The Ashes of an Oak

by Bradbury, Chris

  ‘Thanks.’ Milt closed the folder and put it back in his drawer. ‘Don’t for Christ’s sake share it yet. It’s completely unofficial and it’s full of maybes. There’s a million guys out there like this. All it does it narrow it down a bit. Plus, it’s the kind of thing that gets the bosses mad, you know? Waste of resources, time et cetera.’

  Frank put his hat back on and straightened his jacket collar. He looked like he’d just pulled himself out of a dumpster. ‘Sure. Any ideas how I tell Emmet why I’m investigating the last thirty years’ worth of harelip repairs in every hospital in New York State?’

  ‘You’ll think of something.’ Milt brushed his hands together and held them up to show they were empty. ‘My work here is done.’

  Chapter 10

  Frank massaged his hand and tried to squeeze the pins and needles out the ends of his fingers as they pricked at him like a thousand tiny bees. Whoever it had been that he’d picked a fight with, they had jangled a nerve somewhere.

  He had taken a tongue lashing from Mary when he got back. The hour had turned into two by the time he came through the door. He took it. He deserved it. He had crawled, exhausted, back into bed and pushed his face into the cold, crisp pillow, pulled the cocoon of cotton across his shoulder and slept.

  At midnight he threw the sheet back and went into the kitchen. He needed an aspirin. His head throbbed to the point where it stopped him sleeping. What with the pins and needles and the aches and pains, it felt like his body had thrown itself headlong into a rebellion of its own.

  He tossed an aspirin into his mouth and chased it down with a whisky, then went into the living room and sank into a chair.

  Headache or not, beneath the pulled muscles and torn nerves lay a greater hurt; it nagged at him that he’d fired three shots into a wall. Emmet was right. Who the hell misses three times from point blank? And why wasn’t there any sign of another in the struggle?

  Was it possible, should he consider, in this quiet, sultry, mournful night, that he had imagined it? That there never had been anyone there?

  After all, he was the only one to have ever seen the man in the sharp, dark grey suit; across the street, on the fire escape, in the rain among the distorted lights of the night-painted town. He was the only one to have been led by him to the victims. Others may have followed, but it was he who had given chase.

  He went rigid with fear and felt beads of sweat pop and roll down his face. His eyes widened, his pupils enlarged and burned as they took in every last ounce of light in the room. A rush of images swam by, every last painful event of the last few days – the bodies, the blood, the pores on the thick, dead skin, the rolled, dusty eyes and flaccid tongues. He saw the dark corners, the grimy floors and he saw the man in the sharp, dark grey suit.

  His eyes danced as they tried to keep up with the reel of images that flickered by in degraded, bleeding, blurred Super 8. Colours flowed one into another, faces distorted until they became monstrous caricatures of the already bloated, blue corpses into which they had decomposed.

  He saw the shadow emerge from the wall, a black, almost tangible, three dimensional apparition. It turned towards him, its hands raised to shoulder height, full of menacing silence. It came at him at a rush and they collided like giants, isolated in a silent, airless vacuum. He punched and clawed and saw his hands pass through the man, beat at the air and felt his fist hit the hardness of the wall. Thunder rolled three times around them; gunfire or the anger of the gods? He found a grip and pulled at the man, dragged him through the vacuum and heard the pop of reality as they smashed against the cold hard ground.

  He searched beneath the hat, for the eyes that lay in shadow and saw to his horror that the man in the suit had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no face, no more than the bland undulations of pretence, an indistinct counterfeit of humanity.

  Frank felt himself go cold. His skin crawled.

  Was it possible that there had never been anyone there?

  Oh, my God, he thought.

  After all these years, I’m broken.

  I’m the killer.

  Friday

  Chapter 11

  Frank woke up on the floor of the living room. He could feel the carpet burn into one side of the back of his head as he squirmed. He tried to get up but, like an anaesthetised cat, he would get halfway and flop back. He tried to raise his right arm, but it wouldn’t move. It was beyond heavy, it was someone else’s arm, existent only by way of attachment.

