Six Days, Six Hours, Six Minutes

by Alex Smith

  He’d walked halfway down the garden when another thought hit him. Hit him hard.

  The mark on the door. That symbol. It was the exact same thing he’d seen tattooed on the devil man’s wrist.

  And it had been carved into his door yesterday, before the other guy even came to his office.

  Fuck.

  Ten

  “You definitely don’t seem like yourself.”

  Blake stared into the cafeteria crowd, watching people as they browsed and queued and paid and left. Every now and again he thought he caught a glimpse of the two men—a guy with long, dark hair, a sickly-looking blond kid—and his heart would somersault. But it was always just an orderly, or a patient, or a family member.

  “Blake, do you want me to get a megaphone? Do you need a hearing aid?”

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were here, though, that he’d turn around and see them grinning at him from inside a dark room, or peeking out from beneath a ward bed. It was ridiculous, he knew, but the thought that all this had begun before yesterday morning was putting him on edge, it had blown his perfectly reasonable theory out the window. Now what the hell was he supposed to make of it all?

  “Ground Control to Blake, this is Planet Julia calling my husband.”

  He’d got to work nearly an hour late, the traffic doing absolutely nothing to help him. Once again, his first appointment of the day had left, something he felt terrible about. His second appointment had been a regular patient, a woman with liver cancer who was thankfully in remission, but Blake couldn’t recall a single thing about the conversation they’d had. His third appointment had thankfully cancelled. Harold had been on the warpath, but he’d managed to avoid him so far.

  “For fuck’s sake, Blake.”

  Something swooped in, a gentle slap to the face, and a grunt of panic escaped his mouth. He scraped his chair back, colliding with the one behind. For a second he thought he was going to puke again and he swallowed hard, apologising to the man he’d thumped into. Julia was staring at him open-mouthed, one eyebrow almost climbing off the top of her face. Connor sat in a highchair next to her, equally bemused.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling his chair back in and pressing his hands to the table so nobody would see them trembling.

  “Seriously, B, what’s going on?” Julia asked, feeding the boy another spoonful of baby food. “You’re acting like a dick.”

  “It’s…”

  Tell anyone, and your wife and child will die.

  “It’s nothing. I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Man flu, no doubt,” Julia said, using a napkin to clean Connor’s face. “Again. You do look a bit peaked, though, to be fair. Are you shaking?”

  “Just a bit,” he said. “Feel sick, a bit hot.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll live.”

  Blake snorted a laugh, but there can’t have been any humour in it because Julia stretched a hand across the table and wrapped her long fingers around his. They were cold, the way they always were, but they held on tight.

  “Blake,” she said, locking eyes. “You would tell me if it was something else? You’re not worried about what happened yesterday, are you? That guy in your office?”

  He opened his mouth and the words were almost out, sitting in his throat, so heavy that they might have choked him. Better that she doesn’t know. Better that it’s just you. Then it doesn’t have to be real. He clamped his lips shut and shook his head, putting his free hand over hers.

  “Just being a wuss,” he said eventually. “You know me, any excuse to get a day off.”

  She studied him for a moment longer, searching for the lie. Then she nodded and started to pack up the remains of her lunch.

  “Well, no more days off. You piss Harold off anymore and you’re going to be cleaning these tables for a living. Come on, kiddo, my turn to take you back today.”

  He watched her lift Connor from his chair, and he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the man in the house that morning, picturing the fucker doing to Julia what he had done to him. It made him so furious that he clenched his fists, his nails digging into his palms. But he managed to smile as Julia blew him a kiss.

  “Go do your job, lazy arse. I’ll see you at home.”

  He made his way back to his office as slowly as he dared, descending the stairs to the sub-basement. It was always quiet down here, the offices occupied mainly by researchers and post-grads who kept their work behind closed doors. It was an old building, unlike the main hospital, the floors covered in worn, patterned carpet that seemed to suck up all the noise. He scuffed his feet along it, wondering if maybe he should just tell Harold where to stick his job and go find something else to do. Maybe cleaning tables wasn’t such a bad idea. It paid, and at least he wouldn’t have to deal with everybody’s shit day in day out.

