by Maynard Sims
Crozier had always had a fantasy about hospitals.
In truth it was a contrived one, created from his perceptions of hospitals as he imagined they should be. Drawn from TV programs such as ER, Chicago Hope, and Casualty.
The doctors were busy but never too busy to flirt and more with the beautiful nurses. The patients always had some deep psychological problem or family issue that the wise interns could solve while discovering a previously undetected tumor, or heart murmur. The patients were always grateful for the interference. The nurses always grateful for the romantic attention.
There was another reason why Crozier liked hospitals. They were full of confident, educated men in doctor’s garb, and in his fantasies it was they who were grateful.
He parked his car in a two-hour bay outside the Maudsley psychiatric hospital on Denmark Hill. He glanced across as he navigated crossing the busy road. That’s likely where I’ll end up, dealing with people like Carter.
The iron arch heralding the King’s name stood proud in the light morning sun. The vast glass frontage of the hospital reflected tops of ambulances, occasional trees, and the tall, elegant figure of Crozier as he walked across to the front entrance and went inside.
King’s College Hospital is now an acute-care facility, referred to locally and by staff simply as “King’s” or abbreviated internally to “KCH.” It serves an inner-city population of 700,000 in the London boroughs but is also a specialist center for millions of people in southern England.
Crozier took off his raincoat and placed it over his arm. The foyer was large and modern. It spoke of cleanliness and efficiency. He walked to the reception desk and asked where he needed to go to see Carter. It was several floors up, the elevators were to the left, and it was a neurological ward, he was told.
King’s was originally opened in 1840 in the disused St. Clements Dane workhouse on Portugal Street close to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was used as a training facility, where medical students of King’s College London could practice and receive instruction. The surrounding area was overcrowded slums full of poverty and disease.
Whether in a fantasy or in reality, hospitals are always busy. There is an underlying swell of noise from voices. The emotions contained within the walls cover every aspect of human experience. Good news, bad news, a lifeline or a death sentence. The patients emit almost visible waves of fear, hope, desperation.
The elevator was quiet and efficient, much like the majority of the staff. Unlike Crozier’s fantasies, they were too busy and too professional for anything like the atmosphere of suppressed sexual excitement he imagined.
Simon Crozier, who had an active social life, lost patience with people when they let their lives outside Department 18 get in the way of their work. He was a large man in his early fifties, with iron gray hair cut close to his skull. His eyes were deep brown and penetrating, and his hawk nose gave him a predatory aspect that was reflected in his manner. Simon Crozier was not a man to suffer fools gladly and made no pretense that he did.
Carter was in a private side room along a sterile corridor where white walls were punctuated by modern and abstract prints of bright colors.
The first thing Crozier noticed was that the room was dark. The blinds were drawn, and the only light was from an under-shelf unit over the bed. Once his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he realized there were several vases of flowers dotted about. He hadn’t brought flowers, or grapes, or anything to read. He hadn’t brought anything.
In truth he didn’t really know why he had come. He didn’t like Carter, and he knew Carter did not like him. It was obvious other people had visited, and many of them would be from the department. So far as Crozier was aware, Carter had no social life beyond the department, and that hold had tightened through his relationship with Jane Talbot.
Something moved behind him, and he turned casually, expecting it to be the blinking light of a monitor or similar. There was nothing there.
Then the nothing shifted.
In the corner of the room was a pool of black shadow that seemed to ripple. Crozier tutted. The appearance of cleanliness in the hospital obviously didn’t extend to the side rooms if that pile of dirt was anything to judge by.
Eventually he looked at the figure lying in the bed. Carter was asleep, probably drugged to the eyeballs. There were two drips feeding into his arms, one would be saline for fluids and the other would be painkillers. His head and shoulders were encased in a brace that prevented movement even when he was sleeping. There was a chart clipped to the end of the bed, but Crozier couldn’t discern anything from it. He knew Carter had been badly injured, but the full extent of the damage he didn’t know.
He found it surprising that he was a little scared to ask, in case it was serious.
He noticed some more untidy piles of dark dirt under the bed. This was really not good enough. The department’s health insurance was paying for this, and the least they could expect was for the room to be cleaned.
It was colder in the room than he would have expected as well. Normally hospitals were kept far too warm. He checked the windows, but they were shut, with unattractive views over a side wall of another part of the building.
Behind him, under the bed, the pile of what he thought was dirt moved and breathed.
Chapter Five
To live is not breathing it is action.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Clerkenwell, London, England
Oh Christ, it hurt!
Of course it bloody hurt! He’d fallen thirty feet onto the unyielding roof of the elevator car and landed on his back, snapping his spine. His left arm and collar bone were broken as well. With a monumental effort of will, he opened his eyes and stared up. A few faces were peering down at him. The woman with the perm, not grinning now but dabbing her tearful eyes with a tissue. The teenage seductress, her pink tongue flicking across her lips because, to her, death was a turn on.
