by Greg James
Closing the doors quietly behind him, he then took a step forward, and then a step back, trying to keep his breathing steady and soundless.
Three dead cats hung and gently swung before him, like puppets on severed strings. One black. One white. One tabby. Patches of tight, wasted skin showed through in places where their fur had been worn away by prolonged malnutrition. Their small legs were contusions; splinters of bone poked through broken skin like harsh, probing fingers from another reality. The heads were the worst – skulls crushed in; ears cut down to tattered, black rags; each eye a small, scraped-out hole – and so they hung, and so they swung from crude nooses fashioned from rusted wire and used plastic carrier bags.
John should have looked away, but he didn’t. Instead, he reached out a hand and stroked the mangy fur of each cat in turn. How hard, cold, and rigid they were. The way they hung over the entrance to this part of the hospital was more like a sacrifice, a ritual, than simple murder. He should’ve cut them down, but he didn’t have a knife, so he had to leave them there, to swing and turn and swing again. The warning signs on the fence outside had been left for people like him, by people like him. The cats, they’d been left by something else, something crueller than children could be.
As he left them and headed up the stairs, John stopped and listened. He’d heard something. He looked back the way he’d come. Footsteps faded away, above and below – perhaps the sound of his own? All was still again. Nothing moved. John did not move until he was sure it would be okay. He went back, and saw the cats were gone. Then he heard it again, on the other side of the door. It was crossing the bridge, making the sound of something dry and dead, dragging other dead things away.
John did not follow the sound. He kept on up the stairs, climbing higher and higher into the main building. A water leak had sprung somewhere close by, and the air tasted of mould. Things were piled unevenly in the stairwell; stacks of water-damaged files, rot-fattened books, and mottled picture frames littered the way.
The main doors onto the second floor were blocked and the windows reinforced by solid plywood, so John left the stairwell through the narrow doorway he found after groping along the walls. It led onto a series of thin balconies with white railings. The late evening air tasted good, after breathing in the foetid ripeness of the stairwell. The sealed section of the floor came to an end, and a window was waiting for him; someone had already taken the time to remove the glass. It took a few tries to make the corroded hinges yield, but finally, with a shrill crack, the window opened and John clambered through into a room with an ornate mantel set over a small Victorian fireplace crowned by patches of peeling, silver-embossed wallpaper. It must’ve been a private room at one time.
A shape rested in the way of the door: a child that could’ve been there for years. The frame of its stroller had decayed until it was almost rusted through, and the bleached plastic buckles fastened over its body were thin, scratched and splintered. Its face was a fibrous mask with the texture of perished fruit-skin, out of which nothing but darkness stared. Vermin had taken its eyes back to their nests. The mouth was puckered severely, as if in pain, and its little hands were papyrus fists. It had died suffering, and it had died alone. John could feel Death in the room with him, beady-eyed and crow-like, watching over this sad remnant no-one had cared enough to clear away.
John had to get away from it. He crossed the refuse-laden floor back to the window for a clean breath of winter air. His eyes were damp. It must be the dust, he thought, as his gaze returned to the dead child. A pervasive, bitter stench emanated from its shrunken form.
It had been left behind, just like the cats and the rubbish in the stairwell. All of these things had been put into position. All these things once loved, once upon a time, waiting to be swallowed whole. He turned his back to the window and knelt down, trying to look past the wasted skin and empty eyes. There was something about this child, though he didn’t want to go too near to be sure. The shape of the face. The grimy traces of its hairline. The look of pain, cut so close to a look of anger – and of hate. It was almost the same face as the boy he’d seen cutting Daria with the knife at Madame Jo’s .
How could this be?
London air blew in through the open window but did not touch his bones; a different coldness was taking root there. John decided to leave. He’d not come here for dead cats and dead children. He’d come here for Daria, and she wasn’t here. He could see that now, and he didn’t want to be here any longer.
