Dark Horizons

by Dan Smith

  ‘She’s not dead,’ I told the woman.

  Another sympathetic smile.

  ‘No, really,’ I said, taking the picture from my pocket. ‘Look.’

  I unfolded the paper and held it out to her. She took it from me and studied it for a while as if she were trying to decide whether or not she’d seen her before. Then she shook her head and handed it back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I sighed. ‘So what now?’

  ‘You could leave your picture on the board. Leave a contact number on it. An address. She might see it. Someone might know her.’

  ‘It’s my only picture.’

  ‘You could leave her name. A message.’

  I’d seen the boards, the people crowded round them, reading each name so closely that their noses were almost touching the walls. One name. Helena. It would get lost among all those other names. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

  ‘Ask around?’ she offered. ‘You might get lucky. Or …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Or what? There’s something else?’

  ‘We have photos. It’s difficult. Not easy at all.’

  ‘Photos? What kind of … ? Oh. Oh, I see.’ Photos of the dead. Unidentified husbands and wives. Boyfriends and girl-friends. Sons and daughters. I’d heard a voice in the crowd, one of many, speaking about dental records and I knew that even a picture might not be enough to identify some of the victims. I wondered who or what could have been so intent on destroying life.

  ‘We can give you a numbered ticket. Someone will call you.’ She looked over at a closed door that opened as I followed her gaze. The couple I’d seen at the bomb site, the parents looking for their teenage daughter, were coming out, holding each other, their faces crumpled, their world collapsed in on itself.

  ‘No,’ I said, holding out the picture for her to see. ‘Look. She’s not dead. Helena’s not dead.’

  ‘I’m sure, sir, but we have to try everything.’ She led me to yet another desk. ‘Marla will help you,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

  When she was gone, I leaned forwards, putting my hands on the desk. I stayed like that for maybe a minute before looking up at Marla. But Marla wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the picture that was still in my hands, flattened against the top of the desk.

  Marla was pointing. ‘I’ve seen her. I’ve seen that girl.’

  At first I hardly knew what she’d said. My ears accepted the sound of her voice, the formation of the words, but my brain took longer to register them, to understand them. I was preparing myself for the possibility that I might never find Helena, not here, but now Marla was offering me hope.

  ‘Downstairs, I think.’ She vexed her brow, looked up to one side, remembering what she’d seen, trying to draw one image from countless others.

  ‘You’ve seen her?’

  ‘Mm.’ Still accessing the memories.

  ‘She’s all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her words hesitant, not wanting to give me too much hope before the memory came back to her in its entirety. ‘I think …’ Then her face changed. A sudden dawning. Her eyes came back to look at me, her eyebrows lifted, traces of a smile touched the corners of her mouth and I knew – before she even told me – I knew that Helena was all right.

  ‘She was downstairs,’ she said. ‘A few cuts and bruises but she was OK. She helped me with a lady who … yeah. She was nice. Hold on.’

  She turned away from me, touching another volunteer’s shoulder, asking him to man the desk for a few minutes, she had something she needed to do. I could see such relief in her features. I had given her something uplifting to do. She wanted to take me to where she’d seen Helena, share in one of the happy stories of the day. She’d seen so much death and heartache that even the faintest glimmer of hope might be enough to carry her through the rest of this ordeal.

  ‘She was here earlier on,’ Marla was saying as we descended the stairs, heading against the constant flow of people. ‘I’ve only been on the desk,’ she looked at her watch, ‘a couple of hours, and before that I was helping down here. This girl, the girl in your picture—’

  ‘Helena.’

  ‘Helena, yes, she came in with some cuts and bruises, a bit shaken up, but not too bad. I helped the nurses clean her up. She could’ve gone, but she said she wanted to stay. Help out, you know. She might still be there.’

  Marla led me to a ward that might’ve been a field hospital. Men in jeans and shirts, identifiable as doctors only by the stethoscopes round their necks, nurses in white dresses that were stained fresh red and stale brown. All the beds were full, trolleys pushed into the free spaces, multiple casualties sitting on the floor waiting to be treated. I felt a sense of everything turning full circle. I had seen all this before, on a smaller scale, and I wondered if I were doomed to forever visit hospitals, to always see patients crowded into corridors, to always be surrounded by the sick and the dying.

  As we entered, to one side of the open doorway was a gurney, the mattress indented where a patient had once lain, blood pooled in the spot where their buttocks might have been. The thick red liquid, soaked into the thin mattress, dripping onto the floor beneath it like an over-watered plant pot.

  A man lay in the first bed, turned on his side, the skin of his thighs and lower back completely seared, nurses leaning over him. Another patient, her head fully bandaged, another with bandages in place of an arm. Marla seemed not to notice the carnage around her, pulling at my sleeve, directing my sight, saying, ‘There. There she is.’

  ‘Where?’ I moved my head to see among the people moving about, looking at Marla, trying to see where she was pointing.

  ‘Right there.’ She urged me further into the ward. ‘By the far bed.’

