Blood Tears

by Michael J Malone

  ‘C’mon guys,’ I whispered and took three steps forward. And another. I was level with the man’s head. He smelled differently. Must’ve had a wash. I could make out the silver of his hair and the lines of his brow. Hair sprouted in a wild thatch from his eyebrows and his nostrils.

  I placed the pillow over his face. As gently as if it were a veil.

  ‘Just a wee fright,’ I say. And Carole, the twins and I hold a corner each.

  The man moved. ‘Wha…’

  Oh no. He’s going to get up. I jump on top of the pillow. If he gets up and recognises us, he’ll tell Sister Mary. And then the nine visions of Hell will seem like a picnic.

  ‘C’mon guys,’ I beg. ‘Help!’

  Three bodies pile on top of the old man. He twists his torso from side to side, but his feet are pinioned by his blankets. One of the twins is on his chest. Carole and the other twin are on top of me. Frances is standing at the end of the bed. Her mouth is open. One hand is between her legs and the other is hanging by her side. She is rocking back and forward, a strange noise issuing from between her teeth. Something is in her hand, but before I can make it out I feel the old man’s hands on my arm, my hand, my neck as he blindly reaches for a hold to try and pull me off. Those hands did things to me. I don’t want them to touch me again, but I can’t move. Each time he touches me my skin feels burned. I fight the dread that sets my breathing faster.

  ‘Frances, we need you,’ Carole says. ‘You’re heavier than the twins. C’mon, move.’ But Frances can’t hear her; her mind has gone somewhere else.

  ‘Get off me. Get…’ his muffled voice sounds from under the pillow. I can feel his chest heaving as he fights to fill his lungs and I can hear the panic in his voice. His movements are weaker now. He was stronger the other day. Much stronger. Perhaps his age means he can’t fight for so long. My anger has subsided and I’m starting to feel that this is bad. Very bad. We have given the man a fright and we need to stop now. But no-one else looks like they are prepared to stop. From what I can see of the rest of them their faces are all set on causing the man maximum pain. Frances is still immobile at the end of the bed.

  ‘Guys. The man’s had enough,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’ I move from my position and pull at Carole. Then I push one of the twins. ‘Let’s go.’ I am thinking that we need to get off the man and out of the door without him catching a glimpse of us.

  He takes a loud, long, panicked breath when the pressure stops. The sound chills me to the marrow.

  ‘Get out of here quick,’ I say.

  The man sits up and the pillow I was holding slides in slow motion from his face to rest on his chest. He looks around himself, his chest heaving, ‘Who…’

  ‘Noooo,’ I hear a strangled cry. A body flashes past me. The man screams and falls back down on to the bed. Frances is on the bed and punching down on the old man with one hand. Each time she did so something wet splattered over me. Something wet and dark has sprayed over the wall. I look at the twins and they each look like they have been sprayed with it as well. I wipe some of the sticky, hot fluid from my forehead. It still hasn’t occurred to me what is happening. Another strike and a cloud of feathers is released from the pillow and rises in the air. The smell. I want to cry. I want to hide in a corner. I try to hold my breath against the mixed smells of blood and excrement. I am gagging. Chest heaving I take a deep breath and my mouth fills with feathers. I spit them out. Cough out some more. One lodges in my throat. I can’t breathe. I can’t stop coughing. Panic.

  Cough.

  Can’t breathe.

  Can’t…

  Am I dead yet?

  Floating. I can smell the blood from my wrists.

  I can remember everything. I send a silent prayer of sorrow to the old man.

  ‘And we got the wrong guy,’ Leonard cackles in my ear. ‘Can you believe it? Some poor old sod is in the wrong bed, at the worst time.’

  ‘Jim. Let’s go,’ shouts McCall.

  Am I dead yet?

  I am not alone in this limbo between life and death. It is the ghosts of the living who surround me. Allessandra’s uncertain smile the day I gave her a hug. Daryl’s answering grin when I told him to fuck off. Theresa’s face before she turned and walked away from me.

  Did I let any of them down? What should I have done differently?

