She called him lad sometimes, as if to remind him of his birthplace. Colloquial words always sounded alien and without lyric when tinged with her remote accent, but they were important to her – like cricket and soccer and shepherds pies (the meal she cooked most often), they were incantatory words dense with Englishness.
– it could be worse, Nic decided – she hasn't called me old chap yet.
She pressed, "What about Julianne? She can't blame you for her sister, can she?"
He hadn't seen Julianne in three days, not since her sister's death, but another thump saved Nic from giving an awkward response.
He felt this one in the air. It rippled through the house, as if the old bricks tried to shirk off a nightmare. It jarred the floorboards and startled dust from the radio, from what his mother called the cocktail table (she'd only ever set books there), from the bare mantelpiece.
His mother clapped her cup on its saucer. The rest of her crockery was inferior when compared to that cup's delicately curved handle (it reminded Nic of a musical note), its gold rim. It wasn't fear of spilling the contents that had her wince, since she never poured drink into the cup; it was how the brittle China jarred on the saucer. To Nic's mind, the cup and saucer had appeared during the first signs of her creeping mental illness, when she became the only guest of a private and endless phantom tea party.
If not for the war and his absent father, they might have a name for his mother's affliction – Nic knew it as the hidden stranger. He thought it resented him, but took heart that his mother still had lucid spells. These kept him hoping her hidden stranger would eventually retreat into the oblivion it had grown from this last year, as if it was an infection for her mind to overcome. He wondered if she knew what was happening, if she was as afraid of her hidden stranger as he was.
"Someone is inside" she said. "Are they coming through the basement? Or is it another bomb?" Her stare turned grave.
Nic doubted it. It had been too brief, and without the violence of a blast. Besides, there were no sirens, and no one panicked on the street.
"You stay here, Mum. I'll go and check the basement."
"Are you sure?" She was already lifting the cup to sip air from it.
*
The hall was dark. The kitchen door was open; they had adopted the habit of leaving most doors open. The cupboard installed by Nic's father and the basement door beside it were grey in the murk. Nic wondered if they kept rat poison in the basement – Elisabethville suffered a plague of rats since the crater of the Silverstone house had exposed a section of forgotten sewage works.
He wondered when the electricity would work again. London wasn't concerned about restoring power to one of its fringe towns. He felt among the wax sticks for the box of matches. He heard it inside, the matches sounding as if they skittered from his probing fingers. He grasped the box and lit the wick.
They kept the key in the door, but before he unlocked it, he heard his mother murmur in the living room.
– maybe I'm wrong, he thought; maybe she has guests for her tea party. She could be sharing Earl Grey and lemon biscuits with the Mad Hatter.
Thinking so made him feel like a traitor.
He opened the basement door and took the narrow stairs down. The room was the span of the house, but long shelves (also built by his father) divided it into five aisles. His father was a hoarder, and stored his paraphernalia down here. The only time Nic got near to investigating the random collection was when he had moved trinkets and boxes before dissembling two smaller shelves to board the windows. That had upset his mother. "Your father's always collecting more," she had said. "Always things he never needs." Despite this, she had proudly watched Nic carry the boards and nail them across every window.
Nic tried to resist wondering if his father still collected – from gutted foreign towns, from abandoned homes, things belonging to people in graves.
He checked each aisle for something fallen, but the floor was bare. He listened again for scampering, but heard none. He'd been right. The thump couldn't have come from down here.
Given a reason to be down here without his watchful mother, he moved by the nearest shelf until he was past the carpenter's belt and tools. The first curio was a long triangle of plastic, its paint dulled, with RESERVED printed across it. Nic wondered why anyone would want to collect an old sign from a restaurant.
Another thump put a jump through him. His cry almost blew the flame from the candle. Now he knew it wasn't a rat – something had struck the wall past the end of the aisle, where aged mortar crumbled over the floor with the sound of static.
– but there isn’t anyone on the other side, he thought; I'm underground.
A voice muffled by the house called, "Come out, Hun!"
The bricks rendered the voice anonymous, but Nic still knew it was Billy Boggs. The boys' schedule was almost workaday – most of them had departed to find another pastime. Billy Boggs was always last to stray, but for once, Nic was thankful of Billy's loitering. The taunt helped him to concentrate on what he saw, instead of what his startled imagination would have him feel.
Two raps from the basement door snapped his attention to his mother as she peered down. She had brought the empty cup and its saucer. "I heard a noise," she said. "I thought you hurt yourself?"
He looked over the basement again.
His mother said, "Well? What happened? Nicolas?"
