‘Can we expect more blips?’ I ask.
‘Maybe. I can’t rule it out. If it were to become frequent, then I would definitely recommend more tests. But a one-off, with these results? I don’t think you should worry overly.’
‘The headaches?’
‘I’m surprised you’ve only had two bad ones. Your brain’s been injured. The blood flow has changed. There are some major changes occurring in your brain. A headache or two is to be expected, and a headache doesn’t indicate a stroke. Any other questions?’
Helen’s got some. I want to know about my eye, but for some reason I don’t ask. I just want to get out. Before he changes his mind.
Helen wants to understand. I don’t. I like the doctor. He sounds sure. That’s his job. I get a clean bill of health, he gets to move on to the next job. He’s busy. I don’t want to take away any more of his time.
That said, I know Helen needs to take some control. I leave her to it and stare at the dead space in my brain.
I wonder where the part that controls my right eye is. I wonder where yellow was, and why it got rewired. I figure the doctor wouldn’t know where yellow should be, anyway.
Helen finishes.
We stand. Shake hands again. I don’t know if he’s a surgeon or just someone who reassures people by interpreting pictures on a screen. He might be a surgeon. I guess surgeons need delicate fingers. There’s no chance of me hurting him, though. We shake righties. Maybe he’s not a surgeon, after all. Maybe a surgeon’s hands would be too precious to shake.
We drive home, in time for the sunset.
It’s a fine day. We get some chips for dinner from the chippy in town, plus a saveloy for me and a spring roll for Helen. We share a cream soda.
The sunset’s beautiful.
Our sunsets are out of synch. Hers comes before mine, like her orgasm.
We talk about our sunsets while we eat. When it’s dark we sit there talking. It’s getting cold by the time we go back to the car.
I’m so tired, but I tell her I want a cuddle on her couch. We don’t do that so much since Samantha died. We stay that way until Helen falls asleep. I stroke her hair, and think about dead space in my brain and my dead sight.
Some part of me didn’t make it back when I died. I’m carrying dead flesh. That feels strange in a way that hasn’t bothered me until now.
I wonder if the ghost of the stranger lives there, in the dead parts of me.
I fall asleep holding Helen. Maybe she keeps the bad dreams I’m due that night at bay.
*
20.
I don’t have a bad dream. It’s just a dream. One I’ve had before.
It’s a dream, but it’s déjà vu, too.
Samantha’s there. She’s standing outside a house, one of those paint-by-numbers houses you get on estates right across the county. In the dream I can smell the house. It smells of home cooking. I think maybe there’s a hint of cookies about the house, and that makes me think that this could be a good dream. A dream where you smell cookies has to be a good dream, right? My dream mind isn’t so sure. My dream mind thinks that maybe the cookies are burned, and maybe charred, and maybe they’re not cookies.
But dream minds are malleable. It’s cookies I want. I can do that sometimes, believe what I want and make it real.
I want Samantha to turn and be alive and laughing like she always was, apart from at the end, but even the stranger can’t make that happen.
But this isn’t the stranger’s dream. This is mine.
I hold up my hand in front of me, just to make sure. My right hand is like a claw, but it’s not dead flesh, it’s just a crippled hand and it’s all mine.
Satisfied, I let the dream roll on. It’s like tapping the pause button twice. Checking out a frame. Yeah, that’s what I thought I saw. Tap. Play.
The house is dark inside. The lights aren’t on anywhere in the estate. It’s just on the dark side of dusk. I can tell, because there’s still a hint of yellow in the western sky.
Samantha’s wearing a yellow dress. She’s older, too. She’s the age she would be now if she hadn’t died. I know this from the shape of her, her build, and from her size. I’m not the director of this dream, though. I can’t swing the camera round. I try to walk forward, but I can’t do that, either. My control is limited.
Samantha’s looking at the house, looking up, her head pulled back. She pulls out her phone, a newer model than the one we’d agonised over when she was eleven. Eleven’s early for a phone, we thought, but then all the kids had them. We got her a cheap one. She was always losing things.
