"No!", he had pleaded. "There is always hope... Do not ask me, ME, your son, to do this!"
But Maciek knew deep inside that there was no hope. That no one would be able to save his mother from the pain of the cancer that had been eating through her liver and back, and that science would never be able to reverse the tide of death that was irreversibly sweeping her way.
And he knew, deep down inside, that there was a logic to his mother's request.
If he loved her, he would kill her. He would help her end it all.
.
It was during a weekend trip back from his studies at Kraków University that Maciek finally found the courage to kiss his mother one last time, and to place a pillow over her face.
She had not fought, or struggled, but lying there in her bed she had welcomed that next step in her evolution.
One moment she was there, sadness in her eyes, and the pain contorting her hands into balled up fists that shook and trembled with the weight of life, and then the next she was gone.
Maciek could still remember in minute detail the moment when he removed the pillow from her face and saw the peace that had finally graced her. Outside a dog had begun barking loudly, bellowing at the moon and the sky, perhaps sensing the moment of transition and heralding the passing of a soul.
But when the barking stopped, the room inside the house was quiet. Still. Peaceful.
It was at that moment that Maciek had discovered his fascination with death: with the moment during which a person transitioned from a living being into a framework of rotting cells, muscles and tissue, devoid of life, and incapable of movement.
Soulless.
.
Did Maciek believe in a soul? He did not know. But in the moments following the death of his mother he had sensed something. A sense of peace in the room that had not been there before.
It could have just been the silence. It might have just been the emptiness of the night. Or it could have been something else, something more spectacular...the passing of a soul from one life to another.
The silence had only been broken by the torrent of grief that had flowed from within Maciek, the tears that burst forth and continued, unabated for almost an hour. He had cried, almost violently, until there was nothing more within him. The last two years of suffering had not only been his mother's. He too had endured that pain, but now, mercifully it was gone.
As Maciek sat on the bed beside his mother, he had slowly begun to wonder about the moment, that exact moment during which his mother had passed from one world to another. It amazed him: that one moment there was life, and then there was none.
That was where it had all started, and the need was born within him to recreate and study that moment over and over again in greater detail.
Until now, until today, everyone he killed had been someone that he had loved. They were all girlfriends who he had cared deeply for, and which had therefore made them ideal candidates with whom to recreate that intimate moment of passing.
Today would be the first time when he would share death with someone he did not care for, for whom he felt no love, or with whom he had no physical bond.
Last night, as Maciek had lain in bed alone, listening to the foxes cry in the woods outside, he thought about what he was going to do...and a strange thought had entered his mind: "Am I mad?"
It was then that he had remembered the words of his mother, spoken one day when Maciek was young and growing up, and in reference to an uncle of his who had been admitted to an asylum.
"Do not worry, my Maciek. Poor Victor will not suffer, for those who are mad do not question if they are mad. They are not capable of logical reasoning, and are not aware of the madness of their actions..."
.
Maciek had slept soundly that night. Secure in the knowledge that the simple action of questioning his sanity, thereby proved his logical capability and that he was thus sane.
.
He missed his mother. And her wisdom.
Chapter Nine
.
.
Maciek's Story
England
Present Day
September 6th
.
.
Maciek closed the door behind himself and locked it. He walked over to the window and looked out through a small hole he had made in the shuttering, checking nervously to make sure that there was no one walking nearby in the woods.
He saw no one. He never did. No one ever walked down here or around these woods. If anything people avoided this area, partly because it was run-down, partly because their little street was at the top of a steep hill, and partly because there was simply nothing special to attract people to the dark forest at the top of the hill where the constant wind blew so cold most of the year round.
Which made it perfect for Maciek.
He stepped forward and bent over the man lying on the floor. His guest.
The man looked back, his eyes wild and staring, the pupils in his eyes tiny pinpricks in spite of the dim lighting in the room.
Abject fear.
Maciek recognised the emotion, and his pulse instantly quickened in response to the surge of new adrenaline pumped into his blood.
He knelt down, leaning over the man.
For a second he thought about releasing the restraints on the man's arms, so that the struggle between them could be made more authentic, but he quickly dismissed it. It was a stupid thought. The man beneath him was large,-although not as tall as Maciek-, and in spite of the fact that he had been pinned down to the ground and drugged for over twenty-four hours, it was possible that given a chance, the man would put up an incredible struggle. Maciek knew that the will to live can help people achieve amazing feats of strength.
No, better left as it was.
Maciek surveyed his hard work, looking at the German uniform that he had forced the unconscious body of his guest into last night, after having injected him once more to ensure that he was completely out for the count. Unlike the uniform Maciek was wearing, the German clothing was not all completely authentic. It was made up from a mixture of various items from different time periods, some authentic, others not.
