Deathbed

by Jason McIntyre

  Behind us, a new noise.

  I half-turned, and even before I made it far enough to see what was there, I already knew. It was the beast that had traversed down into the elevator shaft after Doctor Drumheller. It blew past both of us and galloped to the trio at the dark tunnel in what looked like two or two-and-a-half big strides. It was that large. My guess would have been three-fifty or even four hundred pounds of heavy black muscle and hair. The ground of dirt and pebbles thundered with his weight pounding into it. I saw big yellow-white eyes, bloodshot and angry. I saw a portion of the primate’s head shaved with metal plating and wires protruding form scar tissue. I saw an open mouth with dark red gums and tongue and big teeth that reminded me of Drumheller’s stark white femur bone. I saw its smooth belly and pectorals in dark grey-like leather. I saw its stiff, wiry shag of hair all over. It looked like the smaller gorilla but it had flecks of silver in its coat. This one was older, bigger, made of muscle and sinew. It was the smaller primate’s parent. Its papa.

  And right now, it was pissed off and aiming for the people between it and its little one.

  Ketwood took a backhand from the gorilla and it scooped up the little Ketwood boy as it made its way to the smaller gorilla. Ketwood plummeted to the ground with a loud crack of his bones against the hard floor. But he was up almost immediately. While Drumheller and I squeezed against one far wall of the cave and stayed mute, Ketwood started shouting like a madman. He was up on his feet and closing in on the beast. He took out his lighter and lit that, waving it at the creature. I saw its eyes fixate on the flickering flame but that lasted for milliseconds. I thought Ketwood was going insane. He waved his arms and closed the gap. The big gorilla turned and roared a blood-curdling wail at him, baring teeth and showing the crisp pink of his mouth and quivering tongue, but Ketwood kept shouting. “Hey! Hey! Mangy Animal! Get gone, you!” stuff like that.

  His boy trembled in the arms of the big animal and after another roar, the giant hurled him at Ketwood like a sack of vegetables. Little Ketwood crashed into his father and they both bowled over and rammed against the wall before tumbling in a jumbling heap on the uneven floor.

  The big gorilla scooped up its kin and backed off in the direction he’d come: the smaller opening that led up to the multiple tunnels and eventually the elevator shaft. It walked on hind legs, but hunched over and using one set of knuckles to support its heft.

  It opened its mouth wide and roared again. Spittle hit me in the face. The sound cut through me like the winter wind off the Pacific when you’re out on the ferry. It was so loud, I thought I’d never hear anything else again. But the noise turned to an echo in my ears. The beast retreated after that. It had its boy and it took its leave.

  The rest is a bit of a blur, to be honest. I remember trembling as I did the only thing I could think to do. And that was to load Drumheller onto the hand cart and then help Ketwood get his injured boy up there too. Drumheller leaned over with a painful strain and checked the boy’s pulse. The kid’s eyes were closed but Drumheller gave me a nod that said there was a heartbeat. I know that words were said and exchanged, but I don’t recall the gist. I know that Ketwood was limping but he got himself up onto the cart opposite me. We started pumping and the cart eased forward with a squeal on the rusted rails.

  We got some speed, and drove the cart out of the big open cave where the electrician had squared off against a giant gorilla to get his son back. We went down deeper underground on the track and were soon gliding along, shooting a spray of sparks up behind us with each change in elevation or bend in the path.

  I don’t know how long we pumped. I do know I lost track of the overhead lamps we passed, and of the tunnels that birthed alongside us. I do know that we came out in a big cave of red-brown rock. I know that the floor turned to sediment and then to foamy water. And I remember the ache in my arms and my shoulders as I heaved Drumheller off the cart and propped him as we exited the mouth of that low cave.

  We came out into the rain and the grim late afternoon. But it was the cove alright. Drumheller collapsed in the wet surf. Sean Ketwood had come conscious and found a place to collapse. His father, Sam Ketwood, trudged four or five steps behind him and fell into the wet muck of the shore.