  I’m allowed one more surge of awareness.

  I hear some shouts, a scuffle. More shouts.

  Then a voice speaks into my right ear. It‘s Kenny. ‘Don’t worry, Ray. We’ve got him. McCall won’t be able to do any more damage.’

  I am so tired. My mind is a fog of half-finished thought. Not McCall, I want to say, but I can’t. Tired. I want to sleep. As the light and the pain fades I feel the feathery touch of a hand on my neck. Another, more gentle voice whispers.

  ‘Welcome home, Ray. Welcome home.’

  Chapter 43

  Everything is white. I didn’t know white could come in so many shades. At first it appears that there is only one. Then if you look a little closer, follow the blur and concentrate, you see more: the colour white in tones as infinite as the thoughts in your head.

  There’s the light, grey white of the sky, which filters into the bright white of the distant hills, even brighter are the flakes of white that are falling to my feet, a curtain of small, dry feathers.

  I take a step forward wanting them all to fall on me. I need their purity, their cleansing. Neck bent back, I look up and let cold feathers fall in to my open eyes and bathe them. Too cold. I blink hard and they melt into tears.

  ‘Ray. What the hell are you doing?’ asks Maggie. ‘Can we go back to your place now? Or at least go for a coffee. I’m freezing my tits off here.’ Ever since I got out of hospital Maggie has been my constant companion.

  ‘Don’t know what you like about this place. It’s bloody morbid.’ She looks around at the gravestones. ‘Mind you, it must have been an amazing place in its heyday.’

  ‘Do graveyards have a heyday?’

  ‘Shut it,’ she punches my arm. I exaggerate the pain and she’s all over me like a nurse of the year nominee. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to…’

  I grin, and when she realises I’m pulling her leg, she punches me again.

  Walking back down the hill, we take great care with our footing, a slip up here might mean a very cold wait for both of us as we wait for medical attention. I love it that the snow is softening the noise of the usual boisterous Glasgow. Everything is muffled. It’s as if the religious hush found in the nearby Cathedral has found its way out of the confines of its Gothic architecture. It’s as if the world is holding its breath. Spread around the hill on which the Necropolis sits, the city is being cleansed and to my snow-washed eyes it has never looked better.

  As we pass St Mungo’s and approach the crossing, Maggie senses my fatigue and keeps up a stream of chatter to try and distract me from it. This relationship and how it has developed has been one of the biggest surprises of my recovery. It worried me at first. After all we did nearly sleep together on our first meeting. The more she came to visit, the more I began to worry that she had a wee fancy for me. But what we have has turned into something familial, I see her and think friend and sister, not get your clothes off, honey, I fancy a shag.

  ‘Piss off,’ was her reply when I found the courage to ask her. Then she smiled slowly as a thought articulated itself. ‘So that’s why you’ve gone all quiet the last few times I’ve been to visit.’ She plumped up a cushion for me with exaggerated care. ‘Nah, sorry, wee pal. I don’t want to jump your bones anymore. We’re mates and this is what mates do. They look after each other.’ I wasn’t sure which expression to allow on my face: relief or embarrassment.

  ‘Let’s go for a coffee,’ I pause at the traffic lights and look over my shoulder at the door of St Mungo’s. ‘I don’t want to go home just yet.’

  Once inside Maggie ushers me to a seat and then goes to stand at the counter. She looks back at me and mouths ‘Carrot cake?’ I n
od. The diet is definitely finished for now. I deserve a few treats after all I’ve been through.

  Since waking up in hospital I have been blurred with guilt. Every thought, every action is tinged with the memory of how I helped kill a man when I was only a child. The memories crowded in like a mob of feasting parasites.

  Old Betty was the first to come and discover the scene. The view of five blood-spattered children and a punctured corpse set her scream to banshee levels. And the nuns soon came running.

  We boys were led away to the bathrooms, we were too young and must have been led astray by the girls. We never saw them again. We heard that Carole had been sent to another home and Frances had gone to jail as the knife was covered in her prints.

