Game over (standard:mystery, 2240 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Apr 13 2008	Views/Reads: 4014/2364	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Why does a train have to be walled up? and does it relate to an unfinished game of hide and seek?

The word divorce was becoming more and more frequent in his mind, as
though pervading his consciousness like an unwelcome image, which to 
Neil Parker, it was. He had just ended a phone conversation with his 
wife. It was basically an argument over how much she was spending. It 
was quite petty really, considering it was simply about buying extra 
food for their dog. Neil had said they didn't need it, as there was 
plenty to last until pay day. No, she insisted, it can never have 
enough. 

It was a spiralling argument in the fact that their voices grew louder
and louder until she had cut him off, leaving Neil sat in the car with 
an angry red face, clutching the steering wheel tightly after the link 
had been severed. He had pulled over to the kerb to take the call, and 
still sat there, his thoughts twisting and turning in disorder, but 
reaching the conclusion that he did not want to go home just yet, did 
not want to face her, as home was where he had been heading when he had 
received the call to ask him if they needed anything whilst she was in 
the supermarket. It was one of a number of arguments they had had 
recently, over petty and trivial matters. Four years of marriage, he 
thought had dissipated what affection there had been in the beginning. 
Now, the dying embers of the flame that they had once called love was 
almost extinguished, and divorce had passed the horizon, and was 
becoming closer and closer. 

Neil was 36, and worked as a network administrator. He had been writing
a firewall program for a mental health branch of the local hospital for 
their internal network, as some of the staff had been caught surfing 
the internet for nefarious sites that even the most liberal minded 
person would be embarrassed at. They had been asking him to basically 
get a move on, as they were impatient to monitor their employee's 
computer access in the interests of security. So a hard day would not 
be compensated for by an angry wife who increasingly picked arguments 
about insignificant matters. He decided to go for a drive, basically to 
calm himself down, as his face was still tinged in scarlet. 

He performed a U-turn, and after around a hundred metres turned right.
Any further and he would have seen his place of work, and he didn't 
want to think of that. He drove as straight as the roads would allow 
for around two miles and found himself in what was familiar territory, 
even though he had not been there in over twenty five years, as well as 
the fact that he only lived three miles away, he had never found reason 
to return, but now he found himself in the housing estate where he and 
his school friends used to play.  After a few minutes he saw a house 
that made him brake. It was decrepit and metal sheets covered the 
windows. Neil parked the car and stared at the house, smiling slightly. 
It used to belong to Gregory and his father. His mother had left when 
he was two years old, leaving his father as a single parent, so Greg's 
anti-social behaviour could almost certainly be levelled at his parent 
who could barely look after himself, being as he was, addicted to 
sniffing glue. So no surprise then that Greg turned out to be the 
school bully, to show signs that he wouldn't follow the rest of the 
children in class and get an education. Greg was the one who showed a 
penchant for outdoor pursuits, for survival tactics. Basically, he 
always carried a pen-knife around with him, and liked to carve sticks 
and twigs into arrows and spears. Perhaps he ended up in the army, Neil 
thought. Maybe that was the best place for him. What became of him 
though? he wondered. He remembered the last time he had saw Greg. It 
had been the both of them and two other school friends, Ryan and 
Patrick, on an after school sojourn to the local abandoned railway to 
engage in exploration. With bushes and shrubbery sloping up on both 
sides of the embankment, they were shielded from even the most 
suspicious of prying eyes. Neil remembered standing at the entrance to 
a dark and gloomy tunnel, feeling a surge of fear at the prospect of 
walking in there, but putting a brave face on in front of his friends 
to show that he was fearless, and brave. The tunnel, though, was not 
the only source of interest for the boys. Greg seemed to be in his 
element, with his pen-knife, slicing off blackberries and eating them 
raw. ‘I could live here,' he had said. ‘I've got everything I need. 
Food and shelter'. None of the boys had doubted the fact that he would 
probably have tried, if the lure of a house and a warm bed had not been 
available. Perhaps it might have been better if he did, Neil wondered, 
considering the father that he had to go home to. They had begun to 
play a game of hide and seek, with Neil being the one who was to do the 
searching. As he had to count to a hundred, he sneakily looked through 
his fingers, and saw Greg wandering into the tunnel, swallowed by the 


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