It was a real Second World War jacket, bought from an antique shop in Poland, a few years ago when the idea to recreate the scene from the film had first started to form in Maciek's imagination.
The boots were real too. Bought from an antique shop in the Czech Republic, although they were unfortunately too small for his guest and he had had to force them on to his feet and make them 'fit', by cutting the leather a little on the heel to help cram the feet into the confined space.
The belt was also real, but it came from a different uniform than the jacket was part of. Maciek didn't know the finer details of German Army clothing, so he couldn't tell what the differences between the uniforms actually were in great detail. As far as the shirt and trousers were concerned, they were both German, although probably more likely to be 1950's or 1960's than from the Second World War. But it was good enough for the purpose: a Schwab was a Schwab, and that was that. Or alternatively, as the English would say, 'a Kraut was a Kraut'.
The man tried to say something, struggling upwards as far as he could, the veins in his neck bulging and rising to the surface.
Maciek cupped the man's jaw in his hand and bent forward.
"Don't worry, it will soon be over."
He was tempted to say something more, to tell the man why he had selected him to die. Why Maciek had chosen him out of everyone else. And then perhaps give his guest the opportunity to show some remorse for having made Maciek so angry.
Maybe he should take the gag out of his mouth and let him beg for his life?
But no, that didn't happen in the film...
Silence. There should be silence between them.
Just the sound of breathing, and their mutual struggle for life.
.
Maciek reached down and pulled the knife out of the sheaf tied around his ankle. He
brought the blade up and held it in front of his guest's face.
The man's eyes widened. For a second the expression on his face turned blank. A look of puzzlement and disbelief flashed briefly across his eyes and he looked quickly from the knife to Maciek.
And then he tried to scream and began to writhe and struggle violently, thrashing from side to side, and pulling and straining at the ties that bound him.
Some blood appeared around the thongs tied around his wrist, and for a few seconds Maciek was scared that the metal stake pinning his right arm to the floorboards was going to work its way free.
Maciek hit the man firmly in the face, and he felt a bone in his guest's nose crack.
Blood welled from between his lips, and began to pour out of one of his nostrils.
Maciek could see the man start to struggle to breath.
This was good.
Already it had begun to feel more like a fight, a struggle...
Maciek lowered himself on top of the man, allowing his weight to slowly push down on the torso beneath him. He readjusted his weight and brought the knife up between them.
He saw the eyes of his guest dart back to the blade, and then return to Maciek's face. He began to struggle so violently that Maciek was unbalanced and pushed sideways onto the floor, the restraint across his guest's forehead simultaneously working loose and slipping backwards off his head.
Maciek stood up and kicked the man in the ribs.
"Bastard! Fucking Schwab!" he shouted at the man, and then lowered himself back on top of him.
He leaned forward, his face just centimetres from the man in front of him, and stared into his eyes. The man's breath stunk to high heaven and as the man struggled to breath, some blood spluttered out of his nostril and landed on Maciek's face. Maciek was just about to reach out and hit the man again, when his guest forcibly lifted his head off the ground and head-butted Maciek across his nose.
It was an almost perfect act of retaliation. The central bone in Maciek's nose cracked loudly under the impact, and Maciek screamed aloud.
"Fucking bastard! What the fuck have you done?"
Pushing the knife firmly against the man's throat, Maciek lifted his other hand up and cupped his own nose: blood was now running freely from his nostril and dripping onto the German beneath him.
For a second Maciek found it difficult to breathe, but then started to breathe through his mouth, spitting blood from his throat onto the German's face.
He pushed the blade harder against the man's throat, and the skin sliced open, some blood immediately starting to ooze out of the wound and trickle down towards the floor.
Maciek pulled the knife back, adjusting his weight and his position again so that he could bring the knife between them and point the tip of the knife towards the man's heart.
Immediately Maciek began to feel a wetness around his groin area, and he quickly realised that the German had urinated again.
And then the air around them began to smell of diarrhoea.
The German had just opened his bowels and everything had come out.
"Fuck...!" Maciek shouted aloud again, and sat upright.
This was one detail that Mr Spielberg had omitted in the scene in Saving Private Ryan.
Maciek wiped some more blood away from his face, coughing and spitting some onto the man beneath him.
Gingerly he lowered himself back on top of the German, brought the knife back into position, and readied himself for the moment.
In a darkened damp room in a ruin of house, both men coughing blood and struggling to breathe, Maciek momentarily closed his eyes and savoured the moment.
The man underneath writhed violently again, and Maciek opened his eyes.
This was the time. This was the moment.
He readjusted his hands around the hilt of the German knife and gently started to push forward. For a moment the thickness of the cloth in the German jacket prevented the knife from any penetration. Maciek pushed harder.
The cloth began to tear, admitting the knife, letting it slide through and forward.