  Yeah, right. That was another thing he was incapable of: actually changing something in his life.

  He reached his office and ran a finger over the crude carving in the door—that same weird assembly of circles and lines. He checked the handle, locked like he’d left it, and used the key to let himself in. God, it was a mess in here. He’d started to tidy up during his spare session that morning, figuring that if he ever did need to make a quick getaway from a patient then he’d better move the hazards. Tripping over a folder of old transcripts or the box his printer had come in would be a cruddy way to go.

  He wanted to move his desk, too, put it to the side of the door rather than against the back wall. At least that way he’d have a clear route to the exit. He checked his watch, just a few minutes before his one o’clock arrived. He’d have to do it later.

  Kicking some more crap out of the way, he took a seat. The top of his desk was as cluttered as the floor: sheaves of paper, old textbooks, a computer monitor that looked like it had been made in the 1960s, and a jumble of photos in their frames. He switched on his machine, spinning from side to side in his chair as it booted up. Whoever was next, he wanted to make sure they were a legitimate patient before he let them through the door.

  Footsteps outside, as quiet as a country mouse—just a faint tap tap tap tap. Blake realised he was clutching onto the edge of his desk and he forced himself to let go, almost spluttering with relief when Harold’s moustachioed face appeared. The old man took a cursory look at the office, wearing that permanent frown of disapproval, before turning his attention to Blake.

  “I know,” Blake said, trying to cut him off at the pass. “I know, I’m really sorry, Harold. Please, believe me, something came up.”

  “It always does with you,” the old man replied. “Every single time.” He stepped into the room and braced his hand on the back of the other chair. “My patience is wearing very, very thin, Barton. We are a hospital. We may not slice and dice and stitch like your wife and her colleagues, but the work we do here can save lives, too.”

  Blake lowered his gaze to his desk, feeling like a schoolboy in front of the headteacher.

  “Or end them. The people who come to you for help need you. They cannot be pushed aside like… like toys. Can you imagine how it feels? To be told that you are dying, that you may not live to see the end of the year, your child’s next birthday.”

  “I know,” Blake muttered, looking at the computer screen as it warmed up, at a sheet of numbers in front of him, anywhere other than his supervisor’s eyes.

  “Let me finish. And then, on top of it all, to make an appointment to see somebody who may just be able to steer you back onto a normal course, who may be the one thing between you and the vast, unthinkable abyss of your disease. To traipse all the way down here into the forgotten bowels of this building, clutching your appointment letter, checking the door numbers one by one.”

  Sheesh.

  Blake still couldn’t take his eyes off his desk, turning them to the faded spines of his books—the same ones he’d used at college, all those years ago, and never again opened. To the photographs of him and Julia and Con
nor and…

  Something was wrong.

  He picked up the nearest frame, a cheap plastic one covered in smileys that Julia had bought him as a present from Connor. The photo inside was of his son when he was a baby, just like it had been yesterday, just like always, just like when he’d unwrapped it last Christmas morning.

  But this wasn’t that photo.

  This was Connor aged two days, sure, but where the photo had once shown him wrapped up tight in his cot, those eyes almost black as he gurned up at the camera, it now showed Connor in his first-ever bath, his wife’s disembodied hands holding him up in the water, the kid’s face twisted by fear.

  “What the hell?”

  “Excuse me?” said Harold.

  Blake ignored him, dropping that frame and picking up the next—this one silver-plated, bought from Covent Garden one winter way before they’d even talked about kids. It had held the same photo for almost as long—a selfie in Hyde Park that very Christmas. There hadn’t been any snow so they’d bought marshmallows and tossed them in the air, taking the snap as they fell. It was a godawful picture of Blake because he’d been the one to throw them and his face was a mask of concentration, eyes twisted up, his hand a blur. But Julia stared right into the camera, looking gorgeous as always. It was one of his favourite memories, even though he’d tried to talk Julia out of going to the park because he was convinced they’d get mugged.