I don’t hear the conversation.
When she’s done talking, she hangs up. I’m behind her, but I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her.
I want to walk forward and hold her, but I’m not as in control as I think I am. I strain, will my feet to move. Everything’s heavy. I push against the dream. Fight it. I can hear myself panting with the effort. I can’t hear anything else. It sounds like I’ve got my head in a box.
Something snaps, and I look down to see my arm getting longer and longer until my hand hovers just over my daughter’s shoulder.
I touch her shoulder and she turns.
She doesn’t have a face. But that’s OK. She never has a face in the dream. It’s not a bad dream. How can it be, when my daughter’s there? Right there. It’s her, face, no face, it doesn’t matter. I can feel her shoulder under my hand and it’s beautiful.
But she’s shaking and her skin crawls under my hand.
‘I’m lost,’ she says.
That’s new. I try to speak, to tell her we’ve moved. My words are slurred, though, like they were when I’d just had my stroke.
‘We movened Sam. Movened...’ No matter. She’s not hearing me or she doesn’t understand me. I give up trying to speak. She doesn’t recognise me. She’s got no eyes to see. My voice is different. How could she know me? By the touch of my hand?
I look at the hand on her shoulder and I see that it’s not my hand. It’s the stranger’s hand. Her skin’s not crawling. My hand is running white with crawling dead flesh. I jerk my hand back and some of his flesh stays on her shoulder, a sick stain on a pristine sheet.
I want to tell her to come home. To get away. Get away from the house and me. But I can’t speak anymore. The dream is done with my words. My words can’t beat the dream.
It’s not a bad dream, but now I know I have to beat it. I have to fight it. My girl...get her home. Home to us.
The lights come on in the house. I notice that there’s a ‘Welcome Home’ banner, diagonally, across the front door. Shining words and pictures of party poppers and stars.
Samantha turns her face away from me. A white fat slug sits proud on her bony shoulder. I reach my good hand up to brush it off, but she’s too far away. The stranger has more power here than me.
He can put his filthy hands on my daughter but I can’t touch her and I can’t stop her walking toward the door and the man coming through the door. The door squeals and the banner burns under blistering paint. He ignores me. I try to scream, because he’s on fire and he’s coming for my daughter.
‘I’m lost,’ she says. She can’t see he’s burning. She can’t see the fire hiding his face. She hasn’t got any eyes.
‘Can you help me?’ she says, and I try to pull her away even though I can’t reach her. My hands grasp at air.
‘We don’t live here,’ says the burning man. His voice is full of crackles and sparks, knots in logs bursting.
She moves closer to him as she floats away from me.
I push against air and shout and thrash but it does no good. I can’t hold on. I only succeed in waking Helen with my scream.
Helen’s there. Thank God Helen’s there.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ she says, her voice slurry, like mine in the dream.
‘Dream,’ I say. I’m shaking when I hold her tight, so she doesn’t float away.
‘Bad dream?’
> ‘No,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t a bad dream. Samantha was in it.’
She cries, and I hold her.
‘What was it?’
‘She was happy. I just missed her. She was wearing a yellow dress.’
She forgets about the scream that woke her, and she doesn’t press the lie. She wants to believe. She wants to believe there are no bad dreams.
I do, too.
But then the dark things don’t need dreams. They’re right there, when you’re wide awake.
Some you see. Like a black cat with no tail, or little grey tennis balls.
These things you can see in the light of day. Others, you can’t see no matter how hard you look, because they’re the strangers within us.
I tell my wife to go back to sleep. I tell her it wasn’t a bad dream.
But by then I’m not sure it’s me talking, because I remember the cat. He remembers, too…the one that tells my wife it’s fine, just like he used to when I was flat out fucked on drugs and had blood on my collar.
She rolls over while the stranger lies beside her. He’s been there all along.
It was the cat that let him in.
*
Part Three
-
The Black Cat and the Ball
21.
Time of death, 12.03.