His eyelids drooped, and he lost consciousness, drifting into a comfortable black void where pain was just a memory. He was vaguely aware of being lifted; hands under his shoulders, fingers curling around his ankles. When he drifted back to the world of pain, he found he was lying on the cold hard linoleum of the corridor. There were three of them still there, crouching over him, concerned looks on their faces. The biker, the pinstripe, and the perm, all staring down at him anxiously.
“Yes, I know you said he wasn’t to be harmed, but the stupid fucker jumped down a bloody elevator shaft before we could get to him.”
There was someone else there too; another man, standing out of Daniel’s eye line, speaking into a cell phone, his voice echoing in the bare concrete corridor.
“I think his back’s broken. He’s barely alive. What shall we do with him?”
There was a pause. The three faces transferred their attention to the man with the phone. He was standing some way away, and Daniel couldn’t move his head to see him.
“Okay. Will do.”
The conversation ended.
“Well?” the perm spoke; a nicely modulated voice, a Home Counties accent, a woman more used to addressing the weekly meeting of her local Women’s Institute than hunting fugitives in derelict office buildings.
“We leave him here,” cell phone said. “From the look of him, he won’t last much longer.”
“Oh dear,” the perm said. “Such a shame. All that effort to bring him up here, and we could have left him down the shaft. What a waste of time.”
And then they were gone.
Daniel Milton started to shiver.
Chapter Six
Krakow, Poland
The depressing concrete apartment building stood in a row of similar buildings on the outskirts of Krakow, decaying quietly, its metal casement windows corroding, the moss-covered roof hemorrhaging tiles, leaving gaps for rain and pigeons to enter the roof space and destroy its integrity.
It was a building in waiting, holding its breath until some sharp-eyed developer recognized it
s potential and transformed it into a retro-chic block of living spaces for the wealthier city workers to occupy. It would happen eventually, as it had happened elsewhere in the city limits, but at the moment it offered cheap, if less than salubrious, accommodation, and it was the best Jacek Czerwinski could afford.
The apartment he was renting was on the third floor. The elevator had died six weeks ago and as yet no one had been around to fix it, despite several increasingly bad-tempered complaints to the landlord. The only way up to his apartment now was via a series of echoing stone staircases and cracked-tiled corridors. Walking along the corridors was like listening to a radio whose tuning knob was being twisted and turned. Sounds issued from each apartment he passed. A snatch of an argument here, a blaring stereo there. In one apartment, someone was practicing the clarinet; in another, a baby cried, fractious and forlorn. The sounds were as random as the smells that drifted through the building. Wafts of curry and other spicy foods mingled with the sweet smell of marijuana and the rancid tang of stale cooking oil. But underpinning the various aromas was another, stronger odor, acrid and sour, as if someone had been pissing on the radiators.
As he walked the corridors and climbed the stairs, he kept stopping to glance behind him. The feeling he was being followed had started the moment he had climbed from his ancient and battered Renault and walked across the road to his building. By the time he was turning the key in the front door, he’d stopped glancing and was staring intently along the corridor, convinced that any moment whoever was following would reveal themselves. He stood, staring for a full sixty seconds before pushing the door open and letting himself into the apartment.
He closed and locked the door behind him, dropped the heavy leather bag he was carrying, and switched on the light. The bulb hanging down from a cracked plastic rose in the center of the room spread a dingy light over his meager belongings. He’d rented the rooms furnished, so at least he had a couch to sit on and a bed to sleep in, but there wasn’t much else in the way of furniture, and what there was had been wrecked.
The apartment had been trashed.
“Shit!” he said, looking about him.
His ancient television was lying on its side, the screen smashed, the back ripped off and tossed into the far corner. The faux-leather couch had been slashed and ripped apart. Drawers had been pulled from the plywood sideboard, their contents scattered over the floor. He walked through to the bedroom. It was the same story in here. The duvet had been stripped from the bed and was piled in a heap in the corner of the room. The wardrobe doors were hanging open, and his clothes were shredded. This wasn’t an ordinary break-in. There was fury and rage here. Whoever did this had systematically wrecked the place.
This was a warning.
He wandered back to the lounge and, like a magician pulling a bouquet of flowers from his sleeve, he fished in the pocket of his overcoat and produced a half bottle of vodka. Setting the couch back on its feet, he unscrewed the cap from the vodka bottle and took a long pull, then flopped down on the ruined vinyl, dragging his leather bag toward him. He unzipped it and reached inside, using both hands to lift out three box files, each overflowing with documents and photographs, the lids of the files held in place by thick rubber bands. Setting them on the couch next to him, he took another swig from the bottle, then laid his head back and closed his eyes.
A few seconds later someone knocked on the door. Perhaps whoever had been following him had finally plucked up the courage to make an approach. Or maybe the same person who had trashed the apartment had come back to trash him. He was taking no chances. He reached into the bag again and took out a small Beretta. Holding the gun against his leg, he went to the door.
“Who is it?” he called through the flimsy wood.
There was a pause and then a quiet male voice called softly. “Mr. Czerwinski, I need to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“It’s very important. Please open the door.”
