by Mark Morris
Sarah lobbed the phone to the end of the bed with an almost silent snarl, then pulled the duvet around her. Snuggling into the warmth and comfort, she slipped into an uneasy, restless sleep.
* * *
That had been Monday. Now it was Friday, and nothing had changed.
Sarah had quickly fallen into a new routine. It consisted of feigning sleep until Tim left in the morning, then shuffling down to the living room to eat and drink tea. On the first morning, she’d tried watching the television, only to turn it off in horror after a few seconds, the mutilated faces and hands of the breakfast TV hosts and the blood-soaked sofas repelling her.
The cartoon channels seemed safer initially, but after the first advert featuring a young girl with blood-soaked hooks in her cheeks came on, the TV stayed off.
Instead, she read. Not the magazines she’d previously devoured—the bleeding faces of the smiling models on the covers turned her stomach—but books. They became an escape, a window back into a world she’d known, lived in, understood.
Whatever was going on was still going on. Even with her isolation and media avoidance, the clues were all over the house—literally. Every morning there were fresh drops of blood in the sink, on the bathroom floor, the kettle. She could track Tim’s movements by the red dots on the floor and smears on surfaces, like some grisly dance-step diagram. Each day, after getting up, she spent the best part of an hour cleaning the surfaces and floors, trying not to think about what she was doing and why.
Managing Tim through the door was increasingly hard. She’d claimed fever for forty-eight hours, until he started sounding scared, threatening to call an ambulance. Wednesday night, he’d begged to be let in to see her, wept when she’d denied him access. It had been a horrible scene, but she’d promised him that she loved him and that she needed the space and that she wasn’t seriously hurt, just ill, and eventually he’d left her alone. She texted him more after that, to let him know she still cared— and, most importantly, to keep him away from her.
On Thursday morning her door handle was caked with dried blood, his palm print stark on the white plastic, and she’d done some weeping of her own.
And now it was Friday. And she had to leave the house.
She’d arranged the doctor’s appointment the previous day, having promised Tim she’d do so. She had to, anyway. Work would need a sick note, or they’d stop her pay—she’d seen it happen before, it was the kind of thing the firm was really strict on. Of course, she wasn’t running the fever she’d been feigning for the last week. But: “There is something wrong with me,” she said ruefully to the empty house.
* * *
She spent most of the cab ride to the surgery with her eyes closed behind her dark glasses, trying to shut out her brief glimpse of the driver’s wounded face and hands, attempting instead to rehearse what she was going to say to the doctor. She’d been working on the problem since she’d made the appointment yesterday morning. It would have to be mental health, obviously; there simply weren’t any physical symptoms. That worried her. Officially the firm was as supportive around mental health issues as other illnesses, but in practice she suspected that kind of sick note—especially one with the dread word “stress” anywhere near it—would probably put a damper on any further career progression.
The sound of her own laugh surprised her, her underused vocal cords producing a noise somewhere between a cough and a bark. Her concerns about retaining her job, when she could not bring herself to leave the house without battling waves of panic, seemed pitiful, bleakly comic.
The realisation hit her then, in the back of the cab, the conclusion she’d avoided all week as she devoured paperback after paperback and slept too long and wiped drops of blood from door handles, sinks and floors, absorbed in her new normal.
There was no going back to work.
She tried to picture it, tried to imagine the office, her colleagues; faces torn, bleeding, the thin sharp metal pulling, twisting…
Her sob did not sound much different to her laugh.
* * *
She let the cabbie keep the change from the tenner—anything to avoid more bloody coins in her hand. There was a self-service check-in system at the waiting room (good), but it was a touchscreen (bad). She used a paper napkin she’d found in her coat pocket to wipe the surface before using it, but even so, a thin film of rusty brown coated the screen and stuck to her fingertips. She went straight to the bathroom after signing herself in to wash her hands, but there was blood, dried and fresh, on the taps, in the sink basin, and all over the door handles.
