It started out as a usual tuesday morning at London Paddington Station with a general feeling of business in the air as people hustled their way to work in suits and skirts, and briefcases in hand. While everyone bustled by, Abbey and Mabel causually strolled towards their platform, stopping along the way to look at the Paddinton bear merchandise scattered throughout the station. They were used to rush hour of that sort but since they were on vacation, they were in no rush. Abbey was a tall, hilariously funny painter who loved birds and Mabel was an incredibly fast marathon runner who loved to cook. The two had just graduated from university and to celebrate they decided to take a trip to Europe.
On this part of their trip, they were to journey to the south of Wales with Samael, an overly large disgruntled janitor who worked at a run down school in Hackney. The girls had befriended Samael at a small café in Convent Garden Market the week before during their visit to London. Samael had no friends and no family and was to marry Lilura, a lonely chiromancer from Monmouth. Abbey and Mabel, being the generous people that they were, agreed to come along to see Samael and Lilura wed the next day since Samael needed a witness and complained of melancholy over the fact that he had nobody to see him tie the knot.
When the three boarded the first train headed towards Swindon, it wasn't very busy. Mabel was tired from her early morning run and quickly fell asleep. Samael spent the rest of the train ride showing Abbey the treasures of his dirty old backpack, which amongst a lot of dirty clothes included a fake id, Wet Ones, and a half eaten stalk of celery. Samael seemed very excited to boast about his belongings, leaving Abbey thoroughly bored. Her thoughts drifted as he bragged about his fake id to how much she looked forward to a relaxing time out in the countryside, where the wedding was suppose to take place. Other than the wedding, the only solid plans they had their minds set on was to watch the World Cup soccer game. England was to played Algeria that day. The train chugged on and Samael gleamed at his back pack with pride as Abbey fell in to a midday dream...
Things turned uncomfortable by the time they got to the train station in Swindon. Although Abbey had won a free bag of chips with the coupon she received from the sandwich she bought while waiting for the next train and was in a generally happy state, Mabel could sense that something was wrong. As the girls were enjoying their snacks they heard Samael yelling on the phone. The two girls looked at each other with perplexed faces but remained silent. Samael hung up the phone quickly when the train arrived, walked over to the girls as if nothing was wrong, smiled, and hastily ushered them on to the train before Mabel could ask what was wrong
When they boarded, he pick up the phone again whilst a second cell phone went off in his other pocket. After the third ring, he picked up it up also. Abbey and Mabel watched as he began yelling the same incoherent garbage in two receivers. He seemed to be worked up about something, though they couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was. In a fury of loud voices and swear words, he put both phones up to each of Abbey's ears, expecting her to do something about it, like the 6ft2, 28 year old childish janitor that he was. Abbey proceeded to talk to two different women, Lilura being one of them, and the other, Samael's mistress, Nukpana, who sounded pretty sassy, at the exact same time. It was really confusing and eventually Abbey was able to calm Lilura (who sobbed hysterically from her end of the phone) down for long enough to tell Nukpana that she had to get off the line. Abbey learned from Lilura, that contrary to what Samael had told the girls, the wedding had been called off because Samael had beaten her up causing a restraining order to be placed on him!
What an evil man Samael was when he seemed to be so unassuming and generous to the girls on their first encounter.
Abbey and Mabel were mortified by the scene he had caused. Disappointed by his behaviour, Abbey handed back the two phones and walked all the way to the end of the train with Mabel. Neither of them wanted to talk to him ever again. Unfortunately, the seats were all taken and they had to stand by the door with their bags for the rest of the train ride. It was long and tiring but the view outside of the passing landscape of fresh, green Welsh countryside was beautiful and Abbey tried to enjoy the time by sticking her head out the window to take in the air as it blew fast past the speeding train and made her cheeks feel cool and her hair wind-blown and messy while Mabel laughed at her.
The girls knew the wedding was called off, but they absolutely had to watch the game that day. It could possibly be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and they would settle for nothing less. So with time running out till kick-off they decided it would be best to wait it out and watch the game in Newport rather than train all the way back in to London right away. When they got off the train, they passed by Samael who tried to apologize to them as they waited for Lilura to pick them up. Mabel shot him a stern look as they walked away. Lilura was there waiting to pick up the girls, and the three ladies went off to a pub to watch the game.
At the pub, a cozy little place packed with friendly soccer fans crowded around a large TV at the back of the restaurant, Lilura, Abbey and Mabel enjoyed nachos and beer. The evening was turning out nicely as Abbey and Mabel quickly learned that Lilura was a very sweet natured chiromancer as well as an excellant conversationalist. As for the game, it was a draw and the travellers did not end up getting to see any worked up fans, soccer chants, or billigerent drunken celebrations, but it also meant that everyone was in an O.K mood.
