Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  “What I’m getting at,” Devlin said, “is that some people are the disease. You’re not doing any good by keeping them alive; you’re just adding another layer to the shit we’re all walking in.”

  “Nobody is a disease. That’s a vile thing to say.”

  Devlin shook his head in sorrowing contempt. “Well, never mind,” he said. “If she hangs on too long, maybe I’ll come on over with a plastic bag and close the betting myself.”

  He turned then, and saw Stock. He didn’t seem even a little bit worried about being overheard. There weren’t many people at Fellside whose pricked-up ears Dennis Devlin needed to worry about, and Stock wasn’t one of them.

  “Hey, Sylvie,” he greeted her. “Talk some sense into this moron, would you?”

  He walked out, leaving Dr Salazar gathering up the pieces of his fractured dignity. As he walked away, he heard Sally say, “That man is a bully, pure and simple. Pay him no mind, Sylvie.”

  He didn’t hear what Stock said. But he was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. He thought of her as someone very like himself who wouldn’t bear fools gladly and could always tell one when she saw one.

  22

  Stock was PD that night. Primary duty nurse, in charge of the infirmary until Dr Salazar signed back in again at eight the next morning and relieved her. And through the watches of the night, Devlin’s words worked away inside her.

  Stock was a woman of strong and mostly conservative convictions. She disliked gays and immigrants and any other people who in her opinion asked for more than they deserved. Despite her atheism, she liked the moral seriousness of religions and religiously minded people. She felt they sat in the right corner on most social issues.

  And one of the issues that oppressed her most was the abuse of children. She thought Jimmy Savile was a worse man than Hitler had ever been, because at least most of Hitler’s victims had been able to fight back. What could a child do when a grown-up hurt them? Nothing.

  She brooded about the sex offenders in the closed unit in Dietrich block. She never got to meet them because Dietrich was a kingdom within a kingdom. It had its own medical staff geared up to the specialised needs of lunatics and monsters. That was probably for the best: if a paedophile took some damage, for example in a punishment beating, Stock didn’t know if she could bring herself to fix her.

  There might be a riot at Fellside some day. In riots, Sylvie knew, all kinds of scores got settled. The protection that was routinely provided at the taxpayer’s expense for the child murderers and the child rapists meant nothing when the walls came down.

  But that was a distant prospect. In the here and now, under her care this very night, there was Jessica Moulson, the Inferno Killer. With the blood of a child all over her hands. And Devlin’s soliloquy to Dr Salazar was hanging in the forefront of Stock’s mind like a permission slip from a teacher.

  Her only intention was to put her finger, very lightly, on the scales of justice. Nothing more than that. And she denied to herself that she was even doing that much. Her first sins were sins of omission. She was meant to apply Vaseline to Jess Moulson’s lips every two hours to keep them from drying and cracking any worse than they already had. She didn’t bother. And when Moulson’s water bottle emptied – the one with the teat on it so Moulson could take nourishment like a baby without moving her head – she didn’t refill it.

  But those small things unlocked something bigger inside her – and even though what she was doing scared her badly, she did it anyway. When she took Moulson’s temperature, she jammed the thermometer in under her swollen tongue with unnecessary force. And when it came time to give Moulson her pain meds, she handled her a lot more roughly than she needed to.

  She lifted Moulson’s wasted leg and turned it, looking for a likely vein. She bent the leg sharply outwards like someone who was about to joint a chicken, gripping it too tight at the knee and the ankle. She was aware of how easy it would be to pull the tibia out of its socket. The woman’s muscles were basically string at this point.

  She pulled back from the horrific thought, pretended it hadn’t excited her. She had her job to do and she would do it. She was a professional.

  She found a vein at last, right up in the groin area. Evidently Moulson hadn’t got that far, back when she was using. Stock had seen heroin addicts with track marks everywhere on their bodies. She’d once treated a prisoner who’d blinded herself in one eye by shooting up into her sclera. And she’d known another one who used to inject into her tongue, using dental floss to strap off. Nothing surprised her any more. She’d gone into nursing to relieve pain, and at Fellside all she’d seen was people committing atrocities on their own flesh. She hated it.

  She scrubbed the inside of Moulson’s thigh with antiseptic and prepped the hypo. She was using a multi-dose bottle of tramadol, so she slid the tip of the needle through the rubber seal and drew up the dose.

  Then she put the needle to Moulson’s groin and drove it in. As with the thermometer, she pushed a lot harder than she needed to, not intending to injure Moulson but almost imagining that her hatred would communicate itself somehow through the needle’s point. She sank the plunger in as though she was detonating a bomb.

  She didn’t realise her mistake until she withdrew the hypo and the blood started to well up out of the pinprick wound. The dark blue-purple was suffused with a brighter, richer red. And it was coming too freely, running down Moulson’s thigh and dripping on to the sheet before Stock could get a towel to it.

  That was wrong. Very wrong, in a very specific way. She must have delivered the dose of tramadol into Moulson’s artery.

  Stock bit down hard on her lower lip, but an involuntary moan forced its way out anyway. For a moment she was literally paralysed with horror. This was a terrible thing to have done – the kind of mistake that could end your career. More than that, it could end a life.

