RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural

by Craig Saunders

  My heart’s thudding like mad. I’m biting down hard to hold in a scream.

  She’s burning. Flames are licking the back of her head like hair blown in the wind. Tendrils of fire flit about her head, sucking oxygen from the air. The fire is feeding on the air, but totally unnatural, too, because only her head burns.

  I think maybe I’m having a heart attack. I’m aware I’m making a kind of keening, terrified sound in the back of my throat. My teeth grind.

  She’s wearing a coat. The coat is untouched. It’s a black coat. Looks woolly. Like it’d catch fire easy enough.

  I can feel the sweat under my armpits, like her heat’s reaching me back here, at the entrance to the chapel, but it’s not her. I’m cold, but I’m still sweating. Cold enough to burn.

  In as much as I’m thinking anything at that moment, I’m thinking about her coat, and wondering about how flammable it might be, because I can’t think of her head on fire. Bright red and orange and strangely green petals dance in the air and all she does is kneel there. She should be screaming.

  I should be screaming but the scream can’t make it past my teeth. I don’t want her to turn. I don’t want her to know I’m there.

  She crosses herself. I can tell by the way her right elbow moves, even though I’m behind her.

  Then she does turn. She walks down the aisle, straight to me. I’m in a fucking wheel chair. I can’t run, I can’t move. I can’t get away. I try to turn away because I can’t see her face. Beneath the flames there is no face.

  Nonetheless I know she’s crying.

  She stands before me. I think I say ‘no’. I think I try to turn my head, look away.

  She doesn’t touch me. I don’t think I could bear it if she did. I can feel cold fire burning off her and I see her hands, too, are alight.

  ‘Don’t touch me, God don’t, don’t, don’t...’

  I’m pleading, begging; even though she can’t speak maybe she can hear. She can’t speak anymore than she can cry with no face, but that doesn’t matter because I know what she says after all.

  ‘You burn. You burn, too.’

  She makes like she’s going to touch me but I scream like a fucking convent girl and squeeze my eyes tight shut, then I hear the doors behind me slam against the wall and feel a hand on my shoulder.

  My heart thumps, massive, like a coronary, but I’m not dead.

  *

  3.

  I flick my head around, my neck cracking, ready to thrash out if the burning woman’s behind me. I don’t care about touching her, I just want to...I want to...

  But I turn and Helen’s there.

  ‘I was worried sick,’ Helen says. Her voice is calm.

  I’m shaking. I turn away from Helen and stare straight ahead. I don’t want Helen to see me like this and I don’t want to look behind me anymore.

  ‘Where is she...? There...’ I say. But the words die in my mouth, my jaw aching from clenching my teeth so hard. I don’t say what I’m going to say, because it’s not real. It can’t be. And if it’s not real there’s something wrong with me other than the frightening, mad drumming of my fat heart.

  ‘Who?’ she says. ‘You OK?’

  Of course she didn’t see the woman go out the door because if she had she would have screamed like me.

  Did I scream?

  No. I did not.

  If I did, Helen would have opened with something more appropriate to the sudden terror I was feeling. Like, ‘What’s wrong?’, or ‘I heard you scream, I came running.’ She’d be pale. She’d be shaking. Like me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says as she moves round in front of me. ‘You’re shaking. You’re pale.’

  That’s how I know I’m in trouble. Either I passed out, or I had some kind of waking dream.

  Didn’t happen and it wasn’t real. My heart’s slowing, and I’m not afraid.

  I’m damned certain I didn’t have a religious experience. It wasn’t the face of Jesus in a slice of toast. It was a woman with flames framing her face where she should have had hair. A woman in a black woollen coat (cloak. Was it a cloak? Did people wear cloaks, anywhere, anymore? No. It wasn’t a cloak. And it doesn’t fucking matter because there wasn’t a woman with a burning head in the chapel).

