She didn’t know if he’d wake in a minute, or two. She didn’t know if she could bleed to death from the cut in her side. She’d misjudged, maybe. Maybe she could. One chance and she might yet bleed to death.
She couldn’t break free, either. The cleaver was in the bath, but she couldn’t do a thing about it. She couldn’t pick it up with her hands bound.
He’d come around soon enough.
She didn’t want to die.
She looked down at the blood flowing freely from her side, and from a deep cut in her hip where he’d dropped the cleaver on her.
Maybe she’d bleed to death. Maybe she wouldn’t. It might be better if she did.
Could she even take the pain anymore?
She thought she’d known the height of agony through the worst of a migraine, but now it paled, because during a migraine she’d wished herself dead, but now she knew pain while she wished herself alive, and the fear somehow made the pain worse.
He was going to wake up, pick up the cleaver, and cut her into pieces.
Come on, you pussy.
Could she pick up the cleaver with her feet?
She thought she could. But then what? Throw it at him? Throw it at the cord he’d used to tie her?
Wouldn’t work either way. There wouldn’t be enough force behind it. Not to cut deep enough to kill. She couldn’t reach the ropes with her feet.
But she could scoot.
With her bum, her thighs, her calves, she scooted until finally she could reach the cleaver with her feet.
He was stirring.
And no, she couldn’t reach her arms with her feet. She couldn’t throw it with her feet over the side of the bath and kill him.
But she could reach the ropes with her teeth. Her teeth weren’t sharp enough to cut her bonds.
Could she clench the cleaver in her mouth and cut?
She tried out clenching. The pain was unbelievable. But though the bone was out, and broken, the muscles were in the right place. It hurt like hell but she could do it.
It meant flicking a cleaver at her face, but now he was groaning.
It didn’t sound like a young’s man’s voice anymore, either. It sounded like someone older. A harder sound, a deeper bass. She didn’t like it, but then she was right in the middle of a whole list of things she didn’t like and she couldn’t do a thing about any of them right now except maybe flicking a cleaver at her face and taking that one last chance, because when it all comes down, there’s always one last chance. It’s not about God’s hand in things, she thought. It’s just what being human is.
She flicked, and while the cleaver tumbled toward her face, she thought she heard a voice from the walls, a rush of wind, like many voices shouting at once, but then the cleaver hit.
*
XVI.
The cleaver flipped through the air. The lights glinted off the blade. She had time to see that, then it hit and the only voice she heard was her own.
It stuck in her clavicle.
She didn’t scream this time, but shouted out, something guttural.
Then his voice. She could make out words from him now, dark words spoken in a voice that wasn’t his. Not anymore.
But whoever he was, in his head, for real, it didn’t matter. He was down on the floor and she was in the bath. There was a wall between them. Porcelain and consciousness.
Sanity, too, but she couldn’t think about his, or her own.
She could hear his hands sliding about in the blood on the tiles, like a baby clenching and unclenching its untutored hands in its sleep.
She could hear time moving on, slow or fast, but moving regardless of her wishes.
She pulled her head to one side and bit down on the handle of the cleaver with a muffled scream and wrenched it free. Both the biting and the pulling hurt beyond belief – her clavicle and her jaw, both broken, cut, torn.
But she was out of time. She rolled her head to the right and pulled her hand down and her body up, both as far as strength and bonds would allow. She began to saw.
He pushed himself up, grunting, speaking in that strange heavy voice, but as yet she couldn’t make out the words.
He was a fighter, trying to beat the count. Maybe he’d beat it. Maybe he wouldn’t.
She was a fighter, too.
Worry about the rope, she told herself.
Sawing at it wasn’t easy. She had no coordination. She couldn’t bite down hard enough.
Easy, she told herself. Go fast, you’ll lose. You’ll die. Because you’ll drop the cleaver. Drop it and you won’t get it back. He will.
Slowly, so slowly, she sawed at her bonds. The synthetic filaments gave way, slowly. He moved, slowly.
‘Bit’th,’ he said. Like he’d lost some teeth.
A little faster, maybe. She bit down as hard as she could. The bathroom lights dimmed as the pain grew beyond any pain she could ever imagine existed.
But the bonds gave way.
Her arm came free.
His head came over the bath. His first two teeth were out and his eyes were still unfocused. She took the cleaver from her teeth, not realizing she knocked her own front tooth loose. She swung it as hard as she could with a snarl and a scream and smashed the heavy blade deep into his forehead and something else screamed. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t him, but it sounded very much like it came from the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling. From all around her.
It screamed and then it was silent. The last thing she saw was blackness, but then, slowly, it turned to light.
*
XVII.
Bright lights finally woke Yvonne two days later when she found she had a steel frame round her head.
At her collarbone, her hip, her side, she had a total of 78 stitches. Her collarbone was chipped, not broken. The surgeon had taken out the chip of bone. She had more stitches in her face, where they’d operated on her jaw. More bone lost.
She couldn’t speak. She’d be drinking through a straw for months to come.
She was on a drip, and sedated. She drifted on the heavy painkillers, floating on top of a sea heavy with pain.
