Falling Into Heaven

by SIMS, MAYNARD

  ‘Water,’ I croaked.

  I still couldn’t see. I tried opening my eyes, but it was if someone was holding them shut.

  Matt lifted my head from the pillow and placed a cup against my lips. I sipped noisily, most of the water running down my chin, the rest drowning the furry animal so when I spoke again my voice sounded halfway normal.

  ‘I can’t see,’ I said, trying to keep calm, but the words spiralled upwards into panic.

  Some feeling miraculously returned to my arms as fear-fed adrenaline surged through my body. I tried to raise myself from the bed.

  Matt’s strong hands were restraining me. ‘It’s all right,’ he said urgently. ‘Bandages. It’s not permanent.’

  And then there was another voice. Female. Officious.

  ‘You told me you’d ring me if she woke, Mr Tyler.’

  ‘She’s only just come to,’ Matt said, sounding cowed, defensive, his usual reaction to most figures of authority.

  Another hand took my wrist, steady fingers feeling my pulse.

  ‘Good,’ the female voice murmured. ‘Good. I’ll fetch Dr Martin. Just lie back and relax, Christine.’

  I could do little else. I felt like a wet rag, wrung out and hung up to dry. I gripped Matt’s hand and he gripped back, an unspoken communion. His grip made me feel safe.

  It all came back to me in technicolor clarity. The unlit country lane, driving back from my mother’s. A car approaching, headlights dipped, another car overtaking it on a bend, unsighted, lights blazing. I had no room for manoeuvre. I swerved and the overtaking car clipped my wing at sixty, sending my tiny Fiat spinning off the road, down the bank and into the densely packed woodland. Trees rushed past me, their skeletal shapes bathed in white light, and then there was another, in front of me, dead ahead, and a low-slung bough crashing through the windscreen. Blackness.

  Gary Slater was twenty-three years old, in a stolen Toyota, speeding away from a petrol station he had just robbed. During the robbery he’d shot and maimed the manageress, pistol-whipped the young cashier when she refused to open the till, shattering her jawbone and smashing several teeth. They’d told the police later that Slater seemed high on drugs, almost demented, laughing hysterically as he inflicted the terrible injuries on the two women.

  That night on the lane Slater was driving like a maniac, drinking from a bottle of Metaxa and not even wearing a seatbelt. So there was nothing to protect him when he crashed into me and his car left the road, up-ended and sent him hurtling through the windscreen, the Toyota rolling and crushing him under its gleaming metallic paint job.

  I was lucky – or so the doctor standing at the bedside was telling me.

  ‘We’ll take the bandages off in a few days time. There was a lot of glass, but we were lucky to have Mr Henderson here to do the operation. He’s the best ocular surgeon in the field. He doesn’t think there’ll be a problem with your sight.’

  I let out a sigh, feeling slightly reassured.

  ‘I told you it’s not permanent,’ Matt said to me when the doctor had gone.

  ‘You can’t blame me for panicking though, can you?’

  Matt wasn’t with me in the car when I crashed, which was unusual as he and my mother got on like a house on fire and he never usually passed up an opportunity to sample her delicious steak and kidney pie. But that night he’d had to work late. Fate. Later, when I saw the damage to the car it was obvious that had he been sitting in the passenger seat the tree would have skewered him.

  The next three days passed interminably. I was used to the bandages now, and apart from some minor bruises and contusions the rest of me was fine, if a little achy. What haunted me though was the possibility that once the bandages were removed I still wouldn’t be able to see. And no amount of reassuring words from Dr Martin, or my husband for that matter, would make the fear go away. In those three days I practiced walking blind – feeling my way around the room until I could negotiate all the obstacles without touch. Later I summoned up the courage to leave the room unaided and walk to the toilet. If I were going to be blind then I would fight it all the way.

  The night before the bandages were due to come off I shared my fears with Matt. He hugged me tightly and stroked my hair as I sobbed in his arms. This time he didn’t offer any reassurance. He just said, ‘Wait and see.’ The words parents spoke to their children all the time.