  Now, though, the photo was a more recent one, maybe three years ago. It showed Julia standing alone outside the door of their old house, an awful new build over in Queens Hill. She looked sad, and Blake couldn’t quite remember why, only it had something to do with an argument they’d had, one of the more serious ones. She’d wanted to move, that was it, because the neighbours were arseholes who thought it was okay to party until five a.m. And they had dogs, two vicious Staffies who spent the day trying to chew through the wire fence in the back garden so they could get to Doof. They’d been going somewhere that night and Blake—who’d thought moving was more hassle than staying put—had been an arsehole, a real douchebag. He’d told Julia that if she wanted to go then she could just go, that he didn’t give a shit. And he’d made her stand next to the house before she left so he could take a photo of her as something to remember her by.

  Wow. He thought that night had long gone, just a turd in the relatively lovely rose bed that was their relationship. He’d been drinking, but it was no consolation. The thought of it, of how vicious he’d been, was like poison in his already unsettled gut. How the hell was this photo even here? He’d taken it on his phone, and he knew for a fact that he’d never printed it out. They’d made up the next day and moved not long after that. They’d never even mentioned it again.

  “Barton!”

  Each of the frames on his desk—five in total—was holding the wrong photo. Doof in the garden of their old place looking small and terrified instead of Doof in the bed, peeking out of the duvet. Him and Julia standing awkwardly, almost sadly beside the wedding cake while she fixed something on her dress, in place of the official wedding photo that had been taken of them both grinning like idiots. And there, the worst one by far—in the frame that used to hold a picture of Blake at the end of his first and only 5k run (which he had mainly walked), two months after he’d been given the all-clear—was a photo of him and his mum and his mum’s sister in Frankie and Benny’s, ten years ago now when they were both still alive, Blake’s face turned away from the camera, his brow furrowed while everybody else smiled. He could almost see the thoughts in his own skull, like they were written there in big, black letters.

  I. Have. Cancer.

  Because he’d been diagnosed that morning, right before his mum’s birthday breakfast, the words resounding in his head like a church bell, like a funeral bell, bone-shatteringly loud but heard by him alone. He hadn’t told a soul for weeks, not until he was due to have surgery and he didn’t have any choice.

  “Blake!” Harold was yelling now, and Blake looked up at him. The old guy seemed a million miles away, his voice a whisper. “I will not tolerate this behaviour. Consider this a formal warning. One more late day, one more incident, and I will begin procedures to dismiss you. Do you understand?”

  Blake stared at him, trying to remember if he’d changed the photos himself, one of those quirks of memory that made you put your keys in the fridge, which made you drive to work some mornings and not remember a single moment of sitting in the car. But no, no way, even if he’d switched the pictures around he wouldn’t have chosen these. It made him feel sick just looking at them, like they weren’t his photos. Seeing him and Julia and Doof—even Connor, completely naked and screaming—made him feel ridiculously exposed, like somebody had cracked open the surface of his life and was poking a dirty finger through into the muck beneath.

  He scooped the frames into a pile and clamped them between his sweating palms, standing so abruptly that Harold took a step back. His supervisor jabbed a finger at him.

  “I don’t know what’s got into you, Barton, but just remember what I said. I want no more of it. No more.”

  “I need to go,” Blake said, rounding his desk and pushing past Harold, ignoring the man’s protests. He was running by the time he got out of the door, almost crashing into a woman standing in the corridor—presumably his next patient. He clutched the photos to his chest and just ran.