She thought about blackness, turning to light. Every time she woke the light came, or the dark came, and she could never tell what was her dream and what was real day, real night.
She dreamed of the dead, tortured and dismembered and stuffed into a madman’s walls. She dreamed of them crying out for release, and of them crying as they met her before great gates set into the sky.
She dreamed of many things. Sometimes they were nightmares. Her landlord, cutting on her, cutting her legs from her body, or cutting her arms away with two swift chops. In one dream her head was stuffed into a plastic bag and she couldn’t breathe and when she woke from that one she couldn’t even scream because her jaw was wired shut.
She thought maybe she’d really died after that dream, and that the hospital bed and the pulling and the itching as her wounds healed was the dream.
Dreams have a way of healing, though. She drifted and dreamed. The dreams receded, a tide going out, coming in, ebbing, flowing, until she drifted to shore and woke, not whole, but not in parts, either.
Just a woman in a hospital bed waiting to see someone, anyone, just to be sure that she wasn’t dead.
*
XVIII.
A doctor was fussing over some charts at the foot of Yvonne’s bed when Terry poked his head through the door.
‘Doc, OK to come in?’
‘No. No visitors.’
‘OK. I’ll just come in for a bit.’
‘I said no.’
‘I know,’ said Terry, with a smile for Yvonne. ‘But I only asked to be polite.’
Terry heaved himself into an armchair to one side of Yvonne. The doctor swore quietly. Terry could have that effect on some people. Yvonne would have smiled. Maybe it was the drugs, but she could manage to feel happy at the sight of Terry even through the pain.
‘Is she going to be OK, Doctor? No fancy words, please. I’m not a Doctor
.’
‘She’ll make a full recovery,’ said the doctor. ‘She can’t talk.’
‘That’s pretty obvious,’ said Terry. ‘Thanks, Doc.’
The doctor walked out, saying something under his breath.
‘You’re pretty amazing,’ said Terry. ‘You know that, right?’
For some absurd reason he seemed proud.
She turned her eyes to him. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t smile.
‘The guy you killed…turns out he had over forty people stuffed in his walls. They’re still sorting out the parts. They’re calling you a fucking hero on the news. Well, not fucking, but…heroine, too, if we’re honest.
‘I’d kiss you if I could get near you. I can’t begin to imagine…’
He fell silent for a while. He looked like he was going to cry, but he was a big man and big men don’t cry. Not in front of anyone, anyway.
‘I just wanted to see you. Let you know…I’ve got a house…there are no neighbours. It’s up in Norfolk, just in the country. It’s not much, but it’s quiet. I thought…when you get out the press’ll be all over you. Maybe you’ll want to get away.’
A tear rolled down Yvonne’s cheek. She was just a little woman. She could cry in front of people.
She couldn’t talk. She wished she could. But crying felt good enough for now.
‘You sleep now, if you want.’
Yvonne wanted to say thank you. A simple thank you. It meant more than Terry knew. But then, perhaps he did. He was a good agent, but he was a friend. A friend, maybe, first. She was surprised she hadn’t seen it before.
Even if she could talk, she wouldn’t know what to say.
‘I’m right here, honey. You want to close your eyes, go right ahead. I’ll be here when you open them again.’
He noticed her tears. ‘Favourite client, that’s all. Don’t get all bloody misty.’
Yvonne somehow managed to smile at Terry without moving her mouth at all.
Then she closed her eyes again and drifted off.
This time she didn’t dream of darkness, or the unquiet dead packed into her landlord’s walls. Their voices were gone, never to be heard again.
She never had those dreams again, but she had a new dream instead, the first of many while her friend watched over her.
She dreamt of a home in the country. Nothing big, just a small cottage. It had low ceilings, but then she wasn’t tall. The light was dappled and shone through the trees but her head didn’t hurt anymore. She didn’t see the blackness, lurking there, at the edge of her vision. She saw only light and shade.
The cottage was covered in some kind of plant, out of season. Maybe it was wisteria, or clematis. Maybe she would find out.
It was somewhere quiet. She could hear birdsong and the whisper of the wind through the trees all around. It was a place with cool breezes and water nearby that trickled and cleansed everything underneath it. There was just her, sometimes Terry, coming to visit, and no one else for miles on end.
*
This, too, was published by a magazine called Ginosko. It's my wife's favourite short. It's not mine (That honour is reserved for a short called 'The Dancing Car' which features in an anthology called 'The Box of Delights'...alongside Steve Rasnic Tem, an achievement I'm inordinately proud of).
Slate
Even the snow flouts the rules this morning. It is supposed to float and swirl. It doesn’t. It falls flat and dead, landing heavily on the veranda.
Icicles hang from the guttering above me. The house looks like it has teeth. I blow smoke hard into the still air and the house is a dragon snoring.
I pull up my collar and cup my second Marlboro of the morning between pink hands. I never got the hang of smoking with gloves on.
The veranda creaks, but only for me. It wouldn’t wake her. It is subdued, a forlorn farewell. The snow holds the sound down, gently restraining the sounds from within. The snow, my ally.
