The Time Traveller, Smith Page 8

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  I awoke with a start to find I was fighting for breath, my mouth and nose covered, my head constrained and my arms pinioned to my side, with a great weight pressing on my chest. At first I thought I struggled still beneath the ruins of Conel’s shop, that I had never escaped that dusty grave and all my experiences of the past day had been merely death dealt dreams. But my eyes could see, at least in shadow, the outline of the curtain dividing the room, the glint of moonlight through the cracks in the boarded windows, and above me, hanging in the dark, the large, puffy face of a man, one eye covered with a canvas patch, a finger pushed to his lips to silence me, his other hand the clammy thing which covered my lower face.

  The finger moved from the man’s lips to point towards the other side of the room. I saw the curtain parted and another figure stood there in the shadows, struggling with the bound and hooded form of my saviouress, K.

  I saw no more, as my captor pulled a coarse hood over my own head and roughly hoisted my prone body onto his shoulder with a winding jolt.

  And as I was carried forcibly I-do-not-know-where, I could only think that my good luck, what there had been of it, had indeed run its course and that what lay in store for me would be altogether more dreadful than any horrors I had up to that time seen in this despicable world.

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