by Neil Jackson
He couldn’t assign any meaning to their words before slumber claimed him once more.
Greg was as weak as a kitten, and that concerned him for more reasons than he wanted to examine closely. He found himself staring out of his window and comprehending just how isolated the hospital appeared to be; there were thick woods just beyond the manicured lawns. There was also an eight foot high security fence and a guardhouse, which struck him as both peculiar and somehow frightening.
He’d remembered more things today: he was an architect, he hated anchovies on pizza, he’d once broken his ankle during a game of touch football.
“When are my parents getting here?”
Senka looked up from her clipboard, where she was making notes. “I am truly sorry, Greg, but they had problems getting flight. Maybe document issues? I’m not sure. They will try to get here as soon as they can, and your wife too.”
Greg tried to return her reassuring, almost too sunny smile. He simply watched her for a few moments as she set down the clipboard, checked his catheter and fussed with his bedding.
“Uh...what did you say my wife’s name was again?”
“Abigail,” she replied patiently, fluffing his pillows for him and handing him the remote control for the TV. “Would you like anything else before I leave you?”
“No, thanks,” he replied with a false smile, keeping it plastered on his face until she’d exited the room and then letting out his breath in a long, wheezing exhale, gasping at the pain in his chest. His brow furrowed in a worried frown.
He’d remembered lots of things that day, including the heartbreak and loss of a funeral. He could vaguely recall the ceremony, the hymns...but one thing was as clear as a bell: the headstone. Maria Franklin, resting with the other angels. Beloved wife of Gregory. 8 February 1974 – 15 July 2008.
He supposed that he could have remarried within six months. The same as there could be some reasonable explanation for why his parents hadn’t been able to obtain a flight in four days. And perhaps, in context, Senka and the doctor’s conversation hadn’t been sinister at all.
But he suddenly didn’t feel so lucky anymore.
His name was Greg. He had been in a car accident.
The car had been annihilated by a lorry, pieces of metal flying everywhere, slicing and piercing. He’d lost his spleen, left kidney and lung, part of his liver and pancreas and his right eye. A valve of his heart had also been removed during surgery.
He’d barely made it through alive. He was extremely lucky.
Greg’s forehead creased in confusion as he examined his wounds, blinking to focus properly with his remaining eye and hampered slightly by the thick gauze taped to his face.
The authoritarian nurse – Senka? – had warned him not to tamper with the dressings, but he’d wanted to see just how much of a Raggedy Ann doll he really was. The scarring was so...localized. It was as if the deadly shrapnel he’d apparently been so fortunate to survive had aimed directly for his organs. And the weirdest thing of all? While the gashes over his heart and liver were raw and wet, some of the others appeared to be healing. The bruising around them had yellow and black tinges and he itched like crazy where the skin was knitting back together.
There was something very wrong with this picture.
He’d had amnesia at first but he was beginning to remember things now. Certainly he recalled enough to know that he was being lied to. Moreover, he was getting some disturbing flashes from what he assumed to be the last moments before the accident. And he hadn’t been in Serbia, nor even in a car. In fact, he’d been walking out into the parking lot of a local hospital after having given blood...He’d become quite vigilant about that after Maria’s death; while the doctors ultimately hadn’t been able to save her, the transfusions she’d received following the accident had at least given her an improved chance and he appreciated that. Apparently he was a good candidate for donation: strong and healthy with type ‘O’ blood, meaning that it was universally compatible.
He didn’t remember much else apart from screeching tires.
When Senka came to wash him, Greg told her that he believed his memory was returning. She congratulated him, not offering any genuine warmth but not outwardly alarmed by the news either. Maybe his mind had been playing tricks on him. Maybe he was just being paranoid.
Greg lay awake in the early hours of the morning, concentrating on slowly breathing in and out as a way to combat the nagging and growing pain. He needed more morphine but when he’d tried to call for some he’d realized that he didn’t have an alarm to press. He’d tried shouting but soon become resigned to the fact that no-one could hear him.
