Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  I didn't need to ask where I was. I recognised the view of redbrick walls through the room's single window. The Royal Victoria Infirmary, on the northern edge of the city. There was something I needed to ask, though:

  'The old man, is he. . ?'

  Aimee looked askance at me and I didn't even begin to understand. I belong to the modern school of 'wave-your-own-stupidity-like-a-flag-rather-than-try-and-hide-it.' I was clearing my throat; that was something my father had always done whenever he broached a subject he found particularly distasteful, never otherwise.

  'The old man,' I said again. 'The tramp. Is he dead?' I knew he was. I had taken his non-existent pulse, felt the ice rotting under his skin but, however stupid it was, I still needed to hear someone else say it out loud.

  She shook her head, clearly not understanding, and for a moment had me doubting myself. Only then I saw his bottle and his hands held out and I saw him staring, his eyes burrowing into the back of mine, and I thought: 'Don't you dare. . .'

  Oh, Christ. . . It was all there.

  'The old man. I hit him with the car.' It was like being an unwilling actor trapped in a Noh play, going round and around in word circles. No matter how many times I said it, or how many different ways I said it, always the same outcome: incomprehension. Aimee talking to me as if I were a child, explaining:

  'You hit a lamppost, Declan. No one else was involved. You didn't hurt anyone. You didn't kill anyone. You hit a lamppost.'

  Two

  Aimee left me to fetch a doctor. I was asleep if you can call it sleep as opposed to being semi-comatose before she returned.

  Unconscious, I drifted into some pretty gloomy thoughts; my own personal darkness that lived with me through the comfort of sleep and nagged, chipping away into the waking up on the other side.

  The morning after the accident I woke up bathed in a stinking sweat, unsure how much of what I remembered was owed to the night's hideous dreams. The accident, the look on the old man's face as he stepped out in front of the car, how it changed as he died.

  I was alone in the room. I could have cried. It was the usual, cheerless hospital lockup with its insipid blue colour scheme and twin reeks of ammonia and disinfectant. I had been tagged around the wrist like a new born baby: Shea, Declan Thomas, was written on the plastic bracelet in block capitals of blue biro ink. I guess that was in case one of us suddenly forgot who I was. And the worst of it was that I could picture it: Nurses and doctors on a frantic room to ward to room search looking for my lost body, not asking anyone, just grabbing patients by the wrists and checking them off on a register of missing bodies.

  Aimee had left her book open like a dead butterfly on the small window-side table, and next to it, her Discman, sandwiches, coke can, and a small selection of compact discs: Jules Sheer, Sister Double Happiness, Liz Phair, Dave Matthews, Carlos Santana, and two others I couldn't read for the light reflecting off their slipcases.

  I stretched, and again that isolated flare of pain in my lower ribs. Tentatively, I felt out the tender spots, which seemed to be a whole hand's worth below my right pectoral. The doctor's diagnosis chart was hooked to the metal frame at the foot of the bed. An educated guess placed broken or fractured ribs somewhere on my roster of injuries. I struggled against the restraining blankets to sit up far enough to reach the chart, but it wasn't happening so I resigned myself to at least a morning of lying prostrate with nothing to look at comfortably but a three foot square strip of ceiling above my head.

  The wishbone headphones of the hospital radio headset were hanging within reach, but even as I started to reach for them a ghost DJ inside my head dedicated the next track to Mary, the woman on Ward 3 dying of leukaemia. I gave up stretching.

  Three

  For such a young example of his trade Stephen Carroll wore his careworn compassion with comfortable resignation. Regular eighty-seven hour shifts with the terminally ill had taken their toll on his washed-out smile. If I was meant to feel reassured by the sight of my doctor stifling a yawn, one of us was going to be mightily disappointed, and no prizes for guessing which one. I felt about as hopeful as Chicken Licken when he thought he was going to have to hold the sky up all by himself.

  'Ah, how are you feeling this morning, Mr.-,' Carroll glanced down at his chart. I felt like thrusting my bracelet under his nose. Might as well get some use out of the damned thing. 'Shea? Those ribs feeling tender?'

