Thresholds III

By the fifth day the waitress stopped asking why Sarah sat there until closing time. Everyday the same. Three or four cups of tea lasting the afternoon, then having to be shooed out. Sarah paid, fishing round in her old rucksack for the change then, picking up her sketch book, she walked out and stood with her back to the cafe door. She closed her eyes, putting the bag on the floor, and listened to the shutters being pulled down, the key turn in the lock and the gentle click as the lights turned off.

She opened her eyes and pulled her coat tighter around her. The voice of a bitter wind crept down the street. The rush hour traffic tailed off, the red eyes of the cars and the drivers moving, stilted, towards suburban comfort. The market played through twitching death throes, the sound of metallic skeletons being broken down, hemorrhaging banana boxes of battered paperbacks into dirty white vans. The air vibrated to the harsh ring of alarms being set, the trapped animal call of retail security.

She opened her sketch book, her rough drawings bringing back memories of that Monday; the light drizzle, the rattle of the shutters. The small, terracotta angular figures dragging themselves out of the brickwork.

She listened, her sketchbook and pencil in hand Waiting for that moment. That point of pure silence, between the bustling commerce of the day, and the hedonistic indulgence of the night. That one moment of pure silence as the town changes from one state to another. The tipping point. She sensed it. Between the wail of the car alarms, following the footsteps of the commuters leaving the station it filled the streets. The moment between the two halves of the town's day.

The air tasted of spun sugar, to start with. It became bitter on her tongue, like unripe blackberries. In the corner of her eye she noticed movement, the creatures she had seen before pulling themselves out of the cracked brickwork. From the glass of the window children the colour of dirty sand, Psameads she guessed. They were everywhere now, dragging themselves out of the stone of the flowerbeds; small squat with eyes of quartz. The tar of the street now swam with long dead occupants of long gone seas.

Her sketchbook squirmed under her hand. Leaves and tendrils spread from it, crossing her lap, creeping down to the floor. Her hand opened and she tried to drop the pencil. The pencil didn't fall. The splinters went under her skin, sprouting through her hand, tattooing her arm with bark and leaf. She tried to pull her other hand away from the stone underneath her. It bonded to her skin, heavy, mineral now. Shot through with veins of agate and amethyst where blood no longer flowed. Plant and rock intertwined; granite traced through with roots spreading through her lungs.

Sarah senses drowned as the otherworld came rushing in. The bricks drained away down the gutters, flooding under the rapid disappearing streets.

She strained to open her eyes, her vision stained green and grey, watching motionless as a figure clothed in mist and faded light approach. Much taller than the dainty little terracotta men who enticed her here. The creature reached out a long knotted hand and, with delicate fingers, closed her eyelids to the twilight of the town.