[b]Herbert
[/b]

The flowing shadows lapped gently at his ankles. He felt a sensation, one that was far too singular to describe, but the word that reached closest might have been “cold”. It was unnatural. His body was beyond shivering. He felt as though he were being strangled, his brain starved of oxygen, keeping his mind in a constant state of disarray. The river beckoned him. He felt it, deep inside his chest, as though the urge to advance was tugging at the strings of his heart, as if he were a stubborn dog on a leash.

He stepped forward. Images flashed inside his eyes, burning his brain. Memories of life. His father’s study, his nanny Eileen, carefree summer evenings, ingenious games with friends, the smiling faces of all in his town. The embers of his home. He wobbled, and almost fell sideways.

Fog, thicker than any London particular, and a curious shade of blue, fell over the water in a thick blanket. The water was treacle, flowing as if time was drawn out and stretched here, like hot toffee pulled upon a hook. It was all wrong, but Herbert’s thoughts were scattered and falling like firework sparks. So, unconsciously, he took another step.

His father’s coffin lowering into the yawning ground. The boarding school, a new best friend, University in London, the brilliant mind of professor Otto Lidenbrock, their happy stumble upon fortune. The first time he met Smith. 

Herbert felt lesser, as though the insignificant thing called “self”, that beast over which everybody obsesses desperately, had been slowly drained away from him, the thread of life unravelled by the Plutonian current. What use was it to resist?

Elizabeth’s smile across the room, their first dance, the courting, the wedding, the sweet nothings and promises of a fairy tale future, an intangible goal they hoped and strove for day in and out. Her illness. 

“Sweet Liza.” He swung his head about, looking, but then realised they were his own words that had escaped his lips. His purpose in life was the pursuit of his own happiness, but he needed his Liza for that, and without her he was lost. He knew what memories would torture and wrack his mind if he took another step, so he stood, rooted by fear, and by the shards of a broken heart, held together by the fragile stitches of futile hope. 

But then, seemingly as he resolved to move no more, a ghostly vision at the edge of the mist, blurred, but human, with the voice that chimed in the pure melody that the heaven’s even envied. It was his Liza. He grabbed for her, running. Memories bit his mind painfully.

Liza, motionless in a coffin of glass, perfused with an arcane liquid lent by science, to preserve her until means of her resurrection could be conducted. A man with a crop of neatly combed ginger hair and a conceited smile. Their talk in the study. The ruffled red hair and torn suit that same night. The body on the slab. 

Then the monsters.

Liza was gone. The water was at his mid-thigh. His mind was reorganising itself, and forgotten memories floated to the surface. He had to get her back. He’d already sold his humanity to that end. Abandoning his passion would be self-damnation. It had become his existence for the past… how long had it been? He looked down at his hands. They were shrivelled and liver-spotted, loose flesh hanging from his bones like sack-cloth. 

He sunk to his knees, and the water flowed through him, up to his shoulders, and washed away his pain. Life is pain. Yet he wanted to live. His own meagre existence was all that he could offer for Liza, who was taken too soon by unseen forces. He tossed his head back and cried in anguish as he teetered between life and death unknowingly, on the edge of oblivion. 

Stars through the fog. Their warm light pierced from the heavens, though Herbert had a strange feeling they were not meant to be there; an ingrained wrongness pervaded them. In the shadows of the stars he could make out the faint impression of colossal bodies, moving cosmoses, beings of whose great and incomprehensible power and presence he felt crushing his mind even from here. He closed his eyes and thought of Liza. 

“I will get you back, my darling dearest, sweetest truest.” He stood, his body feeling younger than it had in many a year. The stars smiled down upon him. They were not of his own night sky, so could guide him neither east nor west, hither nor thither. He stood in the river shrouded in fog, with no idea where he had come from or where he should go. He was truly lost.