a witch’s lair. It was a fairy-tale cottage after all. Nothing there to tempt him inside. So why had he left her?
Why hadn’t he come back for one last look for her, like Flip the penguin’s mother in the storybook?
He was sitting with his old grey head slumped on his chest, one hand dangling down beside the chair, the other resting on the table.
It looked like he was asleep.
‘Why did you leave me, Daddy?’
Why did you leave me?
Little Charmagne stood in the crofter’s cottage and screamed at her dead father.
A world of time away, a clutch of years away, a handful of seconds away, twenty-five year-old Charmagne stood in the crofter’s hut in the middle of nowhere in the nightmare truck and screamed at her dead father.
‘WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?’
The dead old man in the chair lifted his head up to face his daughter. A length of cobweb stretched from his mouth to an empty plate on the table.
‘Heart attack, love. Didn’t they ever tell you?’ His voice was whispery and dry as if his throat were crammed like the hut with cobwebs. ‘I looked, but I couldn’t find you, and I was so tired, I had to play a game of hide-and-seek of my own.’
His old face was stiff with rigor mortis, the words squeezed out of a locked mouth. The eyes were cold and frozen and...
Grey. Grey as snail flesh. Grey as the flesh of his face. Grey, like stone.
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The figure in the chair stirred and Charmagne saw the rags that hung from its twisted frame. she saw the things that squirmed upon the hairless head; she heard the rasp of air coming from the mouth and realised the Ragman was laughing.
Thick-legged spiders, living knots of darkness, trickled out of the mouth and down the bridge of web towards the plate.
‘It took me so looooongto find you...’
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Chapter Twelve
Kane’s hand was on the library door. The hand was shaking. He’d been back