Left to Darkness

by Craig Saunders

  Don’t fret, baby.

  She imagined her mother saying something like that. She kind of wished she had someone around like that, real family, to hold her hand. But she didn’t. She had to be brave all by herself.

  “Nah,” she told Wayne, so he wouldn’t worry too much. “Just got bored sitting on my butt,” she said to him, keeping her voice light, letting him off the hook. “Figured I may as well come down where the action is.”

  Wayne nodded. “Thanks,” he said. Like she’d made a choice to hold on to her baby for a while longer, if such a thing could be done. Dawn didn’t think it could.

  She nodded, too, though, and backed away to let him pace. He had to do what he had to do, and the truth was no amount of sitting on her arse was going to upset her right now. Her arse, hips, back, bladder, ankles…everything was sore or worse. She’d be happy enough sitting, though, because walking wasn’t really that great a relief when she was four centimeters dilated, even if she wasn’t contracting.

  Now there’s something to look forward to.

  She took a foam-covered plastic chair, back in the shadows a little, and watched people bustling about with no real direction.

  Anyone would think it was a visit from the bloody Queen.

  She almost laughed out loud at the thought, not because it was in any way funny, but because it was so utterly inappropriate. Man missing an arm was due in, and she was laughing about it.

  Better, though, she figured, than the alternative.

  But all the while she watched the other members of her little commune making busywork, she wondered if the new people would be the kind of folks who parked in the car park, or who drove right up to the front door.

  Maybe she’d give them the benefit of the doubt. If the guy only had one arm, she guessed he could probably justify parking wherever the hell he wanted.

  “They’re here…” said Greg. Then, “Shit…shit…!”

  She understood why everyone began to run. Turned out the new guy wasn’t the kind of man to use the car park, after all.

  63

  The man was driving something big. It had to be a truck, she thought. She could see the cab getting closer and closer. The lights were on full beams, the ones above the cab, and the headlights, too. Glaring, blinding light, shining right in through the glass bay doors to A&E.

  And he wasn’t stopping.

  He wasn’t going fast, but it was a big fucking truck.

  She couldn’t see into the cab, because the lights were way too bright to see past. She had no idea if the driver was awake, drunk, stupid, or blind.

  But she was certain he was going to drive straight into the glass.

  Move, she thought. Slow, though. Too slow. She was going to get showered with shards of glass…and if the truck didn’t stop? She would be crushed to death.

  Not now…not now…

  Her stomach cramped so hard she gasped and couldn’t move even though she wanted to. The pain was enormous, crippling and sudden.

  Is this a contraction? she wondered, idly, watching the truck’s inexorable approach toward the glass…and then…it hit.

  The truck was absolutely massive, seen like this, through the filter of her agony and close up, right up so close she could see the driver in the cab and the passenger, out cold, beside him.

  The glass broke, but it didn’t shatter, because at the first crack of glass, the driver finally applied the brakes. Those heavy-duty air brakes. The sound was deafening, for a second, but then a new sound. From inside the cab.

  Someone shouting for help from inside. Shouting in panic, sounded like.

  Wayne had leapt back when he’d seen the truck coming. Greg, too. Debbie was shaking. She’d backed herself against a wall.

  The lights of the cab blinded everyone in the tight space. The engine was deafening.

  But still that panic in the blind man’s voice tore through them and got them moving.

  “Hold on! We’re coming!” Wayne…shouting. Loud, but calm. Dawn wondered how many years of blood that kind of calmness took. How many horrible deaths, how many people in pain?

  Wayne pushed a gurney out through the opening, to the cab.

  “Not me…him…” she heard someone say.

  Wayne, first, then Greg, climbed up to the cab. Dragged a man down and out and through A&E as fast as they could. The guy really was missing an arm. He was either dead, or dying. He smelled dead. He smelled like he’d been dead for a long, long time. And he was immense, too, Dawn saw. Tall, yes, but broad and heavyset. Like a wrestler. He wouldn’t be wrestling anymore, though, because his right hand was gone. The wound, she saw, was ragged and horrible.

  But Wayne was checking for a pulse even as he pushed the gurney toward the operating theater, even as he shouted at Debbie to follow. He knew what he was about, even if Dawn didn’t.

  The pain in her belly hit again. So tight she thought the baby would pop right out.

  Not now. Not yet. Not yet!

  “He’s alive. Fuck…he’s alive?” Wayne, disbelieving. Dawn understood why. The guy smelled like a corpse.

  Then the other man got down from the cab and fell to the floor.

  There was no one else around to help but Dawn. She pushed herself forward. The man might not have parked in the car park, but he might just have saved a man’s life. She was willing to give him a chance, and she wasn’t dying or sick.

  Just having a fucking baby, she thought.

  She noticed he wore a policeman’s uniform. Well, half of it.

  He had pale, torn and bloody legs. She got a hand under his shoulder.

  “Come on, I’ll help you up,” she said. “You’re safe now…”

  And he looked up with such gratitude. She noticed he was blind. He’s not looking…he’s listening…

  Hot on the heels of that thought?