That was, until Lilura's phone rang. The first call that she picked up she only noticed after the 26th ring. This was because everyone was too busy happily chatting with absolutely no care in the world for the measly Samael for her to notice her phone. When Lilura did finally pick up, Samael had a nasty conversation with her. Through the receiver Mabel could hear his voice sounding livid from across the table.
The next time he called, Abbey picked up. She thought she might be able to find a way to calm him down if he was stressed out about something and it sounded like he was. But when she picked up the phone, she could barley get the h-e-l-l out of the hello before he laid, well, Hell on her. Abbey had never heard someone sound more stark-raving mad in her entire life. She didn't know insanity had such a special frequency, as his voice reverberated with rage, and cringed with craze, piercing Abbey's ears with a powerful sense of evil. She listened as Samael told her he would kill her if he ever saw her again. Abbey had no idea why he was so angry at her but before she could get in even the first syllable of a word Samael hung up, leaving her holding the phone with her mouth open almost in tears over the hurtful things he had said.
She went inside and walked over to Mabel, shell-shocked over the conversation she had just had. Abbey looked at Mabel with the straightest face Mabel had seen for the entire trip and said, "I think I just got my first official death threat. This is probably the point where we should call the cops". Lilura and Mabel looked at Abbey with astonished faces but before they could say anything the phone rang again. This time it was Lilura's landlord, Luke.
"Lilura, you better get over here now, Samael is at the house and if the cops find out, we'll all be in deep trouble.", he said nervously. Lilura could sense Luke's fear and immediatly began to panic, hyperventalting right there in the pub. All the two girls could do to calm her down was to agree to go with her to the house although Abbey had no desire to go closer to a person who just told her they would kill her. But looking at the poor disheveled victimized state of Lilura, and being the sympathetic girls that they were, they hadn't much time to think of a better solution as they focused on calming her down. Little did they know that choosing to get in that car was like unknowingly signing up for a potential suicide mission.
It was dusk dark, and the temperature had cooled down as clouds rolled in over the horizon and the sun set low in the West. They traveled through the small, narrow lane ways of the countryside. Abbey felt like she was in a game of Mario Kart, as Lilura's tiny car kept swerving off the dirt roads every time they hit a corner at insanely fast speeds, spitting up dirt behind them. Meanwhile, in the back seat, Mabel's adrenaline kicked in and and her body prepared itself for fight-or-flight mode. Her heart beat increased, pupils dilated, and hair stood up in it's pores. You know, the stuff movies are made of. Abbey peered at her friend through the rearview mirror and cuing in, gulped, fastened her seat belt and grabbed a hold of the door handle. As the car turned in to a tiny road lined with high stalks of corn, ahead they could see a car wobbling fast toward them. Lilura knew that it was common courtesy to slow down her car to establish who would be the Good Samaritan and inch to the side to let the other car pass. However the car in front did not do the same. As the car approached quickly, Lilura realized it was Samael as she stepped on the brakes and came to a full stop. For a moment they remained in one spot with the car in idle. Samael kept speeding forward. As the three sat still watching a car come at them full throttle ahead, time slowed down for a brief moment between their brains rationalizing what was happening and what was about to happen next. Abbey's body moved in reaction but she felt as though she was almost paralyzed as she tried to calculate if she had enough time to do anything to save them. Finally her mind made up the helpless decision that she did not, as her life flashed before her. In the split of a second, the most important things to Abbey came to the surface. She felt for those she loved. She felt for the love she would loose; love she would never get to give. She thought about her parents, and her pets. Both Love and Fear filled her heart as he reached to the back of the car to grab her friend Mabel's hand.
And then in an instant Samael hit them head on with his car. When his car bounced back from Lilura's with force, Abbey had a moment to piece together that they were still alive. Everything happened very quickly. By the time she had thought about it, he reversed and hit them again. The second blow hurt far more than the first. The first time Mabel was just happy to be alive and could not think about the pain. But by the second hit she could feel her stomach drop within her as her body flung forward towards the seat in front of her.
The girls' car had plummeted in to the ditch at the side of the road, and Abbey's door was rammed up against 6 feet of cornstalk, making it impossible to get out. She yelled at Lilura to reverse the car, but the engine had stalled. Then to their extreme horror, they watched as Samael got out of his car and came charging towards them on foot. His face looked like it had transformed in to an evil demon, with wide, horrifying eyes, a gaping mouth and hair that stood up in all different directions. Even from metres away, his look made the girls freeze in terror for a brief moment before Abbey snapped out of it and slammed her hands down on the automatic locks.
