Yelling with fear, twisting and turning, I tried to escape the powerful grasp of the strangers but they were too brawny. I struggled and wriggled but it was all in vain. These brutes put a blindfold on me and murmured to one another. My body was aching from the sharp ends of their brass knuckles weapons. These metal objects made me uncomfortable; it was like an elbow plummeting down onto my spine. The pain was just immense. Whispers and echoes from people were surrounding me and howls from the outside wind were troubling me. I lay in the arms of the strangers, waiting to meet the terrible fate of my life. After a while, they chucked me down onto a velvety carpet. With an evil laughter, a raspy voice boomed, “Welcome to my fortress…”
The passage was from The White Cockade by Alexander Cordell
Now a strange, new dread was seizing me as I went slowly up Watling Street, for I knew my Dublin like the back of my hand : the dread increased now with every step, for deep within me an instinct warned me - that l was walking into a trap. There was no basis' for this fear, yet it was enhanced by the very silence of the sleeping city, by the very fullness of the moon in this criss-cross, baying moonbeam of a night. And then, quite suddenly, the sky was blanketed :blackness, a pitch darkness fell over the streets. I stopped, in utter loneliness and spine-chilling fear, and listened.
I heard, in a little sigh of the wind, the bass whisper of a man.
I looked up. Black clouds were rushing over the moon, and in that lonely darkness I backed away to a wall, my hands outspread, my heart pounding. For the first time in my life I knew real and absolute fear : the chilling numbness that freezes the muscles, forbidding movement.
Yet somehow, in this obliterating blackness, 1 had to find Thomas Street. And then, from the direction of the stables behind Watling Street, came their on-tipped rasp of a boot : faint whispering, I heard, and sighing. I stiffened, flattening my body into the shadows of the wall, and a hand rasped the brickwork within a yard of me, like the hand of a blind man scours' as he feels his way.
Close to me in this merciless blackness of night, a man was breathing.
Behind me ; behind the very wall against which I was flattened, I heard the dull tread of measured steps, and the creak of a door. And I knew that although these enemies were invisible to me, they were slowly, inexorably surrounding me, drawing a net about me from which there was no escape.
It was the fear of the unknown that was numbing my senses. Had they been a score of men, in daylight, I could have made a fight of it. But now I shrank from the evil like a man condemned?.
I sensed, rather than saw the man standing directly before me. And even as l clenched my good hand for the attack, a match was struck, lighting his face. Momentarily, the darkness was banished : I saw that face in redness and shadow and stared into it with a new and nameless fear.
Bracing myself against the wall, I hooked hard. The face drifted away, then sank under the blow.
“Take him," came a whisper.
And they rushed from all sides, feeling for me, clubbing me to my knees. In a clatter of boots they came, their fists thudding into me ; pulling me down, they pinned me there. Six men held me; it was impossible to move.
From The White Cockade by Alexander Cordell
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