by Shaun Allan
It had to be him.
"It's Connors," she whispered.
I didn't think. I didn't hesitate. I don't recall even standing up, but I suppose I must have. Somehow, though, Joy's hand was in mine and we were no longer in my room, sitting on the bed. We were... somewhere.
It was dark. It was black. It was as if it was night. It was as if all the light had got scared and took flight. Well, it was night, that much I already knew. But the sound and the air had joined in with the light and skedaddled. There was an absence of anything other than the feel of my sister's hand in my own. Was this what a flotation tank felt like? Sensory depravation? The situation was pretty depraved so we were on to a winner there. But where had everything gone? Or rather, where had we gone...?
Suddenly I could feel the blood pumping in my right ear. A rushing sound with a rhythmic beat that made me feel as if I were walking in my own heartbeat. The sensation lasted for no more than a few seconds, little more than a short stroll, before the rushing sound increased and the world flooded back around us. There was still silence and darkness, but now there was also substance. I could feel the air. I could feel the breath entering and exiting my body. I could hear faint sounds of life.
Yes, I know I said there was silence. I didn't mean there was a complete lack of sound, a void where sound had lived until it had been evicted by a jobsworth council for not paying council tax. I didn't mean sound had vanished as if a flying saucer had plopped down out of the sky and zapped it away to poke and prod and analy probe. I meant it was quiet. Very quiet. Not the silence from before my ear decided to run a river through itself, but the silence of a late night, when only stray cats and restless dogs wandered the streets, and fallen leaves drifted across roads travelled, normally, by the metal behemoths that could crush them in a second; cars. The silence that was only that because it was such a contrast to the cacophony of the day.
After sound had crept back from whence it had fled, light followed warily after. Or wearily. A smattering of stars sprinkled themselves across the sky, a light icing on the Victoria sponge of the night. Vague shapes formed around us. They began as shadows that feinted about, threatening to join together but deciding not to, rather preferring to fool us into believing they were something they weren't, before finally giving in and coalescing to become something indistinct but almost recognisable. My eyes adjusted slowly, seemingly taking their time, enjoying the fact that I had no idea where we were and wanting to drag the suspense out for as long as possible. Well jeepers, peepers, let's wait for those creepers, eh?
Did Joy's eyes needed time to adjust? Did being dead give her the ability to see better than someone who still had the beat of a heart to chase the blood around their veins. Did the jeeping peepers of a corpse dilate or were they lacklustre and lifeless. Well, I actually knew that already, at least in the case of my sister. The sparkle of a thousand stars still shone in her eyes and even the unfortunate fact of being an inhabitant of the afterlife hadn't dimmed its shine. That led to another thought. I'd kind of had the idea that this was Joy, as I knew her. This was physically her. I'd touched her. I smelled her. This was my sister, in body, mind and what was left of her spirit after the Grim Reaper had done whatever it was that Reapers did. Sure, she'd let herself melt back in the forest, flaps of maggot riddled skin sliding off like butter on hot toast, but other than that, this was Joy. Once she'd plopped her eye back in and the cockroaches had finished crawling out of her mouth, my sis was back, as good as new.
But was she? This couldn't be her actual body, even though it looked, smelled and felt like her. It couldn't be. I doubt even Mr Grim was good enough at jigsaw puzzles to put all those tiny bits of ash back together. He might have been World Champion at the 500 piece landscape or the 1000 piece Where's Wally Super Edition. Perhaps he could even put all the Corn Flakes back together to make them look like the cockerel on the box, but a human body, with thoughts and feelings and attitude was something else entirely. I didn't think even the mighty Death himself could manage that particular feat. Maybe that was just me, though. I was rubbish at jigsaws. I never had the patience for them to be honest. Even a 500 piecer would bore me after about twenty-five or so. So maybe Death could rebuild her. Maybe he did have the technology, and a staple gun, super glue, and double-sided sticky tape, to get the job done. I didn't know. The chances weren't good though. So this wasn't Joy, but it was. It wasn't her body reformed. She wasn't a phoenix risen from the ashes of her own cremation. But it was still her.