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘OK, honey,’ she say. She doesn’t crouch down to talk to me like I’m a kid, but just goes behind and takes the handles of the chair. She backs out the door and pulls me into the corridor where everything is absolutely normal for a hospital. The walls are a kind of blue grey, almost like steel. There’s a yellow line down the centre of the wall. I know it’s yellow, because it’s a different hue to the walls. A bum wheel on a bed squeaks as a porter wheels a young kid with a cast on his leg to whatever ward he’s going to. People walk and talk and there’s the constant murmur of life just going on quietly. People are quiet in a hospital. Even when they’re in pain, there’s a sense all sound is muffled. It’s quiet, and there are yellow eyes painted in between the yellow line on the grey wall as Helen wheels me to the glass door. The eyes watch me go. I don’t know why the hospital would paint yellow eyes on the wall anymore than they would paint a yellow line.

  I know it’s yellow, but I can’t see yellow anymore. I know it’s yellow because it’s the same colour as my tennis ball, and people don’t make grey tennis balls.

  Helen wheels me to the car and bundles me in. By the time I’ve had my first taste of fresh air my head’s cleared. The cold sweat coating me dries. My heart’s normal for me. Doomp. Doomp. Just a steady beat of a guy who’s not dying anymore. The beat of a guy who’s not scared because he didn’t see a woman on fire.

  And yet I look for a woman on fire the whole way.

  She’s not there.

  There’s a winter moon in the cold black sky. It’s chilly but the goose bumps on my body have nothing to do with the air.

  God, I think to myself, I just want to go home. I’ve got a thumping headache but it doesn’t stop me falling asleep before we even make it out of the car park.

  *

  4.

  I don’t tell Helen about the woman and maybe me having some kind of episode. She doesn’t ask.

  All hail the new bullshit, I think, same as the old bullshit. I feel like an arse, but I put it from my mind. I’m good at that. We’ve got a life to live and I’m not going back to the hospital, that one, or any other kind. Definitely not the other kind. The one with electric pads that go on your shaved scalp. Maybe wet. Maybe you feel the wet dripping down into your hair before they jolt you and you bite down on something rubber and piss yourself.

  I don’t know. I don’t want to know so I’m not telling Helen I saw a woman with no face on fire.

  I concentrate on living. That’s what the living do. That’s what takes up our time.

  I don’t think about burning women or God or visions or fugues or weird aberrations in my brain that are fucking me up.

  I don’t.

  Living’s hard enough as it is. I’ve got some weight to lose and my own rehab to go through. I lost 13 pounds in the three weeks I was in hospital. That’s good, but one shy of a stone. Not good enough.

  Living’s a good goal. When I’m home with Helen, I don’t think about drugs and drink. I think about bending my legs and working on getting up and down stairs on my own.

  It’s my own fucking fault I’m crippled, just like it’ll be my fault if I go back down the old road and die.

  I go as an outpatient to see Seetha for rehab. There’s another girl there, sometimes, instead of Seetha, but in my head I’m doing it for Seetha, even if she’s not there.

  Most times, though, she’s there.

  I can’t get up the stairs in our townhouse without some help. The stroke’s left my right side dead. I can’t see properly out of my right eye, but I can see not quite shapes, like the idea of shapes. It’s dark in that eye, but it’s not pitch like it was in hospital. I still can’t hold my tennis ball in my right hand.


  I can get about on the flat with my standard issue crutch. I get about a lot. I can put a little weight on my right leg, although my foot flops around because I’m numb. It feels like a false leg. I can’t deny it, though – there’s definite improvement.

  Speech has pretty much been unaffected. Sometimes a word comes out weird. Hot, hotten. Cold. Colden. Things like that. It’s a pretty small thing. Words elude me, from time to time. Thoughts might slip away. Anger doesn’t help there. I’ve spent too much time on anger. Seetha says it helps, but that’s my one rebellion.

  I used it, everyday, with her. I used it, until I could walk the line. That stupid fucking yellow line that wasn’t yellow. I know she meant it metaphorically, but the line was there. Now it’s there in my head and I’ve got Seetha to thank for that little piece of extra shit in my brain.

