Run to Ground

by Bark, Jasper

  Mike pulled out a bottle of pills. “Please start taking your medication again.” Maybe it was because he reminded Stephanie how her parents tried to cajole and control her. Or maybe it was because he had taken complete advantage of her emotions, but Stephanie lost it. She knocked the bottle out of Mike’s hand and it shattered as it hit the wall, scattering capsules all over the floor.

  “Fuck you,” she shouted. “You had me feeling something for you and you threw it back in my face. Stop making this my problem. I’m sorry for what’s happened Mike, but you left me for my own sister. Stop trying to dope me with tranquilisers because you hurt me!”

  Stephanie turned to leave and Mike grabbed her wrist to stop her. “Stephanie, I’ve spoken with Dr Connor and your parents . . . ” Stephanie tried to punch Mike in the chest to make him let go. He held up his palm and caught her punch.

  “Fuck you,” she cried again.

  “Stephanie please, you’re in danger, great danger . . . ”

  ***

  Stephanie put her hands over her eyes and pushed her head back so she didn’t have to watch anymore. The blood was playing with her. It knew she didn’t want to see these things.

  Even though she knew how each scene ended, she couldn’t stop looking. She couldn’t tear her gaze away until the very last moment. There were things she didn’t want to admit to, not yet.

  The blood was aware of this, it had to be, it came from her body. Was it playing with her? Did it need her to admit something before it . . . before it . . . Stephanie didn’t want to finish that thought either.

  She was trapped between things she didn’t want to remember and things she didn’t want to think. Her eyes dropped back to the pool of blood. Another image was forming. She was in uniform again and back in the ICU . . .

  ***

  Stephanie hadn’t been back to the ICU since her run-in with the Duty Nurse. She’d found it was best to steer clear of certain parts of the hospital sometimes until things cooled down and the staff forgot about you.

  Stephanie preferred to fly below the radar and not draw too much attention to herself. There was always something to keep you busy on the wards so it was easy to blend into the hospital without being bothered.

  All the same, Stephanie had to risk the ire of the Duty Nurse to come back and check on Jan. She’d seen a lot of patients in distress while she’d been in the hospital. She knew many nurses remained detached and kept a professional distance. But you can’t stop everyone from getting under your skin, you wouldn’t be a good nurse if you did.

  Stephanie was shocked when she saw Jan. She wasn’t just slumped against the pillows propping her up, she’d sunk into them. Jan seemed to have lost an alarming amount of weight. Her skin was the colour of wax, and there were dark rings under her eyes. Her short hair was matted into brown clumps which stuck to her forehead with sweat. Her dressing had been changed but it was stained with perspiration.

  Though she was hardly moving and just staring straight ahead of her, Jan still had that same twitchy energy, if anything it seemed to have intensified. The vein in her temple was bulging and throbbing, all of Jan’s veins were. It was like they were alive, writhing under skin so pale it was almost transparent.

  Stephanie drew the curtains around Jan’s bed and sat down. Jan barely registered her presence. “Oh,” she said, after a considerable pause. “It’s you.” She hardly moved her head, just flicked her eyes in Stephanie’s direction. “Is everything okay?” Stephanie said. Jan rolled her eyes and sighed. “Does it look okay?”

  “No, I suppose not. Have there been complications with your burns. Did you get infected?”

  “Not from my burns, they’re not the problem.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you?”

  “Really? You were my last hope. I thought you, of all people, might have understood, considering what you know.”

  “Jan, you’re not making any sense. If you know you’ve got an infection you’ve got to tell the doctors, otherwise they can’t give you the treatment you need.”

  “There’s no treatment for what I’ve got.”

  “It’s not A.I.D.S, is it? Because you have to tell the doctors about that. You could be putting other patients at risk.”

  Jan’s chest started to quiver and her breath sped up. Stephanie thought she was about to have a coughing fit but then she realised Jan was actually laughing. “Oh Christ, you’re in so much denial aren’t you, it’s so incredible it’s almost endearing.”

