Enigma

It Was the year 1993. Yet another cold night in the rural area of North Cumberland.

An old man named Henry Staff lived alone on these streets. Nobody like him and nobody cared for him.

He was now approaching the latter years of his life; a sad torturous life filled with some happy memories and about three times as many bad ones. Henry now only wanted one more thing in his life and that was for his death to come and take him away. The last ten years of his life were a pure hell. He was not sleeping well at night and was starting to feel the effects of old age. His sight was fading and he was partly deaf in one ear. His left hand ached with sharp pains from arthritis.

Henry had been having the same dream now for the last number of months. It was a series of grotesque images. Men who raped young women before dragging the bodies to their flat to gauge their insides out. Strings of sexual abuse suffered by children who were then beaten to within an inch of their life if they were to tell a soul of what happened to them.

Waking up at exactly the same time every morning in streams of sweat. You would have thought that another person could not have handled this but Henry was not your average person.

All be it that he was strange he was a skilled toy maker and specialised in making such simple things as dolls and train sets. It was as though his work was the only thing that was keeping him sane in his little world. He had a cosy toy store on the street, which he now only opened one day a week as bigger stores now existed and Henry was too old to compete with them. Adults looked at him with sympathy and others refused to even acknowledge his presence in their town.

Henry loved the children of the town to bits. Their faces would always light up when they were in his store and he was very happy and proud that even after all this time there was still some little demand for his toys.

As a child growing up himself things were not as good for him as it was for the children who visited his store. Going to school everyday was very painful for him. He had little friends and kept relatively to himself, as he wanted to keep people at a distance to him. Henry had a gift, a very special gift that not many people around the world posses and so did not accept it to be normal as a result. Henry had the power to see, sense and interact with things, which he saw around him. Things which other people were not aware of.

Strange voices were the main things he would hear. Not really understanding them at the age he was he had to rely on a visual image. These appeared to him in shadows, always at night for some reason and the voices all seemed to sound familiar but Henry was never quite able to put a face to them.

The death of his brother was Henry’s first of many bad memories. A drunk driver had knocked him down at the age of sixteen. He had been killed instantly though his body had been so badly disfigured in the accident his family could not give him an open coffin for his funeral.