  Shit…he drove here blind? Fucking blind?

  Then it hit her so hard her knees buckled. A dream she’d had. And like déja vù, jamais vu, she saw the past and the future played out and rolled up into one.

  She buckled and dropped her and him both to the floor.

  64

  Something was coming through the unnatural darkness. Dawn ran. She didn’t know what it was that she ran from, but it was something terrible, something new for a new world, a world of setting skies and burning, scalding rain.

  She ran through the rain feeling it burning on her bare shoulders. She was fleet, too fleet for a pregnant woman…but then she wasn’t gravid, was she? Not here. Not in the dream. Not anymore.

  She was faster than she’d ever been in her life. Faster now than she’d been when she was a schoolgirl. She’d been only fifteen, gawky, gangling, and fast, then. Now? She ran like an arrow, thin still, but stronger now, even though she felt older, like a woman, not a girl.

  She felt older, yes, and faster…and she wasn’t even out of breath. It felt good to run, and right, despite (what are you running from, Dawn?) the thing out in the dust swirling and the dark blanket of a purple sky.

  Someone ran beside her, feet pounding hard on wet pavement. They ran between the hot and dirty raindrops. Her companion was a man, she thought. A man with bare feet, running and panting like he was tired. She wanted him tired. Wanted to leave him in the dust and the rain. Leave him. Because he meant the end.

  So she ran. Faster and harder than she’d ever thought she could. Her feet flew across the hot pavement. She was up on her toes, running for her life, her arms pumping and her elbows like sharp little pistons, driving her toward…?

  And there, just ahead now, so close, a door.

  The door was glass, but it was shattered and there was no red button.

  No red button to close the door because the door was broken. She was barely touching the ground and her bare feet skipped so fast below her light body that she didn’t even cut herself on the shards of glass that littered the ground.

  There was no red button. She couldn’t shut him out.

  She could shout, though.
Shout him out. Shout that bastard with no eyes away and get him gone and save herself (save the baby…save the baby…)

  She shouted. She fucking roared.

  Spittle flew from her lips and hit his barren blind eyes but he held her tight and she couldn’t move. She snapped with her teeth, trying to tear his face, his soft face. He couldn’t see her teeth, her bitch-mother’s maw, couldn’t dodge.

  He didn’t try.

  Blood dripped and his face was torn.

  But he held her and she couldn’t flee. Her baby…save the baby.

  Kill him. He meant the end…he was going to…going to…

  He pushed the button.

  X. The Last Child

  65

  Dawn screamed and screamed and pushed that red fucking button right out.

  Her baby was screaming and wailing. Save my baby, she thought. Don’t punish him because of his father’s sins, or mine. Please…GOD PLEASE.

  But someone was beside her and people were shouting and trying to save his life. Not her baby, someone else. Someone else in her dream, still. The blind man?

  You’re delirious, Dawn…something’s wrong with the delivery and you’re hallucinating…freaking out.

  She managed to turn her head. The man with one arm was under the knife beside her. Something stank like death.

  It’s him, she thought/felt. It’s my baby (boy…he’s a boy) and he reeks of death he’s the death bringer he’s the fucking DEVIL get him the FUCK OUT…

  Terror and sanity warred in her until she saw the man’s arm in a bucket on the floor. A bucket. The arm was rotten.

  It’s him, she thought, and something else popped into her tortured head. In the realm of the blind, the one-armed man is king.

  But that wasn’t how it went, was it? Was it?

  Focus, Dawn Elizabeth Graves, for your life and for your baby boy, come back right now. Come down, baby girl, come down.

  That made sense to her. It sounded like her mother. Dawn imagined sitting with her mother while they drank tea and talked about boys. It was something solid. She tried to hold on to it, because it was solid and heavy and she was as high as a kite (Did they give you something? Something for the pain?).

  But she grabbed onto the memory of her mother and let her pull her down, back toward the earth. Not all the way, but like she was falling though a cloud, but it was a low cloud and Dawn sensed that the ground was not, thankfully, a long way off.

  She was in a bed (table…it’s a table? Table in theater…I’m in a theater…best perform…dance, sing some fucking show tunes…)

  She screamed again and felt something rupture between her legs. She screamed she pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed and PUSHED…

  Until, whether quick or slow, she had no idea, something eased within her. A kind of numbness with pain in there. She was still in that low cloud of the drugs they’d given her (she remembered attacking the blind man, her contractions hitting like a truck driving into a hospital, the pills, yes, they’d given her pills…).

  I think I just gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, she thought, muzzy-headed, but proud and at the same time, terrified to look down.

  There wasn’t anyone to applaud.

  Where’s my fucking applause?

  Then, a face, over her. She realized someone had been holding her hand and talking the whole time, talking soft words.

  She turned her face to see. A woman.

  I know her, she thought.

  Deb…nearly…

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Something’s wrong…”

  “You’re fine, honey,” said the face.

