Acid Rain

by R. D Rhodes

  “You said you had seen things too?” I asked. “In the quiet room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Oh, well, I once seen a ghost, a pale figure in uniform, some sort of army uniform, pass through a wall. It just came through one wall towards the other and went through that one as well. It didn’t look at me or anything. Some people call it a time warp.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, supposedly it’s when a part of history repeats itself. Time is different in the fourth dimension, as physics says, and through that fourth dimension, I don’t know, things just happen like that. People see horses and carriages, world war two planes in the sky, ghost trains, dogs, people in Victorian dress, all sorts. What I want to know is why nobody has seen a dinosaur or somethin? Why is it all just restricted to the last three hundred years? Nobody ever sees any cavemen. What’s it all about? And if some people are lingering in between worlds, which some people think, then after so long do they just accept themselves or get accepted then move on to where they’re going?”

  “What about the Loch Ness monster?” I joked.

  “Hm, that’s probably bollocks, just a tourist hoax. But then how do we know? The thing is, these people are fucking it up for everyone else. These hoaxers who fake ghost shots and play alien pranks and make crop circles- they’re holding back all of humanity! Like I was saying before about the truth at all costs, when people start to fake these things it takes all credibility away from it and nobody knows what to believe. All of science balks at the idea of ghosts and aliens and UFO’s and all that stuff, but if so many idiots hadn’t held everyone back, we could be getting somewhere. Why do people fuckin lie?”

  “Was it see-through, that ghost you saw?”

  “No, but it was pale. And it didn’t walk, just kinda floated. There were no footsteps.”

  “So that’s what you think it meant? A time warp?”

  “I dunno. It was in my old mate’s house back in Wales. Apparently his house was built on an old battlefield of some sort. It wasn’t scary anyway. It might have been just revisiting a scene from its past.”

  “So, you think we’re free to come and go when we’re dead? Come back and re-live memories and experiences?”

  “Yeah. I think so. Pretty much every traditional culture says that we are surrounded by spirits, a spirit world. It’s all intertwined. Heaven isn’t some place up in the sky with a man with a goatee floating about, it’s all in another dimension, right next to us. And everyone just has different names for it. Spirit world. The other dimension. Heaven. The afterlife, whatever.” He sort of chuckled. “You ask a lot of questions. That’s good.”

  I smiled. “What about the other time? Have you seen anything else?”

  “Hm. Erm… I don’t like to talk about that.”

  “What? Go on! Tell me.”

  “Well…me and a couple mates did a weegie board once. Again it was in a field where this guy was meant to have died in the war. That was in Scotland, someplace else that was supposedly haunted. Well, the four of us did it, out in the pitch black, in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or buildings or people or lights. No trees. Just an open field with some low bushes for about three miles around. We stood in our circle and we asked him to come forward. The person who supposedly haunted the area was called George Stewart. He had died in the second world war. I don’t like to say how he died. I don’t even like talking about this. But we kept repeating his name, asking him to come forward. To show himself to us. And after about a minute, from nowhere, came this horrible… blood-curdling scream. I couldn’t pinpoint it, it seemed close but from a distance at the same time and it came from all sides. It was terrifying. We all just fuckin ran, ran back to the lights of town, where it felt safe. Scared the shit out of us. We were all looking at each other, thinking what the fuck was that? No-one could have known to do it at that precise moment, we were totally alone for miles, and our phones, old shitty Nokia ones, were in our pockets. So we couldn’t have phoned anyone. And afterwards we all swore that we hadn’t set it up. There was no other way to explain it.”

  I didn’t say anything. Our footsteps sounded on the road as we walked side by side.

  “Do you believe in heaven and hell then?” I asked.

  “Hm, not really. That’s too simplified. Maybe there’s different planes or something. I don’t know.”

  “What about God?”

  “Yeah, I definitely think there’s something. What about you?”

