The Storage Space thought it felt slithering again and would have been most horrified over what it gathered was the return of Le Grand Rat, but just then an extraordinarily noisy emergency vehicle made a deplorable mess of parking out front. Next a veritable horde of extremely inelegant individuals added to the racket by clattering up the stairs.
The teenager’s father was the first to address them: “You must save my darling daughter!”
Never, in all the years the Storage Space had been a grand old theatre, had it heard a line delivered with such utter and complete ineptitude.
The emergency workers each tried to question the teenager about her baby’s father, but she kept denying she was pregnant. They started murmuring among themselves about something called DNA testing.
The teenager’s father stiffened. “And, when the baby’s born, you can prove with DNA testing, or whatever it’s called, that my daughter was impregnated by…my wife’s boyfriend?”
Did one have to be firmly grounded in the theatre to pick up the telltale tremble of fear with which that last speech was positively riddled?
“Don’t you worry now…”
Remarkable that one of those inelegant intruders had a voice like silk.
“…we’ll find out who impregnated your daughter. But the thing to concentrate on now is… Hey!”
“I tripped!”
“If my colleague hadn’t moved like lightning, you would have hit your daughter…quite hard, I might add…in the lower abdomen!”
“Edward! Oh Edward!”
That last speech… Not the emergency worker with the sometimes silky voice that spoke last. Certainly not the inept pregnant teenager’s father. Her. Not speaking aloud yet. Way too small. Way too weak.
But just as the Storage Space wanted more than anything to concentrate on her, it found all it could concentrate on was Karen. Something about witnesses again. Oh it was all too tiresome. The Storage Space simply wouldn’t pay it any attention, simply chose not to think about it.
Karen raised the scalpel she somehow still had and plunged it into an emergency worker’s back.