  Wait and see. I was waiting but would I be able to see?

  Mr Henderson smelt of expensive cologne and had soft moisturised hands. He cupped my face and said gently, ‘The moment of truth, eh, Chrissy?’

  Deftly he removed the bandages covering the top half of my head, and for a long moment I sat in the chair with my eyes screwed shut, terrified to open them in case the blackness that had become my world refused to go away.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Open your eyes.’

  Tentatively I relaxed my lids, raising them ever so slowly. A glimmer of light. Relief. I opened them fully, saw Matt, my darling Matt, sitting on the edge of the bed, tears coursing down his cheeks. I blinked, turned to Dr Henderson, a handsome black man in his early forties, and smiled. ‘I can see,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said simply.

  Matt leaned across and kissed me on the cheek. It was the kiss that made me cry. Huge fat tears of relief welled up in my mended eyes and dripped down the front of the white cotton shift I was wearing. Matt hugged me, Henderson hugged me, and even the nurse hugged me – the nurse with the officious sounding voice, in reality a tiny Irish woman with a ruddy face and benign smile. It was an emotional moment.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said through the tears. ‘Thank you all so much.’

  I was scared to touch my face. There had been glass, Matt said. Would there be scars? ‘Could I have a mirror?’ I said.

  The nurse smiled indulgently. ‘Of course,’ she said, and left the room, returning a few moments later with a looking glass in a white plastic frame. I took it from her with a nod of thanks, drew in a deep breath and stared at my reflection.

  ‘What happened to my hair?’ I said looking at the black stubble covering my scalp. The stubble was intersected by a livid red scar, U shaped – U for ugly.

  ‘It’s healing nicely,’ Henderson said. ‘I’m afraid the tree tried to scalp you when it came through the window. We had to sew you back up. Luckily there was no damage to your skull.’

  There it was again. Luck. The fates were certainly smiling on me that night. I touched the stubble gingerly, my fingers avoiding the scar. I turned my attention to my face. There were tiny cuts all around my eyes and on my cheeks, but nothing that looked as if it would cause permanent disfigurement.

  ‘Can I go home?’ I said.

  Henderson’s face creased itself into a frown. ‘Not just at the moment. You’ve suffered a very severe concussion. We’d like to keep you in for a few days longer.’

  When they’d gone I held Matt’s hand and talked. We talked about everything. I’d been unconscious for seven days so we had lots to say to each other. They’d left me the mirror and I glanced at myself from time to time, just to make sure I was still alive. The hair was a shock still, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I’d always worn my hair short and sometimes wondered what I’d look like if I shaved it all off. Now I knew. With the scars on my face and scalp I looked liked Frankenstein’s monster after a heavy night terrorising the village. I could live with it – no problem, I told myself.

  But there was another problem. It was something I hadn’t mentioned to Mr Henderson, or even to Matt. I had my sight back, but it was different from before. I was having trouble seeing people clearly. Objects were not a problem. I could see the table and chair in the room with perfect, razor sharp clarity. But people... Everyone I looked at, Matt included, had a fuzzy outline. No, I’ve described that wrongly. Their outlines were sharp, but there was another image slightly to the left of them. Hazy, shimmering slightly. Like echoes on a poorly tuned television. It was strange. Unsettling.

  The ex
citement of the unveiling had left me exhausted. I asked Matt to come back later as I wanted to sleep. He nodded understandingly, kissed me on the cheek again and left me alone. I didn’t sleep at all. I lay in bed wondering about what I was seeing when I looked at anybody, and hoped it would right itself in time. If not then I would be forced to tell Mr Henderson, and I dreaded what he might say. I closed my eyes, opened them again. Closed them, opened them. When an orderly came in with lunch I stared at him intently. His blurred mirror image was slightly more pronounced that anyone else I’d seen that day, almost luminous but with a dark, shadowed edge. He noticed my attention and smiled, slightly lasciviously. Maybe he had a thing for bald women. He left and I sighed. This was going to take some getting used to.