  But this life, life after dying in an ambulance and being brought back to life, life after a stroke and a heart attack, a second chance...this isn’t about me walking the line, anymore. This is about me and Helen.

  But then, maybe it is. Maybe it’s all about walking the line.

  I take my anger, push it down, and remember the best present I ever got from my wife, a fuzzy grey tennis ball, and I move about as much as I can.

  The weight keeps coming off. I don’t eat so much anymore. I have no cravings for coke or pills or weed or beer. I don’t drink coffee. I just drink water.

  My hand bugs me. I use these little tricks. Manipulating it with my other hand. Lifting my arm. It’s useless, but I try, all the while thinking I’m going to have to teach my stupid hand to be clever. I don’t tell Helen this. This is my secret. I don’t want to let her down.

  Seetha says I can take a break now I’m home. She says I can let myself rest, but I won’t. I’m awake and I can feel a clock ticking down, counting out the day. I don’t want to waste it. I can feel something over the horizon. Something good is coming.

  A month down the line and the letter comes through the door. I know from the return address stamped on the envelope that this is it. Helen’s out. She usually opens the post but I don’t need her for this. It’s better that she’s not here. I can manage this.

  I tear the letter open with my teeth and pull out the letter with my teeth, too, then straighten the paper on my lap.

  I read it through. It takes a long time. Reading is hard. The words swim, but I have an idea what it says, because I’ve been expecting it.

  It’s the best news I could hope for. The best news because the commission on my last deal went into my account three weeks ago. The best news because they got the medical report the week after. They’d had time to digest it. It hadn’t taken them long.

  Am I sad? Not a bit. I’ve been off sick for nearly two months. Not one fucking bastard from work visited me in all that time. I thought I was golden, but I realised a while ago, even as I knew it then, you’re everyone’s friend when the coke is free, nobody’s friend when the party’s done.

  £120,000. My commission. Not bad for a glorified salesman.

  Seventeen years worth of redundancy, once I’d signed the form enclosed with the letter and returned it.

  The question: Did I want to take voluntary redundancy?

  The unspoken suggestion: We want you to take voluntary redundancy.

  I left the letter on the coffee table for Helen. It’d be the first thing she’d see when she came back from the hairdressers. Once she’d read it, we’d have some serious talking to do.

  I wanted to celebrate. My first thought was coke. Coke’s kind of like champagne. It’s the drug of choice for a celebration. The thought made me ashamed. And yes, angry. The anger helps there. Instead of celebrating alone, like in my old life, I would wait for Helen. This was something for both of us. Like everything should be.

  I paid my own penance for backsliding and thinking about drugs, even though just in thought. Penance was manipulation until I was drenched in sweat.

  If my arm and leg were numb, why did it have to hurt so much?

  When I was done, I sat in the newly fitted idiot chair in the shower to slew off the sweat. That’s where Helen found me after an hour. Her hair looked good. She looked good, too, after the initial ‘Shit, he’s dead in the shower’ look had gone. I didn’t like that look. I’d been seeing it too often.

  But I did like the nod and smile I got in response to my own.

  Yes, that nod said. I’m going to take it. The smile because I’m happy about it.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she says.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say.

  We need to celebrate. Together.

  We make love, right there in the shower. I can’t remember how long it’s been. It’s not fucking easy, but all I know is it’s better than celebrating alone.

  *

  5.

  The backslide, wanting to score, worried me. It was like I’d had some kind of relapse. I could get drugs if I wanted. Easy as a phone call and a taxi ride.

  I don’t want to, though. I don’t want coke or pills or heroin I can lay out on a piece of tin foil and burn hot enough to breath in the smoke, or some shitty dirty drug like meth or crack that I wouldn’t have touched with someone else’s bargepole even if I was so fucking desperate I’d turn yellow and shit myself without a hit.

  Now, I don’t even want coke. I don’t want that shit up my nose. I don’t want to fall down after it’d taken me so long to get up off my arse and wake up.