  There he stayed. In a few minutes I went over to him calling his name. “Sam?” I said. “Sam Ketwood?” I rolled him over but there was nothing in his eyes. No sound came from him other than the escape of a final breath. The man was dead. Doc Sawbones would be summoned when we finally got to one of the hotels and called the police Chief and the doc. He would tell us it was a coronary. Short form for a coronary thrombosis. What most people call a heart attack. We wouldn’t tell the doc or the chief what we saw in the tunnel—what we’d experienced and what Sam Ketwood had fought off. We’d only say we traversed our way out after the power plant went into lockdown. The scare and the effort of getting his son out of those tunnels had likely been too much for the man’s ticker, Doc told us. And that was all he told us.

  We got scanned with a Geiger to see how many rads we took and, apparently, I took a lifetime’s dose.

  Drumheller and I would never speak again, on the advice of my lawyer—and his, I presume. I never cashed in my windfall from the attempt I made at blackmailing the socially-inept wizard. Not sure if he ever walked again, I heard stories this way and that. Some said he didn’t. Other said he did. But not without a cane. Some said they caught glimpse of him in a wheelchair on the deck of a ferry one afternoon, likely moving back to the mainland for good. Both of us reached fine settlements with the government department. They were in exchange for our silence. I was told that the gorilla’s name was ‘King’ and he was one of dozens, maybe hundreds of experiments happening down below ground. His offspring was nicknamed ‘Prince’ and both primates—I was assured of this—had been located and returned to captivity.

  The experiments were all shut down. I was assured of this. And the remnants of those experimental dealings were carted off-island before the rest of the plant’s activities were wound down a few years later.

  The Ketwoods? They both signed waivers that very morning in the security office at the plant. I don’t care what his dead dad said, the little boy, signed one too. And he couldn’t say a word about what they’d seen. The government had those signatures. There was absolutely no legal recourse for what had happened to them. I think the boy’s mother tried down that road. And I think she gave up after she failed a time or two.

  Me? I got a piss-bucket of radiation poured on me and that meant a fatter-than-usual paycheck sent to me every other week, but I never worked another day in my life.

  I remember all those trivial details, but what I remember most was the look of that silverback gorilla in the dim light of the tunnels. I remember how it went after a threat to its child. What it thought was a threat to its child.

  And I remember the failing light in the pouring rain out on the cove’s beach. And I remember the icy salt-smelling froth up to my calves as I watched young Sean Ketwood weep over the dead body of his father.

  Part VII

  Behind The Curtain

  1971

  1.

  There was a postscript at the end. It didn’t have anything to do with flying monkeys, cowardly lions or a wizard behind a curtain. It read:

  I will place this account in a locked box and ensure that it goes to a person close to me. Should Doctor Drumheller or anyone else involved with the incident at Deus Island Power Plant ever cause me concern, I will always have access to it. Should something happen to me that is, shall we say, unnatural, the reader of this account will know that it most assuredly had to do with either Doctor Drumheller, his politically-appointed superior, or the rads I took on that dreamy-turned-dreary Thursday in August of 1956.

  Farrah read it three times but only to herself. It felt like it wasn’t really part of the mystery box’s story. She had been delighted to find that the story she’d uncovered through her latest adventure to the street market was the
best one yet…but by now, the ending had devoured any delight. Now it left her feeling…funny. There was a sadness that lingered now.

  In a way, Farrah wished she hadn’t bought the key to the mystery box. In a way, she wished she’d never come across the junk dealer with the long grey hair down her back and the tinted John Lennon glasses.

  She looked over at Gran in the bed next to her.

  “Gran,” she whispered. “You awake?” She wondered how much of the ending her Gran had missed. The world out past the tall windows was black and thick. Gran lay still. Farrah quietly got out of bed and gathered up all the contents of the black tin box. She replaced them, closed the lid and crept across the quiet rug to the door.

  It had gone cold in Gran’s room.

