by Mark White
He felt Sarah stir beside him. When he turned to look at her, she slowly opened her eyes and stared back at him. She tried to smile, but as she did so she frowned and raised a hand to her brow. ‘Ow,ow,ow,’ she said, wincing with pain. ‘My head hurts.’
For a while, Sam kept quiet, studying her face for signs of his father. Fortunately for him, there were none. For the time being, he was lying next to his wife.
‘I’ll get you some painkillers,’ he said, pulling back the covers.
‘Wait,’ she said, tightening her grip on him. ‘Get back into bed. I don’t want you to go.’
‘But what about your head?’ he asked, reluctantly lying down again.
‘In a minute. I need to ask you something first.’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s wrong with me, Sam? Why do I feel so bad?’
The innocent, child-like nature of her question caused Sam’s eyes to well up. ‘What…what do you mean?’ he asked, trying his hardest not to cry.
‘You know what I mean. Whatever it is I’ve got, you’ve had it too. The headaches, the nausea…not being in control of your body. Only now you seem fine and I…and I feel like death warmed up. Seriously Sam, I’d rather be dead than feel this way.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘But it’s true! Maybe we should call for a doctor.’
‘No!’ Sam replied, a little too forcefully. ‘You don’t need a doctor. All he would tell you is to stay in bed and rest. You’ll be fine, I promise. Look at me – I felt exactly the same way as you, but now I feel great. It’ll pass, Sarah. Give it time.’
‘I haven’t got time to be ill,’ she said. ‘Max is coming home tomorrow, remember?’
‘Shit! I forgot all about that. What time’s he due in?’
‘The bus is due back at school for eleven. If I’m still feeling like this, you’ll have to collect him without me. Some mother, eh?’
‘It’s hardly your fault,’ Sam said, racking his brain for a way to stop his son from coming home just yet. Perhaps he could stay at a friend’s house for a couple of days. Ethan Richardson’s place, maybe. Yes, that might work. I’ll call Ethan’s mother and check if it’s okay. I’ll just lie and say that Sarah’s suffering from a highly infectious fever.
‘He’s going to be heartbroken when he finds out about Gracie,’ said Sarah.
‘I know. Maybe we shouldn’t tell him straight away.’
‘We have to, Sam. It’s not right to keep it from him.’
Sam sighed as he was faced with yet another problem to add to his sizeable and growing list. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, okay? Right now I’m more concerned about you. I’ll fetch you some painkillers.’
‘And a cold drink, please. My throat is killing me.’
‘Coming right up.’
‘Sam,’ she said, stopping him as he went to get up.
‘Do you want me to get those pills or not?’
‘I’m sorry…it’s just…it’s just…’ She began to cry.
‘Hey, come on,’ Sam said, sitting back down and stroking her hair. ‘Don’t be upset. You’ll get better soon, I promise.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said.
Sam looked at her. ‘What is it then?’
‘Don’t you see? It’s everything! You, me, Gracie, Tom…for God’s sake, will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?’
If only you knew, Sam thought.
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘But what I do know is that you need to rest. You’re in no condition to dwell on the past week. You need to focus all your strength on getting better, okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said. And then, with the same smile that had made Sam fall in love with her all those years ago: ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
‘We don’t say it to each other enough, do we?’
Sam smiled at her. ‘Why don’t we promise to start now, eh? Once a day at an absolute minimum, twice on special occasions.’
‘Sounds good. I don’t deserve you, Sam. After what I did to you…the way I cheated on you with T-’
‘Sshh. Not another word about that, okay? As far as I’m concerned, what happened in the past can stay in the past. I forgive you. Maybe I’m stupid for saying that, but it’s true. I can’t help the way I feel about you; the way I’ve always felt about you.’ He leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘Let me get you that drink and those pills.’