"Nothing," he said.
Yet something had happened; he had felt someone else in here with him.
– gone now, he thought. He hoped it would stay away.
"Nothing made that racket?"
"A jar rolled from a shelf."
He stepped toward the stairs. Near the top, the candle illuminated his mother, and he realised days had passed without him seeing her out of the shadows. He'd avoided staying in the same room as her when he could, particularly during the nights, when the hidden stranger seemed more confident, more in control. The stranger was there now, a hardness flickering in her eyes. Nic hadn't noticed how warm the basement was until his skin crawled. His hair clung to his forehead and sweat dampened his shirt. His lungs felt like the underground room, stodgy and unused.
She asked, "A jar fell by itself?"
– that stranger knows everything about me, Nic realised. He reminded himself the stranger had never done anything to harm him, it only ever watched, but knowing didn't help his already rattled nerves. The stranger was growing stronger. It was learning. It was waiting.
"The shelves have warped," he said, which was true. His father had left without a chance to varnish and preserve them. Nic paused on the stairs. "Mum?"
"Hmm?" She took a breath, looked startled to find herself above the stairs, and stepped back. "Come up here."
"I should clean down here," Nic said, unsure of why he wanted to linger. He'd seen a man who wasn't there, and heard noises in an empty room. Maybe he was crackers, too.
"Now, lad. The water is out. The taps are dry."
– as if I can do anything about it, he wanted to say. The water supply had become unreliable. They had taken to fillings pots whenever the taps allowed.
"Come up," his mother insisted. "The tea is going cold."
He took his time. His mother stepped through the hall humming All or Nothing At All, her favourite tune, the one she tapped and hummed most often. Back in the living room, his mother sat in her chair, and he went to peep through the boarded window. The last of the boys had departed with their dented pots. Nic listened anyway, to the automatonlike hammering and sawing of people repairing their homes and air raid shelters, the rhythms of a code he couldn't break.
*
THE COLLECTOR is available on Amazon Kindle.
DAMAGE
By William Patrick
Read on for a preview.
Available for Amazon Kindle.
Before Jess finished tapping the three digits into her mobile phone, the ambulance cut left and tossed her over Jim on the stretcher. She reached over
Jim's shredded shirt and gored midriff to the side of the cabin, pinning the phone between the wall and her palm. As she pushed back, the ambulance swerved again. Her thigh struck the stretcher, and her elbow dipped into Jim's ruined midriff. The sleeve of her denim jacket turned slick and cold. An unpleasant odour unfolded. She could almost handle all the blood and Jim's near-unconscious state, the senseless flapping of his eyes, but that smell of a body souring –
Jess pushed back, expecting Jim to cry out as he had when the broken bottle had slashed into his midsection. Instead, he made a sound close to a bored sigh. Jess saw his face fade from bluish-green to grey. She told herself Jim might have passed out from shock or from loss of blood – so much leaked from under his shirt, over the stretcher – but he was not dying. He couldn't die.
I should have seen how wrong all of this was, went through Jess's mind – but her own shock from the hooded man's attack had stifled the early warnings. Now, she noticed the mould peeking from the cabin's seams. Cobwebs hung from the corners like rotted veils. The ambulance had no medical equipment, other than the wheeled stretchers on either side. And that smell. Some of it came from inside Jim, but the longer the ambulance ran, the stronger that other smell became, as if the shuddering engine was fleshy and putrid.
Jess raised the phone again to tap the three digits for the emergency services. Streets swept by the ambulance's tinted windows, so this was still Moone and not one of woods outside town, but she recognised nothing. She had no details to tell the Gardaí other than keep an eye out for two bogus paramedics driving an old ambulance with an abducted couple in the back.
She pressed DIAL, listened, and then glared at the phone's display. It was a witless black.
Weight like a heavy rag dropped over her heart.
"No," she begged the phone. "Don't. Don't."
It had suffered countless knocks and scrapes in the year she' owned it, many worse than the most recent knock on the cabin wall. She pressed the ON button and waited … waited … before an abrupt fury rose in her.
"No!"
She turned it over and checked the back, which doubled as the battery. She tried activating it again, before noticing the latest addition to its history of sufferings, a fracture dividing the display. She planted the phone in a jacket pocket, and knelt beside Jim. Her right thigh stung where it had bumped the stretcher, but a bruise didn't matter.
She prayed that wasn't blood gurgling in Jim's windpipe. She touched his skin below his short sleeve. Cold. His arm felt hollow, a shell. Jess couldn't help but shirk back, repulsed.