  Stephanie bridled at this. “What do you mean? You think I’m in denial? I’m not the one hiding things from my doctors. You’ve got to tell them what’s wrong with you if you’ve got an infection.”

  “They won’t believe me if I tell them what’s infecting me.”

  “Why on earth not? What is infecting you?” Jan turned to look at Stephanie for the first time since she’d come to see her. Her emaciated features made her eyes stand out, accentuating her piercing glare. “What did we talk about last time?”

  “Last time I sat with you? It was your PhD wasn’t it? Moon goddesses, witch hunting and that guy Edward something or other . . . ”

  “Kelley.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And what else?” Stephanie searched her memory. “Oh yes, the Anglo Saxon myth about the thingies—the heel . . . erm helio . . . ?”

  “Heolfor.”

  “Of course, I’m sorry, it’s not a name I’m familiar with, so it’s hard to recall.”

  “Not after you know what I know it’s not. Then it gets right into your blood.”

  “Jan, I’m sorry I’m not as clever as you, with your PhD and everything, but you’re talking in riddles and I can’t follow you. Has this got something to do with when you got burned, how you lost your father and tried to . . . erm . . . ”

  “Kill myself?”

  “Yes, I err . . . I wasn’t trying to be insensitive.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “Do you want to talk about it? Will that help?”

  “Help me or you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean—help you of course.”

  “I’m beyond help now.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “Okay, then let’s talk about the Heolfor.” Jan made a feeble gesture towards the books that lay unopened by her bedside. “My reading only scratched the surface of the myth. Most of my research was done in the field. I wanted to get a proper sense of where these beliefs came from. Why people needed to hold them. There are no precedents in other pagan religions.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, according to Austin Osman Spare, he’s a 20th century artist and mystic, the idea of a being made entirely of blood is unique to Ancient Britain. Spare called them ‘a living blood sacrifice, bound to the service of the moon’s dark designs. A sinister sisterhood devoted to delirium and deviltry’.”

  “So how on earth do you do fieldwork on something like that?”

  “You have to know where the Heolfor congregate and how such a sisterhood was said to manifest in these places.”

  “Places like what?”

  “Anywhere blood is spilt and people take leave of their senses in the darkest hours, a battlefield, a site of slaughter and atrocity, even a hospital.”

  “Like this one?”

  “Wasn’t it you who told me about the things that take place here, right under the noses of people too busy to see them?”

  “You did field research right here, in this hospital?”

  “Did you know it’s built on the site of the last great Pagan uprising in Britain? King Sighere of Essex and his army of followers were put to the sword here in 683 on the orders of Augustine of Canterbury, the Pope’s emissary and the first Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “There was an archaeological dig here when they laid the foundations for the hospital. They found all the bones, along with some pagan artefacts. Some of it’s still on display a
t the local museum. But that’s not all, in the eighteenth century they built one of the first British asylums here. It was burned to the ground in 1793 when the inmates rebelled and beheaded all the trustees with a makeshift guillotine in solidarity with the French Reign of Terror. This has long been a site of death and destruction, of dark, dark places that never lose the stain of delirium. What better place to search for the Heolfor.”

  “But you said they were a myth, right? You’re talking as if they’re real. I mean, you can’t actually see a mythical being can you?”

  Jan went very quiet at this and stared intently up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” said Stephanie after a long pause. “I didn’t insult you did I?”

  “You asked me why I didn’t tell the doctors about my infection. This is why. You’re the only person in this hospital who might understand what’s happened to me, and even you find it hard to believe.”

  “Okay, I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, but I’m not actually sure what you’re talking about. How can I believe you when you hide what you mean behind all these riddles?”

  “You’re right, it’s a trust issue. People think I’m crazy enough without finding out the truth. That’s why I keep them at bay with riddles.”

