Others by James Herbert Page B

or two and I brought both hands up to the wound, rocking there on the beach on my knees. I remember crying out, pleading with them to stop it there and then, not to let it go further, that I was hurt enough, but then they were on me, kicking, punching, pounding me until everything became a blur - everything except the pain - and I was tumbling, tumbling forward and curling into a foetus position, a frightened, confused, malformed thing scrunched up as small as I could make myself, there to be pummelled and humbled because I was an oddity, because I was an oddity with money, because I was an oddity with money who wouldn’t fight back.
    I don’t know how long it went on for - a thousand years, two minutes? In its way, it was a lifetime - but I heard them calling me names, snarling their hatred, screeching their bile, and I absorbed it, let the pain and the name-calling sink into my system, so that soon my body and my mind had swallowed it whole, and then I allowed it - blows and words - to deaden me. That was the only way I could make it tolerable.
    And when it was finally over and the five leather and amulet clad girls had walked off, I cursed them under my breath and prayed that one day the sickness inside each and every one of them would cause them to suffer the way I had suffered that night.
    It began to spit with rain again.

9
    The wet stone steps to my basement flat were treacherous in my condition, mainly because my vision was still bleary with tears of self-pity and humiliation and my limbs were stiff, the joints almost locked; each movement, each lumbering step, took willpower, each draw of breath took an effort. Both body and mind were in a wretched state.
    Practically falling against the front door, I dug inside my trouser pocket for the key and then, for the second time in two days, scraped its point over the paintwork to locate the hole. Once inside, I fell back against the closed door and blubbered there in the darkness. I was hurt, but by now I knew it wasn’t badly, and although I’d lost the cash, the girl-gang had contemptuously tossed the wallet back at me; it had struck my head, then lay open on the pebbles beside me. They hadn’t been interested in the credit cards, just the money for their next fix. No, I wasn’t crying because of the physical pain they caused me, nor the loss of hard-earned cash; I wept because of the dagger thrusts of their derision, their unconscionable and conscienceless verbal assault. And I cried because of their gender and their youth - two at least could have been no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. I had been broken by a team of young girls and it wasn’t their blows that had weakened me, left me foetal on the beach, absorbing every punch from their fists, every slap from their hands, every kick from their high-laced boots; no, it was the viciousness of their barbs that had struck so deep, words so vile and uncompromising that it seemed as if my muscles and my mind had atrophied, had become useless and limp. It was their disgust that had defeated me.
    ‘Oh God, why, why?’ I heard myself mumble between sobs. And when I asked again, it came as a shout, a demand for an answer, and the question was full of loathing for myself and the Supreme Being who had created me, for I was not questioning the attack on me that night, not challenging the violence dealt to my miserable twisted body, but asking why I had been born this way, why had He created me as a monster to be reviled or pitied but never to be accepted as a normal human. How did He justify such cruelly protracted torment, a lifetime’s punishment which would only end when my lungs gasped no more breaths and my heart lost its beat? I needed to know. I had to know. Yet even as I raged, implored, I was aware there would be, could be, no response, because no matter how often I’d asked - how often I’d begged - the question in the past, never, never, never even in my deepest despair - and this was one such moment