Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,46

two in the morning… but have to leave the lights on just in case.

Ought to pull in to the side.

Ought to…

Too much trouble. Couldn’t move my arms properly, anyway, so couldn’t possibly do it.

Deep deep in my head a tiny instinct switched itself to emergency.

Something was wrong. Something was indistinctly but appallingly wrong.

Sleep. Must sleep.

Get out, the flickering instinct said. Get out of the car.

Ridiculous.

Get out of the car.

Unwillingly, because it was such an effort, I struggled weakly with the handle. The door swung open. I put one leg out and tried to pull myself up, and was swept by a wave of dizziness. My head was throbbing. This wasn’t… it couldn’t be… just ordinary sleep.

Get out of the car…

My arms and legs belonged to someone else. They had me on my feet… I was standing up… didn’t remember how I got there. But I was out.

Out.

Now what?

I took three tottering steps towards the back of the car and leant against the rear wing. Funny, I thought, the moonlight wasn’t so bright any more.

The earth was trembling.

Stupid. Quite stupid. The earth didn’t tremble.

Trembling. And the air was wailing. And the moon was falling on me. Come down from the sky and rushing towards me…

Not the moon. A great roaring wailing monster with a blinding moon eye. A monster making the earth tremble. A monster racing to gobble me up, huge and dark and faster than the wind and unimaginably terrifying…

I didn’t move. Couldn’t.

The one thirty mail express from Paddington to Plymouth ploughed into my sturdy little car and carried its crumpled remains half a mile down the track.

CHAPTER TEN

I didn’t know what had happened. Didn’t understand. There was a tremendous noise of tearing metal and a hundred mile an hour whirl of ninety ton diesel engine one inch away from me, and a thudding catapulting scrunch which lifted me up like a rag doll and toppled me somersaulting through the air in a kaleidoscopic black arc.

My head crashed against a concrete post. The rest of my body felt mangled beyond repair. There were rainbows in my brain, blue, purple, flaming pink, with diamond bright pin stars. Interesting while it lasted. Didn’t last very long. Dissolved into an embracing inferno in which colours got lost in pain.

Up the line the train had screeched to a stop. Lights and voices were coming back that way.

The earth was cold, hard, and damp. A warm stream ran down my face. I knew it was blood. Didn’t care much. Couldn’t think properly, either. And didn’t really want to.

More lights. Lots of lights. Lots of people. Voices.

A voice I knew.

‘Roberta, my dear girl, don’t look.’

‘It’s Kelly!’ she said. Shock. Wicked, unforgettable shock. ‘It’s Kelly.’ The second time, despair.

‘Come away, my dear girl.’

She didn’t go. She was kneeling beside me. I could smell her scent, and feel her hand on my hair. I was lying on my side, face down. After a while I could see a segment of honey silk dress. There was blood on it.

I said, ‘You’re ruining… your dress.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

It helped somehow to have her there. I was grateful that she had stayed. I wanted to tell her that. I tried… and meant… to say ‘Roberta’. What in fact I said was…‘Rosalind’.

‘Oh Kelly…’ Her voice held a mixture of pity and distress.

I thought groggily that she would go away, now that I’d made such a silly mistake, but she stayed, saying small things like, ‘You’ll be all right soon,’ and sometimes not talking at all, but just being there. I didn’t know why I wanted her to stay. I remembered that I didn’t even like the girl.

All the people who arrive after accidents duly arrived. Police with blue flashing lights. Ambulance waking the neighbourhood with its siren. Bobbie took Roberta away, telling her there was no more she could do. The ambulance men scooped me unceremoniously on to a stretcher and if I thought them rough it was only because every movement brought a scream up as far as my teeth and heaven knows whether any of them got any further.

By the time I reached the hospital the mists had cleared. I knew what had happened to my car. I knew that I wasn’t dying. I knew that Bobbie and Roberta had taken the back roads detour like I had, and had reached the level crossing not long after me.

What I didn’t understand was how I had come to stop on the railway. That crossing had drop-down-fringe gates, and they hadn’t been shut.

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