He stood up and opened his bedside table drawer, retrieving the key to the bedroom door. He walked across the room and opened the door in such a way that Sarah wouldn’t have known that he’d locked it earlier. He turned to look at her, relieved to see that she was lying back in bed with her eyes closed, drifting back towards sleep. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he whispered, only half-joking, but there was no response. Nevertheless, he chose to lock the door behind him. He wasn’t about to take any chances.
He returned around five minutes later to find her fast asleep. For a moment he considered waking her to give her the pills, but immediately thought better of it. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought, smiling as he thought about how Sarah would react if she knew he was comparing her to man’s best friend. Locking the door, he tiptoed around the bed and placed a glass of water and two Paracetamol on her bedside table, before returning to his own side and lying down. The second his head hit the pillow, he knew that this time he would sleep. Maybe she’s stronger than me, he thought, reaching under the covers and taking her hand in his own. What do you mean, maybe? She’s a thousand times stronger than me. If anyone can stand up to that bastard and give him a run for his money, she can. Feeling slightly more confident, he leaned over and placed the key back into his drawer.
Within thirty seconds he was dead to the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY
He knew something was wrong the second he woke up. He moved his arm to touch her but felt nothing. She wasn’t lying beside him. She wasn’t in bed.
‘Sarah?’ he said, rolling over to switch on his bedside lamp. As he did so, he noticed the drawer. It was pulled open. The key had gone.
‘Shit.’ He scanned the room, his eyes quickly adjusting to the light. He was immediately drawn to the bedroom door, which was wide open, the key still in the lock. ‘No!’ he shouted, leaping out of bed and sprinting towards the door. ‘Sarah! Where are you, darling?’
When he reached the unlit hallway, he paused and listened for an indication as to where she might be. He found the answer as soon as he looked across to his right; there was a thin bar of light coming from under the closed bathroom door. She’s in there, he thought, moving towards the light. Please God. Please don’t let any harm come to her.
Arriving at the door, he tried the handle, softly at first but then harder, to the point where he was twisting it with so much force that it threated to snap off if he continued. It was no use. The door wouldn’t budge.
‘Sarah!’ he screamed, banging his fist against the door. ‘Open the door! I beg you, darling. I beg you. Open the damn door!’
Silence from the other side.
Having exhausted the handle option, he stepped back from the door, and in a fit of fury, he lashed out with his right foot and struck it against the door. Nothing happened. He kicked it again. And again. Summoning every ounce of strength left in him, he turned side-on to the door and barged into it, using his shoulder as a battering ram, and this time he was successful. There was a sharp snapping noise as the lock gave way and the door flung open and struck the side of the shower cubicle behind it. Unable to control his momentum, Sam fell into the room and landed in an undignified heap on the tiled floor, crying out as his forehead cracked against the base of the toilet and began to bleed profusely from a resulting cut above his eye. He ignored the pain, wiping the blood away with his pyjama sleeve as he grasped hold of the toilet and hauled himself up to his knees.
At first glance, there was no sign of her anywhere, prompting him to breathe a sigh of relief at the possibility that nothing untowar
d had happened to her.
But then his blood-splattered eyes noticed the hand that was sticking up above the lip of the bathtub and he froze. He didn’t need to see the plain gold ring on her third finger to know whose hand it was. Any last remnants of hope that she might be safe drained from him as he slowly rose from his knees to his feet and peered into the tub.
