Psychic Night

The one remaining street light had just flickered into life as I stumbled through the freezing rain and cold wind howling round the towerblocks. A mutant child dressed in rags ran screaming towards me from behind a bin and spat on me as I fell cursing into the empty road. I picked myself up and staggered on, the deranged hooligan hurling abuse and dog excrement at my back. The rain was now coming down in sheets, driven by the baltic wind and I knew that I had to find shelter before darkness brought more random assaults from gangs of feral children out foraging in the night. A tattered portacabin at the far corner of a desolate car park had a light in one broken window so I climbed over the moss-slick wall and made towards it. Upturned supermarket trolleys rusted like skeletal prams and gaping frames of burnt out cars littered the filthy shattered tarmac around the seemingly derelict old building as I approached. The door must have been caught by a blast of the freezing wind because it swung out wildly into the rain, slamming into me and knocking me to the muddy ground. I pulled myself up and tore at the madly flapping door to get inside out of the rain. As I burst into the building I could hear the crazed screams of stampeding children attacking a terrified dog which had hidden in one of the torched cars. I slammed the door shut and leaned against it to get my breath. In the semi-darkness of the corridor I could just see the outline of a sodden plank which I picked up and jammed through the door handle to keep it closed against the weather, the night and the children. I lurched towards the light behind a half open door at the end of the corridor and realised that I could hear the distant swirling music of a fairground Wurlitzer organ. I pushed gently at the door, wanting warmth and light, hoping for company and comfort. The door opened onto a large empty hall with a stage at one end and broken wooden climbing bars up one mouldering wall. Garish multicoloured plastic chairs were stacked in huge piles along the other two walls. The music was louder now, manic and merry. In front of me was a card table with a little red cash box and some leaflets. A smiling older woman was standing behind the rickety table with her arms outstretched in welcome, mouthing my name as tears streamed down her face. I reeled back as I realised that the woman was my long dead grandmother. I just managed to raise the camera to take my daily blip photo before I fell to the floor....