  It was likely a half hour or so later when Nurse Anne came back down the dark hall. The house looked the same but it felt different, somehow. Farrah was lacing up her shoes, sitting at the edge of the carpet in the front porch when Anne came and touched her shoulder. She looked up at Anne and just knew.

  Anne’s face was pained and that confirmed it. There was no mention of Can’t hurt. No mention of Won’t help. Just silence. Farrah grabbed hold of Nurse Anne as Anne came down to the floor. She buried her face into the woman’s bosom and she started to bleat and sob.

  Can’t hurt, the nurse’s tone had said when Farrah wanted to go in and read Gran a story. Won’t help, mind you, but it can’t hurt.

  2.

  The bike ride home was windy and cold. Farrah had assured Anne she’d be fine, that there was no need to wait for Dad. She of course had called Doug Birkhead at his office down on Main. The secret was out now—Farrah had snuck out to visit Gran. And it had turned into one last visit with her. Of course, the ignorance of Dad’s instruction didn’t matter now. He couldn’t get angry with Farrah for breaking the rule.

  And Farrah didn’t care one way or another. She’d been right: tonight was a time for throwing out old ways, for ignoring the rules.

  “I don’t want to ride home with him,” she had shouted at Anne before she left. Anne had been holding out the phone to her so she could talk to her dad, who’d just found out. “He’s a liar!” Farrah shouted in frustration. “He made Mom leave!”

  Then, quietly, as the tears started to well up, her volume dropped. At twelve-and-a-half, Farrah Birkhead didn’t have the grace to stop a childish outburst. But at twelve-and-a-half, she had enough self-awareness to recognize one. “I just—I just need to be by myself. For a while.” She plopped down from her Gran’s front stoop, picked up her bike and rode away into the woods.

  She peddled. And the faster she peddled—up and down the inclines through the trails, brushing against the branches—the faster the cool wind whipped at her.

  She dared to look up at the night sky—as if she’d see Gran up there, half-translucent, floating and looking down upon her. It was only the off-white of the moon, illuminating some clouds.

  And then there was something else. Birds. Small black birds, circling above her as she peddled in her fury.

  It was a few more pumps before Farrah realized they weren’t birds. They were either large black bats or smaller brown ones that looked black against the light of the moon. There were, she realized with a moment of panic, hundreds of them. And as she peddled even harder, she realized they were fluttering on the forest path up ahead too. She tried to stop. It was too late. She was engorged in a cloud of them and they started screeching at once. Farrah knew that the story of bats getting entangled in a girl’s long hair were just wives’ tales, but the feel of their hot bodies and wings flipping and flapping against her cheeks and neck and body—it was revolting. She panicked, tried to jam on her bike brakes, but hit a stiff root on the packed path.

  The front wheel turned sideways and over she went, up in the air and careening head-first into a mound of thick, overgrown shrubbery and weeds.

  3.

  She came conscious, but only briefly. She felt the warm embrace of being carried. Someone was whistling a tune. It was the end of Otis Redding’s song, The Dock of the Bay. Thoughts jumbled up like stacked train cars after a derailment. One idea was of the mythical tunnels beneath the power plant and the idea of silverback gorillas hunting people down there. Another was that helmets were for sissies.

  Above, the moon had clouded over, but a sliver of it revealed who was toting her along the dark path. It wasn’t her dad, Doug Birkhead. It was a man with red hair who looked down upon her with a smile and gleaming eyes. He was the one whistling.

  4.

  She came conscious yet again. And this time it was more permanent. As she bobbled up to the surface of being awake, she heard that Otis Redding tune, the part with the whistling. But she realized that it was in her head. It was a memory, or a dream, she wasn’t sure which. She was on the long couch in the living room among the piles of books and trinkets and files and things that her mother had gathered before her departure.

  Above her stood father with a knitted brow of worry and a steaming cup of something—likely the black coffee he drank.

  “Before you get mad—”

  She heard herself croak these words from a dry throat.