  They moved me to the main ward shortly afterwards. They needed my room for the victim of a house fire. I didn’t object. I was getting sick of my own company anyway, and I thought the camaraderie of the open ward would probably do me good. At least I’d have people to talk to, especially as Matt’s visits were becoming less frequent. He’d gone back to work full-time and had a lot to catch up on.

  It was a mixed surgical ward, male and female patients but we all had the traumas of our operations in common so it gave us something to talk about.

  I palled up with a girl called Anne-Marie who was in for a twisted bowel. She was a pretty, petite little thing, who looked much younger than her twenty-nine years. We gossiped the days away, poking gentle fun at the nursing staff who we’d given outrageous nicknames. Anne-Marie was lovely, a bright, lively girl with a zest for life and a wicked sense of humour.

  When she died it hit me like a hammer blow.

  It was on my third night on the ward. I was having difficulty sleeping. Hospitals at night aren’t the quietest places in the world. As well as the comings and goings of the night staff there are other noises to contend with. Men snoring, people having loud, animated dreams, sirens in the street leading up to the A and E unit.

  I’d spent several hours tossing and turning and was about to call the nurse to see if she could give me something to help me to sleep. Anne-Marie’s bed was opposite mine and at about four a.m. I happened to glance across at her while she slept.

  They talk about life hanging by a thread, and that night, in the sullen netherworld of the early hours I understood what the term meant.

  I’d almost grown used to the weird double vision I was experiencing. Anne-Marie had a particularly vivid second image. Colourful and bright. But as I watched her sleeping I saw her image leave her body, floating up from her sleeping form, a perfect replica of her in shimmering reds and blues. At the feet the image seemed to taper away into, what looked to me like, a silver cord that was joined to her flesh and blood body.

  For a few moments I watched the phenomena, fascinated and just a little frightened. Gradually the cord lengthened, became thinner and thinner until the crimson and blue image was hovering just below the ceiling.

  I got out of bed, crossed the floor on tiptoe and stared down at Anne-Marie as she slept. Only she wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes were open and staring sightlessly up at nothing. In the half-light of the ward her skin looked waxy and grey, covered with a thin film of sweat. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. I put my head against her chest to listen for a heartbeat but heard nothing. I felt like I wanted to shake her, to wake her, but looking at that strange pale face with its dazed, almost surprised expression, I knew that no amount of shaking would do any good.

  I ran back to the bed and pressed the bell for the nurse. The young Asian girl was at my bedside in a moment.

  ‘Anything wrong, Christine?’

  I’d climbed back into bed, pulling the sheets up to my chin, my eyes never leaving the floating form by the ceiling. ‘It’s Anne-Marie,’ I said, my voice tremulous. ‘I think she’s dying.’

  The nurse screwed her face into a quizzical expression and glanced across at Anne-Marie’s bed. ‘She’s due to go home tomorrow. Try to get some sleep.’

  ‘Please, go and check,’ I said, trying not to shout at her. Couldn’t she see what I was seeing? Couldn’t she see the ghostly image of my friend, hovering above us? I looked at the nurse’s dull, rather unimaginative face and realised that no, she couldn’t.

  And then, with a very slight popping sound, the cord connecting Anne-Marie to the spectral form above her snapped and the blurred image floated upwards, through the ceiling and out of sight.

  ‘It’s too late,’ I said thickly. ‘She’s dead.’ I could almost taste the words in my mouth. They tasted sour.

  The nurse walked slowly across to Anne-Marie’s bed. She bent over her for a moment. Then, with a sudden surge of activity, she punched a button of the wall, pulled the sheets back from Anne-Marie’s body and thumped her chest with her fist.

  They worked quickly. They pulled screens around the bed but I could still hear the hum of the defibrillator as they tried to bring my friend back to life. I could have told them they were wasting their time, that I had actually seen her spirit leave her body, but I said nothing – just laid there huddled under the heavy sheets and blankets, shaking slightly, crying silently. Two days later Matt arrived with the car to take me home.