  “Definitely.” I said. “No doubt about it. Like you were saying about simplifying everything. Evolution and science just doesn’t explain it all. I mean, look at that,” I pointed up at the half-moon, “Everything happens just so, it’s like someone’s taken a knife and split it right down the middle. It’s so…symmetrical. The earth keeps rotating around the sun, three hundred and sixty-five odd days every year. The earth is positioned in the exact distance between the sun to be warm enough without being melted, and the moon to get the gravitational pull. To be honest I don’t see how anyone can believe it’s all just chance.”

  “People are scared. They don’t like the truth.”

  “And what’s the truth?”

  He grinned. “That life is a joke at our expense.”

  I forced my frozen hands into my pockets. It was getting colder.

  “Nah, but seriously,” he said, “if the evolutionists are right then we are all just organic material, we are all descended from mutant-monkey-frog-fish, and are all just skin and bone and muscles and neurons. When the brain dies, we die. But it’s so much more complex, and it may be evolution but it’s still a miracle. We have a billion neurons all connecting our brain, a billion strands of DNA, when just one single one isn’t right, we are born with illness and deficiencies, yet most of us are born healthy.”

  “And,” I said “it’s like Einstein said, E equals MC squared. Energy can’t just die, it has to go somewhere. When we die our souls have to go someplace. And we do have souls, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “Right! Most people have had a supernatural experience, whether they accept it or not. Whether some of the people in the hospital are more susceptible to it, I think they are, but anyway, most people have probably seen a ghost or experienced something. The idea that there is a soul is present in all faiths, in all of history pretty much. Science hasn’t proved it yet, but they haven’t proved evolution or gravity either. Or found a reason for millions of other things, spontaneous human combustion…”

  A pair of headlights shone in the distance. We jumped down the roadside and waited till the car passed, then got up and continued on the road again.

  “This isn’t it. This can’t be it. There’s much more to life than this. There just has to be.” I said. “I know it.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s denied to people. Like some, not all, of the patients who get told they are hallucinating, it’s all denied them. All forms of transcendence are crushed by society. I think it was Emerson said that “A man rejects his thought because it is his own. In all works of genius, a man is forced to recognise his own rejected thoughts come back at him.” So he’s saying that we could have a genuine, profound, life-enhancing experience, yet deny it, and not believe it, because it doesn’t fit with what everyone else says or believes in. Or with what you believe in, or what society tells us is real…I don’t know, we spend this thing called money, and we make robots and build technology, but we don’t progress as people. We haven’t evolved in ten thousand years. If anything we’ve gone backward. We rely on all this shit. Society might have moved forward but man definitely hasn’t.”

  Our shoes crunched through the crisp layer of frost on the whitening road. A set of clouds that had long been lingering in the distance at last began to drift over in the soft breeze. One reached the moon and passed over it, throwing a great shadow of itself across the land.

  “Yeah,” Harry sighed. “Man might progress, really properly progress one da
y, but we can’t keep going on like this. I sometimes think I might know more about heaven and the soul than I do about man. I just don’t understand them. War, rape, murder, greed. We litter and spill oil and over-fish a dying sea. We cut down the forests, melt the ice caps, tear up the land. We bomb each other over the slightest thing whether money, color or religion. “Man is hell,” as Sartre said, and, for me, woman is the superior species. If women ruled the world we’d be in a much better place and I hope to God that’s the way the world goes one day, otherwise we are all fucked. The things that matter- love, care, compassion- women do naturally. There couldn’t have been a female Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini. Man just corrupts the earth. De-files it. Brutalizes it. Yeah, no truer word was ever spoken, man is hell.”

  We went on for hours, talking and walking, until a faint bluish glow emerged over the horizon in the distant east. We got off the road and, in the ever-increasing light, went deep into a wood of beech and oak.

  Harry insisted on making a shelter in case it rained, and judging by the clouds it looked like it would do soon. I helped him gather up some fallen branches. He kept picking up ones of a familiar size, about four inches thick in diameter, straight and quite long, and I copied what he did as he set them up against a beech tree in a sort of semi-circle. A bit like a small, half-made tepee.