  I stopped and put a hand to my mouth. I could see where she was pointing. A young woman was standing by a bed, holding an intravenous drip, leaning over to speak to a man sitting up in the bed. She was still wearing the same clothes as she had been wearing last night when the photograph was taken. And it dawned on me that Marla and I had misunderstood each other.

  I lifted the photograph and looked at it again. The woman in the picture, the one supporting Helena – the woman with her arm around Helena’s shoulders – that was who was standing at the far end of the ward.

  Marla was mortified. She had given me so much hope. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. The pain was clear in her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I told her. ‘It’s fine. I’ll find her. Thanks anyway.’

  Marla looked at me, a mix of sadness and weariness.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I found myself consoling her. ‘My mistake. I should’ve been clearer.’ The girl she had brought me to see was in the picture I had shown her. ‘It’s OK. Really.’ I felt awkward, watching her face fall. Her need to help me had been so great and now she was crushed. I did something that didn’t come naturally to me. I put my arms around her and held her for a moment, telling her again it was all right. She had tried. She had done everything she could.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, stepping back, ‘she might be able to help me. She might know where Helena is.’

  Marla nodded.

  ‘Come on.’ It was a calculated risk. If the woman from the picture had helped Helena, there was a good chance she knew where she was. I was certain that Helena was alive – I had seen her, I had a picture, she had to be all right – and if Marla could hear the news too, perhaps it would change how she felt.

  We picked our way through the ward, almost unnoticed. Like worker ants with a job to carry out at all costs, the staff and volunteers moved around us as if we weren’t there. If the woman noticed us approach, she didn’t register it, and even when I was standing right behind her, she gave no indication that she knew I was there.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She turned her head, a slow movement, and followed it with her shoulders and the top part of her body. She looked at me just long enough to acknowledge that I was there, then she turned her head again, her eyes going to the wind
ow.

  Outside, I could see the pandemonium being played out at the front of the hospital. Ambulances, cars, motorbikes, people everywhere. There were even people at the roadside, holding out boxes, asking for money to buy supplies, cash to fund the rescue. Occasionally, as a car or motorbike passed, weaving through the traffic, passengers would throw money from the windows.

  ‘Is this you?’ I said, holding out my picture, showing it to the back of her head. The picture carried signs of having been repeatedly creased and pushed in and out of my pocket. It was crumpled, softer than before, and the folded cross that had run through it was no longer clean and crisp.

  The woman continued to stare.

  ‘Please. This is you. I’m looking for the girl you helped. The one in this photo. From last night.’ I moved around her, standing in front of her, holding the picture up to her face so she couldn’t ignore it.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Help me.’

  She seemed to shake herself, and as she did so, she shook tears to her eyes. Tears of grief, exhaustion, frustration, I had no idea.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to know.’

  She swallowed hard, nodded. Cleared her throat and pulled herself together. She looked at the photograph. ‘I remember her,’ she said, then turned to look at the bag of fluid she was holding. It was more or less full. If she stood there, holding it like that until it was empty, her arm would be numb, drained of blood. Marla realised this before I had, though, and already she was dragging an unused stand towards us.

  ‘She must’ve been in the club, too,’ said the woman. ‘At the back, where we were. I couldn’t see much. All the fire and smoke. Dust. Managed to get out, though, across a courtyard or something. There were a few of us, the fire chasing us. She was there. That girl. She was hurt. Her face.’ The woman touched the side of her own face as she studied the photo. ‘We helped each other over the wall.’

  Marla took the bag from the woman and hooked it up to the stand.

  ‘D’you know where she is now?’

  The woman continued to stare at the picture, shaking her head. I was waiting to see what the head movement meant. Part of me wanted to grab her, to get the information from her so that I could find Helena and get away from this hell. I wanted to shout at her, to tell her to pull herself together.

  Marla took the woman’s hand, encouraged her to sit on the corner of the bed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Steph.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you come outside for a moment, Steph? Have a cup of tea, a bit of a rest. This is hard for us all. There are other volunteers. Someone else can do this for a while.’

  ‘I’m not a volunteer,’ Steph said, turning to look at the man in the bed. Until now, I hadn’t taken much notice of him, I’d been so concerned with my own problems. One side of his face was red, raw where it had been burned, seeping fluids. His eyes were closed and he looked dead but for the weak rise and fall of his chest. Seeing him, I couldn’t believe no one was doing anything more for him. ‘He’s my husband,’ she said. ‘They told me he’s going to die.’

  We fell silent, our world pushing outwards, dismissing everything around us. I could hear no sound, see nothing other than what was immediately before me. I thought about what Steph was doing, and I knew it was what I had done for my mother. I had kept hoping and I had made her live. Whether it was a selfish desire to keep her with me or an unwillingness to quicken her death, it didn’t matter. I would always carry the guilt of it, and I couldn’t run away from it, but I was more able to accept it now, and I knew I would have felt worse if I had taken the other road, if I had done as Domino had said she would do, that night when we sat on the hospital steps. Perhaps I should have seen then that it was something that separated us. Domino was willing to participate in the death of another, but I was not.

  I looked up at Steph. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t … know.’