  I went to Anne-Marie’s funeral – heart failure was given as the cause of death; a congenital heart defect that no one at the hospital had picked up on – and after that life returned pretty much to normal. My hair grew back, covering the scar that had made even my best friends wince, I went back to work, and more importantly my eyesight seemed to be reverting to the way it was before the accident. I was still seeing the strange ghosting effect around people, but not with everybody now. Some people had no images around them at all. And there was no repetition of the phenomena I’d witnessed that night in the hospital. I felt I was finally getting better.

  So when I started seeing the Dark Souls it sent me into panic. Dark Souls is a name I gave them because to me it summed up what they were, and it certainly described them well.

  Looking back I suppose the signs were there. As I said, my eyesight had almost returned to normal, but there was still the odd incident to jar me out of complacency.

  One night Matt took me out to dinner. There was a new Italian restaurant on the high street, and Matt had wooed me with the delights of pizza, pasta, and ambience.

  We pulled up outside the restaurant a little after eight on a Friday night. Matt left me on the pavement while he went to park the car. I looked through the window of the restaurant and my heart sank. It was heaving. All the tables appeared to be filled, and waiters in white shirts and black waistcoats were running between the tables in a frantic effort to serve everybody.

  ‘I said we should have booked,’ I said as Matt came back from the car park. ‘It’s packed.’

  He swore softly. ‘We might as well try; now we’re here. You never know, they might have a cancellation or something.’

  He took my arm and pushed open the door.

  As we stepped inside he turned to me quizzically. Apart from a table in the far corner where a young couple sat drinking Chianti, the place was empty.

  ‘I thought you said... Ah, you were winding me up. Trying to make me feel bad for not booking. Very funny.’

  I managed a smile, letting him believe his own explanation. It was certainly better than anything I could come up with. Though later, as I played it over and over in my mind, there was something unusual about the scene I’d witnessed through the restaurant window. I tried to recall details, the people I’d seen, what they were wearing. Most of the men were wearing suits and had short haircuts – old-fashioned haircuts, lots of brylcreem. And the women... well the women could have graced the pages of a 1940’s fashion magazine.

  It made no sense to me then, though later things became much clearer.

  We live in a house set back from the road, separated from the hard macadam by a walled garden. A man comes twice a week to keep it looking tidy, removing weeds, cutting the grass, and pruning the shrubs.

 
; It was a Monday morning. Matt had already left for work in town. I worked locally at a solicitor’s office, fifteen minutes away from home. I’d showered, applied a layer of make-up – heavy on the foundation to cover the tiny purple scars that remained from the accident – and made myself some toast. I was eating the toast in the bedroom and washing it down with sips of strong tea. I never usually looked out of the window at the front garden, but this morning the sun was high, summer was in the air and it felt good to be alive. I stood at the window staring down at the rose bushes, heavy with bud, ready to unleash their riot of red to add to the multi-coloured palette of the garden. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye.

  Two children appeared in the garden, a girl and a boy, no more than seven, skipping across the lawn, the boy using a stick to propel a large wooden hoop in front of him. He was dressed in something that looked like a sailor suit, a white peaked cap sitting on his head at a jaunty angle. The girl was wearing a flouncy pink dress, and her long fair hair was caught up at the back of her head and hung in ringlets down her back. I watched them curiously. They seemed wrong, out of place, out of time. The girl called something to the boy, and he glanced back at her, taking his eye from the hoop, batting it into a flowerbed. He took one step forward to follow it and disappeared. The girl called something else, ran forwards and vanished.

  It was a curious kind of disappearance. Not instant. One minute they were there, playing happily, and then they slowly eroded. It was gradual. They disappeared inches at a time, as if slipping slowly behind a curtain.

  I rushed downstairs and out through the front door, eyes darting everywhere, looking for the slightest sign of them. I dashed across to the flowerbed where the hoop had fallen, but there was nothing there, not even a bent flower to show where it had landed.

  ‘I think I’m seeing ghosts,’ I said to Matt. He was sitting in the lounge, his laptop on his knees, tapping away at the keyboard.