  He tried to move his legs and found his left leg rotating in mid-air while his right leg lay inert. He called out, but heard nothing but a mumble. His tongue felt swollen, displaced, weighted down.

  Suddenly above him, almost as high as the ceiling, he saw Mary. Her face loomed, a confused moon, her eyes wet, her nose red.

  She mouthed something at him and suddenly came rushing at him. He wanted to close his eyes and run, to flinch from her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch as she descended in the fish-eye of his vision, distorted and ugly.

  He must have passed out, because the next thing he remembered was being in the back of an ambulance. For a second he thought it was a police car, what with the siren and the lighthouse rotation of the lights outside the window. He struggled again and this time found some strength in his limbs, but he was easily overcome and fell tearfully, dejectedly, hopelessly into unconsciousness.

  Daylight filtered through the thin drapes and lent a muddy hue to the hospital room. Frank opened his eyes slowly. To him it was still bright, painfully so.

  He immediately tried to move his right arm and found to his delight that he could lift it and manipulate his fingers. The pins and needles remained, if anything were slightly worse, but the movement was all. He wiggled his toes and to his delight they responded under the tight sheet and counterpane.

  Thank God, he thought. Thank God.

  He saw Mary asleep in a chair. She looked peaceful, but retained the worry lines of a cop’s wife across her forehead.

  Memories of the previous night came back and filled him with dread. He had to tell her. He had to wake Mary and tell her that it was he who was the killer, that he had finally cracked after all those years on the job and become that which he feared the most – his enemy.

  Would she reject him? Would she listen patiently to his confession and then slowly, silently get and up leave the room and his life forever? Or would she rant and rave and scream of betrayal, of her wasted years, of the lonely old age yet to come, the single room apartment where she hid her face in shame for fear of being recognised as the wife of a serial killer?

  She might try to persuade him to keep quiet, to keep it their secret, to say that she would keep an eye on him come the full moon and the changing of the tides. She would lock him in at night and tie herself to him so that he could not leave the house, the bed, without her.

  Or she might stand by him through thick and thin, face the newspapers and the courthouse and the sneers of strangers with all the grace God gave her and visit him every Thursday afternoon for the rest of their natural lives.

  What had he done? What had he done to this mother’s child, this father’s daughter, this faithful wife?

  How many lives had he destroyed in the ripples, the blast wave, of his madness?

  What would the black-haired boy he once was say to the crazy old man he had grown up to be?

  ‘Mary,’ he said. She didn’t stir. ‘Mary.’

  Something inside her heard him and she opened her eyes. She smiled and moved sleepily over to the edge of the bed.

  ‘Hey, Frank.’ She lay down and put her head on his chest, stretched her legs out next to his. ‘How do you feel?’

  He felt ashamed, scared, ridiculous. ‘Okay,’ he said. He felt a tear roll down his cheek.

  ‘You’ve been out a while.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  Mary lifted her hand and looked at her watch. ‘Three twenty-five in the afternoon.’

  ‘Still Friday, right?’

>   She laughed softly. ‘Still Friday,’ she said.

  ‘How am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Old, messed up and sexy,’ she sighed.

  ‘That’s not quite…’

  ‘It’ll do for now. The doc’s coming to see you at four. We’ll discuss things then.’

  Frank wanted to ask what there was to discuss. He wanted to tell her his fears and his nightmares, but it seemed absurd in the murky light of that small room.

  ‘Okay,’ he said and closed his eyes, his left arm around her, rising and falling with each breath she took.

  Frank’s mouth gaped in disbelief. He was hearing, but the words washed over him in a frothy stream and moved on without mark or substance.

  ‘A brain tumour?’

  He looked at Mary, who held his gaze with watery eyes.

  ‘You mean a brain tumour? A thing that grows inside my head and eventually eats me alive? That kind of brain tumour?’