It’s a cold night in London town. I’m walking. It’s thirty minutes until I die, give or take.
I’m pretty drunk and some way high. I just closed a big deal. I guess when you come down to it I’m a glorified salesman. I don’t do the cool work, though I get paid enough to keep me in drugs.
It’s a hard time for everybody. There’s a recession on and some feel the pinch more than most, if you’re a plumber, maybe. I don’t know what plumbers earn. I guess it’s not as much as me. Companies are cutting budgets and cutting hours. Sometimes those self same businesses go under. People are losing their jobs. London isn’t immune to a recession. But I am. I’m golden.
The deal’s worth 1.2 million. Some of that I spent in advance, on ten grams of coke. Some, less, on pills and pints. Thirteen pints, two pills. Beer and cocaine mix pretty well. Pills and beer not so much.
It seems a lot, but when you’re six foot one and weigh over 19 stone, the drugs and the alcohol can get lost in the pipes.
Maybe not totally, though, because my heart’s pounding and my head’s thumping.
I’m on an anonymous street, making my way home to where my wife waits, and my car. The car’s on a finance deal I can soon afford to pay off. It’s parked outside my house, a three story townhouse with a basement, on which the mortgage will soon be history.
Commission. It’s a beautiful thing.
11.39. I’m starting to feel something. Something not good. I walk past a pub. There’s a gang of young lads outside, laughing at the fat bloke. Look at the funny fat man. He’s staggering, bumping into cars and lampposts, pale and bloated by the city lights and coke and pills and bitter. I imagine my eyes are firing, pupils getting big and small like a cartoon fat guy. Feels like that, too, like I can’t see. The sounds on the pills...kind of pounding, floating, with an echo, like someone’s got reverb on a speaker. The light swirls, too, contrails on the street lights as I stagger.
My blood’s struggling to make the circuit round my huge frame.
Then the fat man, me, is looking at them from the kerb.
I hit my head on the way down. It’s pretty funny. I can see the funny side. Until a horse, a fucking 40-hand stallion, kicks me in the chest. I’d scream, but I haven’t got any breath. My breath is stuck. It’s hitched. Maybe it’s hitched to the fucking horse. I try to thump it loose. It steals in, sudden, like the pain. There’s an aftershock that follows it up, like a little guy putting the boot in after the heavyweight’s done the hard work.
It could have ended right there. Me, shit in my work trousers, drowning in puke. I can’t turn to spit it up. It’s just sitting there, down the back of my throat. Pints, bile, maybe the curry I’d had at the start of the night.
But it doesn’t end there. One of the lads is on the phone. He’s talking to me while he’s talking on the phone. I want to tell him that it’s rude, talking on the phone while you’re talking to a real person. I can’t speak though. My mouth is full of sick.
He turns my head. Out it comes.
I mumble. Try to move. My leg’s gone spastic. My arm, too. Both on my right side.
I’m blind. Just out of one eye. Same side. Maybe the ground’s cold. Doesn’t explain the eye. I decide not to think about it.
It’s at times like this that the drugs and the IPA don’t help. Still, it’s not like I got all the coke. At the time, I was pissed. Everyone loves you when the coke’s free. Now it seems like a good thing. Because even flat out fucked on beer and drugs, I still know I’m dying.
I don’t want to. I don’t want to die.
I try to tell this to the guy on the phone but it’s no use. I can’t speak.
The ambulance comes quickly. I’m in the back when my heart finally stops.
12.03.
No drama. No flashbacks. No tunnel.
There’s just pain, shortly followed by death and then, the cessation of pain.
12.07, at 70mph, they bring me back to life in the fast lane. Four minutes of sweet peace before agony comes crashing back in and then I’m aware, vaguely, like you’re aware of your wife in bed next to you even when you’re asleep, of someone saying technical shit that even I know means ‘heart attack’ and ‘stroke’.
Drugs, beer, fat. Blood clot heaven, right there in me.
