As she stepped out of the hospital's main doors the sunlight acted like an acid, dissolving her determination not to cry. She'd controlled herself in front of the doctor and the over-attentive nurses but now she was no longer able to hold back.
Finally she managed to dry her eyes and took her mobile phone from her pocket. Her brother's voice greeted her from the other end of the connection.
"It's Dad. He's gone, Chris,'" was all she could say before her throat closed up with the tension. She turned away quickly as two visitors passed her on their way into the hospital, feeling the need to hide her grief while thinking it desperately unfair that she should have to.
Her brother made a soft groaning sound at the other end of the phone. Chris hadn't spoken to his father for several years, and the one time he'd visited him at the hospital the old man had been sleeping.
"Right," was all the reply he made. There was a brief conversation in which Chris took on the lion's share of the funeral arrangements. Then he was gone and she was left with silence.
She stared down at her shoes. Under the right toe was a dead moth, grey and shedding tiny wing scales around its corpse. Although she was sure she hadn't killed it, merely trodden on it because it was lying there, she felt its feather-weight add to the burden of death that she had to endure.
She stamped through her anger and helplessness to her car.
*****
Once she'd parked down a side street it took a few minutes to make some perfunctory repairs to her make-up. She didn't expect to meet anyone but did it just in case. Her tears had dried for the time being.
Relying on a faulty memory from childhood, she looked for the industrial estate near the river. Even once she'd found it, she had trouble locating the path. The overgrown piece of land had disappeared under rows of houses long ago.
When she did find it, she was disappointed. It seemed so very ordinary. Not at all how she remembered it. Yet her father had woven beautiful children's stories around it and it obviously meant something special to him.
She felt she had to keep faith with him and do what her father had never had time to do. So she picked her way around some discarded food cartons and took her first few steps down the path.
It was just a dirt path with nothing at all magical hiding under the plants that fringed it. Some of the foliage had been cut down when the houses were built, and the area was now more open to the sky.
After about 100 yards the path took a turn to the left and headed towards the river. Then it broadened out and she found herself on an open piece of ground, hemmed in on one side by trees.
The ground was sodden and covered with wild flowers that thrived in the damp. Some species were as tall as her, making the most of the absence of people to spread themselves out.
She continued to follow the path, unable to see very far ahead of her because of the abundance of foliage. To the right, the ground simply fell away until it finally met the backs of the houses.
Somewhere nearby she could hear the river rushing softly by and the cars on the road adding their voices to the strange song. Yet it seemed silent and still despite the sounds, the flowers acting as nodding guardians to their perfect little world.
Then she pushed past a bush that was beginning to grow across the path, and there was the river. It seemed very high up the banks and was running very fast, but it didn't make as much noise as she'd expected.
She hadn't looked at any maps before she came, but somehow she knew there had to be a footbridge across the water and, sure enough, she came across it within a few minutes - a broken old wooden bridge.
Wooden slats hung out over the river, the planking splintered and broken, suspended above the rushing silver just a dozen feet below.
Then she drew in her breath too quickly, painfully, as she saw where the bridge led. Her hand pressed on her chest as she tried to hold in the shock and the discomfort.
A sense of unease crept over her. There, beyond the broken timbers on the far bank, was an exact copy of the hospital where her father had just died.
Yet it seemed almost twice the size of the building she had left just hours before; a deformation of the hospital whose corridors she had walked for months. And there were other things about its appearance that seemed odd and unnatural.
Its greyness seemed to be an exaggerated hue; an ideal grey, soaking up light and never returning it. The surface of the building was blotched, as if with a fungus, and seemed to be in a state of near-terminal decay.
One of the pillars of the portico was cracked right through with a grey-black growth spilling from the narrow fissure.
The sign was still intact but many of the letters had disappeared, making a meaningless jumble, with the only continuous run of letters forming the word 'pit' above the door.
There was no road leading to the place. It sat in the middle of a field and, even where the bridge ended on the opposite bank, there seemed to be nothing but grass, undisturbed and untrodden.
As she stared in disbelief, the sun seemed to rise higher in the sky, shining in her eyes and forcing her to squint even harder at the unsettling sight before her.
Behind the glass doors, the entrance hall was dark and filled with a voice whispering of emptiness. From the blackness behind each window came broken night-time sobs, answered by even more feeble cries in the darkness.
She looked up to the second floor, to the room where her father would have been. The inkiness inside seemed limitless, overwhelming. For a second she thought she saw someone who looked like one of the doctors, moving past the window. But that was impossible: whoever it was would have to be twice the size of a normal man.
The impression of immenseness was close to overwhelming. Fear rushed at her as she felt a sense of enormous size and of a limitless blackness within the structure. Its suffocating mass seemed to bear down on her.
Finally, she forced her eyes away from the building, staring instead at the turmoil of the river, which seemed comforting in comparison.
She choked back her tears, feeling her father had been betrayed somehow. Maybe she had, too. Now that she'd come here, where was there left to go?
Walking out on to the remains of the bridge, the wood complaining beneath her feet, she stared down into the water as it hurried past, eager to be gone. The sun reflected painfully off the surface. She stood for several minutes as the silver and grey bounced around inside her overcrowded skull, carving new pathways for her fear and loss.
Then the sunlight shattered on the water, dividing into a million tiny reflections. She stretched out her hand towards the apparition of the hospital, not knowing if she was warding it off or pleading for help.
She took a step forward. Oblivion welcomed her like a long-lost child.
END