Was it an illusion? Was it all in my mind? No, because that would mean that it was all in the mind of Wendy as well. Or Wendy was in my mind. Or I in her's. Or this was the Matrix and we were all in the mind of a machine, sleeping like batteries... erm... babies. I supposed that would make the cell I'd been incarcerated in fairly appropriate. Dry cell as opposed to padded cell.
So what then? Was she a ghost? Like Casper or Swayze? Were we Matthews and Matthews (Deceased)? Or did George A. Romero have dibs on her life story?
It didn't matter. My head had spun this little web already and I was likely to get stuck fast if I didn't pull free and focus. Joy wasn't going to tell me and I didn't know how to find out myself. I didn't know if she was a spirit or a sprout. A ghost or a gherkin. It didn't matter. There were bigger fish to fry in the chip shop of our little drama and if we didn't sort our heads out - if I didn't sort mine out at least - we were likely to get drowned in a great dollop of mushy peas at best or curry sauce at worst. And we'd be battered in the process.
The shadows had stopped pratting about and had taken on more distinct shapes and my eyes had decided they'd had enough of winding me up and were prepared to do what they did best and let me see, albeit it still vague and grainy in the low lighting.
We were inside a vast room, so large it almost felt like were outside rather than in. The ceiling was completely clear and apart from a very few support struts it appeared to be made totally of glass. The smattering of stardust across the sky could easily, I suppose, have been a splattering of bird droppings, but either way, it had the same effect. Even being inside, I felt exposed. I felt vulnerable. And even though, if I didn't know where I was no-one else could, I still felt at risk. I was an insect on a slide, and not the kind found in a playground amongst the swings, Witches' Hats and bruised knees. The glass roof was the microscope lens that was peering down at me, an ant struggling to survive.
Shake it off, shake it off. Twang the shit back into the butt-cheeks of Life.
I grabbed my composure off the hook and wrapped it around my shoulders, slowly feeling its warmth settling through me like a log fire in an Alpen lodge. Not that I'd ever been in front of a log fire, nor had I visited any lodges, Alpen or otherwise, but I imagined that's how it felt. Calming. Dousing the chill flames of fear like frostbitten fingers returning to life. Trying my best to keep the cloak of composure tight around me, not quite as effective as Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility but close, I looked around. Joy was in a semi crouch and I realised I was too.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
I could have laughed, but I didn't. A giggle threatened to well up inside of me, maybe morphing into a snicker or possibly even a guffaw on the way out, but I held it in check. I might laugh at a funeral, but I didn't want that funeral to be my own.
My own funeral. I wondered if I would laugh then. If I were there in body and in spirit, though not actually in body-and-spirit - if I had moved on, passed over, stepped on a crack to never look back, would I laugh? Old Uncle Alfred and his ridiculous tie? A rack of people I didn't really know wondering why the song I wanted playing was Simple Minds' 'Alive & Kicking'? A eulogy by someone who had never even met me waffling on about how wonderful I was? Which, naturally, was the truth... Would there have been something to amuse? Amidst the tears, some real and some more crocodile than Captain Hook's arch nemesis, was a little entertainment to be gleaned?
Well, hopefully, it would be a while before I had to find out. In the meantime...
Jump. Was that what we'd done? Jumped? Was that the correct word to use? It still grated to say we'd teleported. This wasn't science fiction. Scotty wasn't upstairs not wanting to give her any more because she'd blow and we weren't Jeff Goldblum in disguise. So was it a jump? Or was it... was it a flip and a catch? Were we living (and I use the term loosely with respect to my partner in grime) two pence coins? Had we flipped and let the world catch us as it spun on its wobbly little axis?
'Where are we?'
Who knew? Should we jump again? Then again and thrice again? Let the trail criss-cross who knew where, so much so that we were dizzy with the flipping and the catching and the spinning and the...
