by Lou Morgan
“I believe you, Tigs. None of us knew.”
“You don’t blame me? Not like Noah?”
“Noah’s just scared. We all are. Nobody blames you. Not really.” Izzy hadn’t even finished speaking before she wondered whether that was a lie.
Kara was waiting for them on the steps outside the Art Deco front of Florin Court. It was a shock to see her again. She looked so normal. So ordinary. Her eyes weren’t red and sore and there were no dark shadows below them. There was no sign of the greyish pallor that the rest of them had. Kara’s skin as good as glowed.
“You look awful! All of you.” Kara was clearly as shocked by the way they looked as they were by her.
“Thanks,” Tigs shot back, her vulnerability vanishing in a heartbeat.
Grey tipped his head on one side. “Are you going to play nice?” he asked Tigs, who rolled her eyes.
“I’m fine. Just go, all right? And … be careful. I mean it.” There was something in her voice that wasn’t usually there. A warmth. Concern. Her gaze flickered from Grey to Izzy. “Seriously. Be careful.”
They didn’t need telling twice.
“Do you think they’ve found her?” Izzy was breathless from keeping up with Grey, even though he was obviously struggling, too. His path was no longer straight, and when they had to step into the road to pass the hoarding around the borehole for a new Underground tunnel, he came dangerously close to walking straight in front of an oncoming taxi. The cab’s horn blared as, headlights flashing, it swerved and Izzy yanked Grey back on to the safety of the pavement.
Grey scratched his head. “Whoops.”
“Yeah. Whoops.” She nodded towards the roof of the market ahead of them. “We cut through the middle, right?”
The main building of Smithfield meat market was, unlike most markets, divided in two by an open-ended central aisle – a semi-pedestrianized road running through the middle. It was a busy commercial market, where forklifts laden with crates and carcasses buzzed up and down the aisle all night. But for now, it was still quiet. Access to the refrigerated stalls themselves was through two large gates that opened off the aisle, or directly through the loading docks – a setup designed to keep the stalls as clean and cool as possible. Several of the loading bays had lorries parked outside them already but Grey and Izzy raced past, down as far as the path through the centre of the market.
Izzy pulled her phone out of her pocket as they went and stared at it. Nothing. There was still no sign of Juliet, and no word from Noah.
On the other side of the market, the road opened out into the large circular space of West Smithfield. Trees and cobblestones surrounded a ramp that swept down to an underground car park, and right in front of them was one of the entrances to the hospital – a grand gateway cut into a high stone wall. Through it, a courtyard with a huge fountain in the middle was just visible.
There was nobody there. So where were Juliet, Noah and Mia?
“Plan?” Izzy sank on to a bench beside the car park ramp.
“Go in?” Grey flopped on to the seat next to her. “They must all be inside.”
“You think they went in after her?”
“I don’t think anything any more. I tap out when I get past ‘Need to sleep’.”
“And that’s how you’re keeping going, is it? Not thinking?”
“Usually.” He winked at her and stood up, but she could tell even he had less energy than he normally did. The Grey she knew, the one who was always joking and messing about, was slipping away. Was that what was happening to her, too? It sure felt like it. It felt like everything that should be her, everything that she normally was, was asleep somewhere… And instead, there was a washed-out version of her walking around. A dream version.
Not for the first time, Izzy found herself wondering whether all this was just a dream. A bad dream brought on by too much pressure at school, and tomorrow she’d wake up and it would be the last day of term and she’d never have taken the pills. And she never would. She pinched herself experimentally. It hurt.
“Did you just do what I think you did?” Grey was leaning away from her, staring at her like she’d just grown another head.
“No,” she scoffed, then shuffled on the bench. “Maybe… Stop judging me, all right?”
Grey didn’t reply. Instead, he stared at the main gate into Bart’s Hospital.
Guessing what he was thinking, Izzy hauled herself up off the bench. “Come on, then.”
“You want to go in?”
“Well, we can’t exactly sit here all night, can we?”
“It’s one way to kill the time.”
“Can we not use that word?”
“What word?”
“You know. ‘Kill’.” She dropped her voice to a whisper.
He paused, trying to work out how serious she was being. And then, at long last, he cracked a grin. “Loser,” he whispered back.
It was only for a second. But just for that one second they were normal again, themselves again. And it was enough to keep her going.
The receptionist was not happy about letting them in. Izzy couldn’t blame her. She probably thought they were there to case the joint and raid the pharmacy. Izzy had caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the door as they’d walked in, and it was fair to say that if she’d been the receptionist, she wouldn’t have let them in, either. Her hair looked like someone had dropped a damp, dark, tangled mop on her head from a great height. Her eyes were red (no surprise there) and her skin had turned a sort of pale greeny-blue. The shadows under her eyes had darkened so much they looked like someone had punched her, and her lips were starting to chap and crack.
“We look like a couple of junkies,” she whispered to Grey as he sidled up to the front desk.
“The irony of that is not lost on me, you know,” he whispered back, before turning what he clearly meant to be a dazzling smile at the woman on the other side of the desk.
It had been intended as a dazzling smile. It fell quite a long way short.