She rinsed her hands, pulling her sleeve over her fingers to operate the sink, and again to pull the door open to leave. Back in the foyer, she glanced through the glass into the waiting room proper.
It was a charnel house. There were maybe fifteen people in there, mostly old, but a few her age, and a couple of young mothers with toddlers. The blood was everywhere—on the chairs, soaking into the clothes. It darkened the carpeted floor, the blackened trail of footprints reminding her of dirty melting snow. She felt a strange sensation in her head, behind her eyes, as though the world she was seeing was flattening, becoming distant. It was disorientating, but not entirely unpleasant. The distance allowed her to watch without flinching as the hooks tugged, flexed, moving a hand over a mouth here, crossing a leg there. She wondered if this glassy bubble she was in would hold, allow her to rejoin the world somehow, live with this new reality. She suspected not. It felt both insubstantial and brittle.
Still, for now, she watched. And because she watched, she finally saw the toddler. It was a boy, to judge by the haircut and clothing, and it was playing near another child, moving coloured wooden squares from one end of a wire path to another. The other child was older, and Sarah could see the hooks in the back of its hands as it ran a toy car back and forth across the floor.
But the first child, the one playing with the blocks, had no hooks at all.
She stared at the child, without thought, mesmerised by its undamaged skin.
“Sarah Meld to Room Seven, Room Seven for Sarah Meld, thank you.”
Sarah blinked, attempted to swallow, but produced only a dry click. The announcement from inside the waiting room had been muffled but clear enough. She pulled open the door (the habit of using the sleeve of her coat to cover her hand already almost instinctive) and stalked through the room and into the corridor that held the doctors’ offices.
The corridor was in some ways the worst part so far; the harshness of the overhead strip lights gave the bloody tracks on the linoleum a garish glare, especially where the darker puddles had been smeared by a dragged foot. She walked as close to the wall as she could, carefully placing each footstep as clear of the blood as possible, like a child solemnly avoiding the cracks in the pavement.
The door to Room Seven stood open.
The doctor was in profile as Sarah entered, but even a quick glance showed the redness and telltale flashes of metal in his face and hands. Blood pattered on the keyboard and corner desk as he typed into his computer. She got an impression of blue eyes under bushy salt-and-pepper brows and a bald head, wrinkles and laugh lines, a long clean-shaven jawline.
“Sarah, is it? Come and take a seat.” His Welsh accent was soft, his voice smooth and kind. The chair he indicated was against the wall next to his desk. She would be facing his direction, but not directly opposite him. She sat hesitantly, making sure her long coat covered the bloodstains on the seat. More blood was pooled at her feet, so she stared straight ahead, at the wall above the examination couch in the corner. She hoped the sunglasses would hide the fact that she wasn’t looking at him.
“So, I understand you’ve been poorly—running a temperature, headaches, that kind of thing. Can you tell me how you’re feeling now?”
She was relieved to find the rehearsed words came to her lips easily enough, as she stared at the wall.
“I wasn’t honest with my work about what’s been wrong with me.”
<
br /> “I see.”
The silence sat, punctuated by a slow, quiet dripping. She quickly started talking, raising her voice slightly to smother the sound. “I’ve been feeling afraid. Afraid to leave the house. To talk to anyone.”
“Can you remember when you first started feeling like this?”
“Monday.”
“Did anything happen on Monday that made you feel this way?”
She felt her voice catch in her throat, the prepared lines momentarily refusing to come. “It… I… no. I was just…” The hooked, bleeding hand holding her money flashed into her mind, and she swallowed. “…I was just getting coffee. At the station.”
He shifted in his seat, and through her peripheral vision she could see he was now looking straight at her. She continued to stare at the wall.
“At the station?”
“Train station. I was on my way to work.”
“I see. And has the feeling been constant, or does it come and go?”
