Cold Hands

by John Niven

  ‘Mike! Be careful. She’s not hurt. She’s got a bulletproof vest on.’

  ‘Help’s on its way.’ His voice came disembodied down the long hallway. ‘Are you armed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then stay put. They’ll be here in a few minutes. Lady.’ He raised his voice, shouting to the empty house. ‘This is over. Come on out and give yourself up.’

  Silence. Darkness. I pressed myself against the wall, the gun held tightly in front of me. Directly across the corridor from me lay the open door to one of the guest bedrooms. It connected to a bathroom, then onto another bedroom on the other side. Suddenly, in the periphery of my vision, I thought I saw a change in the density of the blackness through the doorway, something moving fast across the bedroom. I screamed and fired three times, the muzzle flash briefly lighting up the hallway, strobing madly as I blew holes in the drywall, the concussion ringing in my ears.

  ‘It’s her! Mike! She’s moving towards you! Mike!’

  ‘Stay where you are, Donnie!’

  I strained to listen, my ears ringing but my eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness. To my right the long hallway stretched off towards four steps that led up into the living area, towards Mike’s voice. To my left lay the utility room, with its connecting door to the big garage.

  Moments passed in silence.

  I heard a noise far away, up towards Mike, something breaking, or falling over, then Mike was shouting ‘HOLD IT!’ then two sharp reports, a fast BANGBANG and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor, then silence. I hugged the wall, trembling the gun pointed straight ahead of me.

  ‘Donnie?’ Relief as Mike’s voice came back down the hallway. ‘Stay put. I’m going to check on the body.’

  I could hear him in the distance, boards creaking as he moved across the hardwood floor, moving further away from me. I crawled forward on my elbows, the fear anesthetising the pain in my leg now, poking my head out into the corridor, the gun extended in front of me. Silence. Then something very faint, like a grunt or a gasp.

  ‘MIKE! MIKE!’ I shouted into the darkness.

  I became aware of a wet, patterning sound from somewhere far down the hallway, like water from a burst pipe spattering onto wood. Maybe the shooting had damaged a –

  The house lights erupted back on, blinding me.

  I looked up and saw her move out of the shadows and reveal herself at the top of the short flight of stairs, maybe seventy feet away.

  She looked like she’d been dipped in blood.

  I started screaming.

  Her arms were extended, the butcher’s knife in one hand, the chrome revolver in the other, showing them to me.

  I kept screaming as I brought the pistol up and started firing, seeing her disappear in the muzzle flash, ducking left as I blew holes all around where she had been, hitting the walls and the ceiling, turning the gun left and pumping the trigger, blowing holes in the drywall she disappeared behind, my ears singing, thick cordite smoke choking me as I kept pumping the trigger and screaming and then the slide locked open, the gun scalding hot in my hands and the trigger clacking uselessly, and I was throwing the empty gun down and running, careering down the hallway away from her, blood sloshing in my left trainer.

  43

  I BURST INTO the utility room and stood panting, clutching my leg amid the washer, the dryer and the plastic wicker baskets. The clothes horse, the bottles of detergent and fabric softener and the laundry smell; the ultra totems of domesticity madly, incongruently alien. I could hear her coming thumping down the hallway and I froze – weaponless, defenceless.

  Through the door and into the garage, feeling the drop in temperature as I came into the huge, fluorescent-lit, breeze-block space we used as extra storage. I pulled the flimsy deadbolt on the door behind me and looked around. Up at the far end was an assortment of packing crates, boxes and old furniture. A workbench with some tools. An axe for splitting wood.

  I grabbed the axe and bolted for the back of the garage just as I heard the door into the laundry room being kicked open behind me. Threading my way through the crates and boxes, I crouched down and tried not to breathe. The door was rattling, then banging as she started kicking it. Five or six hard kicks before the wood splintered, the door flew open and she came down the steps.

  I was only thirty or forty feet away and it took all my strength not to scream out loud at the sight of her brightly lit under the cold strip lighting. The blood. She was soaked in blood. She looked around the garage and started scraping the knife along the barrel of the gun, like she was sharpening it. I cradled the axe as she came nearer. Twenty feet away.