Several years earlier, Sam and Sarah had hosted a dinner party at their house; a small gathering of close friends who liked to get together socially once a month for dinner or to enjoy a few drinks. On this particular occasion, one of their friends – Joanne Thackeray – had been describing how her grandfather had recently died. Apparently, he’d passed away only two weeks after the death of his wife – Joanne’s grandmother. They’d been married for fifty-three years, and in all that time they’d never spent so much as a single night apart. Sam remembered Joanne saying at the time how her grandfather’s doctor had claimed that he had died from a broken heart, and that despite there being a clear lack of medical evidence to support the diagnosis, it was – in his experience – an extremely common phenomena. Later that evening, when all the guests had gone home, Sam and Sarah had briefly pondered the subject in bed together. Being a pragmatist, Sam had scoffed at the idea that someone could actually die as a result of being heartbroken, but Sarah had been more open to the possibility, claiming that love was an intangible entity that had the power to do all manner of things to an individual…good and bad. Throughout history, people had willingly died in the name of love, killed for love, risked everything for love; so why was it so hard to believe that there were some couples who loved one another so deeply that they couldn’t begin to contemplate a life without the other. Again, Sam had laughed at this, but nevertheless the idea had stayed with him, buried deep inside his subconscious.
But only now, as he stared down at the blood-soaked body of his darling wife, did he know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it truly was possible to die from a broken heart. As he looked at her, he felt a tightness in his throat, a heaviness across his chest, a crushing pain around his heart as he fought to process the atrocity of what he was seeing.
She was lying in a pool of blood, her nightie drenched and splattered with dark, irregular patches. In the hand that wasn’t poking up from the tub was a pair of nail scissors, the blades of which were covered in incriminating evidence. From the puncture marks in her stomach and her legs, it was evident that she had used the scissors to repeatedly stab herself to death. Only it hadn’t been her. It couldn’t have been. The blame for this lay entirely at the foot of one man. And although Sam had tried to protect her, he had won. His father had destroyed her life, and in the process had succeeded in taking away from Sam everything that had ever mattered to him.
Everything, that was, apart from Max.
Close to unconsciousness, Sam hobbled across the floor, leaned over the bathtub, and kissed his wife tenderly on the cheek. The fact that her skin was ice cold suggested that she had been dead for an hour or two at least, but Sam didn’t flinch. Instead, he reached out and pried the scissors from her fingers. Kissing his wife one final time, he knelt down by the tub and took her hand in his own.
‘You’ve won, dad,’ he said, tightening his grip on the scissors. ‘You’ve had your revenge and you’ve won. But I won’t allow you to take Max. You won’t take my son.’
Then, lifting the scissors towards his face in a dreamlike state, he pointed the blades towards him and whispered: ‘I love you, Max.’ With that, he sunk the scissors into his eyes; the left eye first, and then, in an uncontrollable fit of rage, the right. He howled in agony as he felt the sharp metal split through the cornea and into the pulp of the eye. As he did so he thought he could hear his father screaming at him to stop, but this only served to spur him on and finish the job. Where there once was light, there was now only darkness; a pitch-black void that could never be healed.
Still holding Sarah’s hand, he pulled the scissors from his face and dropped them on the floor, blood and vitreous fluid streaming down his face. In spite of the pain, he suddenly felt a triumphant wave of joy flow through him.
He stared up into the blackness and grinned. ‘Maybe you haven’t won after all, dad,’ he said, picturing Max smiling at him.
As he smiled lovingly back at his son, he felt an excruciating surge of pain crushing his heart as if it were being squeezed by two huge hands, and in a matter of seconds he could no longer feel anything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Blackstone Mental Health Hospital, London.
Five years later…
‘Well, Doctor Jarrod, how are you finding things so far?’
The young, trainee psychiatrist shrugged her shoulders and looked at Doctor Ahmed as if to say no big deal. ‘As far as first days go, it’s been fine. I think I’ll enjoy my time here. I’m certainly looking forward to making a difference.’
The arrogance of youth¸ thought the older, wiser doctor. ‘I admire your confidence,’ he said, ‘although you should be careful not to take anything for granted in a place like this. My advice would be to always expect the unexpected. I hear you were at Broadmoor for a while?’
‘I spent a few weeks there in my second year of med school. It’s what made me want to specialise in psychiatry.’
‘I imagine you came across some interesting characters during your time there.’
‘One or two.’
‘Good. In that case, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ve enough time to fit him in before lunch. Is that okay with you?’
‘Sure. I’d like that.’