In a nasty dull fog of hurt, he drifted frustratingly on the edge of unconsciousness, the sharp stabs of pain preventing him from succumbing. Forgetting the fear and concern inspired by his returning memories, too absorbed by his current distress, he almost cried with relief when Senka slipped into the room, cell phone jammed to her ear.
“I’m just getting the chart.” She pinned the device with her shoulder as she picked up the item, shining a penlight on it so that she could read in the gloom. “Yes, all good. Stable enough to undertake the last surgery, at least. You have buyers for all?”
Senka flinched slightly when she looked up to see that Greg was awake, gazing at her with wide, horrified eyes. She stared at him for a few beats before saying in clipped tones, “Call back when you have a buyer for the heart. Then we can operate.” She snapped the small phone shut decisively and sidled over to the head of the bed. “Greg?”
“What’s going on?!” he demanded, trying to sit up, crying out as his torso flared with hot agony and Senka pushed him back down as gently as she could.
“Hush now. Go back to sleep. Maybe you will see your wife and family tomorrow and you want to look well for them, yes?”
“You lying bitch!” he hissed. “You didn’t call my family...and my wife’s dead!”
Senka smiled and it was the first time that the gesture seemed real, reflected in her glittering, cat-like eyes in the dim glow of the penlight. “So, you see? Maybe you will see her.” She lightly traced a finger over his torso, tsking as he tried unsuccessfully to shrink away from her. “So strong. You healed so well. It’s a shame you don’t have two of everything...”
As her softly spoken and yet malicious words sank in, Greg attempted again to rise out of bed, to fight her, something. But he’d had so much major surgery and was in so much pain, debilitatingly weak. He sank back against the pillows, screaming and clutching at his body, and she stepped backwards out of reach.
“Sorry, Greg. But we don’t let you have drugs for twenty-four hours prior to operating,” Senka confided with mock sympathy, backing towards the door while he tried to pull enough breath into his remaining lung to cry out louder, to curse at her.
This time when she left, he heard the sound of a bolt being slid home.
Agony welling inside him, potent and nauseating, Greg considered that he was facing a day of waiting to die, with no painkillers to even soothe his decimated body. Time would draw out sharp and slow, each second a burden to be borne. He’d probably lose his voice before the ordeal was even half over. If he was lucky, he’d pass out...but he doubted it.
For the third time, Greg realized why his room was soundproofed.
His name was Greg. He had been in a car accident.
The local press in his home-town carried the story of his tragic demise while he was on vacation in Serbia. The car had collided with the guardrail on a mountain road and carried on going, rolling down the side of a ravine. The gas tank had exploded on impact, obliterating Greg’s body; there hadn’t even been anything left for his distraught parents to repatriate and bury next to his beloved wife. Apparently on the verge of a breakdown, they insisted that they hadn’t even known that he was planning a vacation.
No-one said anything, at least not above a low whisper, but ‘suicide’ echoed around more than one mind.
It was a heart-wren
ching tale and a tragic waste. Car accidents were such a nasty way to go, as commented many of the readers when the story ran.
But at least it had happened quickly, they all agreed. In that way, Greg had been very lucky.
THE GROWLING - David Jeffery
“Stop it! Stop it, for Christ’s sake! You’re killing him!”
The voice was distant, a dream within the nightmare, fogged by fury and the need to get even, to set things straight; rage fuelling the repeated pummelling punches; blunting the pain in the knuckles as they parted lips, mashing them against teeth, the sickening crackle of a nose disintegrating under the onslaught. The gurgle of warm blood in the back of the throat.
Retribution is a cold beast, but Cory Anderson was warmed by it, juiced up on it, getting positively high on it and all the time his heart pounding, pounding, pounding; in beat with the beating he wilfully doled out.
Hands upon him now, small hands, hands with nails that used to rake him in the throes of desire; Jennifer Spencer loved to do it, hell, he loved her to do it, loved her leaving her mark on him.