The receptionist took one look at the pair of them and pointed at a row of chairs pushed back against the opposite wall. “Wait there.” She glared at them and was about to pick up the handset of the phone that sat in front of her when another member of staff appeared, clutching a pile of folders. The receptionist glared at them both again, then turned her attention to her colleague.
“Now,” Grey hissed at Izzy. “Juliet’s parents share an office on the fifth floor.”
“An office?”
“Look, I don’t know how that works. I just know they have one, I’ve been in there. Fifth floor, out the lift, turn right. Then just follow the signs to the department that has too many vowels in it.” He glanced over at the desk. “Before she remembers we’re here, OK? Juliet must be up there somewhere. Look for her in the corridor, then come straight back down. I’ll meet you on the other side of the entrance.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to split up?” Izzy stood up and stretched, inching towards the lifts as casually as she could. She could feel her spine clicking. Feel every bone in her shoulders and arms complaining.
“If we both try and get in that lift, she’ll have Security down here in an instant. You’re in a public place…”
“Like the Barbican?” she said pointedly.
Grey frowned. “I know, but it’s different, isn’t it? Go, look, come back. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’m coming in after you. And God help you if you’ve stopped to put on lippy or something.”
“Are you serious?” Izzy shot him a disbelieving look, but then the lift pinged and the doors clattered open. Seizing her chance, she slipped inside and pressed the button for the fifth floor.
The lift did not go up. The lift went down.
Izzy tried pressing the button for the fifth floor again, but the controls ignored her and the lift rattled towards the basement. There was nothing to do but go along for the ride. “I must have really bad lift-juju,” Izzy muttered as the doors op
ened again and released her. She peered out into the corridor, stepping gingerly through the doors.
“Oh, no…”
Izzy wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but she was fairly certain that this was not what the basement of St Bartholomew’s Hospital usually looked like. It was dark, for a start – a long, dark corridor lit only by the occasional bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The paint (a sort of vomit-orange) was peeling away from the walls in big flakes, leaving mould-blackened plaster visible below. Thick pipes, encrusted with dirt and rust, were bolted to one of the walls just above head height and disappeared into the gloom. There was an overpowering smell of rot and decay, and a thickness in the air that caught in the back of her throat and made her gag.
“Nope. Not again…” She spun back towards the lift, but the doors had somehow closed without her hearing them and the lift was gone. She pressed the ‘call’ button over and over again, but there was no telltale whir from inside the lift shaft.
She was stuck, and there was nothing to do but try and ride it out.
From somewhere in the dark of the corridor, there came a squeaking sound. Just once. Then nothing.
Then it came again. And again, and again.
It was a wheel, squeaking.
Something was coming toward her, down the corridor.
“OK, Iz. OK. You’re OK. It’s all in your head. It can’t hurt you. Nothing in your head can hurt you. Just go with it,” Izzy muttered under her breath, already feeling her pulse rising.
The squeaking got louder. Closer.
Something was moving along the corridor, slowly and evenly. She could make out the movement now as whatever it was passed through each of the pools of light in turn.
Closer and closer.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
And something else. Something quieter. A kind of rattle, like metal on metal.
Izzy breathed deeply, slowly, and coughed at the taste of the air. It was like breathing moss.
Creak-rattle. Creak-rattle. Creak-rattle.
Someone was humming.
It was a woman – and now, Izzy could see her. It was a nurse pushing a metal instrument trolley, and she was coming down the corridor.
At least, she had been a nurse … once.
The closer she got, the more obvious it was. Her uniform was old-fashioned, like the pictures in a history textbook. She had a complicated hat made out of stiffened fabric, which looked like a piece of origami. It had a red cross on the front of it. Except the cross hadn’t been painted in ink. It was painted in blood.
The edges of her uniform were tattered, torn and stained with green and brown. Her hair, escaping from beneath the edges of her hat, had been curled and pinned, but was now a dirty shade of blonde and hung limply across her face. Her lips were blood-red, but her lipstick had smeared across her cheeks, making it look as though her face had been torn open. Izzy forced herself to look away, but not before she had seen the eyes, rolled far back into her head, only the whites visible, yellowed and dirtied with age.
She’d managed to stop herself looking at the nurse, but there was still the trolley. The closer it came, the harder it was not to look. Not to see the surgical tools that had been neatly arranged on the top of it, not to see the rust that caked the edges of scissors and saws and surgical shears.
The rust, and other things.
Impossible not to see the blunt pliers at the near end of the trolley.
Impossible to miss the tray of fingernails beside them.
The squeaking stopped. The humming did not. The nurse had stopped beside a door a little way in front of her. An arrow painted on the wall beside it said ‘Morgue’.
Izzy’s hand crept behind her back and she pressed her thumb into the button for the lift until she thought it might snap. The nurse looked at her, and blinked her white eyes.
“You shouldn’t be here, dearie,” she said, and her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep underground. It was muffled and thick and clogged with earth. She stepped around the trolley. “You can’t be here.” The nurse lifted her hand and tucked her hair behind her ear. “You can’t be here,” she said again, and her hand dropped to the trolley. Her mottled fingers settled on something that shone dully as she picked it up.
