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quiet and orderly. For them to die in such a bizarre manner was disturbing to
say the least.
Then there was the Reverend Biddlestone, found unconscious on the floor of his
church and kept under heavy sedation since. There was the girl who had been
found in a car on the other side of the field, still unable to give an account
of what
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had happened to her. Her boyfriend had been traced and questioned by the
police;
his story was that a face had appeared at then-car window and that the car
itself had been lifted completely off the ground. He had run away in terror
but the girl had refused to go with him. Naturally, the police were holding
him for further questioning. A man had been found dead by the river the
following morning. They said the cause was a heart attack, but it was
rumoured, because of the frozen look of fright on his face, that the heart
attack had been induced by fear. He had literally died of fright.
Constable Wickham sensed the growing unease, and he shared the apprehension.
He'd had the feeling for several days now: a building-up of tension that was
fast reaching a peak. There was a pregnant stillness in the air that would
eventually break and somehow he knew the consequences would be dreadful when
it did. The guarding of the field had been an uneasy duty for him: he sensed
its brooding sullenness, its indescribable coldness - not the physical chill
of winter, but a deeper, forbidding coldness that tormented the imagination.
As he looked across at the twisted, torn fragments of the wreck and at the
silver shell that had been a burning tomb, he could almost hear the shrill
screams of panic, the terror of imminent death. His mind's eye saw those
hundreds of frightened faces; he heard the crying, the praying, the pleading,
the wailing. He heard the dying. He felt their pain. He suffered their grief.
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Even the animals would not go near the field. The dogs stood at its edge,
their bodies stiff with terror, the eyes wide and pathetic, then" fur prickly
and their necks contracted and rigid. The riders who used the lanes running
around the fields had to fight to keep control of their mounts as the horses
shied away and tried to bolt.
The field had become a shrine for the dead and Constable Wickham sensed -
knew
that death had not yet left that shrine.
The old man rarely left the house now. Since the night of the crash and the
terrible scenes he had witnessed, a part of him had become subdued, a
weariness had descended upon his ageing frame. His doctor had told him it was
because of the
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shock and the exertion he had forced upon himself in his fearful run to the
field in which the Jumbo had crashed. The effort had worn him out and the
carnage he had then witnessed had shocked, then sapped, his spirit. In time,
the oppression would lift and his energy would return, but it would take a
strong effort of will on his part to lift himself above his melancholia.
Curiously though, he remembered little about that night. He could remember
sitting on the bridge and gazing up into the sky; then the drone of the
aeroplane, loud and low, the brief flash as it had split open. After that
there were only blurred images of fire, bodies and chunks of scattered, torn
metal. He'd had a recurring nightmare since: a black shape coming towards him
from out of the flames, growing larger and larger until it stood before him. A
hand reached down and he saw that the flesh had been burned away, and only
blackened, skeletal fingers were stretching towards him. Then, in the dream,
he looked up into the dark figure's face and he saw the two large staring eyes
set in the plastic head of a doll, its pink painted lips set in a cruel,
mocking grin. He would wake suddenly, his body drenched in perspiration, and
he'd still see those terrible, lifeless eyes staring out at him from the
shadows of his bedroom.
And sometimes, just as he woke, he thought he heard whispers.
He only left his tiny house in Eton Square two or three times a week nowadays,
and that was only during the daytime and only when it was essential to buy
food.
The streets made him nervous. It was as if there were something out there
waiting for him; the thought of venturing out during the dark hours filled him
with dread, even though he missed his nightly jaunt to the old bridge. They
had told him that he had collapsed at the scene of the disaster and that it
had been the co-pilot of the
747, the only survivor of the crash, who had found him and carried him away
from the burning wreck. He had never met the young man to thank him, but for
some inexplicable reason, he felt a great sympathy towards this unknown
survivor. Had he been unfortunate to escape when over three hundred others had
perished? Was it something that could easily be lived with?
The old man sighed with despair at his own unanswerable question; only the co-
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pilot himself could know. He leaned forward and stirred the glowing fire with
a poker, then settled back in the wooden-armed armchair, his eyes half closed,
his hands nervously clasped in his lap. It was still early in the day, but
already his heart beat a little faster at the thought of the night to come.
The boys at the College were delightedly scared and did their very best to
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heighten their fear with fantasised stories of the more macabre genre. They
had enjoyed the air disaster, the most spectacular occurrence in Eton's
history, the younger pupils hardly moved at all by the appalling loss of life,
but intensely excited by the publicity the town had received in consequence.
The boys had poured from their separate houses, dressed in a combination of
night attire and black long-tailed coats on the night of the crash, their
various house masters unable to prevent their eager rush to the scene of the
disaster. They had gawped open-mouthed at the burning wreck, their shocked
young faces hued red by the flames, their eyes wide and bright with
excitement. It had taken the full force of the Head Master's fury, and the
house masters' bullying, to get them to return to their beds where, those who
could, watched the spectacle from their houses' windows whilst the others,
intoxicated with the drama, talked ceaselessly into the grey hours of the
dawn.
The Head Master, with some of his house masters and the more senior boys,
returned to the scene to offer assistance, but they were asked politely and
firmly by the police to return to the College so that the emergency services
could cope with the unenviable task of collecting the dead bodies and
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