Jacek put his eye to the spy hole. Through the tiny fisheye lens he could see his caller; a small man, about his own age, balding, with rimless glasses and a pasty complexion. If he was a threat, then Jacek was pretty sure he could neutralize him.
He stuck the Beretta into the waistband of his trousers and opened the door.
Chapter Seven
The earth upon which the sea, and the rivers and the waters, upon which food and the tribes of men have arisen, upon which this breathing, moving life exists, shall afford us precedence in drinking!
—Atharva Veda
King’s College Hospital, London, England
The lake was a still sheet of glass, broken only by the occasional stream of bubbles from the fish that swam beneath the surface. Robert Carter sat on an old wooden jetty, his legs dangling over the edge, his boots inches above the water. A fishing rod was propped on a wire stand to the left of him, to the right a bait box, its plastic tray filled with hooks, spools of line, spherical lead weights, and a polythene container with hundreds of ivory-colored maggots, writhing and wriggling on a bed of sawdust. Hanging from one of the jetty’s stanchions was a keep net, mostly submerged, containing half a dozen perch swimming listlessly in circles—the day’s catch.
He sat smoking a cigarette, watching the fluorescent orange float bobbing gently twenty yards away, waiting for a fish to strike. The day was the best summer had to offer; a clear blue sky, streaked with thin wisps of cirrus; a gentle breeze tempering the heat of the sun before it could become oppressive. High above him in the trees, jays, thrushes, and blackbirds serenaded him with their summer songs, and once in a while a kingfisher swooped low over the water, looking for its next meal.
The Lake District of England was a beautiful natural wonderland of lake and forest. The different lakes, Ulleswater, Derwent, all had their own unique attraction, and the entire area was a magnet for tourists all through the year.
Jane would be coming to see him. He had to get some coffee on, prepare some lunch.
He put down the fishing rod and tried to stand. He couldn’t. His arms were trapped. He tried to open his eyes, but they were refusing. There was a throbbing in his head as if all the songbirds were singing at once, loudly, out of tune, discordant and insistent—shouting at him.
In 1909, King’s moved to its present site at Denmark Hill, south of the River Thames. During World War I, the hospital was used for military purposes. A dental school was established at the same site in 1923. During this time, most patients were still poor, and in 1937 the private Guthrie Wing was established with a donation from the Stock Exchange Dramatic and Operatic Society for wealthier patients to have less crowded wards. During the Second World War, the hospital was used for treating casualties of air raids and was fortunate never to be bombed during the blitz. With the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, the hospital was given Teaching Hospital status.
At the entrance, two people walked through the glass doors and glanced up at the signs, seeking out the ward they wanted. It was clear they couldn’t see it straightaway, so just as Crozier had done, they went across to reception and asked after Robert Carter.
They were directed to neurology. The elevators, the short journey up. Between them they were bringing gifts. Magazines, some chocolate, an iPod, and some fruit. They didn’t know Crozier had already visited; he had kept that as one of his little secrets.
Carter’s eyes opened. He looked for the trees, the lake, tried to feel for his cigarettes but found his arms still bound.
His brain fumbled to explain where he was. This wasn’t his home in the Lake District. This wasn’t outdoors at all.
He was in a brightly lit room with machines bleeping. His arms were connected by wires to bags of fluid above his head.
He gradually realized he was in a hospital. The dull aching pain told him he had been injured in some way.
His head, his neck, most of his shoulders, were encased in a plastic-coated brace so he couldn’t move his upper body at all.
Only his e
yes. He could move his eyes.
He wished he couldn’t.
The room may have been brightly lit, but pools of black punctuated the corners. The pools were rippling as if they were a parody of the surface of the lake he had been dreaming about.
The elevator eased to a halt, and the two people got out, the man holding back so the woman could exit first. She smiled a thanks to him. Their body language showed they weren’t a couple, weren’t involved romantically, but they knew each other, were most likely friends.
They looked both ways along a white corridor, unsure which direction to take. The man pointed left, and they went that way, signs hanging from the ceiling eventually confirming they were on the correct course. Neurology.
The woman shifted the bag she carried from one hand to the other. It wasn’t heavy, the movement was more a nervous reaction to hospitals. Like many people, she was uncomfortable around so much suffering. The healing process was such a mystery it left her uncertain.
The man looked at ease, but the way he held his posture, the way his mouth was set in a determined line, revealed the tension he was feeling.
They reached the nurses’ station and waited while a blue uniformed nurse finished a telephone conversation that seemed to be about reassuring a relative with vague platitudes.
They asked about Robert Carter, and the nurse pressed a key on the computer keyboard.
At that moment alarm bells and monitor buzzers went off and were worryingly loud.
The blackness was moving.
Carter flicked his eyes from side to side trying to see both sides of the room as well as beyond the foot of the bed.
The darkness was sliding across the floor. Both corners of the room at each side of the bed were slithering forward, the inky black absorbing the lights from the ceiling. As each mass of dark reached below the bed, it merged with another pool that was rippling there.