  He paused and waited for the doctor to break into laughter and tell him that the guys at the precinct had put him up to this and that it was all just a sick, hilarious joke. He could walk in tomorrow, hands held out in supplication and shout: ‘You guys! You guys just kill me. You really had me going there for half a second.’ Mary would be in on it, of course. It would be her revenge for all those late nights and moments of frantic solitude, for his taking a stroll and shooting at walls and waking up next to dead girls.

  The doctor waited to respond. His patient needed to say what he had to say. He had a right to his reaction. He had seen it all; the crying, the begging, the disbelievers, the resigned, the sinners who deserved what they got, the intellectuals who saw it as a reward for years of excessive hard work and could wear it as a badge of honour.

  Mary had warned him that Frank would probably make a joke of it and try to walk out. So far, so good.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Frank. ‘Seriously. How can you possibly know that? Did you look inside my ear while I slept and see a small sign that said: This way to the tumour?’ He looked at Mary again. She gave him a tight, anxious smile.

  ‘The reason,’ said the doctor quietly, flatly, ‘that you’re here, sir, is that you had a fit in the early hours of this morning. Your wife found you on the floor of your living room.’

  Mary reached over and put a hand on his arm.

  ‘You probably don’t remember this. That’s normal. You were brought here and we performed a CT scan. It showed that you have a benign tumour the size of a golf ball.’ He paused again. ‘The word I would like you to focus upon is benign. You don’t have cancer…’

  ‘How do you know?’ snapped Frank.

  ‘You’re a detective, yes?’ Frank nodded. ‘In the same way that you can look at a man and know instinctively whether he’s guilty or innocent, I can look at the results of a scan and know what’s inside a man’s head. Experience. Plus I have very able colleagues who assist me and some very expensive machinery. You don’t have cancer. You have a tumour and it has to come out. It has to come out soon. You have reached a crisis point where a decision has to be made.’

  ‘What decision?’ asked Frank. ‘Go get your knife and start cutting. I’ll wait here.’ He smiled wanly.

  The doctor returned the smile. ‘Good. That’s the big decision made. Can I ask you a couple of questions?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Have you been having any strange sensations lately? A change in smell or vision?’

  ‘You could say that,’ said Frank.

  ‘Any sort of hallucination?’

  ‘Maybe once or twice.’

  ‘Any fits prior to this one?’

  Frank hesitated. Had that been what it was about? Had he fought nothing but a hallucination the other night and still lost? All those times at the scene when he’d noticed the man in the sharp, dark grey suit? Was he a trick of the light? Had he shot at nothing believing that he was fighting for his life?

  ‘I believe I may have.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Couple of nights ago.’

  The doctor looked at Mary. ‘And you discharged yourself from hospital yesterday morning?’

  ‘You going to nag me now? ‘Cause believe me, you ain’t got nothing on her.’ He poked a thumb towards Mary. She didn’t smile.

  ‘No,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s just an indication of the seriousness. It’ll get worse if we don’t deal with it.’ He made a note. ‘Today’s Friday. You should never be sick on a weekend; you know that, don’t you? I’ll pencil you in for nine am Monday.’

  ‘For surgery?’

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘Would you like a couple of weeks to think about it?’

  Frank narrowed his eyes. ‘That’s sarcasm, huh?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the doctor. He stood. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you to have some talk time. You need anything, the nurses know how to get hold of me.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Doc?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Is it possible that this thing, this growth, could have affected my behaviour?’

  ‘In what way?’

  Frank looked at Mary. He felt embarrassed and stupid.

  ‘Could I have done things I didn’t know about?’

  ‘You mean a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?’

  ‘Yeah, like that.’

  ‘Probably not to that extreme. You may get mood swings, lost moments, be more aggressive than usual. Some people report loss of understanding or an inability to express themselves. It’s usually post-operatively that some deeper changes are noticed, but I’ll go through those with you later. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘In a way, yes. Thanks, Doc.’

