The Fog - James Herbert [7]
‘I want you to get on my back, darling, and put your arms around my neck,’ he told the girl, lifting her chin so he could look at her face. ‘We’re going to climb up now.’
‘I – I want my brother,’ she whimpered, no longer afraid of him, but still not trusting.
‘I know, darling, I know. But your Mummy and Daddy will be waiting for you up there.’
She burst into tears again, burying her head into his shoulder. The thick blanket of fog was now up to his chin. Moving her around to his back, he took off his belt and tied her wrists together just below his neck, tucking her legs around his waist. He began to climb.
The people above heard the cry for help coming from the huge hole that had wrecked the village. They’d assumed that anyone who had plunged into it must surely be dead, but now gained new heart at the sound of a voice, a chance to react against the tragedy. The policeman whose children were thought to have been lost in the eruption, was lowered over the edge of the crack. He would not give up. He had searched the rubble and still half-collapsed, potentially dangerous buildings, but hadn’t found his youngsters yet. When they heard the cry for help, he was already tying a stout rope to his waist to be lowered into the hole to search for survivors.
When he emerged five minutes later, he held a small unconscious girl in his arms. He laid her on the ground to be taken care of by the elderly but competent doctor, he kissed her once, tears from his eyes falling on her face, then dashed back to the hole and was lowered again. This time, he brought up a man. A man covered from head to foot with dust and dirt. A man who gibbered and screamed, a man who had to be restrained by four others from running back and throwing himself into the black depths. A man who was insane.
The villagers watched the mist rise from the hole, not billowing over the edges, but rising in a densely-packed steady column, the centre of which seemed to glow faintly – or was it merely the strong sun shining through it? – rising high into the air to form a heavy, yellowish cloud. It looked like the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb, only a much smaller mushroom shape, the lower column finally ending and joining the cloud in the sky. It was soon forgotten when the winds blew it away; not dispersing it, but moving it in a huge, almost solid-looking mass, across the sky, away from the ruined village.
3
The Reverend Martin Hurdle trudged across the fields with a heavy heart. His thoughts were on the nearby village that had suffered the great disaster, the peaceful little village that had virtually been demolished by the freak earthquake. It had been the main story in the newspapers all that week. The great shock was that it had happened in England, not some far off, remote country that people had scarcely heard of. This was on their own doorstep, the British people could relate to it, not viewing it distantly through the news media and the press, thereby finding true sympathy hard to arouse. This had happened to their own kind. For the people of his village, they were neighbours, relatives; for the people in the rest of Britain, they were countrymen. This would be the basis of his sermon today: that through this tragic event they could now perhaps truly understand and feel compassion for the plight of other nations all over the world who suffered misfortune as a normal part of their lives. People were concerned too much with their own mundane, day-to-day problems: money worries, job worries, affair-of-the-heart worries, disputes with family, with neighbours, with life itself – all petty, insulated, but only shown to be so when some major disaster happened.
This tragic event would force people to look outward, to see what was happening in the world around them, to realize just how insignificant their selfish, introverted problems were. If only he could use this distressing event to show his congregation just how big life was, that the world did not revolve around individuals but around the great mass of humanity itself. This was the very