Children of Sol was a story I started a few years ago and something happened to give me pause in the writing of it.

The first part is Here

Swiftly moving on...

Previously...
She grabbed his sleeve at the wrist and dragged him hard, almost hard enough to pull him off balance.

He stumbled along after her, through tussocks of long grass and patches of bare soil.

“Where are you going?” he asked in a hushed voice.

No locked gate stopped them entering the churchyard, but he got the feeling they should not be there.

“Here,” she said. “Look.”

She pointed with one hand and lit the way with a flashlight in the other. A dark doorway loomed out of the side of one of the church’s outbuildings. A dark doorway without a door – ripe for exploration.

Paul leaned forward to look closer, scared out of his wits, but too curious to pass up the chance of exploring.

Jelly’s hand in the middle of his back shoved hard and he pitched forward into the darkness beyond the doorway. The flashlight came through the doorway to bounce off the side of his head. The lights flashing across his eyesight were not made by the batteries in the flashlight.

Paul couldn’t have been out cold for long. He came to on the packed earth of the cellar.

“Jelly?” he called. He could tell she’d gone. She must have left as soon as she tossed the flashlight after him. He could imagine her skipping away, giggling to herself. He could imagine it because he’d witnessed the same thing time and time again.

He sat up and blinked a few times to clear his head. Paul grabbed the flashlight and got to his feet.

“Hello, Pissy.” A cold, sinister voice stopped him in his tracks.

Paul straightened but refused to look around. He stepped closer to the entrance to the cellar and hoped to make it to the outside before anything horrible happened.

“Don’t call me that,” he said.

“Or what?” the cold voice asked. It sounded like the person had moved, the sound came from the side rather than directly behind.

“Whatcha gonna do if I call you Pissy, Pissy?”

Paul didn’t answer. He leaped for the doorway, adrenaline aiding his escape. Once out in the open, he ran as fast as he could force his legs to carry him. The flashlight clutched in one hand sent beams of light bouncing off walls, derelict buildings and trees, disorienting him and scaring him worse than he was already. Branches whipped his face and he ignored the pain.

He took a spectacular flying leap over the roots of the tree Jelly had hidden behind and as he landed, he scrabbled on the dirt of the lane to make the turn to sprint down toward the safety of the streetlights.