Chapter 56: The 2 Pound Boy
After that day, the children’s behavior grew increasingly bold.
Unlike before, they no longer entered houses, but most notably, they’d abandoned any pretense of hiding. When our eyes happened to meet, they didn’t avert their gaze but stared back with hollow, unflinching expressions.
I nursed a conviction that teetered on the edge of madness.
I became convinced that the children had excavated some vast warren beneath London, where they slumbered during daylight hours, only to emerge at nightfall and spread throughout the city like vermin crawling from the sewers.
This theory felt disturbingly plausible.
The children, once appearing only in ones or twos, had multiplied alarmingly in mere days. Now they roamed in packs of three or five as a matter of course. They not only orbited my vicinity but prowled every street in London.
As the situation evolved, they transformed into a genuine threat. I doubted my ability to defend myself should they decide to attack in earnest.
This transformation brought not merely threat but profound revulsion.
To me, the children increasingly resembled something inhuman. Their spindly limbs swaying in darkness evoked the appendages of insects, while their emotionless pupils resembled the fractured segments of compound eyes. I hesitated to claim I’d made eye contact with them. After all, one doesn’t make eye contact with flies.