  ‘Are you Alex?’ she asked, taking me by surprise.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was saying your name.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to her?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She’s—’

  ‘Yes. She’s OK. They brought us in the same ambulance.’

  ‘Do you know where they went?’

  But Steph was turning back in on herself again, and I sensed that she had nothing left to say. I thanked her and stood up, moving away from the bed.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ I asked Marla.

  ‘I’ll stay with her,’ she said. ‘For a while, anyway. Why don’t you try the other ward. Your friend might be there.’ She gave me brief directions.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much.’

  She smiled. ‘Good luck, Alex.’

  She had even remembered my name.

  53

  I followed Marla’s directions in a daze of growing relief and excitement. Helena was all right. She was here somewhere and she was all right. I’d had the picture to reassure me all this time, but I now had Steph’s testimony, and I knew that I was close to finding Helena. Soon, we would be together again.

  I hurried along the corridor, twisting and moving to avoid collision, slowing only when I came to the other ward, taking a deep breath and steeling myself before I entered.

  But I could not have prepared myself for what I would see.

  I was looking for Helena, but it was Michael I found. I recognised him straight away, propped up in the bed, his naked torso spotted with blood, as it had been last time I saw him. He looked bad. Much of his left leg was bandaged and there was a large dressing on the side of his neck.

  I stopped and stared. This was the man who had intended to kill me. My last memories of him were of his brutal savagery and his lust for murder, and I felt fear rise in me when I saw him there. But, although I was afraid of him, I told myself he was not a monster. Seeing him like this, I knew he was weak. He couldn’t harm me. I also knew he was my best link to Helena, so I repressed my fear, pushed it deep, and approached him.

  ‘Michael,’ I said, looking down at him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ He opened his eyes, but he didn’t look at me.

  ‘It’s me.

  Alex.’ ‘Alex? Shit. What the fuck are you doing here?’ The tone fairly neutral. Tired, not angry. Perhaps his condition had subdued him, or maybe they’d given him drugs.

  ‘I’m looking for Helena.’ I was surprised I felt no pleasure at his discomfort. Without my fear, I felt nothing for him at all. I was drained. I had nothing left.

  ‘I don’t feel so good.’ His eyes moved as he spoke to me, as if they were searching for my face.

  ‘Have you seen Helena?’ I asked.

  He rolled his eyes high enough for me to see almost nothing but bloodshot whites. ‘I haven’t seen jack shit since … well, since whatever the fuck happened. Last thing I saw was a flash of light, fucking noise and then nothing. When I opened my eyes, everything was gone. And I mean gone. Doctor said it should come back, though. Said a few people’ve had it. Please, God, I hope it comes back. I’m sorry about—’

  ‘You can’t see?’

  ‘Not a thing. Please, Alex, you—’

  ‘Where’s Helena?’ He looked scared, but I wasn’t interested. I had no time for him. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought maybe she was here before. Thought I heard her voice, but … you think she’s all right? Shit, you gotta help me find her, Alex.’

  I looked around, realising now why she wasn’t here. ‘She’s left you. Probably long gone. Saw this as her chance to get away from you.’ Maybe she would contact me through my site now she was free. She would write to me and we would find each other again.

  ‘What you talking about? Why would she want to leave me? Why wouldn’t she come find me? If she’s OK, why isn’t she here?’

  ‘Because she’s afraid of you, Michael; you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘What? No. It was you. You
changed her. You were always trying to take her away from me.’ He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  I looked down at him, this man whom I had hated. ‘I always wanted to ask you. Our Friend and Brother. On the shrine. That was Sully, right?’

  ‘What?’ There were tears running down his cheeks, but these tears were only for himself.

  ‘I guess Domino didn’t tell you I found it. The same night you went to bury Alim.’

  ‘How did you—’

  ‘He was your friend, but I saw where you put him. That is him, isn’t it? And it was you who put him there.’

  ‘Sully left.’

  ‘You killed him, Michael.’

  ‘No … It wasn’t like that. I didn’t mean to …’ He swallowed his own words.

  ‘I told Helena what I found. That shrine hidden in the forest. First thing she said was that it was you. She knows you. She knows what you are.’

  ‘He wasn’t good enough for her.’

  ‘But you are?’

  ‘Damn straight I am.’ His voice cracking, even through such defiant words.

  ‘So you got rid of him. And you would’ve done the same to me if Domino and Helena hadn’t stopped you.’ I stepped back and stared, remembering how I had last seen him, dragging Helena away from me.

  ‘No, Alex, I wouldn’t have done that. We’re brothers, right? Brothers. You and me, Alex, we have to stick together now. It’s just you and me.’

  ‘What about Domino and Kurt?’

  ‘I don’t know where they are, what happened to them.’

  ‘So you lost them, too.’

  ‘Maybe they …’ He wiped the back of his hand across his nose. ‘Shit, man, this is all so fucked up.’

  I watched him, finding no pity. ‘You never thanked me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You never thanked me for pulling Helena out of the water that day.’

  ‘It should have been me.’

  I didn’t reply, I just watched him for a moment longer, then walked away.