An online novel by Gillette Edmunds

They started through the compartment towards him. The crowd would not move. He did not notice they were coming. The train flashed by a brightly lit station. They bumped through several people but could not find a strap to hang on. Falling over a seat as the train stopped, they watched him step calmly out of the car. The French flowed off the train and they leaned into the crowd and flowed with them. He was going up the dark stairs.

“Run!” Michael yelled.

Now the man was running down a dark tunnel and they followed, hand in hand, running. He disappeared up a dark stairway. They were breathing heavily. Barbara felt her foot push through something soft. Coins jangled in the tiled hall. Looking back, they saw a dirty blind man on his side groping for his cardboard box of coins. They could not stop. The yellow skinned man had ascended the stairs. Each step up was more tiring and they seemed to take each one faster, rusty, course metal railings sliding under their sweating fingers, their lungs about to burst, pain with each breath. They were out.

“Where is he?” Barbara yelled, slowing her pace, dragging Michael to a stop, unable to halt tears from filling her sagging eyes. “He would have known a safe way home.”

Grass behind a black iron railing. It was a park. An arch was above them. The sun glared behind a thin cloud as they looked up.

“We’ll never find him. We are lost. We’ll never find anybody,” Michael cried out. “It’s completely hopeless.”

Barbara faced Michael and looked into his blood streaked eyes, his thin face flowing with hot sweat, and she grabbed him as he grabbed her, tightly, heaving up and down, together, soaking in her tears and his perspiration. “We’ll be all right, Michael,” she was sobbing. “We’ll be alright and this hell will end for us.”

“Yes,” he whispered. He was crying profusely, squeezing her whole body into his; tears dripping down Barbara’s back. “We are not lost,” he sobbed. “We’re not lost.”