But I did know.
I realised suddenly, with the impact of a short length of two by four across the back of my head. With the force of a bus through a post office window, I knew exactly where we were. Was it chance, happenstance or seat of the pants? Was it the Universe have a little giggle, or Fate's fickle finger once again? Or was it me? Some warped, deranged, completely bing-bang-boggley insane part of my mind that had a sick sense of humour and thought it would be hilariously funny to drop me slap-bang-bill-a-bong right into the lion's den?
My breath caught in my throat, frozen as if the temperature had just dropped to a couple of degrees above Kelvin and it was no longer today, but time had travelled and taken us with it, maybe in hand luggage, to the day after tomorrow.
Educational. That was what it was called. Stimulating. Enjoyable, even. It was, supposedly all of these things, and was, actually, none of them. To the suits and the auditors and the mighty They, this horticultural paradise was an essential part of the treatment for those fruit and nutters that could go a whole ten minutes without the drool having to be wiped from their faces or their backsides. Under Connors' loving care and attention, that reduced the possible number of those who might be educated or stimulated down to about four and a simple one-two-buckle-my-shoe-three-four-give-'em-some-more kept even those a smidgeon short of comatose.
We were at the hospital. The mental home. The lunatic had returned to the asylum. He hadn't taken it over yet, but hey, the night was still young.
Who sang that song...? Hmmm...
To please those that required pleasing, and to garner funding from those that had fat wallets and fatter bellies, Dr. Connors had built a nursery. It wasn't the kind of nursery where babies were taken to be looked after, although this version wasn't so far removed from that. It was the floral variety where adults requiring the care of babies were taken to be supposedly looked after. Of course, once the money was banked and the curiosities were satiated, I'd have been surprised to see even one patient pass through the vaulted doors that led to the hospital proper. No. It was far cheaper to hire the services of a gardener to tend the plants once a week than it was to let loose a bunch of shambling wastes of space and have half the workforce tied up watching them. No. Educate? Hah! Stimulate? Why? To Connors, I'd come to realise, the patients were a means to an end and nothing more. He could be mean and there'd be no end.
But it looked good on paper and it looked good to any who happened to look. So a purpose was served and no dolphins were harmed. Oh, sorry, that's porpoise. My mistake.
For a few seconds, I didn't know whether to be happy or sad. Happy because I knew where we were and it wasn't just somewhere, it was Somewhere. Happy because we were not crispy chicken. Happy because the world had turned and we hadn't burned. And sad? Sad because we'd returned to my own personal hell. Well, my personal purgatory was the reason I'd come here in the first place, but it had been the physical hell to my emotional one. Sad because we were sitting on the tongue of the mighty beast, waiting its mouth to close and swallow us whole.
Sad because all of my running; the gull, the boy in the car, the farmer, his wife and their child, and watching Jeremy die - it was all for nothing. I may as well have stayed put and kept my mouth shut. Or perhaps I should have tried harder when I clicked my ruby slippers together to leave here in the first place.
Was it a blessing for Joy to not have to breathe? On a cold December morning, when frost lay like icing across the pathways and parks and one small slip for Man could be one giant fall on your backside, did it please her to not breathe in and have her lungs turn to ice? After a hundred meter sprint did she have to worry about the breath being torn from her lungs by a rusty garden rake as she stood bent, hands on knees, panting and wheezing? Probably not. I hadn't noticed if my sister breathed at all. Maybe she did and possibly she didn't. It could be that she breathed normally. Or out of habit. Or her chest moved as if air was being sucked in whilst carbon dioxide was being expelled, even though it wasn't. Or it could be that none of these were true. Either way, I didn't have that option. I needed to breathe. My lungs were still intact and had a basic oxygen requirement to keep on working. Hey, it might be boring being a lung just expanding and contracting over and over in an incessant monotonous rhythm, but someone had to do it. A job was a job, however tedious, and they should be pleased they weren't a rectum. Not that I could tell if they were complaining or not. They were doing what they were designed to do. Or at least they were when I remembered to breathe again.