Tomas Moran comes to his window in the house opposite, pulling the curtains apart to see outside. He waves, and shrugs, then closes the curtains on the outside again. I can barely see him through the growing, silent, storm. It is a wonder he is able to see me. I wear grey today, and there is a full hundred yards between us. But perhaps, as is fitting, the snow allows us one final wave, no closer than we ever had been, from across the chasm that separates our two houses. It could have been a gulf, or an ocean. It does not matter to me that he sees me. Soon, I will be gone. Who cares for goodbyes?
Had it been raining, it would have thundered on the veranda roof. Even then it wouldn’t wake her.
The coffee is already going cold. The third cup bubbles noisily behind me. Snow muffle obviously isn’t omni-directional.
What a time to leave. January blizzards cutting off the main drag, cars still slewed, now abandoned, cluttering Matherson Avenue. A proud old tree had already fallen to the blight.
Ice cracked somewhere overhead.
Snow looks after its own.
I am cold, but not on the outside. I think it will let me pass.
No one is out on the street today. Cars are piled so high with fluff that they look more like random hills, peppering the streets. Ancient barrows of blighted England, wights hiding in the darkness underneath, their wails covered by the silent doorman. Yesterday’s old snowmen sit in front gardens, bouncing for porches. The snow lets the children out, just not the adults. Children’s souls aren’t generally tainted.
Here I am, all alone, looking at the icy slate covering the road, the hard cold death awaiting the unsuspecting as the snow comes in to cover it.
I am cold.
I am one of its own.
Smoke swirls for an instant and an unheard hiss I know is there signals its death. I stand for a moment.
I try to keep quiet as I shut the door gently behind me. My third cup is in my hand, with my third cigarette. Her face comes to me. The coffee percolator gives a dry steam rasp and goes quiet.
I rub some life into my hands and run my fingers through my hair. I smoke another cigarette. The flame sputters in the cold.
Yesterday I had given up smoking. I didn’t know it was to be our last day together. Early that morning we had eaten waffles together. We spent the day inside, knowing that outside was for children and children alone. It had been the perfect day. A Saturday spent snug and warm with gentle trickles of sludgy pre-snow beginning to turn into real snow, huge, almost warm, flakes, settling in the street, on people’s front lawns, in the road. The cars that came down the street crept, as if trying not to wake the street from its winter slumber.
We had lain in bed for the rest of the morning, both with heads propped on pillows, staring out at the gathering storm. The wind was strong and silent then, the children coming out to play, their cries of delight muffled in mufflers. Mittens on their hands were caked in snow. They rolled and tumbled and made angels. As the storm grew stronger, whiter, the snowmen evolved from the earth, little balls into big, one atop the other. Carrots for noses pilfered from warm and cosy kitchens.
I got up at midday and made us a lunch of chicken soup and hot fresh bread from the oven. She had stayed in bed, waiting for my return. While the soup bubbled gently behind me I stood at the kitchen door, looking out. The snow gathered strength as the soup cooked. The smell of roasting bread came from the oven. I got a tray down from the top cupboard.
Back in bed, we watched the snow again.
She never left the house. That perfect Saturday I was happy to stay in, too. Most days I left her alone in the house. I don’t know what she did all day, except to say I know she never left. There was nothing for me to worry about while I left. She would stay safe indoors.
The icicles above my head crackled and brought me from my reverie. I lit another cigarette and drank some still steaming coffee from the mug. I held the coffee one handed and took a long drag on the cigarette. It was cold out here. I should put a coat on. My sweater kept out the worst though. At least the cold that was outside.
I stare into the softly falling snowflakes and a sudden breeze swirls the snow around me. The snow falls onto my hands and into my coffee. Its death is sudden. The snow changes and leaves watery freckles on my skin.
That Saturday afternoon had been wonderful. We had made love. It was our first time. She was strange about closeness. In all the time we had known each other she had never given her body up to me. Under the covers, the heat from the radiator insufficient to warm her cold skin, we had embraced.
It was the first time and the last. It was wonderful. I savoured it now. The remembrance of the touch. The cool, sheer feel of her skin. The creamy smoothness. I had been good. She had been better. Together it had been perfect. The perfect prelude to the perfect Sunday.
Today should have been perfect.
I should have let her sleep.
I let her sleep now and finished my coffee. I should go soon. She would wake if I made a sound. If I broke the silence of the snow the spell would be broken. I would lose all that I’d had that day. The remembered day. I would remember it forever. That first day. That last day.
Upstairs, she waits to be woken up. But she’s cold, too. I’m not the only one. Sometimes you have to bring people into your world. Sometimes it’s lonely being cold all on your own.
I close the door behind me and flip the latch. I laugh at myself – how considerate I am now of her agoraphobia. I unflip the latch.
I put the mug down and my cigarettes into my pocket.
I leave the door a little open and the wind bangs the shutter door behind me as I leave. I wrap my arms around myself and walk out into the cold. I am cold and we are all alone.
- The End.
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Dead in the Trunk: A Short Story Collection Page 16