He was striding briskly down the hallway, away from the child’s room, when he heard the sound, high and scraping. He spun. It was the stroller, resting against the doorframe. It had moved without being pushed. It moved again, coming towards him, wheels rattling and frame creaking in the old silence of the hospital. It was not moving fast, but fast enough to animate the small corpse it carried. Dust bled from creases. The mummified head shook loosely. The little arms trembled and jerked about in violent dance. Something moved – disturbed, awoken – beneath the threadbare fabric of its shirt.
John could’ve run from it. He should have. But his legs found themselves moving through the slow, dying motion of a dream close to its end. He couldn’t walk fast enough to out distance the thing, and he couldn’t take his eyes from it. If he turned away, if he didn’t keep on watching, he was sure the quaking motion of the corpse would generate some nascent flicker of life in its twitching breast. It would stir, it would cry out, it would lunge through the air, latch onto him and begin biting, clawing, and scratching. The notion was ridiculous; he knew that then and afterwards, but in the silence of the hospital with its rust-red shadows and broken, abandoned things, it felt real. It felt true.
The corridor ended through a doorway where double doors had once been and only twisted hinges now remained. A bannister led down into another stairwell, its supporting rails rotted through. Beyond, there was a fall all the way down to the ground floor. John backed away from the steadily rolling stroller as much as he could, keeping a distance, before he took a step to one side with a calmness he did not feel. The stroller passed close to him. He saw skin and hair falling away, showing the child’s frail skull underneath. It went over the edge and fell through the hole, plunging into the dark where it hit the floor with a quiet clatter of echoes. The child’s body scattered into dry, powdered pieces. Something escaped from the torso; it might’ve been a rat, or an overgrown spider finding its way home.
The body didn’t move from under its cruciform of rotten metal. It had never moved by itself, even when the stroller was in motion, not really. There was nothing to fear from the dusty mess down there. It would never rise again, breathe the air, laugh, cry, or touch a butterfly’s wings. John kept watching it for a long time, until it was completely dark outside, thinking that if he turned away, the child might move again.
It just might.
Chapter Eleven
John couldn’t find the way out of the hospital in the dark, so he started going down rather than going up. After the child, he didn’t want to go up anymore. He passed down through wax-hued surgery rooms with thin dividing partitions, dispensing clinics, and wards empty of everything but the moth-coloured markings left by beds and old fittings. It felt like the hospital was twisting in on itself, forcing him downwards, as if it were swallowing him whole, but he knew that couldn’t be what was happening. He’d just gotten a bit lost.
He went down a flight of stairs and found the door blocked by a weight from the other side. Through the wired-glass, he thought it looked like a filing cabinet. It would take a while to retrace his steps, but he didn’t want to do that, so he walked down a floor to the basement and turned on the torch he’d brought along. Hopefully, he’d be able to cut through here fairly quickly, get back up onto the ground floor, and go home.
He entered a number of rooms, he wasn’t sure how many, before water began to rise and splash around his boots. The air became acrid and made his eyes run with blurring tears. It wouldn’t do much good to hang a
round in this for long. He began to jog through the water, sloshing loudly. Light receded until his torch was the only source left. The sound of rushing water from somewhere reached his ears. It must be to do with the leak that caused the damage on that stairwell, he thought. Torchlight glanced off the edges of doorways and the angles of walls as he passed them. The roaring of water was getting closer as John flipped his torch around each room he passed through.
Finally, he came out into a hallway where, at the far end, a plume of water rose up to around half a metre in height. A water main had burst. John passed the light of the torch over the rising and falling gush. The sound of running water made him feel better. It was a normal sound; it wasn’t dry, or slow, or dead. It was a constant, something continuous and life-giving.