Maciek looked up, into the eyes of the German. He saw the moment register in the man's eyes when the tip of the knife began to touch and penetrate the man's skin.
For a second Maciek hesitated. He breathed deeply, and then held his breath, his senses alive and picking up every sensation being relayed back to his brain from smell, touch, sight and sound. He savoured the moment.
The expression in the eyes of the man in front of him changed, a strange look appearing that Maciek did not recognise.
For a second Maciek considered saying something. Something remarkable. Something clever that would mark the coming moment...
But before he could think of anything, the German closed his eyes and turned his head to the side.
This was not expected.
This was not allowed.
The German would NOT be allowed to deprive Maciek of this moment.
He took one hand off the knife, grabbed the German's face and spat on it.
The German screwed his eyes tightly shut.
Maciek put his hand on the German’s face, forcing his left eye open with his thumb and forefinger so that he could see into the man's eye, ...the window to his soul.
And then Maciek pushed on the knife.
Suddenly the resistance was gone, and the knife moved effortlessly forward. Deep into the man's chest.
Maciek stared at the German, taking his other hand off the hilt of the knife and forcing open the German's other eye.
And then he watched as the German began to die.
As the sparkle and the light, the lustre and the magic that made this man alive began to fade. Almost imperceptibly the eyes changed. The lustre in the irises that signified the presence of a soul, of a life, of a 'person' within the body, began to disappear. To vanish.
.
It was impossible to pinpoint the moment exactly, to say "that" was the microsecond it happened.
But it did.
One moment there was life in the man's eyes.
And a moment later, it was gone.
.
Maciek slowly became aware of the stillness in the room, the only sound being his heavy breathing, which was now coming in slow, deep rasps.
His hand still gripped the German's face, and gently he let it go. The head turned slowly to the side, and rolled over, the eyes now staring blankly across the floor.
Maciek sat up on the German's chest. He lifted his hand up in front of his face and looked at it. Examining it.
The hand that had just killed a man.
It had been so simple. So easy.
It was just as he had thought it would be.
He bent forward turning the man's head towards him again, and looked into his eyes.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Just glass. A mirror that reflected an image of Maciek looking down upon his victim.
How could this be? What had happened to the man, the soul, the being that used to live inside this man? Where had it gone?
Three minutes ago, -no, less than two minutes ago-, there had been a life there. A person, a world of experiences and memories, a sentient being with power and energy...
But now it was gone. And before him was just a huge pile of flesh that within minutes or hours would slowly begin to decay and rot.
Outside a fox began to cry.
Suddenly a deep sadness began to engulf Maciek and he looked away from the face of the dead man in front of him, turning to look towards the barred window from where the sound of the fox had come.
His mind was suddenly full of another scene, and he was instantly cast back to the moment when his mother had died. As he always was in the moments after...
He thought of his mother. Her face, the look in her eyes after he had removed the pillow. After her soul had left. The stillness and quiet in the bedroom in Kraków.
And Maciek began to cry.
It had been just like in the film. Exactly like in the film.
It had been simple. So simple.
Two men fighting for the right to live. Elemental. Brutal. But so simple.
He had watched, -studied-, the moment of transition. The passing.
But Maciek had learnt nothing.
He still did not understand.
Could find no sense in it all.
.
Suddenly his mind was filled with another memory. The sight of the empty bed in his mother's room, after the funeral. After she had been buried. Put in the ground.
An empty room. An empty house.
The feeling of loneliness that had engulfed Maciek then, crushed him again now.
He rolled off the body of the dead man beneath him, and lay on his back staring at the ceiling, waves of tears and grief and emptiness engulfing him.
He did nothing to fight them.
.
In the ruin of the house, and his life, again he cried like a baby, unable to stop or control himself.
Dimly, through the tears, he thought to himself.
"This didn't happen in the film..."
Chapter Ten
.
.
The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh
Intensive Care
April
Five Months Before
3 p.m.
.
.
Old Mr Wallace sat beside the hospital bed, reading his newspaper and sipping the tea that the 'nice' nurse had brought him. He liked her: always friendly, always polite, and always sneaking in a couple of digestive biscuits with the cup of tea she brought him.
It had been four weeks now, and Mr Wallace had been visiting him almost every day since Peter had been transferred to this department in intensive care. They were on first name terms now. The doctor had told all of Peter's visitors that they should call Peter by his first name, and talk to him as much as possible. "Try to spark something within him that will help his brain jump out of the coma that he is now in."
Peter's mother, who came in every day too, had said to Mr Wallace that it was okay to visit as often as he could.
It was getting easier now. The bruising was going down, and Mr Wallace was finding it much easier to hobble around on the walking stick. With a bit of exercise, he should be fighting fit again within a month.
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 4