The eighth foetus had been buried, its tiny body now lying beneath the slippery mud with the others. Harold dried his hair with a towel and checked on the milk bubbling in the pan on the hot-plate.
Eight of them in that shallow grave. He yawned and glanced across at the alarm clock. It was 1.45 a.m. It hadn’t taken him so long to bury the last one. The constant rain had transformed the earth into a quagmire. Indeed, it had been raining for the past two days on and off and that, at least, made his task easier. The clods came away easily.
He lifted the saucepan just in time to prevent it boiling over, poured the milk into a mug and tossed the pan into the sink.
Outside, there was a particularly loud growl of thunder which seemed to roll across the land like an unfurling blanket. The little hut shook and Harold stood still for a moment, wondering if the entire flimsy structure was going to collapse around his head. The rumbling died away to be replaced by a whiplash crack of lightning which seared across the bloated, mottled sky and, for brief seconds, left a brilliant white afterburn on Harold’s retina as he watched it. Mesmerized by the sight of nature’s fury at its most potent, he crossed to the tiny window and stood looking out as the storm gathered for its furious onslaught on Exham and the countryside round about. Black cloud, buffeted by the wind, came rolling in to empty its load while lightning split the heavens with blazing white forks of pure energy. The thunder grew to a crescendo, like a thousand cannons being fired at once. The little hut shook once more as the storm intensified. Harold watched in awe, recoiling every now and then from the particularly violent flashes of lightning or the seemingly endless volleys of thunder. And, through it all, came the persistent pounding of the rain as it hammered against buildings and turned the ground into sticky slime. On the tarmac around the hospital entrance, the water puddled in pools ankle deep, each droplet exploding on the black, saturated surface. Even inside the hut, Harold could detect the strong smell of ozone as the sky was torn open by the powerful fingers of light which rent the thick black clouds like hands through wet tissue paper. Thunder roared menacingly and, in one or two places in the hospital, windows rattled in their frames. For those patients still awake, the world outside became a blur as they squinted through the rain-drenched windows. There was no steady trickle of tear-like droplets this time but a massive deluge which seemed to strike the windows and cascade down in one liquid flow, as if there were many men standing out there throwing buckets of the stuff at the panes. The few lights that burned outside were diffused into mere blurs through the rain-battered windows.
Harold sipped at his milk and watched the celestial fireworks, drawing back slightly as each blinding burst of forked or sheet lightning exploded across the sky, to be followed by a deafening blast of thunder. It sounded like some gigantic animal roaring in pain, the lowing of a massive steer lashed by a whip of ferociously undiluted force.
In the field behind Harold’s hut, the pylons swayed ominously in the high wind, their normally stable structures looking suddenly vulnerable. They crackled loudly and the thick power lines hummed as they were rocked back and forth by the onslaught. The metal groaned as it was bent and blasted by the wind and, beneath one of the pylons, less than fifty feet from its base, the shallow grave which Harold had dug was saturated to the extent that some of the top soil began to wash away.
There was a crack of lightning which screamed across the black heavens for a full five seconds, a blast of energy so powerful that for long moments even the thunder seemed to cease. The crackling fork hit the pylon nearest to the hospital fence, striking it at the very point where the huge power lines were attached. There was a blinding flash of blue and white sparks and an angry sputtering as the thick cable, twice as thick as a man’s torso was wrenched free of its housing by the fury of the impact. Then, it simply fell to earth, the other end of it still attached to the preceding pylon. But the severed end twisted and writhed on the wet earth like some kind of gigantic snake, showering the sodden mud with sparks and pumping hundreds of thousands of volts into the sticky ooze. The pylon itself shook violently as the cable twisted at its base, contorting madly like an eel on a hot skillet as it poured its immense reservoir of energy into the earth. The grass nearby was immediately blackened by the furious discharge, the mud even bubbling in places as the endless supply of electricity continued to gush into the ground. The cable twisted and whiplashed for what seemed like an eternity as it unleashed its pent-up power in a display which even overshadowed the mighty forks of lightning still flashing across the sky. The power line poured seemingly endless stores of crackling volts into the wet earth which, itself, acted as a conductor, further aiding the explosive exhibition.