  The sex attacks on the children stopped, making us think that we had been right in picking out that particular man. Only subsequent events have proven that not to be the case.

  I lift my wrists up and watch the demi-bracelets of puckered red flesh come into view. This is something I find myself doing regularly. And each time, the words, I nearly died fill my mind, as if I’m searching for the importance of it. I mean, Christ, this is big and I’m being a bit too blasé about it. I should be shouting from the tallest building, sharing the joy of being alive with every stranger that crosses my path, or at the very least cashing in my Police Federation savings plans and going to lie on a beach paradise somewhere in the tropics.

  But I need to know what’s happening next. Where is Leonard? What will the police decide following my actions during the Christ Killer case? They couldn’t investigate properly while I was having my extended “sleep” and even now they’re waiting for a doctor to say that I’m fit and able to answer for my actions.

  Daryl and a strangely subdued Allessandra have been regular visitors and each time we debate what will happen. What will they throw at me? A demotion? A dismissal, or even criminal proceedings? All are possible, but they’re convinced I’ll be given extended garden leave and then quietly allowed to fill a desk space.

  It helps that they have a real suspect now, albeit the wrong one. During their first visit — in which I was fully present — I tried to get them to impress upon the team that McCall wasn’t the killer. It was Leonard.

  Ruth Dillon did her bit. She managed to convince the police that Leonard’s body should be re-examined. It was exhumed and medical records proved that the body was indeed one Mark “Hutch” Hutchison.

  But it turns out that McCall did have blood on his hands, Daryl informed me with raised eyebrows. He killed Devlin. Forensics found traces of her blood on his clothes. And not only that but he confessed to everything. He’s currently waiting for sentencing.

  The brass are happy to go with that. They have a killer, and even better, he confessed, so they don’t have to spend the taxpayer’s money in bringing him to trial. They’re happy to put aside the fact that a gardener at the scene of a murder lived with a guy who was also murdered. But hey, they’ve got a confession, what the fuck do I know?

  I wonder, what’s in it for McCall? Why confess to a handful of murders you didn’t commit? Will he feel relieved to be away from Leonard? Maybe the man freaked him out as well and a twenty-five year jail sentence is a small punishment to take when compared to years of having that man whisper in your ear.

  So what happened to Leonard? How did he manage to get away? He must have pulled off the gardener guise to fool Kenny. I can just see him – I’m the gardener, mate – heard some screams and came looking, know what I mean?

  The next question is, am I still safe from him? And was Mother Superior his main target all along? Can’t think about this just now. If I do, I’ll have to decide to go after him, a sick bastard like him can’t be left to roam the countryside. Perhaps if I do I might rub away some of this guilt.

  Maggie enjoyed herself enormously telling me about the aftermath at Bethlehem House. Her hair almost crackled with pleasure and her hands waved and flapped in time with the words that rushed from her mouth.

  Apparently Kenny became worried when Calum was found bleeding into the gutter. Then there were a number of messages I’d left him on his answering service. Following my last message, he decided to come down to the convent himself. Mob-handed. It’s a good job he did.

  The next bit tickled Maggie.

  Having called in the emergency services, Kenny came under suspicion and spent a few hours being questioned in the local nick. Apparently he’d been holding me, trying to talk me into consciousness and was therefore covered in my blood. He was not a happy chappie.

  Until then he had managed to keep his person remote from that particular occupational hazard.

  It’s safe to say that Maggie doesn’t hold Kenny in high regard. ‘If he was chocolate, he would have nibbled his own dick down to a nib by now,’ she is fond of saying. She is also fond of saying that I am a bad influence on her speech. She has never used so many profanities in her life.

  Calum recovered from his wounds. He was often seen at my bedside while I was still in a coma, having limped there from his own bed on the floor above. He was suffering more from an injury to his professional pride, Maggie thought. Safe to say, that if Calum were chocolate, she would be the one charged with reducing the size of his manhood.

  From my time in deep-freeze, one memory lingers, a visit from Theresa. The only visit from Theresa. It was her scent that drew me briefly to the surface. That and the feel of her hand on mine. She must have just come in from the cold because whenever I think of it, I can still feel the chill from her skin. That and the warmth that rushed to fill the gap when her fingers hovered above mine, as she delayed the moment of departure.