  “And to show them how clever you are.”

  “Well there is that.”

  “Please tell me what happened, I won’t judge you.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “You can trust me.” Stephanie placed her hand on Jan’s.

  After another pause, Jan said, “I’ve seen them—the Heolfor, right here in this hospital.”

  “You’ve seen them, where?”

  “In the basement, there’s an abandoned storage room, it’s right over the spot where they found all the bones from the massacre. There’s no light down there, which is why they like it. I studied the schematics of the hospital, I snuck in on a new moon and I went looking for them. There’s things about them I didn’t know, though.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “They’re not immortal, they can die over time and they need new blood to replenish their ranks. They sang to me.”

  “Sang?”

  “Stood around me in a circle and sang, seven of them.”

  “I thought you said there were nine.”

  “I told you they need to replenish their ranks, that’s why they sang, it’s how they infected me.”

  “By singing?”

  “Directly to my blood. They converted it, harmonised it I suppose, made it one of them. Now it isn’t part of me. It’s fighting me to get out. Every time my heart beats my blood screams to be free, begs me to open up my veins, so it can be rid of me and join its sisters. That’s why I’m on suicide watch.”

  “You think your blood wants you to kill yourself.”

  “Not kill myself, though I will die if it gets its way. It wants to leave me, to become something else, something deranged and malevolent, a blood being aligned to the darkness.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I tried to fight back but I ended up here. Do you know what it’s like to feel your blood turn against you, to develop thoughts of its own? To know that it’s plotting your death as it moves through your body. I couldn’t give in to it so I decided to poison it. I was walking in the woods near my home and I found a rotting badger. I picked it up, took it home and stuck a kitchen knife in it. My plan was to stick the knife in my body and give myself septicaemia. If I poisoned my blood then I’d kill the blood being, deny the Heolfor their new sister. I was standing at the kitchen sink with the rotting beast when my dad came in. We still share a house. He saw what I was about to do and he tried to get the knife off me. He probably thought I was having another of my episodes. I’ve had problems on and off since my mother died when I was twelve, that’s why I still live with him.

  “He nearly took the knife off me, but he’s getting weak and old and I was angry. Angry that he’d try to prolong my suffering, try to stop me killing what was festering in my veins. So I lunged at him, instead. He didn’t expect that, and the knife went straight into his chest. I remember the tiny ‘clunk’ the handle made as it hit his ribs. How he coughed and gurgled as the blood from his lung caught in his throat. He stepped backwards and reached for the kitchen counter to steady himself, but he missed it and toppled over backwards.

  “He reached out to me as he was lying there, slumped against the dishwasher. ‘Jan love,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, please . . . call an ambulance . . . please . . . ’ I looked at him lying there, crumpled pathetic and bleeding. This wasn’t the man who’d raised me since my mother died. Who’d sat with me when I got ill, comforted me when I was sad and put a roof over my head. This was a vulnerable old man who’d just been infected with septicaemia. So I pulled the knife out of his chest and I rammed it into his left eye. He kicked a few times, went into spasms then he lay still. It was a mercy killing, that‘s what I told myself. Septicaemia is a hell of a way to die and I’d just saved him from that.

  “I felt really cold after that. I couldn’t stop shivering or keep my hands steady. I knew I had to hide the evidence and I knew I had to get back to this hospital. So I went to the garage and I got a can of petrol, then I doused the house and set a match to it.”

  Jan held up her bandaged arm. “That’s how I got this. I think I was cutting off all ties to my past life, limiting my options so I couldn’t avoid the inevitable. A neighbour called an ambulance and they took me here, like I knew they would. It’s a new moon tomorrow night. I don’t have much longer. I can’t fight my own blood anymore. A policeman came to see me this morning, full of questions and insinuations. It won’t be long till they find out what really happened. But I won’t be around to face them.”