“Constant. I mean, if I read it’s not so bad. But even watching telly, I can’t… I get scared.” She’d thought about it carefully. Stay close to the truth. As close as she could without sounding crazy.
The doctor leaned forward, and all of a sudden the dripping became a steady patter, and she looked before she could help herself. The hooks in his face were making the skin bulge out, in his brows, his cheeks. The blood was running down his face in a small stream, almost flowing off his chin onto the floor.
Her jaw clenched against a sob. Trying to look away, but unable to, her eyes darted from wound to wound.
“Sarah, I have to…” The smaller hooks pulled and twisted his lips, and as his mouth opened there was a flash of silver behind his teeth, tugging at his tongue, and the shock of it was powerful enough that she lost most of what he’d said, the words senseless syllables which fell around her, empty noise.
“...glasses off, please?”
Numbly, trembling, she folded the glasses and placed them in her lap, keeping her eyes on them. She couldn’t look back into that kindly, ruined face. She could not.
“Sarah, are you feeling scared now?”
“Yes. Yes, very.”
“Is it… Would you prefer to see a woman doctor?”
“No. It wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Okay, Sarah.”
He went on with the questions. How well was she sleeping, on a scale of one to five? How anxious was she? Was work especially stressful? How were her relationships? Had she ever had anxiety or depression before? She answered them all carefully, quietly, staring at her sunglasses and trying to ignore the dripping sounds.
At length the doctor sighed, and his chair creaked as he moved away from his desk, closer to her.
“Sarah, I can tell this is making you feel very uncomfortable, and I’m sorry about that. Can you tell me why you think it is that you’ve suddenly started feeling like this, this past week? What is it about being around other people that makes you anxious?”
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“…hooks.”
She couldn’t help it. The sound put the image in her head. Sharp, thin hooks piercing skin. It was all she could see.
She heard him shift in his chair.
“Hooks?”
Drip, drip, drip.
“Sarah…”
Drip.
“Nothing you tell me in here has to go any further if…”
Drip.
“…you want it to. It’s called…”
Drip.
“…confidentiality. You really can tell me…”
Drip.
“I see hooks. Fish hooks. In people’s skin.” The words came out in a monotone. She stared at her glasses, willing her mouth to stop, but it didn’t. “In hands. Legs. Faces. I see them pulling. Every time someone moves, I see a hook in them pulling them, making them move. Everyone. Even the people on the TV. I see blood everywhere. I can’t stop seeing it. It’s horrible. I can’t stand to look at anyone, be around anyone.” She took another breath, to say more, and then realised there was nothing more to say, and let it out in a long, shaky sigh.
“I see.” The doctor spoke gently, kindly. Sarah could feel herself trembling, but the sensation was distant, indifferent. Dislocated. “Is that why you won’t look at me? You can see hooks in me?”
“Yes, in…” She thought of the child in the waiting room, then dismissed the image. “…everyone.”
“But not in yourself.”
It wasn’t a question. She felt a hollowness in her stomach.
“No, I… no.”
“Well, that must be horrible. I hope I don’t sound patronising, but I think you’re very brave to tell me about this. You must have been petrified, this last week.”
She nodded, as the hollowness in her stomach spread to her legs and chest, bringing a numbness that was chilling, yet also vaguely comforting.
“Luckily…” He opened a drawer in his desk, and took out a small plastic container. “…we’ve got just the ticket here. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.”
She watched his bloody hand open the box and saw the set of silvery hooks twinkling on a bed of cotton wool. She felt the numbness creep into her mind, filling up behind her eyes. Her scalp prickled.
“It’ll only take a few minutes, and then it’ll all be over. I promise.” The doctor took her right hand, and she felt it move, something attached but distant. The warmth of his touch felt insubstantial. A single tear welled up in her eye. She blinked and barely felt it roll down her cheek.
“Just a small pinch…” He slid the hook into the back of her hand. There was a momentary tug, the welling of blood, and then the hook and wound both vanished.
