Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  I lifted myself up out of the snow, leaving a cartoon outline, a freakish portal that might have allowed me access to a nowhere where I could blank everything from my mind. I was breathing heavily and I'd pissed myself. Blood squirted from the tip of my tongue in a bright, coppery fizz.

  The Arches were concealed behind a low bank of brick dust. The train had collapsed into the void where our arch had disintegrated creating a tiny universe filled with pockets of chaos and calm. Miraculously, the candle continued to burn, shining through the fug like the birth of a new star. Those arches had been steeped in our moral decay. Our shock was the detonation that brought about their demolition.

  The train was empty; at least the carriages that had jack-knifed into the viaduct were. I picked my way down to the embankment, trying to ignore the great fan of blood and clothing that surrounded the accident site. The driver was dead, but intact, his head crushed against the glass of his windscreen, which had withstood the impact. I could hear a stertorous hissing noise, and welcomed it. The silences that fell when it paused were horrible. I could smell the brick dust now, as it layered me with all its historical accumulations: ancient spray paint, stale piss, soiled rain from the bilious cooling towers of the power station. Into one of these lacunae I called a name-Helen or Seamus-I don't know which.

  Neither responded. The high-pitched rasp of MacCreadle's bike as it whistled down Lovely Lane spurred me into action. I was standing there, holding my dick like a baby while my friends lay in the wreckage, needing my help. I approached cautiously lest the mangled tower of train should settle further. I could see a figure pinned beneath the twisted metal but couldn't discern who it was. It was naked. I called again. Helen's name this time. No answer.

  Skirting the debris, I found a path to the body that was relatively clear. I edged towards the curl of flesh and began to get very cold. Shock was kicking into my system, fuzzing my head so it seemed I was viewing everything though crumpled cellophane. I could tell now that the body belonged to Seamus; his bald head poked from the intersections of steel in a grotesque representation of birth. His face was thrust skywards, the patch gone, displaying a chalky nugget in his eye socket. A pool of blood surrounded him, mixing with oil. One of his arms hung from the edge of a warped door frame. Only when my mouth filled did I realise I was gagging. He looked peaceful. He looked unreal. I knew I was still alive when I realised that my tears weren't freezing on my cheeks.

  The air was fresh. My mind felt as clean and as cold as a gum from which a bad tooth has been wrenched. A few minutes later, backing away from the weight of his death, I saw Helen. She'd fallen into the canal and was face down in a broth of oil, her arm twisted behind her back. I could see the resin flower on her finger. A great bloom of red had blossomed at the small of her back. I waded in and fished her out, knowing she was already dead. I touched the blood. It wrinkled, much like the sugar test my mum used to perform on a saucer when making strawberry jam. As I flipped her over, I knew that the set of her face would be a constant with me for as long as I lived; as permanent as a tattoo. Maybe that's why I looked at her, to damn me for eternity, for what I did.

  This was where it ended for us-our unstable (but compulsive) friendship torn asunder on the exposed skeleton of the train, the collapsed waste land of sandstone.

  I didn't fully appreciate how ingrained Seamus' presence had been upon my own. He might have been anathema to me in many ways but he was also irresistible. That it should end so bloodily here, in the one place where we had felt so alive and involved with each other made it doubly traumatic. My tenancy of Seven Arches was over. Nothing beckoned at me from beyond its seedy confines.

  Trying to keep my eye from dwelling too long on the new configurations of Seamus' head, I rooted around for something to cover Helen and found a partially burned blanket in a bed of nettles. I pressed my hand against her breast for the last time, where her flesh was so white and smooth. Then I fastened the buttons at the top of her dress and stood up straight, closing my eyes to a bout of dizziness.

  Through the ticking of the train as it cooled and the various creaks and wails as it discovered new stresses and alien alignments, I heard a sound, as of beating wings. I couldn't see anything that authored the flapping, but I was growing more jittery by the second. I wanted to be away. Especially as I now realised that it wasn't MacCreadle's bike I could hear, but a siren.

  I tramped back through the snow, intending to return to the car and drive it until the petrol ran out. Maybe head north, find some mountains in which to lose myself.

  The night thinned; I watched the puke-stained morning soil the horizon. I was so cold I couldn't feel my mouth.

  The compulsion to go home, to hug my mum and dad and tell them I loved them, was unbearably intense, especially as I could see their house from here. They would be sitting up in bed with cups of coffee, sleepy and warm. Still holding hands after all this time. I wished I knew them better. Loot fled through my mind; a sinuous loop of jet. I could almost smell home and the simple, massive love of my family. Dad's silly little sayings such as: 'Well, David-what do you know?' and 'Do you want to buy a battleship?' Stuff I'd grown up on with Kim and would no doubt bewilder my own children with one day. I thought of Mum attacking the Russian vine in the garden or folding herself into the sofa the way only mums can. I wanted someone to put a plaster on my knee and to sweep hair from my eyes when I was sick in bed with a cold. I wanted that little clump of dependent years back-just for a short while.

  The flapping had increased, the sound of loose clothes on a washing line, frisked by the wind. In my pocket, my fingers moved against something sharp. I pulled the metal tear out and brought it up to my face, trying to see it in the poor light. The flapping stopped just as the sirens cut out. Blue light spat across the field. Bursts of static. People calling, their voices frantic. The clatter of an approaching helicopter.

  In the moment before the tear turned to water and trickled between my fingertips, above the clamour of disaster teams as survivors were sought, I heard the desperate, clotted shriek of a newborn.

  I closed my eyes, turned around and opened my mouth.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Conrad Williams was born in Warrington in 1969. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines including Panurge, Sunk Island Review, ABeSea, A Book of Two Halves, Last Rites & Resurrections, Blue Motel, Dark Terrors 2 and 3, The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII, Darklands 2 and Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers. In 1993 he won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and was a recipient of a Littlewood Arc prize. Head Injuries is his first novel.