  'Those ones and these ones,' I joked weakly, touching both sides of my ribcage to show I was trying to be funny. It raised a glimmer, but not much of one. I decided against asking if I would ever play the piano again. I got the rather frosty impression that he didn't appreciate my sense of humour.

  'Good, good. And how about that head? Fetched it a nasty crack. You are a very lucky man, Mr. Shea. Still, the bleeding has stopped and there doesn't appear to have been any further complications. Of course, we'll want to keep you in for observation, just to be on the safe side.'

  'Of course. I feel fine,' I lied, hoping to head off the rest of his lecture. I'm sure he didn't intend to sound sanctimonious. To do what he was doing he must have cared at some point. Given similar circumstances two years ago Carroll might have sounded genuinely concerned, but now everything about him, the way he held himself, the way he peered down his nose at my notes, said he had seen too much to fret about an idiot who wrapped his sports car around a lamppost at three o'clock in the morning. 'What happened? I remember the car spinning, but after that. . .' I shrugged, feigning convenient memory lapse in the hope he would let slip something about the old man's condition. The way I had it worked out, Aimee must have wanted to shield me from the truth until she knew I was strong enough to cope with the fact I had killed a man. Carroll didn't strike me as being the sensitive sort. I expected the truth, and put bluntly, but what I got was more confusion.

  A tiny frown furrowed his brow. He had been talking to Aimee. We understood each other. No placating lies. I hadn't earned any.

  'Giving you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Shea, you lost control of your car, as you say, and span, out of control, into a lamppost. You received mild cranial trauma from the impact of the collision and fractured three ribs, one splintering and puncturing your right lung. Which is why everything from your neck to waist feels as if it has been trampled on by a herd of wild horses. God be thanked, there was no one else involved.'

  'What about the old man?' I asked, waving my flag again.

  'What old man, Mr. Shea?' Carroll said, shaking his head. 'I think, perhaps, I should explain. You were in a car crash, in which you received a severe blow to the cranium. You were lucky in that there was no haemorrhaging, but the trauma may have caused your unconscious brain to latch on to some sort of anchor. It’s not uncommon. Indeed, it may well be what keeps accident victims like yourself alive. But however you look at it, there was no old man. I’ve spoken with your girlfriend. She understands that there may be some confusion initially, but I wouldn't want you to push her any more than she needs. She isn't lying to you, and I don't suppose she would even if I wanted her to.'

  I felt the smooth sided pebble of doubt sink into the pit of my stomach. 'What are you saying? I don't understand. I wasn't hallucinating.' I was shaking my head now, but I understood all right. 'No. I couldn't have been. He stepped out in front of me. Without him there wouldn't have been a crash. I tried to brake, to avoid hitting him, and I lost control. The car skidded on the water and wouldn't slow down. I went back to try and help him. I saw him die for Christ's sake.' I could tell Carroll was uncomfortable with me now, but I refused let him go easily. I pressed: 'I even phoned in the accident. You can check it with the police. Yes. You can check it with the police. I reported hitting the old man outside the Springfield Hotel. Three a.m., Saturday morning. Ask them for yourself.'

  I had Carroll with that one irrefutable fact. I had phoned the accident in before I lost consciousness. Whatever else he could disprove with his medical logic, he couldn't touch that. I had made the call before
my unconscious brain could latch on to any anchors. I wasn't losing my mind. Somewhere a written report of that telephone conversation would back me up when I said an old man died on that street, and it was my fault.

  Four

  I spent a neurotic hour worrying about the state of my mind. Fear joined worry at the hip. Brain-damage from the accident was the first possibility I was forced to chew over. That something was wrong with the inside of my head. That everything from seeing the old man stepping out onwards was nothing more than a figment of my comatose mind. I didn't like the plausibility all of them had lying in my thoughts, but I had no option but to wait things out. Carroll would talk to the police, then the police would want to talk to me, and once we had corroborated enough evidence between us, we would all be in the same boat: left wondering what could have happened to the old man's body.

  When Aimee didn't reappear, I assumed she had gone home to grab forty winks between bedside vigils. I wasn't about to begrudge her them, even if I couldn't sleep myself.