“I was just leaving,” Izzy said as calmly as she could. She jabbed the button again as the nurse took another step closer.
It was a scalpel. Izzy could see it now; see the tip of her finger sliding up and down the back of the blade.
“I’m just waiting for the lift and then I’ll be gone. I was trying to get to the fifth floor – I got kind of lost…” She hoped she sounded friendly. She also hoped that sounding friendly worked on psychotic hallucinations.
“Oh, we’re all lost down here, dearie.” The whisper came in Izzy’s ear, and suddenly the nurse was there beside her and raising the scalpel. Izzy jerked back, but the nurse’s other hand snapped forward and grabbed hold of her wrist, clamping so tightly around it that Izzy could feel her fingers throb. She tried to pull away but it was no use. She twisted, she pulled and she tugged her whole arm back, but nothing could break the nurse’s grip. All she could do was watch as the empty white eyes bored into her and the nurse raised the hand that held the scalpel.
“I’m sorry,” Izzy whispered, and just for a second, the monstrous nurse hesitated.
Her body aching with effort, Izzy pulled away once more. And this time, it was enough. The grip slipped from around her wrist and she tumbled free. The nurse lunged towards her, aiming for her face and slicing down with the scalpel. There was a pressure on her cheek, a sensation of cold and then of heat. And then the world jerked as though someone had changed the channel on a remote control and Izzy found herself sitting on the floor of the lift with the doors closing on a (thankfully empty) brightly lit, white-painted basement corridor.
All thoughts of the fifth floor, of Juliet, of anything forgotten, Izzy counted the seconds until the door opened on to the reception area. Ignoring the receptionist’s shouted, “Hey!” she shouldered open the door to the outside world. Grey was there, waiting. He turned to face her and then rushed to her side.
“What happened?”
“The basement. There was…”
“Iz, why were you in the basement? I told you to go to the fifth floor.”
“I tried. I did. Lift wouldn’t let me.” It sounded weak, however true it was. Something told her he wasn’t really listening.
“Your face – what happened?” Gently, he turned her cheek toward him. “You’re bleeding…” He stopped and stepped away. “And what the hell are you doing with that?”
Izzy followed his gaze down to her right hand.
She was holding a scalpel, the blade tinted red with her own blood.
Chapter Thirteen
The scalpel clattered to the ground.
There was something new in the way that Grey looked at her. Izzy could see it. Something that had not been there before.
Fear.
“I don’t know where that came from…” she began, but even as she said it, she knew it was no good.
“Izzy, why were you carrying a scalpel?” He took another step back from her, putting as much space between them as he could.
“I told you, I don’t know. I don’t even remember…” But that wasn’t quite true, was it? Images flickered through her mind. The nurse. The trolley. The corridor. And then the corridor again, but as it should have looked; as it really looked. White-painted walls and pale yellow plastic floor tiles, still damp from being mopped. A neat sign pointing to the MRI suite. A delivery man. A pile of boxes. Plastic wrapping fluttering to the floor. An open storage cupboard.
Broken glass glittering in the light and a door slamming shut.
Izzy’s mouth opened and closed silently as the truth sank in. Whatever she had seen, or thought she’d seen, wasn’t real. But any memory of what she might actually have done had disappeared.
“I don’t remember,” she said agai
n. She had stolen a scalpel from a hospital. She had carried it back outside with her. She had come to find Grey with it still in her hand. And she had no idea how or why she had done it. “Grey? I’m scared.”
“Me, too.” He stepped closer again, cautiously, and poked the scalpel with the toe of his trainer. The metal blade tinged against the stone paving as the knife rolled over.
“I don’t think it’s safe here.”
“I’m with you on that one.” He nodded towards the gate. “Juliet’s not here. We should get back to the Barbican.”
“You think we’re any safer there? After what happened to Dom?”
“Thing is, we don’t know what happened to Dom, do we?” He eyed the scalpel, now lying at their feet. “And until we do, we stick to wherever feels safest. That’s –” he glanced up at the hospital building looming over them – “not here.” Reluctantly, he bent to pick the scalpel up, wrapping it in a tissue and sliding it into the back pocket of his jeans. “We can’t just leave it there, can we? Anything could happen to it.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Any other day? No. Today? I’m not sure.”
He was right. Nothing about this made sense, and everything was wrong. But the frightening thing was that it had made sense at the time. Or at least, it had seemed to. Just like it had made sense to try and stop Juliet from telling her parents about the pills.
Juliet was right. Of course she was.
Juliet who was somewhere, alone.
Izzy’s phone chirped, startling them both, and in her hurry to get it out of her pocket, she fumbled it, dropping it heavily on the ground. Noah’s name flashed up on the screen as she scooped it back up. Noah didn’t wait for her to say hello. By the time she’d got the phone to her ear, he was already talking.
“…following me. I lost Mia. I don’t know where she is. We were by the market…”
“Noah, slow down. We’re right across the road. Where are you?”
“I told you, I lost her. I can’t find her. One minute she was behind me, and the next she was gone. And there’s this sound. It’s like… It’s like there’s someone whispering in my ear, all the time. I can’t get away from it.”