All of these thoughts might very well have passed
through the mind of Mr Snatch as the warm and welcoming home of Mr Snipe and
his family dissolved around him, if he hadn’t been quite so baffled about what
was going on.
Don’t worry about it, old son, the bloke writing this
stuff hasn’t got much of a clue, either, but as we’re rapidly approaching the
final third of our story, it was probably as good a time as any to chivvy
things along a bit and get you moving, even if we did have to add another
sprinkling of the supernatural in order to get it done.
One moment he had been sitting warmly and comfortably,
with even a glass of something decent looking in his hand, and beginning to
believe that he wasn’t actually in a strange Eastern European village at all,
but somewhere far more confusing, and then the glass, the room and, as far as
he could tell, the entire world had dissolved around him and he was sitting
somewhere very cold again, hearing the last echoes of some faraway glassware
shattering.
He wasn’t sure quite what the drug was that someone
was obviously pumping into his veins, but it sure as hell was having some
startling side effects. He wondered, briefly, whether it was a company whose
trials his own company had invested in, but decided that it really was best not to think about
that sort of thing, especially not if you chose to believe the sort of things
the investigative journalists chose to write about and his lawyers were
constantly in court over.
Mr Snatch was at least happy to discover that when he
opened his eyes, the thick fog was clearing just enough to reveal the familiar
skyline of the City in which he spent most of his working life, and the
geometric shapes of the glass and steel towers now in front of him, albeit
painted in a faded palette of weak shades of grey, were strangely comforting to
him after all that had been going on.
He decided not to ask himself too many questions as to
how he actually came to be back at least relatively close to the place that he
considered to be his home again, instead preferring to take the more practical
option of deciding to set forth back towards his own office, pondering upon the
worrying notion that he had never, as far as he was aware, ever sleep-walked
before.
But the thick fog now surrounding the tower would not
allow him to penetrate it. It fought with him, battled with him, resisted him and, try as
hard as he could, every time he ventured towards the SnatchCon Tower the grey
and white would thicken around him, confusing him and spinning him around so
that he lost all sense of direction and he would emerge again and again right
back at the cold park bench upon which he had first opened his eyes after his
return, with the towers so tantalisingly close and yet impossibly distant
behind him.
After so many attempts, he finally persuaded himself
that enough was enough, and he might as well take advantage of the fact that he
did, at the very least, have somewhere to sit and wait, and so, for perhaps the
first time in years, he did so. Because of what he was now wearing, he began
shivering so spectacularly that his teeth actually chattered as he waited for
the weak midwinter sun to burn away the fog, and he continued to watch with
less and less interest as the sky continued to lighten and recolour those
tantalisingly welcome grey shapes that were so near and yet so far away. His
mind narrowed and narrowed and he became almost obsessed with just how cold it
actually was as another big day dawned all around him.
He was so cold, and so focussed upon the fact of its
coldness, that he almost failed to notice the approaching footsteps which were
clicking along somewhere beyond the limits of his vision in the swirling fog
which surrounded him and made the whole world into a pale grey monochrome. His
chattering teeth did not help him there either, as the footsteps, tentative as
they were, were more than drowned by the noises in his head.
When he did finally become aware that there might be
another person in his immediate vicinity he panicked slightly at the thought
that he might have to fight someone to retain his little patch of comfort and
really did not feel up to the task.
Then he had a more comforting thought, that it might
be a policeman who might insist upon trying to move him along and he managed to
force his mouth into a shaky, shivering smile as his previous confidence
briefly resurfaced as he considered once again playing the “Do you know who I
am?” gambit.
Of all the scenarios his mind considered, however, of
which there were fairly few as he was getting so very cold that his mind was
shutting down, the one that would probably never have crossed his mind was the
one which actually occurred, as a familiar figure emerged staggering from the
fog, carrying a miserable looking dachshund in her arms…
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