The Bloody Alley

{2} Night of Fear

    2 - Night of Fear

   Ten minutes ago Hanks would have sworn that it was the calmest night he had ever known, but right now he didn’t think it was.

   He got to the graveyard through the shortest way from the pub: a narrow alley that had pretty much nothing else other than huge, red roses. Lots of roses. Hundreds of roses, to be precise.

   All around you looked you could only see red. Nothing more. Even when Hanks had walked along the alley in the darkness – walking in the dark was no problem; he had done that before many times - earlier that night those roses seemed to glow and brighten up the atmosphere above them. And that had given him the creeps, just as it always did.

   People in the town called it The Bloody Alley, and that name creeped him as well. He had actually thought of running to get out of the alley faster, but after considering it a stupid idea, he’d shut that thought down. When he had looked up, he had seen thousands of stars in the sky, stars that looked the same every night.

   A strange thing (which he didn’t understand) had happened when Hanks had gotten to the graveyard. The weather had suddenly changed and become windy and so cold that right now he was actually freezing.

   So he didn’t bother to think about it, knowing that he would come to nothing at the end. After all, it would just be a useless loss of time.

   The graveyard was small but he still didn’t want to go too far. He rather preferred to do his busyness at a side, next to a gravestone that said Howard Mantogany in the middle and 1927 – 1969 below on it. Though, in the gloom he couldn’t see.

   Fighting the wind, he slowly walked there with his head down, one hand holding his hat to prevent it from being swept away by the airstream.

   Out of his coat’s pocket he took a single nail that he had found on the ground while walking the alley – the town was small, and discovering a nail wasn’t a big deal.

   He did what he had planned to do in seconds: he picked up a rock and hammered the nail into the ground with it. Only he didn’t notice that the nail went through the edge of his coat, sticking it to the ground.

   When he stood up from his sitting-on-one-knee stance and turned to go, the coat pulled him down, and he fell, the back of his head hitting a boulder.

   The world before his eyes slowly shifted to grey, then paler, and paler… But he tried – struggled – to avoid white. And he did.

   After the focus came back to him he saw the stars once again, but this time there were only a few.

   He quickly stood up and tried to run away. But he couldn’t. Something was holding him. So he pulled hard, and there was a short and unnoticeable sound as the edge of his coat ripped off. He broke loose, and that made him fall again (only this time, luckily, he dropped on his butt.) He got to his feet once again and ran, without looking back, all the way back to the alley. Now he was scared.

   When he had left the pub that night he had been sure that all of this ghost-stuff was unreal. Now he wasn’t.

   Five minutes later he was half the way through the alley, still terrified. He didn’t notice that his hat was no longer on his head. In addition, he didn’t notice that the back of his head was bleeding and had forgotten about the pain. All he cared about for now was his life.

   He ran as hard as he could (though at this age he wasn’t very fast, compared to his youth.) On his way he must have tripped twice. Five more minutes later he escaped The Bloody Alley, which was now bloodier than ever.

   He turned left in the direction of his house. 

                                                                      **** 

   When Hanks came home, he lied down on a sofa – without taking off any of his clothes – and died in fear.