  Still, I had nothing but my thoughts to occupy myself with. No magazine or book with someone else's musings to take my mind off my own. No music that I could listen to comfortably without the fear of being suddenly reminded about poor old Mary on Ward 3. So I closed my eyes.

  I dozed into and out of various states of boredom and inertia, but I didn't sleep and I didn't dream. I don't think I have ever been frightened of dreaming before. It was almost a fight against sleep. I can't say I liked the sensation, either. I forced myself through some mental gymnastics: overlapping punk riffs and baroque arpeggios to get a feel for how the two would sound sandwiched together in a freewheeling Tachyon Web solo. I half liked my creation, but failed to see a useful purpose for it outside the lunatic asylum. I started playing with twelve-bar blues instead of punk riffs, using the arpeggios as bridges, then giving up that idea I tried using the blues as the bridge. It was frustrating. It should have worked, but in the end I was left with no option but to give it up as a bad job and start trying to occupy myself with something else. Inevitably, I kept coming back to music, home ground, but this time I mentally tripped through Michael Petrucciani's Pianism, with its synthesis of modern and bop techniques, and Keith Jarret's Eyes Of The Heart, free jazz fused with diatonic harmonies.

  It was quiet torture, running a thousand thoughts over inside my own head. I went so far as to play commentator on my twenty six years of life, and found them woefully wanting. I thought about what I had, my incentives to get out of bed in the morning, and couldn't come up with one viable reason why I needed to bother. No one outside my immediate circle would miss me if I hid beneath the covers. I didn't touch that many people's lives, not in any worthwhile way. I thought about the vows I made at the Poly: How I was going to be different, how I was going to make a difference, how I was going to enjoy each second of every day simply because each one was different and I was in love with their individuality. And I thought about just how miserably I had failed myself. My dreams cut up and bled dry.

  Thankfully, food and medication arrived before I went stir-crazy with self pity. I hadn't thought about eating since waking up a quick glance at the clock on the wall told me that was four hours ago but I still couldn't whip up much in the way of enthusiasm or appetite for the plateful of pre-digested fisherman's pie set before me. I couldn't help, however, but spare a glance for the two painkillers left beside my beaker of water.

  Trusting that I was still a competent liar, I promised to clear my plate before I washed down the medication and as soon as I was left alone I abandoned the lukewarm pie in favour of the pills. They made all the difference. I stopped thinking of it as vital that I didn't weaken and succumb to the void where all my dreams were hideous, and started thinking in terms of my eyes getting heavy, my body being tired, getting sleepy. . .

  Five

  I jolted awake with a suddenness and surety. The Angel of Death was there with me, in my room. My tramp. He was hunched double in Aimee's chair, licking spindly, grubby digits as he spooned a handful of mushy potato into his mouth. His bitten down nails were black, thick with dirt and spittle.

  It was a crazy thing to pick up on, the state of the wino's manicure, but it didn't feel that way to me then. It seemed decidedly sane against the vista of craziness laid bare by the last twenty four hours. Coming around to find the man I had killed sitting by my bedside, living, breathing, eating my leftovers. . .

  I blinked twice. I won't lie. I couldn't force myself into believing it was him. Not straight away. Even as a child I hadn't been gifted with the kind of imagination necessary to create imaginary friends and scary monsters, so, crazy or not, I couldn't force myself into disbelieving, either. Not while there was the uncertainty of doubts.

  I think if it had been my imagination he would have been different; not a rag-clothed tramp but a corpse, maybe, that split from groin to neck, innards squirming warmly, glossy red, to wrap around my throat. Or a man whose hands were birds where the skin had been flayed raw and the muscles had been released. Tendons like maggots. A face that had been stitched into the flesh by needle and a thread of catgut. Tattoos that danced with death across alabaster skin. Lips like blood. Eyes that bled fire down scarred cheeks. A halo of barbed wire. Nails driven into every inch of exposed thigh. Ribcage hollowed out. Skin cut away, bound with a criss-cross of wire over the empty cavity.

