Most of the people of Haverton Street stayed indoors, cuddled up inside their warm blankets & centrally heated appartments. Only the unlucky strayed on the street at this time of the night. Take Mr. Desmond, for instance, he was returning home, having had a particularly harrowing day. His whole day of begging for a few pences & some morsels of bread had come to nothing. He had given up hope at 9 and ambled along the street to his Soup kitchen, which was as crowded as ever. They served him cold soup, and stale bread, and when he couldn't force anymore down his unwilling throat, he got up & left for his tin-shack, where he presumed, he would spend another cold, sleepless & uncomfortable night.
They said, Mr. Desmond was not always like this. Before the great war, he was the owner of Bull Enterprises, the leading tyre manufacturer in the whole of Britain, one of the richest men in the county, rather many counties. But then came the Nazi blitzkrieg, and the sight of burning rubber and his factory reduced to a heap of burning cinders, drove him insane. He left his home and disappeared. Noone knows where he went. everybody assumed that he'd died of grief. But then, twenty years later, he resurfaced. A babbling, old buffoon, who still believed it was the 40s and that the Nazis were coming. He'd warn passers-by to build bomb-proof shelters. He'd claim to have personally begged Hitler to let go of Haverton Street, but Hitler had refused. When his former neighbours and friends could take no more of him, they left him at a psychiatric clinic, but Mr. Desmond escaped. Since then, every day, he wanders the lanes of Haverton Street, begging for money & food and retires in the night to his tin shack at the end of the street.
But tonight, Mr. Desmond was delayed. He walked slowly, like any other man at his age would. And it was unbearably chilly today. He folded his arms around his waist tightly, but that didn't help either. He continued walking slowly, shivering and hurling curses at God under his breath. Suddenly, the sky lighted up. It was not the kind of light that you'd associate with daylight... It was a weird purple green kind of a light that seemed to emanate from the spot where Bull Enterprises had stood some half a century ago and where presently was a shady garage, where the ruffians (kids who used to throw stones at him and call him names) used to hang around.
Desmond assumed he was 'seeing' things and that his mind was playing games with him. He had gotten used to seeing what others couldn't. Like last week, he saw the angel Gabriel, who had come down from the skies to take him to heaven. He had also seen what Paradise looked like and how it was in hell. But the images would go away as soon as had they had become visible, at the blink of an eye.
Usually, Desmond would shrug off these visions. But this time, curiousity got the better of him. He continued to walk down to that old desolate spot, muttering curses under his breath and swearing he'd skin those ruffians alive. The closer he got to the site, the warmer it seemed to get, so much so, when he was right in front of the garage, he started sweating profusely and had to throw his jacket away.
He stood in front of the Garage door and yelled out as loudly as he could " Timmy... You better not be upto something mischievious, else I will go tell your Mommy"... He repeated twice, but got no reply. He knocked at the door, as all gentlemen in his times used to, but there was no reply again. In the meanwhile, it seemed to be getting warmer by the minute. Desmond felt his throat was going dry, it smelled as though tyres were burning... It seemed to be taking him back in time... back to the good old days... when he was the richest man in town... when he had a retinue of 20 servants to look after him... How the passers by would wish him "good Morning Mr. Desmond", they'd say, and he'd tilt his hat in reply...
But his chain of thoughts was broken... There was a horrible screech that broke the silence of the night... The still air, seemed to have regained its life and started blowing... Dark clouds seemed to be flowing across the sky... Thunder kept punctuating the silence of the night. And then suddenly, there was a huge blast in the middle of the Garage and the door that Desmond had been knocking on, a few minutes ago was blasted off its hinges. Desmond was thrown away by the intensity of the explosion and landed some 10 feet away...
-to be continued-
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