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their rounded sensuous features drawing him forwards, funneling him through the valley into the town.
    He had reached the outskirts of town. The golf course had invested in a clubhouse. More pleasures for the elite who could afford the club’s extortionate fees and who could put up with the cliquishness – he thought, when he noticed, for only the third time in his life, the black sleeting rain slanting down onto the bone-dry road in front of him.
    The black rain was something that Sandy had managed to explain away as pure coincidence after his original sightings had never been repeated
    The previous occasions had both happened during his time in the Navy.
    The first time had been at Southampton Docks. He’d been standing on the quayside watching the fleet come in when the black rain started. At first he’d thought there was something in his eye but no amount of rubbing or teasing had altered the view. The rain, looking just like oil falling from the sky, surrounded one of the destroyers just coming in. The sighting lasted for a minute or so, but Sandy immediately knew that something would happen to the boat.
    He couldn’t tell how he knew but it felt as if someone was walking over his grave.
    He’d later found out that the ship had lost ten of her crew in battle two weeks after his vision.
    The second time he didn’t like to think about, even all these years later. He’d been drinking with a group of shipmates in Australia on the night before they were due to leave. The black rain had come down again, indoors in the bar. Sandy got the shakes, so much so that the Medical Officer who happened to be in the bar at the time pronounced him unfit for the trip. He had raved and screamed.
    The whole bar and probably half of Sydney had heard him tell the men that they were going to their deaths. Of course they had done just that, and that was the end of Sandy’s career in the Navy.
    As he walked past the first tee of the golf course he realized that if past experiences were to prove any guide, death would be following him into this town.
    It was not going to be a happy homecoming after all.
    The sight that met him when he reached the High Street only laid another burden on his already heavy heart.
    The evidence of unemployment was everywhere in the town center. The main crossroads had, at its center, an area of grass and long wooden benches swarming with aimless people, a large proportion of who seemed to be already, at eleven in the morning, under the influence of alcohol. As if to reinforce this, most of the men suddenly ambled across the road and into the nearest public house.
    The local co-op, once a large thriving furniture store, now had seventy per cent of its windows boarded up, and the rest were plastered with three-foot posters proclaiming SALE NOW ON.
    Even here in this scene of urban decay, Sandy could still see the black rain hanging in the air ahead of him. This was the first time a sighting has lasted longer than a few minutes. A warning, an omen, or merely a sight defect? Whatever the cause Sandy Brown was a very frightened old man.
     
    ~-o0O0o-~
     
    Seven thirty a.m. on a cold autumn morning. The sight of his face in the mirror always brought home to Brian Baillie how much he had deteriorated with time.
    Wrinkles had firmly established themselves in the corners of his eyes, far too firmly to be passed off as laughter lines. Hair at temples and forelock were graying slightly, but the thing which always annoyed him more than any other was how gray his beard had become.
    The beard had been his pride and joy since university days and had gone through many mutations of shape. As some people have worry beads, Brian had a beard, pulled and twisted into strange tufts of varying lengths.
    None of the changes had been so drastic as that of the last year though. His beard, from a sleek black vibrant extension of his face, had become a limp, pale gray collection of separate hairs. This morning as on many others