A Rush of Blood

by David Mark

  Mr Farkas realizes that this woman is here to break the chain. In a moment of weakness he had freed the last girl to carry his child’s blood. Even now she is shivering and fitting in a hospital bed. All he has left is the few frozen sample bags that he cannot vouch for the condition of, and his own tainted blood. The child beneath the mask may die. And that will be the end of it. The end of her. Of his blood …

  There is a flash of silver as the knife in Mr Farkas’s hand slices through the air. The woman throws up a hand to cover her face and yells in pain as the blade jabs into the back of her hand. She lashes out with her foot and kicks Mr Farkas hard in the chest. He falls backwards, gasping and hurt, clutching at his ribs and the woman is on him, wrapped around his waist, pushing him to the floor and punching him, again and again, sobbing as she smashes her fist into his jaw.

  And then she is standing. Sobbing. Gulping for air. She is saying a name, over and over.

  Mr Farkas cannot see out of one eye. But through the other he watches the woman stumble forward, the dead weight of the child dragging down her arms.

  Mr Farkas stands up. In the reflected surface of the brass antiseptic spray tank by the bed, he sees himself. Fine boots and breeches. Braces. Collar and cravat. Wing-tipped moustache, soaked in blood. Dressed the way his daughter likes. Dressed the way she told him to always dress so it would be like forever living in a story.

  He sees the woman pushing at the barely moving body.

  He looks for the dropped knife and finds it beside the girl’s discarded clothes.

  Painfully, holding his ribs, Mr Farkas hurries across the cellar floor. The woman is nearly at the top of the stairs. She is dragging the girl like a ragdoll. She is big for her age, his Beatrix. Solid. Fleshy.

  Mr Farkas reaches up to grab the child’s bare ankle. It is dragged out of his reach before his fingers can close upon it.

  He growls, frustrated, and climbs the stairs, reaching out, grunting at the pain, listening to the woman’s squeals of frustration as she hauls the child up the last two steps.

  Mr Farkas does not hurry now. The woman cannot get the child out of the house. Not before he gets there. He imagines what it will be like to remember this story at bedtime. Whether she will still sleep well after he tells her the story of the bad woman who came to take her away.

  He is about to emerge into the cool grey light of the kitchen when the trapdoor smashes into his head. The impact is like two boats colliding. Mr Farkas thinks only of black and purple and a sudden inexplicable white waterfall that folds in on itself and runs upside down …

  Mr Farkas has fallen awkwardly. The wooden trapdoor is pinning his head, neck, shoulders and one arm to the floor. The rest of him hangs below, kicking against the stairs, scrabbling for purchase. The door is heavy, but a fit person could push it clear were they given enough time. Mr Farkas is not very fit. His body has been shutting down for weeks. He has septicaemia. But with enough time, his resolve could give him the strength to extricate himself from the painful trap.

  Mr Farkas does not have time. He is pinioned and he cannot seem to work out which way is up and which is down. He can taste blood. His own. His daughter’s. He cannot seem to focus on the pictures in front of him but he sees the shape of a woman. A black silhouette. A raven’s shadow.

  Mr Farkas hears himself gurgling. Realizes he is pleading.

  The woman looks inside the refrigerator. Stands there, bloodied and glowing in the light of the appliance, perfectly illuminated for his viewing. He sees her face perfectly. Sees the horror. The sheer, overwhelming revulsion at what she sees.

  Mr Farkas drifts into unconsciousness for a moment. When he returns to himself, it is to the sound of squeaking. Of something heavy being pushed across the broken floor.

  Mr Farkas opens his eyes in time to see darkness fall. His mouth does not utter a sound as the refrigerator topples forward and lands squarely on the angled trapdoor. His body emits a noise like the cracking of a tree trunk.

  There is just light, then darkness, and the sense of true separation; of severing. A sound like a bag of meat falling on to stone.

  Mr Farkas’s brain ceases to function only moments after the disconnection of his upper torso from the rest of his body. They are very long moments for Mr Farkas’s brain.

  Then everything is nothing.

  And Mr Farkas is dead.