  “You’ve done this before?” I questioned. It didn’t look great, there were big spaces in the roof that a decent shower would have no problem getting through.

  “Yeah, once or twice.” he said. “It’s not much, but it’ll do the job.”

  “Is this from your homeless days?”

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  We crouched inside the basic little shelter and lay down, sticking our feet out through the triangle-shaped entrance.

  Huddled tight inside, the night so dark it was difficult to see, I thought of what he had told me last night in the quiet room. About him being homeless, and being followed by the kids, and how he had got that scar. He didn’t seem so crazy to me though. I felt safe with him. Felt I could even trust him, and I didn’t know why.

  As we’d been walking, I had been thinking of the prayer I had made. When I had asked for company. When I had asked for a friend. Maybe my prayer had been answered? But still, at the same time, wouldn’t it be better, safer, for us to split up? They’d be less chance of us getting caught if they were looking for two people and only seeing one. But where could I go? I didn’t have a clue. I had no friends. No real family. We were both on the run. On the run together.

  Another owl hooted hauntingly from the depths of the wood. It was good to have company. I put my arms around him, and we squeezed each other close in the cold.

  Exhaustion overcame me, and I drifted off.

  Chapter 27

  “GET THE FUCK UP!”

  M y senses screamed to life and I stared wide-eyed at the door of the shelter. A huge, bulbous man, clad in green and wearing a cowboy hat, stood before us, his eyes bulging out of his beetroot-red face. In front of him he held a long walking stick, which he violently poked at Harry. A mental-looking, salivating dog growled at his side. I don’t know dogs but this one was big.

  I sat up and held out my hands, “What’s the matter?”

  He glared at me. “YOU CAN’T FUCKING SLEEP HERE! THIS IS PRIVATE LAND!”

  “We’re not hurtin’ anyone.” Harry held out his hand to push away the stick. He got up on his knees and rose towards the door, still holding out his palm to the guy as he spoke gently, “I promise, we’ll leave it as it was before we came.”

  “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT! THIS IS MY LAND! NOW YOU’VE GOT FIVE MINUTES TO LEAVE OR I’LL SET THE DOG ON YOU.”

  His cheeks bulged and his jowls trembled, demented with indignation as he stood blocking the light. He stepped back from the entrance to let Harry out, he was at least half a foot taller and three times as wide, but Harry squared him up anyway, his eyes and tone calm as he said, “Have you ever heard of the public right of way?”

  The man snarled, then gave a disdainful smirk. He lowered his voice, but the cold anger remained, “This land is exempt from it, so don’t give me that shit. You’ve got four minutes.”

  Harry’s messed face stared right back at him, cuts and grazes everywhere above his scarf, though the swelling on his purple lips had reduced. I stood up beside him and pulled his arm. I looked the fat fuck in the eye. “C’mon, leave the greedy bastard to his self.”

  We turned to walk away. The man stood there breathing heavily, his torso heaving in and out as he wheezed. The dog growled, baring its teeth at his side, ready to obey and kill.

  Harry wrapped his scarf tighter as we trudged away. His greasy hair was sticking up everywhere. The ground was soft and wet from the melted nighttime frost and morning dew, and I could feel the water infiltrating my already sodden trainers.

  “WHAT ABOUT THIS SHIT?!”

  I glanced back. The guy was pointing at the shelter as if he couldn’t comprehend what was happening.

  We ignored him and carried on.

  “Fucking asshole.” Harry seethed.

  “Think he’ll phone the police?”

  “Nah, he’s got his power trip. He won’t bother us again.”

  We walked out of the woods and along the side of the road. The light was clear, I guessed it was about eight or nine. We left the roadside and followed its course at a distance, cutting through the fields, until we found another wood to hide out in. We trudged in and this time gave it a full inspection which lasted about an hour. Harry walked to one side and I walked to another and we met back in the middle, content that no-one around would come in. We found a hollow in the ground where the sun was shining, and again we laid down, this time under the open sky, and tried to get back to sleep.