I cried in the back of the ambulance. It was the pain, but also sadness. For all the missed chances. For letting Helen down. This time, there’s no way to make up for it. Have I ever made up for it?
Pain like that, it’s frightening. Add in blind, crippled and smelling of shit, and you’ll have some idea.
Somehow, the shit was the worst of it.
Next thing I know, I’m in hospital.
*
22.
The next time I’m awake after my stroke, my heart attack, since being in the ambulance, Helen’s looking at me. She’s got mascara on. The first thing I think is, why’s she wearing mascara? This time of night she should be ready for bed. The lights are on, therefore it’s night. She never wears mascara to bed. It’s reliable. She’s reliable. It’s like a clock, like my Omega. Never fails. Before bed, she takes off her make-up. She brushes her teeth. I’m in bed. Why is she wearing mascara?
I worry at this. I go round in circles in my head. Tiny circles, ever decreasing, until the thought is no longer a circle, just a dot.
The lights are dimming.
She’s dolled up. She looks her best. No matter what I’ve put her through I’ve always thought she was a fine looking woman. Always better than I deserved. But that simple full stop thought won’t give in. Won’t give me the time to make it up to her, because suddenly I’m sure I’m dead, which explains why I’ve been calling ‘Helen Helen Helen’ out over and over and she doesn’t even look my way, doesn’t turn those sad black eyes toward me, doesn’t even bother to say my name, prefixed with ‘oh’, like it always is.
I’m dead, and this is what happens. People look right through you. Their eyes just slide right off. You’re still there, but they can’t see you. They can’t hear you. You’re like a shadow in the dark.
Someone comes in, talks to my wife. It’s a woman. She’s maybe thirty, maybe forty. She’s wearing a trouser suit and a name badge, but I can’t fucking read. Maybe the letters are small, but why are they dancing?
The woman looks at me, then goes round to my right side, where I can’t see. My wife’s to my left. I can see her. Not that it matters. She can’t see me wherever she sits and I want her to see me. Right then I want her to say my name. Shout at me. Call me names, if she wants. She could punch me in the face if she wanted. I wouldn’t care. If she’d just see me.
I hear something. It’s muffled, just an annoying l
ittle niggle, tickling my ears while I’m busy being dead. I realise it’s me. Talking. Helen looks at me. I think I smile but the look she gives me doesn’t gel with a smile. There’s sadness there, same as always. Shock, too. And is that happiness? For a moment, I’m unsure. I hope it is, but what right have I got to expect it? It’s a long time since I did anything to make her happy.
I’m trying desperately to smile but I can feel my teeth grinding together instead.
She holds my hand and leans in. I can see her bra, just over the top of her blouse. I squeeze her hand and she cries. I think I do, too. Because I’m happy, not because I’m crippled. But that’s in there, too. But I’m crying because I’m happy, because I’m sorry, because she’s here even though I don’t deserve it.
I’m crying because I’m not a shadow in the dark.
When you have a stroke, the most important thing, more than anything else, is speed. You slow down, but if they get to you in time it can mean the difference between a limp and a wheelchair. Or dead. Let’s not forget dead.
It turns out there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I heard a lot about prospects from a lot of doctors. Seems they were good.
‘Don’t seem so fucking good to me,’ I say, as my wife talks to the doctor.
She ignores me.
Their definition of good amounted to the fact that I was still alive.
The chances of having a heart attack and a stroke at the same time? Tiny. So tiny they’d never had any experience of it.
The chances of survival?
Infinitesimal.
I get it. I’m supposed to be happy about it.
Well, I’m fucking not.
I listen to them. I try to talk. I’m an aside, though. Even though I’m sitting there, propped up in bed.
My words won’t come out properly. That makes me angry. So I lash out and knock a glass off the bedside cabinet. The rage I’m in, the glass should fly across the room and shatter, but I catch it wrong. The glass kind of sidles off the MDF cabinet beside the bed. A little water splashes on the top, the glass hits the floor, but it’s a dull sound as it hits, nothing tinkling, nothing satisfying.
RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural Page 29