‘Great. Follow me, please.’ He led her through two sets of coded security doors into a wide, brightly-lit corridor that was spotlessly clean and eerily quiet. Unlike the other wards he had taken her to that morning, here there were no patients wandering around freely, mingling with nurses and healthcare assistants as if they were all part of the same big, happy family.
‘This is Security Zone One,’ Doctor Ahmed said. ‘The patients who reside here are those who pose the biggest threat to either themselves or others, and as a result are separated from the lower-level patients, at least until such time that they are deemed fit enough to undertake one of our structured integration programmes. Sadly, the majority of patients in Zone One will never become well enough to leave.’
When he reached the third door along, he stopped and turned to face Doctor Jarrod. ‘The man inside this room presents no physical risk to either of us. Unfortunately for him, his predilection for self-harm requires continuous sedative and antipsychotic medication. I thought he’d be a good introduction for you to our high-dependency patients.’
Without waiting for a reply, he punched a code into the keypad by the door and entered the room. Doctor Jarrod followed closely behind, her earlier exuberance having softened somewhat as she stared at the man sitting on a chair by the barred window.
‘Good morning, Sam,’ Doctor Ahmed said, reaching into a pouch at the end of the bed and retrieving a document containing patient records, which he handed to Doctor Jarvis. ‘How are we feeling today? Enjoying the sunlight, I see. A vital source of Vitamin D.’
There was no reply.
‘I’d like to introduce you to our newest member of staff. Doctor Jarrod – Sam Railton – Sam Railton – Doctor Jarrod. I imagine the two of you will be seeing a great deal of each other over the coming years.’ Doctor Ahmed turned to his colleague. ‘Like I said, we keep him heavily sedated. Sometimes we reduce the dosage, but more often than not it results in erratic behaviour.’
‘When was he admitted to Blackstone?’ she asked.
‘Five years ago next month.’
‘Five years? And there’s been no improvement whatsoever?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘What’s with the mask around his eyes?’
‘The full details are in there,’ he said, nodding to the document folder in her hand, ‘but I’m happy to give you a brief outline.’ He motioned to
Doctor Jarrod to take a seat. ‘Mr Railton…Sam…is highly psychotic, displaying numerous associated symptoms including delusional disorder, hallucinations and catatonia. He is also a paranoid schizophrenic.’
‘What happened to him?’
Doctor Ahmed sighed. ‘Do you know anything about possession, Doctor Jarvis?’
‘A little,’ she replied, slightly taken aback by the forthrightness of the question. ‘I read an article on it once. It’s when a person believes his body has been invaded by some kind of malevolent preternatural being; a demon or evil spirit. It used to be very prevalent across numerous cultures before modern medicine came up with a rational explanation for it.’
‘It still is prevalent in many parts of the world. Even in some western Christian cultures, there are still people who would rather place their faith in the hands of an ordained exorcist than a qualified psychiatrist. The physical symptoms of possession include fainting, lesions, convulsions such as pseudo-epileptic seizures and severe anxiety attacks. All of which tend to result from a patient’s inability to cope with a particularly stressful event or series of events, such as the sudden loss of a loved one or the diagnosis of an incurable disease.’
‘Is that what happened to Sam?’ she asked, opening the document folder and flicking through the notes.
‘Yes,’ replied Doctor Ahmed. ‘At least I believe so. When Sam first came here he was distraught. He believed – and probably still does – that he is possessed by the spirit of his dead father, a Mr William Railton. William Railton died when Sam was only a young boy, but not before he’d caused the death of Sam’s little sister, Lucy. I’m guessing Sam didn’t have the happiest of childhoods. The records show he underwent several courses of therapy in his twenties and thirties. Despite his troubles, he managed to lead a relatively normal life. He had a wife, Sarah, and a son called Max who is still alive. He must be around sixteen or seventeen years old now. I believe he’s living with foster parents somewhere in north London.’