A sign of her love.
But no love now. No love for quite a while, in fact. Just lies and deceit and distance.
And Malcolm.
Malcolm with his Ford Tigris and faux gold Rolex that rotated on his twig thin wrist. Malcolm with his thin laugh and wide boy charm. Malcolm with his bloodied lips and pulverised nose.
“Get off of him, Cory!” Jennifer was back in his head, insistent, the tone in her voice lilting and frantic, and the nails raking his neck.
Anderson dislodged her, knocking her aside as he climbed to his feet. Jennifer was on her knees, mouse-blonde hair hanging, strands of it clinging to the sweat about her neck.
God, even pissed off she looked great.
Malcolm lay sprawled across a coffee table, his face splattered. He waved an arm feebly in the air and one of his loafers had fallen off. He was making thick mewling sounds.
Jennifer scuttled over to him, her hands unsure of where to go. They settled on his chest.
“Why did you have to do this?” she sobbed without taking her eyes from her lover.
Her little secret, now in the open and bleeding out on the green carpet.
“Why did you have to do that?” Anderson said, his sneer made even uglier by his breathlessness. His eyes caressed her lithe frame in an attempt to avoid any possibility of meeting hers.
“You just don’t get it do you, you fucking animal?” she spat. “You and me, we’re done. And that was before this. Now GET OUT OF HERE!”
Her skin on her neck was mottled red fire. With some incongruity Anderson noted that it was the same colour as when Jennifer came, hot and hungry and holding onto him breathless and sated. That was back in the days when their lovemaking had actually been informed by love. Anderson felt a tear in his chest, realisation that he would never again bear witness to such an act. Never again feel her warmth lying against him, around him.
His remorse chased off the remnants of his anger. His desire for vengeance now giving way to his desire for her. He opened his mouth to say something but nothing wanted to step up to the mark. Nothing wanted to be shot down in cold blood. Instead he turned and without looking back left Jennifer’s flat to the sound of sobs and ragged breathing.
Threlfall House had fourteen floors; a stalagmite of shite brought from the brink of demolition on more occasions than anyone could remember. The housing estate that existed in its shadow was no better; tried, run down, the people who lived there pretty much the same.
Anderson loathed the place. The smell of stale piss and booze pervaded the stairwells. And the lifts were something else. Floors eroded by years of drunks using them as latrines, the top layer of linoleum a corroded ovoid, a mini piss-lake for all to avoid.
But if Anderson was totally honest, it wasn’t this that kept him from using the lift. It was something far more primordial, far more basic.
Confinement wasn’t a friend of Cory Anderson. The thought of those small cars and the long drop had him shivering and heading straight for the stairwell. What was nine floors amongst friends? Besides he’d have guilt and the sharp stinging in his knuckles to keep him company on the way down.
He’d not meant to loose it like that. He just wanted to know why Jennifer had traded him in for a no-mark like Malcolm. And then the little shite had answered the door, the grin on his face, Jennifer’s lipstick on his neck, pushing all the wrong buttons and setting the green eyed beast loose. It had started with a shove and then went from there. Anderson’s muse unleashed in the tiny flat in a giant turd of a building.
Anderson began his descent, his footfalls amplified by the concrete space about him. He kept his hands in free space, avoiding the stair rail. His hands hurt enough without coming across a hypodermic strategically placed to catch an unsuspecting police officer or Community Nurse.
Junkies and their sense of humour.
He made the seventh floor before he heard it. It was loud enough - close enough - to make him stop in mid stride.
Growling.
His first thought was that a dog was loose in the stairway. There were plenty of them in the building after all; their owners mostly drug dealers or games machine junkies. He tried to place it. Was it above or below? He waited; his breath on hold for a while.
It came again, from the landing below, thick and gruttal. And no matter how many times Anderson told himself the contrary, he knew now that it was definitely not a dog. He knew this for many reasons, but the main clue making him sure enough to start backing up the stairs, was the click clicking sound accompanying the growls; the sound of big claws tapping against concrete.