  HILDA

  It’s not the past any more. It’s now. I’m not remembering it, I’m living it. I’ve had a birthday. They brought balloons and cake and ate it around the bed. They played music. Lottie joked about unplugging the life-support machine by accident so she could find a socket for the speaker. Mum laughed, though it was an effort for her, I could tell. She doesn’t seem to find things funny the way she used to. When she reads to me I can hear the tears in her throat. Sometimes she will take my hand and press it to hers and she will beg me, literally beg me, to come back. And I’ll try to squeeze her hand. Try to get my lips to cooperate. All I have managed is a tear. It ran from my left eye on to the knuckles of her left hand and though my eyes are closed, I sensed that she had held it to her face and breathed it in for a very long time.

  I’ve only heard snippets of what came after. Lottie and Mum, talking in whispers. The neighbours had called 999 but the police were already on their way. Karol had phoned in an anonymous tip while he was driving himself to the house. He’d been the first to see what Mum had done. I was still half conscious at that point. I have memories of tears and screeches and Mum’s desperate urging that he look inside the refrigerator. I don’t know what happened next but Lottie has told Mum that Karol had done a good thing. He had made it right. He has some laurels to rest on, according to Lottie. Caught a killer.

  It’s blurry after that. Some of the voices I hear cannot really be there. I hear them in the centre of my brain, as though they come from within me. I sometimes feel as though I am being pulled apart; that I am a ragdoll built to be pulled apart.

  Mum opens my eyes from time to time. When she does I can see how much weight she has lost. She has a grey tinge to her skin, as though she is a drawing. She does not dress like Mum any more. I will tell her off for that when I wake up. We will go shopping together and I will tell her to buy the wackiest, most totally insane ensemble she can find. And even if she looks like a dog’s dinner in it, I’ll tell her she looks great, because she’s my mum and she’s awesome and she saved me.

  Complications is the word the consultant keeps using. An infection in my blood. The coma is intentional, apparently. They chose to do this to me. There is much room for optimism. When the swelling in my brain goes down they will know better. My body has been through a lot. He took pints of her blood. Pumped his own infected plasma straight into an open vein. She’s fighting it. She’s tough. Her blood is winning, we’re sure …

  Sometimes, in the dark hours, I am visited by something … other. I can’t really describe it. It just feels as if something is scuttling about, inside me and over me and probing at the cracks in my shell with its long, spidery legs. Sometimes I hear a voice that I have never heard before. A child’s cry; a sad little plea.

  Let me in. Please. Let me in …

  In such moments I hide within myself. I find the locked rooms in my mind where nobody can follow. I hear the locks being rattled, the handles being turned, but I stay motionless in the little pockets of shadow and the visitor eventually moves away. On such nights I feel my body shiver and fit and the machine beside my bed makes strange noises. Nurses and doctors gather around and there is chaos and shouting and my Mum cries, and that sound is enough to bring me from the locked room and back into my skin for a time.

  I will wake up, in time. I will open my eyes and sit up straight and rip the tube out of my throat and I will make sense of the bits that are still all a jumble. I will sit in the back of the Bonnet and drink hot chocolate. Mum will help me with my homework and I will go to Believerz and stand at the back with Meda and get the steps wrong. I will get into mischi
ef with Lottie. I will play with Ripper and listen to Connie’s stories.

  ‘Morning, fancy pants. Sleep well? Good dreams? Traffic was murder. Lottie would have come up but she managed to fall asleep in the bath and she’s soaked her plaster cast and needs to go have it re-set. She’s asking about doing a webcast. I’ve told her that if she doesn’t wait until you’re back on your feet then I will thumb her in the eye. How you doing? Hungry? You’re looking bloody gorgeous.’

  She opens my left eye with her thumb. Looms in front of me; light behind her like a halo.

  ‘Please,’ she says, quiet now, as if the brightness of her entrance has already drained her. ‘I can bear it if I have you. I’ll know what it was all for. I can’t bear it alone. I can’t.’

  I turn and kick towards her. Try and force myself back to the surface; to break through into the familiar world of her kisses and hugs and her warm, safe smell.

  And then I feel it again. Feel the cold, shadowy fingers gripping at the part of me that floats in the dark. The bitter chill, like being wrapped in metal and thorns; the feeling of being consumed from the inside out.

  There, at the very back of my consciousness, a whisper; a breath … the voice in my blood.

  ‘Cica …’