The Wanderer Read Online Free
Author: Timothy J. Jarvis
painstaking, arms flung out as if for balance. From time to time, she stumbled. Overhead, in a clear sky, hung a moon like a dollop of bacon grease in a black pan. I crossed over and, drawing closer, saw the old woman was in a stupor. She threw her head back, jaws agape, and screeched, in a tone that possetted my blood, ‘That’s the way to do it!’ It was then I recognized her as one of the wonted spectators of the Punch and Judy show.
Letting her go on ahead, I followed after, allowing myself to believe I acted out of kindness: not rousing her, lest the abruptness of her waking caused distress, but keeping an eye on her, ensuring she didn’t come to harm. Thinking back on things now, I realize my true motivation was less noble: curiosity.
The old woman walked on, south, back the way I’d come, her progress slow, halting. Due to the lateness of the hour, there were not many vehicles about, and the drivers of the few cars and vans that passed spotted her in time to slow, skirt round. As the warmth, if not the whirl, of the drink wore off, I began to shiver, my headache worsened. Looking at my watch, I saw it was half past midnight, heart of the witching hour. On Kingsland Road, I kept to the shadows, wary lest anyone see me creeping in the woman’s wake and presume my intentions were ill. Under the railway bridge near the junction with Old Street, a powerfully built man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a well-tailored suit, staggered out of a club. Sighting the old woman, he slurred a hailin an Estuary accent. Getting no response, he reached into his jacket, took out a gun. I stopped. Calling out again, he loosed off a round. The bullet caromed off the tarmac near the old lady’s feet. When she still did not react, he snorted, went back inside the seedy bar. My pent-up breath escaped me in a rush, and I ran to catch up with the woman.
She continued walking down Shoreditch High Street, turned onto Commercial Street, then stopped before Christ Church Spitalfields, stood looking vacantly up at the heathen obelisk that served as its spire. I also turned my gaze on it. It towered skyward to rend the veil of cloud shrouding the moon. Before, I’d remarked it seemed to bear down on an observer as if poised to topple; that night this caprice of perspective struck me as an ill augury (would that I’d listened to that mantic tremble and not followed the woman further). I concealed myself in one of the entrances to Spitalfields Market and watched the woman. She was motionless some time, then, with an agility and strength belying her seeming stiffness and frailty, hauled herself up and over the gate, dropped down, darted off, and disappeared out of view behind the church.
Running over, I too scaled the fence, though with greater difficulty than my quarry, and caught sight of her ducking into a mausoleum at the rear of the boneyard. I crossed the small cemetery plot, but paused, uneasy, if intrigued, on the threshold of the sepulchre. I stared up at the firmament hoping to compose and nerve myself by tracing patterns in the strewn disarray of the stars, but the sky was silted by the city lights, and only the very brightest of them were visible. But I found the mettle anyway, went in. Inside there were several memorial tablets and a marble sculpture on a granite plinth: a female angel in prayer, wings outflung, face raised to heaven. Water stains lined the statue’s cheeks, imparting a melancholy air to her devotions. In one corner of the sepulchre, there was an archway giving on to stairs going down into the dark. I descended and passed througha narrow entrance into a crypt. There was a sputtering taper set in a wall sconce that gave out a wan light, a large sarcophagus, whose stone surface was covered with intricately carved designs, and, in an alcove at the rear of the tomb, a pile of human bones, stacked neatly according to type: mandible with mandible, femur with femur, skull with skull…This arrangement struck me as
Letting her go on ahead, I followed after, allowing myself to believe I acted out of kindness: not rousing her, lest the abruptness of her waking caused distress, but keeping an eye on her, ensuring she didn’t come to harm. Thinking back on things now, I realize my true motivation was less noble: curiosity.
The old woman walked on, south, back the way I’d come, her progress slow, halting. Due to the lateness of the hour, there were not many vehicles about, and the drivers of the few cars and vans that passed spotted her in time to slow, skirt round. As the warmth, if not the whirl, of the drink wore off, I began to shiver, my headache worsened. Looking at my watch, I saw it was half past midnight, heart of the witching hour. On Kingsland Road, I kept to the shadows, wary lest anyone see me creeping in the woman’s wake and presume my intentions were ill. Under the railway bridge near the junction with Old Street, a powerfully built man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a well-tailored suit, staggered out of a club. Sighting the old woman, he slurred a hailin an Estuary accent. Getting no response, he reached into his jacket, took out a gun. I stopped. Calling out again, he loosed off a round. The bullet caromed off the tarmac near the old lady’s feet. When she still did not react, he snorted, went back inside the seedy bar. My pent-up breath escaped me in a rush, and I ran to catch up with the woman.
She continued walking down Shoreditch High Street, turned onto Commercial Street, then stopped before Christ Church Spitalfields, stood looking vacantly up at the heathen obelisk that served as its spire. I also turned my gaze on it. It towered skyward to rend the veil of cloud shrouding the moon. Before, I’d remarked it seemed to bear down on an observer as if poised to topple; that night this caprice of perspective struck me as an ill augury (would that I’d listened to that mantic tremble and not followed the woman further). I concealed myself in one of the entrances to Spitalfields Market and watched the woman. She was motionless some time, then, with an agility and strength belying her seeming stiffness and frailty, hauled herself up and over the gate, dropped down, darted off, and disappeared out of view behind the church.
Running over, I too scaled the fence, though with greater difficulty than my quarry, and caught sight of her ducking into a mausoleum at the rear of the boneyard. I crossed the small cemetery plot, but paused, uneasy, if intrigued, on the threshold of the sepulchre. I stared up at the firmament hoping to compose and nerve myself by tracing patterns in the strewn disarray of the stars, but the sky was silted by the city lights, and only the very brightest of them were visible. But I found the mettle anyway, went in. Inside there were several memorial tablets and a marble sculpture on a granite plinth: a female angel in prayer, wings outflung, face raised to heaven. Water stains lined the statue’s cheeks, imparting a melancholy air to her devotions. In one corner of the sepulchre, there was an archway giving on to stairs going down into the dark. I descended and passed througha narrow entrance into a crypt. There was a sputtering taper set in a wall sconce that gave out a wan light, a large sarcophagus, whose stone surface was covered with intricately carved designs, and, in an alcove at the rear of the tomb, a pile of human bones, stacked neatly according to type: mandible with mandible, femur with femur, skull with skull…This arrangement struck me as