He waded through the deeper flood to a room within a room, partitioned by mould-spotted panels of glass. Objects floated past him. He recognised the shapes of hospital paraphernalia drifting on its surface, and there was something else, deeper in the partitioned room. It had hands, which were reaching out, and there was something wrong with its face. John shone his torch on it, and then quickly cast the shaft of light somewhere else. The face and hands belonged to a mannequin with a gaping hole where its face should have been. John tried to not think about how the prevailing dampness had softened the hole’s edges, making it into a mouth that could not scream.
A sudden, great splashing from behind, heavy and uneven, made him turn the torch back the way he’d come, shining it at eye-level to blind whoever might be there.
The light touched them, but they did not move; some were dressed in the coats of doctors, others in parts of nurses’ uniforms, others in nothing at all. John saw faces with holes in them, and some with no heads at all, just the shattered splinters of necks. No blood ran out. There was never blood from their wounds. All their pain was held within, and there it stayed, no matter how much it hurt. They were remnants, nothing more. John passed his torch back and forth across the crowd, which hadn’t been there when he’d passed through that part of the basement minutes ago. Could he hear a wet rustling from somewhere close, a whispering made without tongues?
He made another pass with his torch and took a step away from them. Those the light had not illuminated had moved closer, not by much, but enough. A few of them were raising their hands towards him, the fingers outstretched in supplication. He imagined lines of distress working their way across the barren, fractured faces that were leaning towards him. John didn’t like it, and didn’t know why he would’ve felt better if they were trying to hurt him. A supple creaking came from his right. He turned the torchlight back to that part of the room. Hands missing fingers caught at his sleeve. John recoiled, and his own fingers failed him, dropping the torch. Darkness fought with light – both flashed, fluttered, and stuttered – as the torch drowned and went out.
John turned and ran blind, seeing nothing ahead. The sound of his hurried breathing was not enough to mask the violent motion of the water, which was disturbed by those following him. Between gasps, he heard something at his back that could have been the breathing of many unfit mouths. John’s shoulders and shins barked against the hard outlines of doors, filing cabinets, desks, storage units, and other shapes that crowded in and found him as he ran through the deep, wet dark of the hospital basement. His lungs burned, each breath feeling torn from inside him as he ran from the promise of being touched by hands that shouldn’t move.
The end came when John tripped up a set of cement steps, sprawled onto them, found his feet, lost them again, and reached for where a door had to be. It had to be there, so he could crawl through and close it on the sounds and shapes parting the waters behind him. His wet fingers found an unyielding surface, then a handle. He pulled, harder than he’d ever pulled before. The door opened, and he barely managed to haul himself through into the space beyond. He closed the door, resting himself against it, and dully waited for them to knock. He waited, waited, and waited – for nothing. John listened, ached, and waited some more. There was nothing, only the sound of water settling outside. They’d gone. Left him alone.
“Thank God.” The words echoed emptily around him. John got to his feet, panting, and felt along the wall, fearing the worst: that he was trapped in the lightless, water-logged basement. He found a switch and flicked it on.
Light came down from above and illuminated a morgue.
Daria was laid out before him on a dissection table. She looked as if she’d just died the day before. Not a trace of rot or decay could be seen on her body. He went over to her and pressed his hands against her flesh, which was cold as stone. He pressed his face against her stomach and breathed in the faint, antiseptic odour of a sterile corpse. It had been her watching him from the window. It must’ve been, he thought, as his need for her began to rise – a desperate, inner tide.
John undressed himself and laid his wet clothes out to dry on the ground. He laid himself out next to Daria and held her close, touching the cold, unresponsive wax of her flesh, stroking at her face, her blue-tinged lips and her long, black hair. His erection came sooner than he’d expected, and it didn’t slacken as he continued to caress her. Her nipples were firm, cool, and tasted good in his mouth. He wet his fingers with his tongue and rubbed them between her legs until she felt slick enough. His breathing became harder and heavier as he mounted her, gracelessly.