  ‘William . . . William.’ Her voice in sing-song was terrible. Ten feet. So close. ‘I might just go and find Walt and get it over with. I think you must have sent him out to hide in that helicopter . . .’ She turned away from me.

  I leapt out, the axe cocked back and already coming down towards her. She wheeled, gun extended, the shaft of the axe smashing into her arm, the gun going down and off, the shot deafening off the breeze-block walls.

  Searing heat.

  The blast from the Python disintegrating my left thigh, firing straight into the knife wound, obliterating tissue and bone, sending me screaming onto the oil-stained floor. Faint now, on the verge of passing out as she climbed on top of me, her face just inches from mine, blood (hers? Mike’s?) dripping onto my face. I could feel her working with the knife, slicing at me, cutting something off.

  Finished now.

  She came up with a long strip of my shirt and started tying it around my leg, above the gunshot wound, tugging it tightly. ‘You need to live, William. Live.’

  Oh, Sam. Oh, Walt. I’m sorry. I could see their faces swimming in front of me now.

  ‘There.’ She was sitting on my chest. ‘I’m going to go and kill Walt now, William. I’ll just stab him to death, I think. I’ll leave the face so you can view the body. Then I’ll put the gun in my mouth and I’ll be gone.’

  The gun. It was lying on the floor, next to her knee, just inches from my right hand. I punched it and sent it skittering away a few feet. She brought the knife up and held it in front of my face. ‘Don’t be silly.’ I brought my left hand up, palm outwards and open, almost like I was going to high-five her, and brought it down straight onto the point of the knife, forcing it down hard, the eight-inch blade skewering my palm as I pushed down, the cut widening – two inches, three – as the blade passed out the back of my hand. I felt no pain. She looked confused, puzzled, as I clamped my good right leg around her waist, holding her tightly. I grabbed her knife wrist with my right hand and started twisting the blade towards her. She began tugging, trying to pull the knife out, to free it, but I kept going, pulling her down towards me with the right leg, pushing the knife towards her with both hands, the cold metal skewering my left palm grating, feeling terrible and alien, my blood streaming down the chequered metal grip. She slashed at my face with her free hand, tearing my cheek open with her nails. She went to do it again and I snapped up at her and got her thumb between my teeth, biting down savagely, hearing her scream, tasting coppery blood spurting into my mouth, the two of us locked in an insane death grip now, like wrestlers in an intricate knot, sweat pouring down my face, and still I kept pushing up with the knife, pulling her forward with my good leg, feeling the muscles in that leg begin to rend and tear, unable even to feel my left leg any more as she tried to rip her thumb out of my mouth, feeling my teeth grinding against bone, the point of the knife just inches from her throat now. In desperation she suddenly let go of the handle of the knife and lunged for the gun. I grabbed the back of her head with my right hand and pulled her down towards me, fixing the handle of the knife against my chest so hard it felt like my breastbone might crack, my left hand still skewered upon it, the blade pointing straight up as I brought her down onto it. With everything I had, everything I was, I forced her chin onto the tip of the blade, the knife entering the soft flesh at the bottom of her chin, beneath
her mouth. Using my right hand on the back of her head, rising up off the floor with the effort, I pulled her skull towards me and heard a soft crack. I could see the blade moving up through her mouth, through her tongue, skewering her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

  ‘Mmmff. Urrr,’ she said.

  A louder crack, like you hear when boning a chicken, as the knife broke through the bone in the roof of her mouth. Blood pouring out of her mouth, all over me, as I pulled harder and felt something give, saw a ridge actually appearing under the flesh beside her nose as the blade passed upwards, deep into her skull, somewhere behind her eyes now, her eyes flickering as though she were trying to see what was happening in there.

  Her eyes locked dreadfully onto mine, burning with thirty years of hatred. I pulled as hard as I could and the knife slid all the way up, her chin smacking down onto the back of my impaled hand while, with my right hand stretched over the top of her head, I actually felt the tip of the blade knock against the inside of her skull. With a sigh she shuddered and went limp, a deadweight, the kebab formed by the butt of the knife, then my hand, then her head.