  Theresa.

  What is she doing now, I wonder? Is she waiting for her husband to come home while a new lover heats her sheets? That’s unfair, I know. But you worry, don’t you?

  You hear about people who’ve had a near death experience and their desire to make the most of their life from that moment on. All I do is think about what I’ve lost, my career and Theresa.

  At least one good thing has come out of all of this. I entered this nightmare with only two people whose company I sought. One was a career criminal and the other was another man’s wife. Now I have all of these real friends.

  The muscles of my face are pulling my lips into an upside down u-shape and my eyes are stinging with emotion. It’s like I’m post-natal or something, I keep wanting to cry.

  Maggie’s on her way back to the table with a well-laden tray, better get my act together or it’ll start her off. I straighten my back, cough twice, blink harshly and allow a smile to replace the emotion.

  ‘What?’ Maggie asks as she sits down. ‘You look like you’ve got something stuck up your arse.’

  I laugh too loudly. Isn’t it amazing how close laughter and tears are? If they were colours they’d share a spectrum.

  While I move the food and drinks from the tray to the table Maggie asks, ‘So, what now?’

  ‘Food,’ I answer through a mouthful of moist, cinnamon flavoured sponge. Swallow. ‘Lots of food.’

  Watch out for A Simple Power

  Michael J Malone's next book from Five Leaves

  Prologue

  The nurse smoothed the sheet over the form on the bed. The quilt cover was bleached of colour and crisply laundered in that way only hospitals manage. The patient’s face and hands were also slight of colour having had no sun for some time. As the nurse worked she moved her hands more firmly whenever they touched the patient, testing for a response. But none came. None had for the last six weeks.

  She ran the back of her fingers down the patient’s cheek. So soft. And not a bruise in sight. What an amazing thing the human body was. This woman had suffered so much damage. Then a long sleep while the body set about healing itself. A host of tiny cells obeying the instructions from a brain at sleep.

  The nurse had plenty of other patients; lots of other people demanded her time, but this woman asked nothing of her, only that the various bags,
tucked out of sight, were emptied or filled. So she made it her special duty to do what she could to make this young woman comfortable.

  ‘There, there,’ said the nurse. ‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ Okay, the blonde hair was a tad lifeless and could do with a wash, but the rest of her was so darling, as her favourite actresses used to say. She glided her index finger down the ridge of the woman’s nose. It was just the right size for her face; the shell of the nostrils, the line straight and smooth up to the point between finely arched eyebrows. Long, dark lashes rested on her cheek, almost reaching the swell and curve of cheekbones a model would die for.

  Lightly, carefully, the nurse caught one eyelid between thumb and forefinger and pulled the eye open. The pupil was a spot of darkness surrounded by an iris that radiated from it in a dazzling blue. Might have known, she sighed. All this and blue eyes too. Lucky bitch. She relaxed her fingers and allowed the slender layer of skin to fall back into place.

  It was all so romantic and tragic, like something from a black and white movie. The beauty asleep on the bed for months. Her only visitor a mysterious, handsome man.

  Well not so mysterious really, he was her husband. And not so handsome either. Too skinny. Needed a good feed. There was an element of mystery, however as on one visit the nurse noticed a certain finger on a certain hand was missing a certain ring. Then when she looked again a couple of minutes later it was back in place, a band of gold snug in its groove of flesh like it had never been missing.

  Every day the man turned up to sit on the edge of his chair holding his wife’s hand. He stared at her face for the whole hour, silent, as if the energy used in speech would detract from the force he was pouring into the slumbering woman with his eyes.

  The nurse sighed and smoothed the corner of the quilt. If only she could attract such devotion. When she first thought of the couple she was reminded of her parents and how they had been lost in each other. Then the incident with the wedding ring had frozen this illusion. In any case no-one could love their partner the way her parents had loved each other. Even a small daughter could not impinge on the attention they paid each other.