  “Don’t fuss,” her dad said and reached down to keep her from sitting up. She only managed to move an inch or two before her noggin sent a shock of pain reverberating across her skull. She was too young to know a hangover—even Jamie hadn’t taken them down that path yet—but it was a pain she would come to associate with a hangover in a few years.

  She cringed away from the pain, back down to the throw cushion propped under her head. She brought a couple of fingers to the forehead where she’d been cut open.

  “Quite a gash, little girl,” her father said, finally sitting at her feet on the far end of the couch. She expected him to get into it about how she’d gone out to see Gran when he’d given specific instructions not to leave the house.

  But he didn’t. He only sat.

  Then it struck her. The memory of Gran. Of Gran being gone.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “But it’s good you were there with her—” He looked over at his daughter and rubbed her calf through the throw blanket he’d covered her in. “—at the last,” he said.

  Farrah started to cry again. Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped at them.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Farrah said. She used that childlike word, Daddy, one she hadn’t used in years. “I’m sorry that I—I guess I acted like a baby. And you lost your…mom tonight. Is she really gone?”

  Doug nodded. He was used to hearing tough news, seeing tough goings-on. Was even getting used to delivering it. Farrah guessed that her father was able to put on a mask when dealing with hard things. He did that now.

  “She is,” he said and finally looked at her. There was a small jewel in each eye but he blinked them away. “I guess we both know what it’s like to have our moms go away. But you know, Farrah. My mom—Gran—she’s been sick a while. And it was time for her suffering to end. It’s actually…it’s better this way. You might not understand that now. But one day, you will.”

  She sniffled. Normally, she hated when adults pulled that card: you’ll understand this one day. You’ll understand this when you’re older. She didn’t flinch at the familiar warning tonight. She didn’t want to understand it. Not when she was older. Not ever.

  It wasn’t ‘better’ this way. Could never be.

  He kept rubbing her legs through the blanket. Eternal patience, Doug Birkhead seemed to have, especially for his little girl.

  “You heard what I said?” she asked. “When you were on the phone?” She meant the shouting part, the part when she’d called him a liar and blamed Mom’s absence on him.

  “I did,” he said. Doug remained quiet and calm. It wasn’t unusual, but Farrah thought he’d be angry for what she’d done, what she’d said, for being, basically, a huge failure of a daughter. “You know,” he said. “I think you’re angry. About Gran, about Mom. About me too. Sometim
es things bleed together. One piece overlaps another and, pretty soon, we’re shouting at something that might not be the real reason for it.”

  Farrah thought about that for a minute. Then she said, “Jamie says Mom cheated on you. She says that’s why you made her leave.”

  Doug took a sip from his hot mug and leaned back a touch. “Let me tell you a little something about Jamie. She’s a smart girl, but she’s a bit of a troublemaker. She likes to say things and do things to get a rise out of the adults around her. She might grow out of that and she might not. She might also land herself in hot water one day. Hope not.”

  He took another sip and seemed to consider his next words carefully. “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “What?” Farrah said.

  “Why Mom left.”

  Farrah shook her head, no.

  “I’m not surprised. Memories can get clouded. I wish I could forget. It was, oh, about three months ago. You had come home from school and you found Mom in the bathtub, you remember that—?”

  Again, Farrah shook her head, no. This time it was a fast shake. Her face was turning red, filling with colour where it once was pale from her encounter with the bats and that bad tumble in the woods. Realization was a striking blow.

  “That’s it, Farrah,” he said. “You do remember. At least some of it. You were the one who found her. You kind of went away for a couple of days after that. You talked a bit about all the blood you’d seen but that was it. Just Mom and all that blood in the bathtub…”

  Doug didn’t look at his little girl in the eyes, only at down at the blanket.

  Farrah didn’t look at her dad, either. Only at his big, rough hands.

  “We got her the help she needed, hon,” he said, “but they have special places for people that do things like your mom did to herself. And those kinds of places are on the mainland. She’s there. Jamie was wrong. No one cheated. Mom’s getting help. Mom will come home. When she’s ready.”