  I fell back, drenched with sweat and gore.

  Suddenly I was aware of how wet the floor beneath me was. I had broken the crude tourniquet during the struggle and blood was flowing from what remained of my left leg. We lay there in this strange embrace. I stared at the strip lighting above me, the glow from the tubes seeming to spread out, to envelop the whole room in a white fizz.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.

  To her? To Sammy? To Walt? To all the people she’d killed because of what I’d done? I didn’t know. The white fizz was increasing, surrounding me like warm snow, the snow that surrounded the house, that enveloped this part of the world so much. And then I saw Sammy and Walt in the snow, running after Herby, laughing and throwing snowballs. I’m somewhere behind them, off in the distance, to one side, half in shadow, where I spent much of my life. The sun is warm above us, reflecting off the snow, creating a steadily brightening glare, the glare growing in intensity, blotting everything out, everything except a steady, rhythmical thumping noise, Sammy and Walt looking up into the sky now, shielding their eyes, trying to see something I cannot see. Because the glare is drowning everything now, Sammy and Walt and Herby and the landscape disappearing, fading like a photograph dropped in water, everything becoming white, and I am leaving my body and becoming part of it and I am glad to go.

  I’m sorry.

  Goodbye.

  Walt.

  Postscript

  Coldwater, Florida

  Fifteen Pints. Nearly two gallons. I sometimes think of it that way when I’m gassing up the car; after my finger’s been on the trigger for however long it takes to pump two gallons, I’ll think, ‘That’s how much they gave me.’ Or four quarts. That’ll cross my mind at the supermarket, buying milk. I’ll picture four of those big quart milk jugs, brimming with blood.

  They did what they could with my leg, but there was so much tissue loss. It aches most of the time, but I get along well enough with the painkillers and the cane.

  It hasn’t been as easy to fix Walt. He cries for his mother a lot, at night, when he wakes from the dreams he has to endure. He adjusted to having nine fingers better than he adjusted to losing the less tangible things she removed. He was prescribed strong sedatives for a time, but they left him stumbling and sluggish all day. We gradually weaned him off them, but now I lie awake most nights listening for the screams that will send me running to his bedroom. ‘She’s coming!’ He’ll be crying and I’ll slip my arms around him and whisper, ‘It’s OK, you’re safe. I’m here. Daddy’s here.’ Sometimes I’ll catch him looking at me and I wonder if he’s thinking about the things I did, the things he heard that night. We don’t discuss it together, only in therapy.

  Neither of us went to the funeral. Sammy and her father, buried on the same day, in the family plot outside Regina. It was huge news. I was still in the ICU and Walt was pretty much catatonic. Months later he asked to see his mom’s grave and I took him up there. He didn’t cry, couldn’t seem to make the connection that the bones of the woman who loved him and nurtured him were laid under his feet. I tried not to think about what was under there. That video. The morgue. She killed nine people, Gill Docherty, aka Irene Kramer. I list their names here.

  Paul Cardew

  Samantha Myers

  Sgt Richard Danko, Regina PD

  Officer Sara Hudson, Regina PD

  Sgt Matt Helm, Regina PD

  Jan Franklin

  William Robertson

  Samuel Myers

  Michael Rawls

  Collectively these people left behind more than sixty close relatives; partners, parents, children. Who can count the sleepless nights, the screaming and crying? The empty hours spent staring into space, imagining their ends, their final moments. Because murder is a cluster bomb, a daisy-cutter, napalm, levelling all around it, spreading pain and destruction down the years, far beyond its epicentre.

  We have a lot of money, Walt and I (Sammy’s estate, the insurance), and, in theory, when his grandmother dies, we will get a lot more. But there is litigation in process, Mrs Myers claiming my marriage to her daughter was fraudulent, illegal. She is angry and doubly bereaved. She wants to make sure that Walt inherits everything when he is twenty-one. That it does not come to me as his guardian if she dies before that. I don’t care. I won’t fight it.