  The thing that made arterial injection so dangerous was that it caused a massive concentration of whatever medicine you were injecting to be delivered very locally, to the tissue that was perfused by that particular artery. The tissue of Moulson’s upper leg and thigh would swell and her blood flow would be massively disrupted. The pain would probably be short-lived, measured in minutes, but it would be incredibly intense. In the longer run, there’d be a serious risk of gangrene because some of that super-swollen, blood-deprived tissue would die. If enough of it died, the leg would have to be amputated.

  Of course there might not even be a longer run. Moulson could get a blood clot and die of a heart attack in the next few minutes.

  Stock backed away from the bed, her left hand clamped around her right wrist as though it now took both hands to hold the empty hypodermic. Her mind was full of clamouring alarms, and the impulse to run was almost overpowering. She couldn’t run. Moulson’s blood was flowing down over the marbled grey skin of her upper leg. The stain on the sheet was expanding outwards, a nearly perfect circle. Irrelevantly, out of nowhere, Stock remembered her husband Ron reading aloud from the Old Testament. Moses splitting the rock, and the water coming forth in great abundance.

  She pulled herself together as much as she could. She ran and got a T-pad from the first aid cabinet and brought it back to the bed, although it felt like someone else’s body she was moving. She pressed her thumb against the insertion point while she tore the packet open with her teeth. The pad was soaked with tranexamic acid. It ought to stop the bleeding.

  She held the pad in place for a full fifteen minutes until her thumb ached from the constant pressure. Moulson was twitching and whimpering in her sleep, little tremors running through her body. But the drug was keeping her under, even though she was registering the pain through the narcosis.

  I have to get away, Sylvie thought. I have to get out of here, right now. I can’t stay in this room.

  A part of her knew that running away wouldn’t help – that this would come back on her no matter what she did. But an animal panic filled her now. She did what she co
uld to clean up. Changed Moulson’s gown and then the sheets, her hands shaking as though she had some sort of palsy. She took the blood-soaked T-pad and its packet through to reception, dropped them into a sharps envelope and stuffed them well down in her handbag. She couldn’t take the sheets. They’d have to go into the laundry the next day, at the bottom of a bag where they might not be noticed.

  She got as far as the door.

  But that was where reality reasserted itself. She stopped with her hand on the handle, at the end of an invisible tether of conscience and fear and pragmatism. She really had no choice but to wait this out.

  And hope that Moulson didn’t die, even though death was what she had deserved.

  23

  A memory, taken out of context.

  Or maybe the needle slipping into her thigh was the context. Bringing back more consensual injections in what (in spite of everything) probably counted as happier times.

  “I don’t know,” Jess said.

  “What don’t you know?” John’s mouth was quirked up into a grin. As though he already had a good idea what she was going to say, and wanted her to say it because it was going to be hilarious.

  “I’m clean,” Jess told him. As shorthand for a lot of other things.

  They were sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the lights down, the TV playing without any sound and soft music on the iPod. The track was “The Trouble I’m In” by Gavin Rossdale, which didn’t feel like a good omen at all, but they’d shared a curry, two King Cobras and a tub of Cherry Garcia. Now John wanted to share something else, and he seemed to want it badly.

  “If you’re clean now,” he pointed out, “that tells me there was a time when you were using. You’ve done it before.”

  “Not this!” Jess protested. This was a little plastic baggy full of China White. This was Not Kansas, was way beyond anywhere she’d ever been. She tried to explain. “I was on oxy for a while. It took me a long time to get off it again. Heroin… Honest to God, John, that’s not my thing.”

  He was still grinning. “You know what the active ingredient in oxycodone is, Jess?”

  “No.”

  “It’s diacetylmorphine. The exact same thing that’s in heroin. You were already on opiates. This isn’t any different. Except that the way I take it, you don’t get so much of the dangerous stuff. You just get a quick high. Look, I’ll show you.”

  There was no ligature, no spoon, no syringe. “None of that shit. That’s mental!” John liked to hot-rail using the glass tubes that florists sell single roses in. He demonstrated, heating the white powder with a Bic lighter until the inside of the tube filled up with creamy white smoke that seemed almost as solid as mashed potato.

  He took a hit himself, then held the billowing tube, the white kaleidoscope, out to her. “Come on, babe,” he murmured. “Don’t leave me here on my own.”

  Memory and longing betrayed her. She let him put the tube up against her lips. She breathed in. A shallow breath at first. But the second one was deeper. And from there, by slow and inexorable degrees:

  the needle

  the first time he hit her and said he was sorry

  the first time he hit her and explained why it was her fault

  losing her friends

  losing her job

  burning the house down

  murdering Alex Beech.

  Jess was aware of the needle going in, but thought she’d dreamed it. The little prick of pain that promised pleasure, an artefact of a past that had to be gone for ever. She’d been floating in and out of consciousness for days now, and she couldn’t tell any more where her dreams ended and the real world began. It was all one long pilgrimage through a slough of synaesthetic porridge.

  The one reliable thing in that bleary universe was the fall and rise that came with each dose of tramadol – the dip into profound darkness, where everything was sweet but barely there, and the gradual return to a more negotiated place of dull aches and neural static.

