Read Strangers in the Night for Free Online

spine.
    Someone—his mother . . . his father?—had dressed him in his pyjamas.
    When Mitts looked up again, both his parents were staring down at him.
    Both of them wearing looks of deep concern on their faces.
    He took in his mother’s face.
    He caught sight of her black hair, cropped back to the nape of her neck. She wore a nightgown, as if Mitt’s father had only just roused her from sleep.
    Mitts’s father wore the shirt, as he had before. That splodge of tomato sauce still there, as yet uncleaned.
    Mitts saw how those dark circles continued to cling to the bases of his mother’s eye sockets. That her eyeballs were webbed with red veins. She seemed to have grown thin, just as Mitts had.
    He wished there might be something he could do for her.
    Something he could do to help her condition.
    But, feeling his energy waning once more, he knew he didn’t even have enough strength to help himself.
    If only he’d been bigger.
    If only he’d been born stronger.
    Then maybe . . . maybe . . .
    Mitts looked to his father, standing to his left, and then to his mother, who had taken up a position on his right. He thought back on what his father had said; the last thing he remembered.
    In the kitchen.
    That puff of buttery steam from the pot.
    The crippling nausea which’d gripped him.
    How he’d slipped from the stool and fell.
    Right . . .
    . . . Down.
    It’d all gone black.
    Or had it?
    Mitts recalled something, some sort of a . . . another world ?
    Those dark-purple hills.
    That buffeting wind.
    And then . . . darkness.
    Mitts realised his parents were speaking to him.
    Slowly, their voices made sense.
    At first, they were as indiscernible as the beating of birds’ wings.
    Mitts had to concentrate.
    He screwed up his forehead.
    His father’s voice; first, thick and gruff, came to him.
    “. . . How’re . . . feeling?”
    Mitts tried to nod back to his father, but, in that second, he was blindsided by an overwhelming migraine. It ripped through his brain.
    Laid waste to what might’ve been rational thoughts.
    Rational words.
    In the end, Mitts heard himself groan.
    He felt his mother’s cool touch against his cheek.
    It calmed him.
    Slowed his swiftly beating heart.
    He turned to her now.
    Feeling the creeping, tingling sensation all through his blood, Mitts tried his best to clear his mind. To bring his mother clear. But her features continued to blur.
    He made out her lips.
    Distinguished words.
    At last.
    One long string of clarity.
    “Doctor Heinmein,” she said, “he will be back in a few moments, with some medicine, something that will help.”
    Mitts couldn’t quite recall if Heinmein entered his bedroom then . . . or if it happened several minutes later.
    But the world, soon after, was lost in a cacophony of sulphur-smelling chemicals.
    And dreary, drug-induced sleep.
     
    * * *
     
    Mitts woke feeling a chill.
    It was like those mornings, back home, in early September. The time in the year just before his parents would switch on the central heating. Sometimes Mitts would wake up shuddering, almost unable to breathe, from the cold of the night.
    He would pry himself up out of bed, shove his duvet off him and go fetch his black, fleecy jumper out of his chest of drawers.
    Then he would tug his duvet back up and shiver himself into some sort of a light sleep until the brightening morning woke him later.
    On those mornings, he always asked his mother to make hot chocolate for breakfast.
    He remembered, feeling the bags tugging at the bases of his eye sockets, how he would peer down into his swirling cup; breathing in the gentle, smooth odour of chocolate, feeling it channel warmth back into his bones as if it was some kind of elixir.
    When Mitts glanced about the room—the room within the Compound where he was now—he saw that it was dark, all except for a single light source.
    It took him a couple of moments to figure out it was a torch.
    A sickly, yellow circle of light illuminated a shadowy corner of the