  With the money, without a job and the lack of friends or family, comes time to think. What happened that day on the riverbank, in those frenzied moments that would entrain the loss and ruin of so many lives? ‘As flies to wanton boys . . .’ Mr Cardew said. But I was worse than that, worse than Tommy, worse than Banny the bully. I was the bully’s lackey, his acolyte, knowing that terrible wrong was being done but looking to impress anyway, to impress by outdoing. ‘If everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you?’ they used to say, back in my time and place. Yes. A bigger bridge. A higher bridge. That low stone wall, me leaping high in the air, caught against the spring sunshine, caught in the gleeful, astonished gazes of my friends.

  Reading, always reading here in the Florida sunshine, I came across a definition of hell somewhere – maybe in Joyce? – which said that the sinner is forced to spend his time in hell in the company of the people with whom he committed his worst sins. Often, when I try to think of Sammy, when I try to reach for a comforting image of her to ease me into sleep – her voice, her face, a moment we shared – it is her near namesake I find waiting for me in the recesses of my mind, with his swagger, his words, his spittle hitting the ground as he straightens his Harrington. Yes. It is right, it is salutary, that I should spend so much time in Banny’s company.

  Walt is nearly eleven now. Almost the same age as Craig was when we killed him. (You see? You still can’t say it. When we killed him? When you killed him.) No one at school knows how he lost his pinkie, what really happened to him. My son has a backstory too now. My legacy to him. (‘And he punishes the children for the sins of the fathers . . .’)

  Sometimes, when I watch Walt lost in a rare moment of play, or made childishly happy by an unexpected treat or favour, the way the face flowers so brightly, opening out towards you, I understand her best. I picture the boy fished from a river after days and laid broken and sightless on a metal slab and her rage floods me like wine, heady and intoxicating, making me sway on the balls of my feet. Every parent has easy mental access to this wind tunnel. You think about your response – about the knife, the gun, the baseball bat. How many are afforded the opportunity to step into it in the real world? I have come across a few examples here on the sofa, or out by the palm-fringed pool, lightly smeared with Valium, a strong drink by my side and a warm book in my lap. The German father of boys murdered and daughters raped by Russian troops, Russian troops who were very soon outflanked and captured themselves. The Wehrmacht officer allowed him his time in the barn with two of the guilty men. He ignored the proffered Walther and went to
work with shears and a chair leg. And against that – the Muslim father praying for clemency for the drunks who mowed down his son in a stolen car. The responses to atrocity as varied as human belief itself.

  Or this, from an essay by George Orwell. I wrote the quotation out in one of the yellow legal pads I keep on my desk in the study.

  Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

  Orwell wrote this in Allied Occupied Europe in 1945, after witnessing the cruelties perpetrated on captured Nazi soldiers. And, despite my own experience, I think Orwell is, on the whole, right. Most people, given the chance to abuse or torment someone who had once done the same to them, would turn away. In most of us the half-life of hatred is short.

  But not in everyone.

  Some people can keep it alive in the breast for many years. And even then most of these people, if they were offered the opportunity to avenge their wrong, to pluck the eyeball or the tooth that they are due, most of them would still turn and walk away.

  But not all of them. A few will reach into their bag and start taking things out. They’ll pour the ether onto the gauze and walk straight towards you. They’ll scrape the knife along the gun barrel as they come looking for you in the dark. And when you call out for help, for your mother or for your God, they will not hear you. They’ll smile and keep on coming.

  I remember the day over twenty years ago that Mr Cardew gave me the Complete Shakespeare, the day I got the three Highers (ABB) that satisfied my conditional offer from Lampeter. I had been Donnie for over a year then and neither of us slipped very often. William was gone. We’d talked of practical things, about what I could expect at university, about the halfway house I’d live in for a few months over the remainder of the summer, to acclimatise before term began and I took up a place in the halls of residence. He’d be visiting me. ‘Don’t go getting drunk out of your mind at any of these freshers’ parties now,’ he’d said, smiling, as he extended his hand. We shook, there in that sad room where so much had happened in the last seven years, where Wilfred Owen’s rifles had stuttered, where Birnham Wood had walked to Dunsinane, where Ted Hughes’s Jaguar had prowled. He left the book on the table and I read the inscription after he’d gone. ‘Now make yourself proud.’