  Images sick enough in-your-face to be instantly identifiable to any one of my generation. Visual and visceral. Stomach churning. Sickening. Physical. Unreal and yet, paradoxically, real enough to be in any of the thousand low-budget slasher movies playing on all sizes of screen.

  Not a rag-clothed tramp. Not something so familiar. Something that could have been dragged in off any street of any city. Something so possible… and because of it, so menacing.

  I watched him tilt his head, tonguing a fishball forward so he could dissect it with nicotine-stained teeth. It was as if I wasn't there for him. His eyes gleamed; dead lights. There was something else there; Malice.

  I wanted to scream, but couldn't. Wanted to reach up and tug the emergency cord but my body's already flimsy control over its automotive system had degenerated to a compulsive head shake that refused to stop; nothing more.

  He lifted the plate until it was level with his lips, fingered the last cold scraps into his mouth before he lapped it clean. I wanted someone in the room; someone to verify that I wasn't losing my mind, but I was alone. Twice I had seen him now; twice, alone.

  My chest felt sticky with something; food. It felt like cold mashed potato. It didn't make sense, not straight away. The hospital-green gown had been rucked up over my chest, cold potato smeared into the skin like balm. I put my hand to my chest, felt the lumps where the potato had begun to congeal.

  The old man let the plate drop. Brushed his hands on the lapels of his coat. I was right when I guessed he was clothed in rags. When he stood, I saw the strips of cloth like bandages mummifying his body. Tatters of the rainbow. Rags wrapped and knotted and tied with strings. He walked unsteadily, moving as if he were unfamiliar with the rolling sensation, distrustful of his own steps, as if they might somehow get away from him.

  'Who are you?' It was all the questions my throat would allow.

  He didn't answer. Not directly. He pushed me down in to the bed. His touch was icy. Cold fire burned where his fingers dug into my bare shoulders. He stared at me then, his gaze burning insanity as naturally as a fire burns flame. There was no light inside his stare. His head went down. Hands pinned me as his coarse tongue laved across the skin of my chest, lapping up the smeared skein of potato. His head came up again, long enough for him to stare into me as he wiped the smears from his lips. There was blood, too. And that rictus.

  The gesture was unambiguous. I hoped my eyes lied. But they didn't. It was blood that leaked between the old man's teeth, and death that had stricken his wretched face. He withdrew his hand from my chest. As he pulled away the bleeding increased, doubled, trebled. He showed me bloodi
ed palms. Blood his blood? my blood? oozed from their every pore, fresh enough to run down his arms as he raised his hands in defiance.

  'Are you afraid?'

  His eyes were full of tears as he spoke. There seemed to be a shifting in his features, in their substance, no longer the beard and scabrous chin, beneath the corruption of the streets the hint of another face, smooth with childlike innocence, was coming to the fore. A trick of the light, or a bird-shadow through the small window. That bird-shadow mouth even seemed to smile. Then, as subtly as it had appeared, the illusion faded and I was left staring into the blank eyes of my tramp, fearing the presence of another mirage.

  He stooped, kissed me. His lips didn't touch mine, but the blood did. It pooled inside my open mouth.

  I could feel myself beginning to drown on my own blood even as he withdrew his kiss.

  'Yes, yes. . . I can taste it. . .'

  Terrified, I reached up, clawed at where his face ought to have been, but he was gone.

  Distantly, I heard an alarm.

  Street Corner Evangelism

  One

  Inflating the lung was like smoking a hubble-bubble pipe in reverse.

  Carroll made a neat incision and fed a thin sterile tube into the cavity left by my collapsed lung. The tube was attached to a bubble jar that appeared to be filled with circling wisps of smoke.

  'Vacuum principle,' Carroll explained as he worked, talking me through the relatively simple procedure because there wasn't time to take me under. The anaesthetic meant I saw all and felt nothing. By draining the air out of the cavity the deflated organ was left with no option but to expand and backfill the vacuum. It felt like I was taking part in some sort of surgery by numbers. You take the tube from point twenty two, affix it to muscle seventeen and wait until organ one has expanded to fill cavity nine. Three neat stitches to suture the incision and that was that. Panic averted. All that was left for me to do was rest and recuperate.