The doctor held up his own right hand, and she saw his hook had vanished too.
His ruined face wrenched into a smile. “See?”
She nodded.
“Ready for the next one?”
She gave no reply, only offered her right hand and turned her head away.
The pinch of the second hook was even fainter than the first.
EMERGENCE
Tim Lebbon
Sometimes it’s turning left or right that changes your life. Sometimes it’s staring straight ahead, not paying attention to what’s around you in case it’s dangerous, or unpleasant, or something you wouldn’t want to go to sleep that night remembering. On occasion closing your eyes and just standing still will alter everything, because as the world parts and flows around you, you cannot help but feel its tides.
Sometimes, it’s recognising that a place you once thought of as normal really, really isn’t.
That was why I went closer to the tunnel. I’m naturally curious, and hidden places fascinate me as much as paths that lead away from the beaten track. I like to explore. I don’t know why it was that particular day and hour, but something about it drew me when I passed. It could be that I glimpsed the skull from the corner of my eye. Maybe it was the smell.
I’d climbed this steep path and run back down it thirty or forty times. It was a favourite run of mine, starting with a solid, unrelenting thousand-foot climb from the small car park to the top of the mountain, then a good trail run around the summit until I descended back down to the car. I’d cover seven or eight miles and spend two hours on my own, just me and the wild and the breeze, the views and the sheep, the sense that I was alone in a wilderness only barely touched by humankind. It was glorious.
Halfway down the heavily wooded lower portion of the slope, I skidded to a stop and stood staring at the tunnel mouth. I was panting, sweating, and I couldn’t quite explain the draw it had over me. I’d glanced at it a dozen times before but never gone closer than this. It was little more than an arch of rough brickwork, partly broken away by years of plant growth and frost damage, half-buried by leaf falls and tumbled tree branches, and enclosing a half-moon of deep darkness that seemed to lead nowhere. I’d often wondered why it was there and who had built it. I assumed it was the remains of an old drai
nage culvert constructed by some farmer or landowner long ago. The hillsides were scattered with such remnants, evidence of past labours that seemed to serve little or no purpose. It was something else that attracted me to places like this.
I climbed the small bank and moved closer. The darkness inside didn’t feel intimidating, I wasn’t afraid, but it was deep and heavy, like a weight luring me down. In the shadow of the brick overhang was a skull, picked clean by birds and insects. It sat on a carpet of old leaves and twigs. Scattered around were smaller bones, the shattered remains of whatever creature had come there to die. A sheep, probably. I’d seen them before, corpses taken apart amongst the heathers and ferns of the wild hillsides. The skull was smallish, and there were scraps of wool snagged on brambles and rolled into dirty clumps. A lamb, then. I wondered what had killed the poor creature.
I edged closer and saw more of the tunnel mouth. It was strange seeing such skilled brickwork in this wild place, and I tried to imagine the people who had worked there. It must have been an effort lugging bricks and mortar up the steep slope, and the purposes of the tunnel still eluded me. It was set deep into a steep bank, trees growing above it. I could see heavy roots dangling down inside, and dislodged bricks littered the ground.
The entrance was half-buried by years of leaf falls, much of it turned to mulch and providing home to ferns and on one side a bramble bush.
I dug into the hip pocket of my rucksack and pulled out my head torch. The batteries were new, but I paused just for a second before turning it on, wondering how long it had been since the tunnel’s interior had been touched by light.
I looked down at the skull close to my left knee. “So what were you doing here?” I asked. For a second afterwards, the silence was loaded. I laughed and turned on the torch.
It revealed no surprises inside. The curved ceiling sloped down, as did the floor, the tunnel burrowing gently beneath the bank. There were more fallen bricks, plants, dead leaves, a few pieces of lonely litter either dropped there by snacking hikers or blown by the wind. I played the light around, crouching in an effort to see further. I already knew I was going to venture inside.