  Stephanie had no idea what to say. Jan’s story had knocked the wind out of her, like a blow to the solar plexus. “You told me I could trust you,” said Jan. “Well, I have. I don’t think you’ll judge me either because I think I know what you’re planning to do. Even if you don’t yet . . . ”

  ***

  Stephanie winced at the pain shooting through her palm. She looked away from the blood to her hand and saw that she’d stabbed herself with the scalpel to stop the vision. How much longer could she struggle with the blood before she gave in and saw what it really wanted to show her?

  More blood trickled from her palm. She held her hand over the tiny pool and let the fresh blood add to it. It ran along her palm and down the length of her thumb, dripping from the tip into the pool.

  Stephanie sighed, the release she felt was almost orgasmic. Her heart beat faster in anticipation, spurred on by the blood pushing its way through the organ. It sang in her ears, rising in volume as each drop joined the pool.

  Stephanie’s eyes drifted back to the pool as the drips rippled its surface, churning up new visions. She saw herself in a different part of the hospital. She was carrying a tray with blood samples on it . . .

  ***

  The samples came from the children’s Oncology and Haematology ward. They’d been taken from a child with MRSA. More tests were needed and a doctor had asked Stephanie to run the samples up to be despatched. As soon as she was away from the ward she knew what she was going to do. It was as if the doctor had handed her the plan along with the tray, it was that inevitable.

  She stopped to pick up a fresh syringe and headed down to the Neonatal ICU. With the recent cutbacks, it wasn’t always fully staffed and during a shift change it could be unattended for up to twenty minutes. This was all the time Stephanie needed.

  She stood over the incubator and gazed at her sister’s child. She thought of the poor thing growing up in her sister’s care. A woman who had robbed Stephanie of everything she’d loved. If this was the way she treated Stephanie, her own flesh and blood, then how much worse would she treat her own son?

  Stephanie considered the abuse and neglect she’d suffered at her sister’s hand. She couldn’t let this innocent child fall victim to th
at. What sort of life would he have with that woman as his mother? Much better to show him mercy now than to inflict years of mistreatment on him.

  He was so tiny and so frail, barely aware he was even alive. Would it be such a crime to take something from someone who hardly knew what they had? Especially if you were saving him from so much misery. He came from her bloodline; she couldn’t turn her back on him.

  Stephanie took the syringe out of the wrapper and filled it from the phial of infected blood. Her hands shook as she did.

  She opened the incubator and stroked the head of the tiny boy inside. His eyes weren’t able to open yet but he stirred and reached out for her. His fingers were so small they couldn’t properly clasp Stephanie’s little finger.

  “Shh,” Stephanie said. “It’s okay, it will all be over soon.” She pinched his little thigh until she saw a vein. He wriggled and let out a barely audible sigh of complaint, but she held him still and stuck the needle in his vein then pushed down the plunger.

  Stephanie heard footsteps in the corridor. She quickly closed the incubator and left the room, dropping the syringe and the other blood samples in the bin on the way out. “God speed little man,” she said over her shoulder and hurried out of the neonatal ICU.

  Stephanie wasn’t certain what to do with herself once it was all over. She felt a sudden need to speak about it, to unburden herself. She realised there was only one person to whom she could talk.

  Stephanie went to look for Jan, but when she got to the ICU her bed was empty. She asked one of the nurses on duty where Jan was but no one knew. The nurse said there was a shortage of beds so Jan had probably been moved to another part of the hospital.

  Stephanie went back to the bed. All of Jan’s books were still there so she couldn’t have been moved. She asked around the other patients in the ward and none of them had seen Jan all day.

  Stephanie began to get worried. She flicked through Jan’s books to see if she could find anything that might give her a clue as to where Jan might be. She scanned the pages and the indexes, looking for any reference to the Heolfor, but she couldn’t find one. The only mention of the word she found was in a collection of Anglo Saxon poetry which gave a brief translation of the word as: ‘blood or gore’.