A Long Walk Before The Rain Arrives - By Steven Sheil
She called out to him that she was going out for her walk, but if he responded, she didn’t hear, so she stepped out of the house, closed the front door behind her, and headed for the corner. She stopped there for a moment, where their little street joined the main road, and let the wind hit her face and lift her greying hair from where it rested against her neck. It was early September, and things were changing. The sky was bright and clear, but there was something else there too, on the edges—the gathering of clouds.
As she walked, she fell into her usual rhythm, her feet moving quickly on the pavement, propelling her forward with an urgent pace. An onlooker would say she was late for a meeting or hurrying for a bus, but it was just Margaret’s natural tempo where she felt most comfortable. To her, walking was primarily a way to stimulate her mind, to get the thoughts that crowded and jostled against each other inside of her head into some sort of order. A way to pull the world into focus.
Within twenty minutes, she was passing the parade of shops where she had often stopped for coffee with a friend, back before the friend had moved away, back when Margaret still had something like a social life. Now, and for a long time, it had just been her and Dennis, bereft of anything to say to one another beyond the usual banalities about the weather, the television, the state of their health. Margaret missed her friends, missed work. Hated the way that the world had left her lonely.
Beyond the parade of shops lay the entrance to the park. Margaret headed inside and immediately made for the footpath which would give her the longest route, the one which culminated on the hill. There were other people in the park - dog walkers, runners, teenagers laughing. One or two like her, just walking. None of them paid any attention to her. She was a background detail to their lives, little more than furniture. With age had come anonymity, a wiping clean of her persona in the eyes of the world, a relegation from woman to something closer to fauna.
She was breathing hard by the time she ascended the hill. Her lungs in recent years had begun to weaken - she could feel that they no longer held the capacity they once did and sometimes worried that something was growing within them, the same tumors that had taken her father and brother. But she had never told the doctor about her fears, never asked for an examination. What would be the point? To suffer through her last few years in and out of hospitals? Where was the living in that?
As Margaret reached the top of the hill, she turned and looked back over the wide expanse of green which lay below, stretching out in the distance to the entrance where she had come in. The clouds were gathering more quickly now above her, giving a grey pall to the day, which only an hour before had been clean and bright. She could see the people she had passed on her walk moving across the grass and along the paths, though at this distance, they seemed more like dolls than real human beings. Even the sounds they made - the laughing, the whistling, the crying out of names - was being lost in the gathering wind, becoming little more than garbled noise.
Margaret closed her eyes and felt the breeze across her face. She let her palms fall open by her sides and tilted back her head to face the sky. The clouds blotted out all traces of the sun now, just the way that she had composed them, and as she let her mind hone her intentions to a sharp point, she felt them grow darker still, darker and heavier until she felt them fit to burst.
Then Margaret raised her hands, let out a breath, and told the rain to fall.
At first, there was just a coldness in the air, a sense of pressure being released, a subtle change in the atmosphere. And then came the screams. Margaret held her eyes closed while she listened, letting her ears try and match-up each owner to its cry. The anguished screech of a woman from somewhere close by, the stuttering yelps of agony in the deep baritone of a runner on the path, the terrified screeches of a child floating up from the grassland below. Each sent a tremor of pleasure through her - illicit, unconscionable pleasure, such as she hadn’t felt in years. She drew in another breath, commanded the deadly rain to fall harder, faster, to penetrate and burn and strip the flesh from the bones of all those that surrounded her, to turn them to nothing more than blood and pulp, to take all that was human from them.
As the rain fell, the only thought that went through Margaret’s mind was that she should have done this years ago.
AUTHOR BIO:
Steven Sheil is a writer and filmmaker from Nottingham, UK. His work has previously been published by Black Static, The Ghastling, Horla and Fudoki. He is the director of the horror film Mum & Dad and a co-director of the Mayhem Film Festival.
TWITTER: @SSheil
INSTAGRAM: @s.c.sheila