My breath, once kick started again, came in short rasping jolts, as if it wanted to stay away and not be seen to be associated with me. I think not, I thought, and did my best to steady myself. I wasn't suddenly centre stage on Britain's Got Talent, my voice all nervous crackles as anxiety strangled the words before I could squeeze them out. I also wasn't a deer, casually crossing a road to see my friends in the forest on the other side, a night of beer and Wii playing planned, caught in the headlights of a gas-guzzling gargantuan that was bearing down on me, wiping all thoughts of alcohol induced wiimote twirling from my mind in a blaze of headlamp and radiator grill. I was simply a normal guy, with his dead sister, suddenly teleported back into the mental institute from which I'd escaped.
Simple.
I settled somewhere in the no-man's land between a smile and a frown. I gave myself a mental botox boost that fixed my face, and my mood, in a grim but fairly relaxed mask of emotionless resignation. Not that I was emotionless - I'd yo-yoed so much I could practically do a cat's cradle or walk the dog with neither a canine nor feline to hand. Nor was I resigned - the fact that I'd just popped up to say hello and couldn't go back down below, much like a rollicking burp after a nice cold glass of coke, wasn't here nor there. The situation was the situation. Deal with it or don't. Do or die, tuck into a big steak pie.
Yes indeedy.
I broke the glorious news of our current location to my sister. She took it rather well I thought.
"Are you INSANE??" she bellowed. I was sure I felt a sprinkle of spit and the heat of her breath as she brought her face close enough to mine for me to see her nasal hairs. She'd always kept herself preened to perfection, any stray hair or zit banished post haste, so I declined to mentioned the odd nostril sprout. I thought that best.
Perhaps I should have returned the bellow, standing up for myself and pointing out that location, location, location was a Channel 4 television programme. If she'd have wanted to go somewhere specific she should have gone with my original idea of calling a taxi. But then I figured it wasn't necessarily a point of going somewhere specific as it was of not going somewhere specific. Either way, though, I didn't tap in an address into a control pad in my
stomach and then follow the directions. It wasn't an exact science, if indeed any science was involved. We just went. Put your lips together and blow. Much like a hot air balloon or a leaf on the wind, I couldn't say let's go left or right or up or down. Before about two minutes previous, I didn't actually realise I could properly go anywhere.
Yes, I know I deliberately evacuated my cell at this very institute. Yes, I know I had figured out that I could teleport. And stop, please, sniggering at that word. It is what it says on the tin, with no preservatives or E numbers added. That was me then and this was me now. It had all seemed so simple - jump into a furnace and die. What was so difficult about that? Quite a fair bit, it appeared. Now I was on the run. Now I had my dead sister accompanying me. Now I'd seen that the doctor who'd 'looked after' me was, in reality, a cold blooded killer who knew all about my particular gifts and had even tried to train me to use them. Albeit under the influence of drugs. Now I'd witnessed a murder, killed a boy and a bird, and almost killed a family and more. Now, I had to admit, the days of being locked in a padded cell whilst a needle was jabbed into my arm and sweet oblivion washed over me seemed to be the greener side of the grassy knoll.
But anywho. The knowledge was gone. Someone had closed that particular book, without noting down the page number or, at the very least, turning down the page corner. Not that it was knowledge exactly. It was more of a feeling, and I'd lost that feeling, loving or loathing. I was walking a blind line between me and who I needed to be. My arms were outstretched and my eyes were closed. I was feeling my way, stumbling and crashing into things that I couldn't see, hoping I wouldn't trip and fall on my arse. Whilst in my cell, I had some confidence in my 'ability'. I wanted to go and I went. But now the hunt was on and I'd left that confidence behind in my hasty departure. I could still hear it in the distance, calling out to me - reaching out beseechingly. Come back! But this blind mouse was running away with his tail between his legs while it was still attached.