  Eleven

  Blake checked the lock, rattling the door to make sure it was firmly secured. He thought about trying the key again, but it would make it the fourth time in as many minutes and he could already feel the OCD gnawing at the edges of his sanity. He left it, walked into the living room, sighed loudly, then went back and tried to turn the key.

  Locked.

  Definitely locked.

  Julia’s voice floated down from upstairs as she sang to Connor. It was too faint for him to hear the words but he recognised the tune, one of the nursery rhymes she’d picked up from her Irish grandmother. He stood there for a moment and listened to it, feeling a million miles away from her, as though their house was a planet and the stairs were a moon. For some reason, the thought of going to her seemed impossible, and he left them to it. Doof was lying in his bed in the kitchen, peering at Blake through the bars of his stairgate and looking for all the world like some alien prisoner. The dog huffed a sigh and curled into himself.

  Blake wanted to do that too, assume the foetal position in a corner somewhere and let sleep take him. But it was seven-thirty, they’d only just eaten. He traipsed into the living room and collapsed on the couch, rubbing his tired eyes. After leaving his office he’d driven straight home and stripped the photos from their frames. Four of them he’d thrown into the box of keepsakes in the hallway cupboard. The one of Julia outside the old house he’d screwed up and thrown in the bin—he didn’t need to give her any reason to think of that night.

  He’d taken a good look at it, though. Like most of the photos in their house it wasn’t professionally developed, just printed at home from the original image on his iPhone. The camera paper was thicker than the stuff they normally used, better quality. It had the look and feel of a professional photo, and when he ran a damp finger over it the image didn’t smudge at all. Which was weird, because this stuff wasn’t exactly cheap. There were no markings on it at all, no clue as to where it might have come from.

  It was only after he’d finished investigating that another question had occurred to him. Where the hell were the old photos? The ones that had been in the frames to start with? And that thought was infinitely worse, because if somebody had switched the photos around then they might still have the old ones. They might be looking at them right now. And even though he tried to stop the image from entering his head, he couldn’t—those two men sitting in their filth-encrusted house, leering at photos of his wife and child.

  No.

  They had been some of his favourite memories, too, some of them irreplaceable. The thought of them tossed into a bin somewhere, or thrown on
to a fire, made him feel so angry—so violated—that he was gripped by vertigo.

  And he still didn’t know why. Why was somebody tormenting him? He tried to think back, to work out if he’d pissed anybody off in the last few weeks or months. Harold—that went without saying—but the old man was the epitome of decency. Blake doubted his supervisor’s snow-white mind would even be able to think of something like this, let alone do it.

  Who, then? The neighbours? Sure, they’d been pissed off about the nappy-throwing incident, but that was almost a year ago now and they’d never mentioned it again. Everybody else on the street was nice—not exactly friends with him and Julia, but they always waved and some of them posted Christmas cards.

  Maybe it was one of Julia’s old flames, somebody who wanted her back. Or maybe a stalker who was obsessed with wooing her and who wanted Blake out the way. Yeah, that could make sense. He tried to think back over her exes. He knew about all of them—all fifteen of them—because he’d spent the first few weeks of their relationship grilling her about her past. How many men (“Blake, I’ve told you this…”), how many times with each of them (“Do you really expect me to remember?”), where had it taken place (“Do you really want to know? You might not like what you hear.”), what about relationships with girls (“Only once, at college, it doesn’t count.”), what about threesomes (“Blake, no way, of course not.”), what about orgies (“Do you get off on this or something?”), had she ever been in a porn film (“Right, fuck you, no more.”). Jesus, it was embarrassing to think of what he’d put her through, the inquisition. But he’d always had this problem with paranoia. Sometimes he just couldn’t let things rest.

  Besides, they were all normal guys—college boyfriends, colleagues, a couple of dates from Match.com that had briefly flowered. There was nobody there who set the alarm bells ringing.

  His own exes? Blake spluttered a laugh. There had only been four of them before Julia, and none of them had been into him for long enough to ever want to come back and stalk him.