John Greyerson made love to the corpse of Daria Lee in a way he could never have done to a living woman, and as he spent the last of himself inside her, he began to repeat something softly to himself and to the observing shadows. It could have been a prayer. It could have been a lament. The words themselves, they could have been ‘ oh, mother’ .
Chapter Twelve
The following evening, on the way home from work, John stopped at a phone box he’d passed many times before on the Broadway. A few public phone booths were left standing, here and there, around London, piss-stained revenants from the age before mobile phones. He needed to do something, so he took one of the dog-eared cards wedged above the phone casing. It was bleached by the sun, the black print having run where rain had seeped into the phone box. It read Love Me Tonight , and there was a number underneath. He called the number as soon he got home.
“Hello?” said a hard Polish voice, and followed with a cough.
“Hello, yes. Is this love me tonight?”
“It could be. Would you like it to be?”
“I think so, yes.”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“I-I am sure. I want it to be.”
“Okay, what do you want?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Give me details, and I can tell you numbers.”
“Ah, right, yes. You see, I’m not sure. What do you do?”
“I do no S&M or anal. I can massage. I can wank you with hands or feet. I can walk on you in shoes. Sleep together costs a lot. Putting yourself in my mouth costs a lot more. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“So, what do you want?”
John told her.
“I can do that for you. Very easy. I’ll give you the address, and you come here in one hour.”
John took down the address. It wasn’t far; it was in St John’s Wood. He could catch a bus there. He didn’t like using the tube at night anymore.
“You will pay me money first when you get here. I do not like time-wasters.”
“Okay, yes. Thank you.”
She hung up, and John wished he hadn’t said thank you.
*
The Polish woman lived on a quiet street in a block of low-rise flats with narrow balconies, which reminded him of the Temperance Hospital. John was on time; he rang the bell for the flat number she’d given him, and he was buzzed in before he could have second thoughts. He’d never paid before. Climbing the stairs, he thought about going back down and making a run for it, but something inside kept him going, taking step after step up the stairs.
He knocked on the door of h
er flat harder than he should’ve done. It opened quickly, and he found himself staring at a handsome woman with dyed blonde hair – her grey roots were showing – dressed in a black-and-white striped tracksuit and shell-toe trainers. Her hair was tied back, and she wore no make-up. Worry lines revealed themselves in the hallway’s light. She was older than he would’ve liked, and not what he’d expected, but then he had little idea what a woman of this profession should look or be like.
“Come in,” she said and retreated into the flat without waiting for him. “Take your shoes off and leave them by the door please. I don’t like mess.”
John did as he was told, noticing a heavy floral aroma as he closed the door behind him. The carpet was quiet under his feet, and as he made his way through the short hall to the living room, he saw that the flat was very tidy and well cared for. There was nothing seedy or unsightly about it. It was not how he’d expected a prostitute’s home to be.
“Please sit,” she said when he reached the living room. Her tone was as hard and matter-of-fact in person as it had been on the phone. John did as he was told, sitting down on the faux-leather sofa.
“You have the money?”
He gave her the money. She took it and put it away in a drawer. He noticed she did not say thank you.
“You know what you want?”
John nodded.
“Okay. You paid for this.”
She took off her trainers and her socks; they were clean, he noticed, and so were the feet inside them. Her feet were as well cared for as the flat. The toenails were neatly trimmed with no sign of a French pedicure. The toes were well shaped, and she sat with her legs stretched out, knees and ankles together, so he could see the smoothness and softness of her soles. Her eyes were on him, but he could not tell what she was thinking behind them.
“I am ready. Are you?” she asked.
John felt himself shaking inside as he knelt down. He took a deep breath and lowered his face to her bare feet, where he lingered for less than a moment. They had the same heavy, floral aroma as the flat. He’d barely kissed them once before he jerked back to his feet – a puppet pulled tight on its strings – and was turning and leaving. He grabbed his shoes, but didn’t put them on until he was outside, and the door closed between him and her. She didn’t come after him. Why should she?