Someone had once said that we fear the unknown more than anything else in the world; and it was this adage that had Anderson going against his instinct to get the hell moving and encouraging him to peer over the railings, to make known the unknown, to quell the gnawing fear in his belly.
Slowly he inched over the banister, the vertical corridor of railings coming into view and dropping out below in a dizzying sense of height. He leaned over a little more, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was on the next landing, and began to question his initial trepidation. He was about to call time on his misplaced anxiety when he saw it.
And it saw him.
Anderson pulled sharply away from the railing, his back slamming against the pistachio coloured wall behind him. He wished that the concrete barrier could absorb him in some way, make him invisible to the thing he’d seen on the floor below. The thing that was slowly making its way towards him.
It had been a brief glimpse, but the image was branded upon his brain, seared there as though he’d inadvertently stared at the mid-summer sun. Red eyes, it had red eyes and they bore into him, marked him far deeper than the nails of his ex-lover ever could. And teeth, oh God it had teeth, lots of them that cluttered its maw so much so that the mouth had been forced into a razor sharp grin.
Anderson noted the door leading to the seventh floor flats. It was made of wood and glass and had no chance of stopping the thing coming to introduce him to those terrible teeth.
But through the glass he saw something else; the steel doors of the lift were open; wide and inviting. And although Anderson never thought the day would come when he’d welcome such a thing, he found himself weeping with joy. He edged towards the stairwell’s exit, eager to get inside the lift before the creature could get anywhere near him. The door to the exit opened smoothly for the first few inches, then the squeal of neglected hinges carved its name in the air.
“Shit!”
An explosion of movement now; heavy footfalls from below, the hideous growling a soundtrack to the event as the creature pounded up the steps. Anderson moved too, throwing open the door and launching himself towards the lift, his feet slipping haphazardly on the greasy linoleum.
But he was a few feet away when, to his total horror, the doors began to close.
He threw himself at the doors, his arm s
tuck out in front of him in an attempt to activate the opening mechanism. He got lucky, his hand made it through and the sensors picked it up. The doors slid lazily open with the incongruous, bright chime of a bell.
Just as Anderson bundled his body into the car, the doors to the stairwell were yanked open, the noise loud as the frame came with it and the remains were cast aside with the din of splintering wood and shattering glass.
The growling was louder now, filling the landing, filling Anderson’s world. The reek of piss was overwhelmed by another stench, the stench of something he couldn’t immediately place until it was so powerful it was difficult to suppress.
The stink of dead meat.
Not the clinical butcher’s shop stink, but that of road kill, or something trapped under a floorboard or behind a skirting board.
In his frenzy, Anderson flailed at the buttons on the wall. The lift doors began to close just as Anderson’s new buddy came into view, the eyes - ruby red and devoid of empathy – scanning his, a streak of viscous saliva swinging from its lower jaw almost hypnotising the trapped man with its pendulous motion.
The doors dragged themselves together as the creature launched at them. The lift began its descent as the beast’s bulk struck the outer doors, the impact bowing them inward and shaking the car violently. Anderson cried out as he was dumped on his ass as the car shimmied. The lift shaft creaked and groaned but the car was moving, leaving the thing battering the external doors on the seventh floor landing.
“Guess again, you sonofabitch,” he said, his voice frayed with fear and relief. As the car slid down the shaft, Anderson climbed to his feet, his mind trying to shrug off the sluggishness his fear had saddled him with. Rational thought needed to re-assert itself and fast.
He pulled out his mobile, his intention to notify the cops, to tell Jennifer and that sorry fuck Malcolm to stay put. His brain was just registering that there wasn’t any signal when a huge, distant thud occurred overhead. There was the distinct din of metal being bent and twisted and then something clattering down the lift shaft, bouncing against the sides with a series of dull echoes until it smashed into the roof of the car.