  When this dose hit her system, it felt at first like the familiar welcoming descent, and Jess surrendered to it in much the same way she’d once surrendered to the saccharine sting of heroin. But this time was different. She sank down with jolts and jars, as though she were pushing her way through a crowd – and then, although she didn’t stop falling, something else was falling through her. Lots of somethings, red-hot and razor-tipped.

  The pain swelled and swelled to a terrible, impossible pitch. She kept on tumbling, end over end. How could anything hurt this much?

  She wanted to cry out but she couldn’t even do that. This was an interior place where things like sound didn’t really exist. There was only the one feeling, filling every corner of the world. She was a snowball in hell, rolling and rolling, cocooned in more and more thicknesses of whatever it was that was hurting her.

  This place didn’t look like how she imagined hell, though. She fell through a roiling chaos of shapes and forms that exploded out of each other and then folded back in again in an endless cycle. There were faces in there, and hills, and meandering hallways. Shifting, hurtling mazes of something and nothing and then something again. Gravity and perspective lurched and plunged from moment to moment, filling her with a sort of bodiless nausea.

  It was a place of infinite size. It had no edges or borders. But after a long, long time – hours or ages – something else loomed up ahead of her. Or perhaps below her. It was a dark and ragged circle, as perfectly black as the moon occluding the sun. She was going to fall into it, whatever it was. Even in a dream world, that yawning absence terrified her. It looked like death.

  Jess tried to reach out an arm to grab something to slow or stop herself, but she had no arms. She had no body. She was only a point of view, flying like a comet through silent immensity.

  But a point of view implied eyes, and if she could have eyes she could have hands. This was a dream, right? In a dream you could have anything, be anything. Give me hands! she thought desperately, and she felt an attenuated prickling where hands might be, or come to be.

  It was too late to take that experiment any further. She’d drawn level with the black circle, which was both bigger and closer than it seemed, and shot right on into it, into a shaft of unrelieved dark. The ocean was gone. There was nothing around her now but emptiness. Emptiness and pain.

  And acceleration. The pit had its own gravity. It laid claim to her. It was bringing her to its bosom with invisible hands and she couldn’t fight it.

  I can, a voice said. Hold on.

  Something laid hold of her, pulled at her from above. The touch was feather-light at first, and unavailing. The pit refused to let go.

  But so did this newcomer. It turned and angled Jess. Twisted her. A little at a time, but persistently, repeating the movement again and again. She was being dragged sideways. Buffeted by contradictory forces. The terrible momentum she’d built up was burning away in shuddering waves that danced and drove through her.

  For a moment it seemed that she came to a halt in mid-air as those forces found a balance. Then she was moving downwards again, or at least it felt like down.

  And landed, with a surprising jolt of impact, on something solid that supported her.

  Jess’s immediate instinct was to throw herself flat, but there was nothing for that instinct to act on so she just stayed where she was.

  Which was where, exactly? There was no way of knowing. No way to tell if she’d just been rescued or taken as prey.

  The one thing she was sure of was that she wasn’t alone. She felt the same sense of close and intense scrutiny that she’d felt on her first night in the Fellside infirmary, and many times since.

  The thing that had taken her was watching her now and had been watching her for a long time. She was defenceless. Terror filled her like a cup and leaked away again just as quickly because she was nothing. She couldn’t hold anything, not even an emotion.

  Jess had seen a movie once where the hero took his gun apart to clean it and then heard
the footsteps of approaching assassins. Over a soundtrack of pounding drums he struggled to put the dismantled weapon back together in time to defend himself. There were no drums here, no sounds at all, but that was what she tried to do now.

  What Jess was building for herself, though, was a body. She might be attacked at any moment, but she built outward from the core because that seemed the right way to do it. She made herself a heart – not a beating heart, because for all she knew she might be dead, but a heart that was her centre of gravity.

  She hung a head above it, like a hat on a hook. Eyes and ears in the head, so the abstract space was darkness now and the strained pause was silence.

  Legs dangling down until they touched the ground – which had no warmth, no cold, no smoothness or roughness yet to speak of, but it was below her and so it was ground.

  She turned a full circle, moving her notional feet in tiny increments.

  She reached out with her imagined arms. Resistance on the right-hand side; nothing on the left. It seemed that the place where she was standing was a narrow ledge of some kind, buttressed on one side and not the other.

  She was ready now. Ready to defend herself.

  I’m not going to hurt you.

  The voice was no voice at all. It arrived in her mind without travelling through the air. Even so, it had volume and tonality. It was high and light, like a child’s voice or a young woman’s.

  What – what – what – ? Jess thought and tried to say. She had forgotten to put a mouth in her face, so nothing happened. But whatever was out there heard her anyway.

  Nothing, it said.

  The question Jess had been trying to frame was, What do you want?

  A mouth has a tongue. Teeth. Lips. A palate. All those things are needed before you can start to make and shape sounds. Jess tried to get the parts in the right sequence, knowing that even if she did an immaculate job, she would still be missing the magic ingredient, which was breath.

  In the meantime, since this thing could read her thoughts, she asked, Why?