  When it was dark enough, we set off again. The villages and settlements grew more prominent as we neared that town of Exeter. The stolen clothes had given us a new description, but the original feeling of relief they had brought me was replaced by heavy anxiety the closer we got. We went around the villages as diligently as we could, and avoided the main road like the plague it was.

  Soon, bright lights shone in the distance like a thousand little Christmas decorations. We made our way through a field and approached a housing scheme. A few little kids were playing on their bikes.

  “So, the plan is, get to the town centre. Find out the next trains or buses leaving for the north?”

  “Yeah.” Harry confirmed.

  “You don’t think we should split up?”

  “It would be safer probably, yeah. But not much. If we’re careful we’ll be fine. Why?” He stopped in the field and looked at me, a bit disappointed, “Do you want to take off by yourself?”

  “No. No, I just wanted to be sure. You’re sure we won’t have to pay on the train? That it’ll be fine with no money?”

  He walked on again, his black eyes watching his feet. “Not sure exactly, but quite positive. Yeah, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  We stepped back onto concrete, the housing blocks splayed out before us. A little Spanish-looking girl cycled close to me and I asked if she knew the way to the town centre. She pointed us along a road and told us to follow it.

  I tried to look casual as we walked under the neon lights by the heavy traffic. The cars’ beady eyes glared in the darkness in their sinister knowledge of their domination of the world. There were a few times when one seemed to slow down before us, and we were on edge and panicking, but they sped up and moved away and we breathed grateful sighs of relief. I hadn’t eaten in two days and my stomach was churning. I was at that moment thinking about food when the ubiquitous sight of the TESCO letters appeared, glowing between a pair of new-build houses.

  “Good.” Harry said.

  “We don’t have any money.”

  “Should be fine. Just follow me.”

  We walked along a path between the houses, and through the massive car park, past the hundreds of cars and the hundreds of people jammi
ng in and out of Tesco’s doors. Harry went right on past the door and followed the wall around to the left.

  “Where you going?”

  “Round the back.”

  He walked round to a long driveway which led up to a large grey-shuttered loading entrance at the back of the building. At the side of the driveway, eight blue and red metal bins were lined up in front of the fence. Harry went to the first one and flipped up the lid and went to rummaging about inside.

  “Cardboard.” he said.

  He dropped the lid and went to the next bin along. I joined at his side and helped him to sift through it as he held the lid up with one hand. The odor of rot and I don’t know what else engulfed my nostrils. There was an assortment of all sorts of stuff -black bin bags, clear wrapping, broken bottles, food wastage, and general crap. “Aha! Here we go.” Harry cheered. He pulled out a small plastic Tesco bag and placed it softly on the ground and his hands went back into the bin.

  I peered through the knot at the top of the bag- it was full of sandwiches! All in the original plastic packaging too! I untied the knot. Every one of them was unopened. The packets weren’t even damaged. There was literally nothing wrong with them. Eight packs with a mix of fillings- egg, tuna, cheese and ham, mustard and beef. I looked at the brightly colored labels- November 1st. They were just one day past the sell-by date.

  Harry laid down another bag beside me. Bananas. They had a few black spots, but apart from that they seemed fine. And three whole punnets of raspberries as well. We were gonna eat like kings. How can raspberries and bananas have a sell-by date? I thought.

  I went to the next bin. It stunk of fish. My hair kept dangling over my eyes, so I tied it back and pulled my hood back up and leaned further in. Old cracked bottles and- a full case of beer. I threw it out on the road- a twelve-pack, unopened, only two of the cans were slightly dented.

  I dove back in and got a full loaf of brown bread, and a carton of orange juice.

  “That should do. Did you get anything?” Harry smiled, three bags at his feet.