  I don’t want it – now.

  But later?

  Can I say for sure? I’m weak. Once an addict, always an addict. Whatever I could get. Coke for preference, but really, it was never about the drug. It was about forgetting.

  Sometimes it worked, if only for a while, and that was always good enough.

  I know I’m weak. I’ve proven that over the last few years beyond any doubt. I’ve a million reasons to stay out of that life. A wife, first and foremost. A wife who loves me. A wife who cleaned the blood from my shirts sometimes; the pillow, other times. Now, a wife who places a grey tennis ball in my hand every night, before she puts her delicate hand around my dead one, and squeezes.

  I owe her more than that.

  I still didn’t think I owed myself anything. How could I? But that has to come. It has to come for me to be free. I want to be clean. When people say you get clean, it’s not just a figure of speech. I remember all too well the feeling of my blood being dirty. Somehow like I was dirty in my veins and arteries, right down to the capillaries in my eyes. The feeling of filth inside that you can’t shower away. The feel of steel on your teeth you can’t brush out.

  You just have to flush it out like a beer shit the morning after, shaking off a heavy one.

  Maybe it’s just in my mind, but even now, thinking about coke, about drugs, fucking, sweet, beautiful oblivion from the constant pain, I can feel the taint in my blood. I hate myself a little for the blood I muddied myself.

  How can you be a better man if you don’t even like yourself?

  They’d offered me drug rehab. I turned it down. I didn’t want to be weak.

  I want to do it on my own.

  Would I slip back? I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t be sure.

  Some things were clear since the stroke. That my wife was my world. That the geography of my life had changed.

  When I’d been working I’d been a part of something large. Pleasantries and banalities and bullshitting along with everyone else in endless meetings, giving clients virtual handjobs for their money.

  Nights, the geography had been different again. Days, I was part of a continent. Nights, a country. Somewhere small and exclusive. Colleagues, dealers, bartenders. I won’t say friends, because none of these people had been my friends. Not ever.

  Maybe I thought so then. I probably did.

  My phone is full of contacts for these strangers that I spent more time with than my own wife.

  Not one of them called. My phone hadn’t rung since the night I died. If I was paranoid, perhaps I’d
still think I was dead. A ghost, cut off from life by the dead silence of a phone that can’t contact the living. But I wasn’t that imaginative, then.

  Things change, though.

  The more I think, the more I realise I want the damn phone to ring. Right then, I see my past played out as my future, how things would be without the heart attack, without the stroke.

  Me, alone. My skin’s grey, but it could be yellow. I don’t know. My wife, long gone.

  I didn’t die when I was forty-two even though I should have. There’s a chain of events. It’s all pretty simple. Because I didn’t die, my wife never gave me a tennis ball. Now all I’ve got is powder under my nose, bad guts, bad heart, a wheeze, a cough. A man waiting to die, but without the good sense to do it quick instead of slow.

  I see it all, in my head, played out like a movie.

  I see it through my dead eye.

  So do I want the phone to ring?

  Fucking right I do.

  *

  6.

  I do the only thing that makes any kind of sense. I’m not one for drama, but the neighbours must love it. I walk out the door as best I can, and believe it when I say it’s not easy.

  Most people, if they’ve got a bum leg, they use two crutches. The tripod approach. Others, they use the opposite arm for a single crutch, or a stick, if they’re a show off.

  Me, I’m doing the single crutch, but on the same side as my good leg. There’s a lot of hopping involved.

  I look like a fucking spastic.

  I don’t care. Curtains twitch. I want to shout ‘Fuck off!’ at the top of my voice. I push it down. I half hop between two cars.

  Cars are parked either side of the road. Bumper to bumper. It used to piss me off, trying to get the car in close enough to the house that I didn’t have to break a sweat carrying a shopping bag or two. Fat men sweat easily.

  Now, the parking situation doesn’t phase me. It suits me, in fact. I get to walk further, which I need, and I don’t have to drive, so parking’s not my problem anymore.