  “Save the baby…please…my baby…”

  “You’re fine, baby’s fine…his head’s clear, Dawn…not far to go. Just another little push…”

  That face went away and she pushed and felt something turning inside her…then…

  Absolutely fucking bliss in the middle of the worst pain of her life and she remembered the woman’s name was Debbie. Not like falling out of the cloud at all, but like the cloud blew away in the wind.

  She’s a nurse, thought Dawn.

  Her heart rate, her panic, her delusions, all were slowing already after a massive dose of adrenaline and a moderate dose of hefty painkillers.

  How did I get here? she asked, but no words came out, because her baby was wailing. A hale sound, and suddenly he was there, swaddled. She could tell he was a boy because…because she was his mother.

  “He’s fine, honey…fine…you’re fine.”

  Her baby was wailing and she was crying but the man in the bed next to her wasn’t making a sound. Someone was working frantically on his (missing, mutilated) arm.

  It felt like heaven, with her child in her arms, and she smiled a great beaming smile and kissed him and couldn’t smell the scent of death and rot in the room because it had all blown away in the wind. The only thing that existed right there in the operating theater was her child and he smelled so good, so damn good.

  It felt like heaven even though the room stank like hell.

  “Can I get out of here?” she asked Debbie.

  Debbie smiled.

  “Well done, mummy,” she said. “Just stay still for a couple of minutes…get your breath…we’ve a bit of work to do yet, but then? Yes.”

  Dawn smiled at Debbie, a tired, beautiful smile, when something wet hit her, splashing across the bed (table), her body, her face, the baby in his swaddling. First, she thought the baby had done something wet, but it wasn’t the baby. She thought maybe the guy in the bed was spurting something vile from his horrible arm. But it wasn’t either of those things. She looked to her side, where Debbie had been, but she wasn’t there, not anymore. Just a mannequin or something, with a fountain where the head should be.

  Still tripping, she thought, but then she wasn’t tripping anymore, but screaming, because there was Death himself, pushing the mannequin (that’s Debbie, honey, she thought…she might have been broken right then, though, and wasn’t sure…) to one side like Debbie was no more than a hollow shell. The mannequin fell.

  Thump.

  The man, the creature, Death’s head wrapped in wire and a grimace, did not speak. Did not caper or jest, like Dawn always imagined Death himself would.

  The man was horribly disfigured, his flesh pulled to pieces by the wires that bit into his head. He held forth his hands like he was about to perform a great feat of magic, but all he needed to do was grin, and then he snatched her baby boy from her arms.

  66

  Paul didn’t know what had happened when the screaming began. He had no way of knowing, and for all the good he could do, he might as well be dead.

  Moments before the screams, he’d been outside the theater. He didn’t pace, like a man worried sick might, because he was blind and he’d just end up breaking his face on a wall. Instead, he stood, shifting from one foot to the other, conscious that he was in the way but unable to move for fear of falling down.

  He was worried sick, though, because the woman in the theater, giving birth, had been terrified at the sight of him. Not a little worried, like someone might be faced with the sight of his burned, abraded, and probably gaunt, blind face. No, it had been more than that. Real, deep terror.

  Aside from the woman’s fear and Paul’s confusion, he was beginning to think that his companion (not friend—Paul didn’t imagine a man like Frank had, or had need of, friends) was either dead or dying.

  And Paul Deacon? The blind policeman?

  Forgotten and useless to everyone. Another person getting in the way while everyone else bustled and did something important like saving lives. At some point, someone brought him a drink that tasted like tea with sugar and was perhaps the finest thing he’d ever experienced in his life. That someone had told him his name, which Paul promptly forgot, and led Paul to a seat.

  Paul still sat on the seat when the screaming began.

  67

  Screams from the theater, yes, but elsewhere, too. They wer
e terrible, horrifying screams and lent power because they came so abruptly. One second, Paul sipped tea. The next, people howling in agony from all quarters.

  A fearful sound, and even more so for a man with no sight.

  It sounded as though the woman birthing her baby was giving it her all—the cadence of her cries different to the others outside the theater. There was no sound from Frank. But throughout the entire hospital—blood and murder.

  At first, Paul didn’t know what to think. It didn’t make any sense. No sense at all. He was tired and blind. To him, it sounded fake, like something from a television movie. No one screamed like that in real life.

  It was echoes of the woman’s childbirth cries, nothing more…

  Of course it’s not.

  Cold terror crept up Paul Deacon’s spine, and he was back in the darkness underground (he’d never left that darkness, had he? He carried it with him always, now) with two psychopaths all over again.

  …crazy people stealing his sight.

  …a little dead brother bouncing at the foot of his bed.

  …a man, an old guy, giving him a cigarette.

  Paul frowned, confused by the shifting memories.

  Someone else joined the cacophony with their pain, off in another part of the hospital, and this time it really did sound like they were being killed.

  That’s because they are, said his subconscious, but he wasn’t one with his thoughts right then.

  Instead, he was sitting up in his bed, and there was an old guy on his bed, and his brother Joseph was bouncing. Like a demented rabbit.

  “Quit bouncing,” he said. “You’re dead.”