  The doctor nodded at each of them and left.

  The silence after he had left lay awkwardly, an unwelcome yet unignorable guest that had barged its way in and had to be acknowledged before it would leave. It was a jagged weight, not to be dismissed by light-hearted banter or a deaf ear.

  Mary broke the silence.

  ‘What was that about?’

  Frank lit a cigarette. He wanted whisky too. He looked at the neutral, cold, sterile walls and wanted to be home again in his chair, with the smells of Mary’s cooking seeping into his pores and the gravelly sound of an older, wiser Frank Sinatra rumbling across the room.

  ‘What?’ he asked in the hope that his ignorance would detract from his earlier question.

  ‘You know what. All that stuff about changes in behaviour. Jekyll and Hyde. What was that all about?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘This guy I keep seeing, this fella in a suit. If he’s just a hallucination, then what else have I seen or not seen? I could’ve had units looking for a guy that doesn’t even exist.’

  He hoped that would be enough. There was still one mighty obvious question that had yet to be answered and he didn’t want her anywhere near it.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll forgive you,’ she said. ‘Once they know what you’ve been through.’

  He felt relief. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said. ‘I hope so.’ He shut up and hoped the subject would die there and then.

  ‘You okay about Monday?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Truth? No. Not in anyway. On a positive note, I have a brain.’

  ‘Sure you have,’ said Mary brightly. ‘I just thought it would show up with a swollen toe and a limp.’

  ‘You’re a crazy old lady, you know that?’

  ‘You were driving the car to Crazytown. I just accepted the lift.’

  ‘You should go, get some rest.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that. I’m exhausted. The school will think I’m truanting. Can I bring you anything back?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘No, thanks. Could you ring Emmet and ask him to call by? Him and Steve. I ought to keep them up to speed.’

  Mary prickled slightly. ‘Why? So you can discuss work from your death bed?’

  ‘No. So I can get them to start a collection
at the precinct and get me the golf clubs I always wanted. There’s no point being sick if you don’t get what you want out of it.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell them. But I’ll forbid him from discussing any cases you have at the moment.’ She kissed him. ‘Stay where you are. I mean it. You attempt to escape, I’ll kill you myself.’

  ‘I wish you’d been my teacher. I might’ve liked school.’

  ‘Well, you got me as a wife instead. Lump it, buddy.’ She kissed him again. ‘I love you.’

  Before he could reply, she left.

  He looked dolefully at the back of the door. The questions started to flood in, least of which was whether, come Tuesday morning, he would still be a cop.

  Emmet and Steve turned up as requested at seven-thirty that night. They sat at the end of the bed looking like they were already at the graveside.

  ‘Would you two lighten up?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Okay,’ said Emmet. ‘It’s not every day you hear your friend has a brain tumour.’

  ‘Just think of it as a lost golf ball, Em.’ Frank wriggled himself up the bed. ‘God, I hate this! Listen, I wanted to ask you something. And I want you to take it seriously. Don’t go blowing smoke up my ass and telling me it’s all okay. Okay?’

  The two men nodded in unison. They were like birds on a wire bouncing with the breeze.

  ‘This thing…’ Frank waved a hand vaguely at his head. ‘It does funny things, you know. Makes you behave strangely. Makes you hallucinate.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Steve.

  ‘So,’ continued Frank. ‘The guy in the suit. I’m thinking perhaps he wasn’t real. What with the bullet holes in the wall and nobody else seeing him. Maybe it was all part of this…thing.’

  Emmet crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. ‘Do you mind if I smoke, Frank? Sorry, should’ve asked.’

  ‘Give me one. There’s your answer.’ Emmet gave Frank the cigarette he’d just lit and did another one for himself. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think, bearing in mind what happened Wednesday night, maybe it’s something we should consider. On the other hand, Frank, it can’t do any harm keeping the description out there, just in case.’