When Jess noticed the bump in Jim's jeans pocket, she pushed her fingers inside, refusing to cringe from the bloody cloth suckling at her fingers. She pinched the object, and slid it free. Needing his mobile phone, she got his blood-slicked leather wallet. She dropped it and leant to pat his opposite pocket. Empty. Jim rarely took his phone when they ate out, as they had tonight.
"Oh, hon," she whispered
The ambulance shuddered to a stop, tipping her once more. This time, she keeled forward. She caught the edge of both stretchers, and turned to the cabin doors. One of the doors had a lever on this side.
"I have to do something," she whispered to Jim. His eyes flickered, but he didn't look at Jess. Pinkish serum bubbled from his lips. "Listen, honey, I have to get help. I have to run. I'll bring help, okay?" He continued lying there, bubbling pink breaths.
One of the paramedics issued a scratchy sound like a cough or rough laughter, and Jess realised they were already walking around the vehicle to the rear doors. She saw their shapes float by the tinted windows on the side of the cabin, like predators sliding through dark waters.
*
Jess listened while the paramedics stood on the other side of the cabin doors. They said nothing, but one of them – the driver, presumably – jingled a set of keys. She breathed quickly to feed oxygen to her blood, as she had done when sprinting in her college athletics team years ago. Despite twinges from her bruised thigh, her body would remember how fast it had been. It had to.
A key slid into the lock. Bolts snapped. She crouched, ready to spring. At least she had chosen comfort instead of heels tonight, and wore sneakers.
– stop thinking now. Just watch the doors. No matter what, run.
The cabin doors parted. The two paramedics filled the space through which she hoped to jump.
– they knew I'd try to run. They've done this before.
The shorter of the two, the one who had had put Jim inside the ambulance, chuckled at Jess. It was a sound that echoed Jim's watery breaths, except this rumbled from deeper inside his cavernous body.
The taller paramedic, eye-level with Jess while standing on the road two feet below, said, "Well, missy, aren't you the anxious one?"
They leant inside, filling the doorway like a movable wall. The ceiling light drifted into their muddy eyes, over the old stains covering the shorter man's shirt, over their crumpled uniforms and their greasy hair.
The stout one gave Jim a disdainful look. "This one bled a mess."
Uselessly, Jess said, "Please…"
They kicked the wheel clamps under the stretcher. The tall one splayed like a large insect crawling through a cramped space, as he reached over Jim's head to pull the stretcher out. His partner caught the handles below Jim's feet. Together, they dropped it on the road. Jim's eyes flickered, but that was all.
From the road, the stout one growled at Jess, "Are you coming? That's not a camper van." They hoisted the stretcher onto the pavement, leaving her to stare at the expanse of darkness beyond and the few working street lamps.
– they're playing with me.
They took Jim away, the wheels clacking over footpath slabs. Jess edged forward. She dropped to the road. She watched the paramedics steer the stretcher along a narrow concrete walkway between unkempt lawns. The walkway ended at a door with this faintly lit sign:
ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY
ADMISSIONS ONLY
An angular two-storey building wore the sign. Other than murky illumination through the A&E's thick glass doors, darkness waited behind its many long windows.
Given the sign, Jess told herself, "You're a fool. They're genuine."
She caught up with the paramedics, and called, "Hey?" They walked on, their murmurs combining to a single voice, the way prayers merge in church. Jess tempered her tone and tried again. "Excuse me?"
The tall one turned. The stout one edged to one side, raising his eyebrows. Outside the meagre limits of the streetlights, their eyes seemed a touch too large and too still.
"Where are we?"
The tall one said, "Hospital."
"Well, yes, but which hospital? I don't know this area of town."
"The Blessing."
"I haven't heard of it."
Moone had one hospital – The Holy Temple – with the Mercy in Sheer Rock to the south. Jess had been to the Mercy three years ago, after her younger brother had broken three fingers.
"Why didn't you take us to the Mercy? Or the Temple?"
"This is closer than the Mercy," the insect-thin one said.
"Temple is a shit hole," the other said, without a hint of vehemence. "No A&E, either."
Jess moved her gaze past them. "This place looks shut down."
"It is," the thin one said, "but the A&E opens a few nights a week to take some of the load off the Mercy. We keep a smaller staff."
"A much smaller staff," the stout one amended, irritated and worn.
"Will someone see Jim soon?"
The stout one said, "Right away, if we don't spend the night out here wagging chins." He turned, and they moved the stretcher through the A&E doors.
*
DAMAGE is available on Amazon Kindle.
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