Samael reached the side of their car and immediately started punching at Lilura's window in an angry fit as Lilura began to sobb hysterically. Abbey continued to yell at her to reverse and Lilura, confused and overwhemled, threw Mabel the cell phone to call the cops.
Mabel began dialing 911 as it is in in their country, when in fact it was 999 that she should have been dialing from Wales. However even if she were to be dialing the correct number, it didn't matter much because the phone kept loosing signal since they were in the middle of a cornfield and from the distance, they could see a convoy of heavy storm clounds rolling in from the East further tampering with the signal.
Abruptly, Samael quit punching the glass and walked away as if some switch inside his twisted head had gone off. Abbey assumed he had stormed away to find a hard object to smash in the window with. They never knew what he would have done next because in that time, Lilura was finally able to get a hold of the cops and explain exactly where they were.
The rest of the night was slightly less painful and unsafe. Mabel and Abbey had never seen police officers come so quickly to the scene, nor had they been as happy as they were then to them. The officers had gotten there in somewhere under 3 minutes, and for a small town and a large patch of field that was pretty quick. Abbey was so relieved and excited to see them that she felt like jumping over the cornstalks from her side of the car when she saw the blue flashing lights before she realized it was easier to climb over the driver's seat to dislodge herself from the horrific scene of the crime.
Back at the station when the two police officers came in to the room Abbey was pretty shocked at how much one of them resembled her friend from back home named Alistair. She was so amused by it that for a second she thought of taking a picture of him to show her friends. While baffling about it quietly to herself and considering if it would be odd for her to ask to take his picture for that solid reason, she hardly noticed the other police officer looking right at her. He was a tall handsome young man with a gentle look, strong well defined hands and brown hair. He quickly jumped in to action mode, indicating that he would interview Abbey and the other officer would speak with Mabel.
Abbey and the officer whose name was Kai, choose a separate room to speak about what had happened. Abbey was too anxious and scared to even so much as look at him at first. But then in the most charming Welsh accent she had ever heard, Kai told Abbey that everything would be okay and that she had nothing to be nervous or unhappy about. It was then that Abbey really noticed him. She admired his consoling nature and the calm way his voice sounded. When he smiled at her, it was the first time for the entire night that she had felt any feeling of remote familiarity, and it made her feel warm inside, despite the cold chill of the night, her lack of sleep, and the eerie lingering intensity of the horrendous events. Kai told Abbey that one day she would look back on this and it would all seem like just a very good story. Despite her state, Abbey enjoyed the rest of the conversation that she had with Kai, which lasted for the entire night, well in to the morning when the sun came up and he drove the two girls to the train station to catch the earliest ride back in to London.
Abbey had no idea a police report could take as long as it did or contain as many side conversations as they had managed to squeeze in between her dramatic account of what had happened. It had been such a terrifying experience, but as Abbey rested her head against the seat of the train, the most vivid memory she had when she closed her eyes was of Kai's handsome smile, soft dimples and the sweet look on his face the times their eyes had met. She found it bizarre that she could have both melted from that and blown up from a car crash all in the same night. And thanks to him and the Alistair-look-a-like, the girls were able to make it out alive. While Abbey sat waiting in the kitchen for Kai to finish up the report so that they could leave the station that night, she watched as Lilura somberly removed her engagement ring. Abbey went over to Lilura and took her hand in hers looking directly in to her eyes as she told her that she sincerely hoped that Lilura would make the right decision about Samael from now on. They parted ways and Abbey and Mabel made their way back to the train station. That morning the sun rose over the valleys casting the most pure rays of light over the grass creating a peacefully pastoral scene as the train speed south towards London.
When Abbey and Mabel got back to the city, they were extremely mentally, emotionally, and physically drained. They spent the majority of the day in bed on one of the sunniest days and were too tired to make it to their friend's party across town the following night. They struggled to see the light at the end of the tunnel as they looked back on the events of the last 48 hours. In the end, Abbey decided to think that they at least ended up saving Lilura from a potentially lethal union with such a low-life like Samael. It made the experience, to some degree, worth it. Little did they know, at the time, before the story hit the news, that it wasn't the end for Lilura. Luckily, by this point, they were already safe back home knowing it was the end of that tale for them. Of course, as for the green-eyed bobby, that story may be to be continued... ;)
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