For The Night Is Dark

by Mynhardt, Joe

  “Kill myself?”

  “Yes, I err . . . I wasn’t trying to be insensitive.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “Do you want to talk about it? Will that help?”

  “Help me or you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean—help you of course.”

  “I’m beyond help now.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “Okay, then lets talk about the Heolfor.” Jan made a feeble gesture towards the books that lay unopened by her bedside. “My reading only scratched the surface of the myth. Most of my research was done in the field. I wanted to get a proper sense of where these beliefs came from. Why people needed to hold them. There are no precedents in other pagan religions.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, according to Austin Osman Spare, he’s a 20th century artist and mystic, the idea of a being made entirely of blood is unique to Ancient Britain. Spare called them ‘a living blood sacrifice, bound to the service of the moon’s dark designs. A sinister sisterhood devoted to delirium and deviltry’.”

  “So how on earth do you do fieldwork on something like that?”

  “You have to know where the Heolfor congregate and how such a sisterhood was said to manifest in these places.”

  “Places like what?”

  “Anywhere blood is spilt and people take leave of their senses in the darkest hours, a battlefield, a site of slaughter and atrocity, even a hospital.”

  “Like this one?”

  “Wasn’t it you who told me about the things that take place here, right under the noses of people too busy to see them?”

  “You did field research right here, in this hospital?”

  “Did you know it’s built on the site of the last great Pagan uprising in Britain? King Sighere of Essex and his army of followers were put to the sword here in 683 on the orders of Augustine of Canterbury, the Pope’s emissary and the first Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “There was an archaeological dig here when they laid the foundations for the hospital. They found all the bones along with some pagan artefacts. Some of it’s still on display at the local museum. But that’s not all, in the eighteenth century they built one of the first British asylums here. It was burned to the ground in 1793 when the inmates rebelled and beheaded all the trustees with a makeshift guillotine in solidarity with the French Reign of Terror. This has long been a site of death and destruction, of dark, dark places that never lose the stain of delirium. What better place to search for the Heolfor.”

  “But you said they were a myth, right? You’re talking as if they’re real. I mean, you can’t actually see a mythical being can you?”

  Jan went very quiet at this and stared intently up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” said Stephanie after a long pause. “I didn’t insult you did I?”

  “You asked me why I didn’t tell the doctors about my infection. This is why. You’re the only person in this hospital who might understand what’s happened to me and even you find it hard to believe.”

  “Okay, I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, but I’m not actually sure what you’re talking about. How can I believe you when you hide what you mean behind all these riddles?”

  “You’re right, it’s a trust issue. People think I’m crazy enough without finding out the truth. That’s why I keep them at bay with riddles.”

  “And to show them how clever you are.”

  “Well there is that.”

  “Please tell me what happened, I won’t judge you.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “You can trust me.” Stephanie placed her hand on Jan’s. After another pause Jan said: “I’ve seen them—the Heolfor, right here in this hospital.”

  “You’ve seen them, where?”

  “In the basement, there’s an abandoned storage room, it’s right over the spot where they found all the bones from the massacre. There’s no light down there, which is why they like it. I studied the schematics of the hospital, I snuck in on a new moon and I went looking for them. There’s things about them I didn’t know though.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “They’re not immortal, they can die over time and they need new blood to replenish their ranks. They sang to me.”

  “Sang?”

  “Stood around me in a circle and sang, seven of them.”

  “I thought you said there were nine.”

  “I told you they need to replenish their ranks, that’s why they sang, it’s how they infected me.”

  “By singing?”

  “Directly to my blood. They converted it, harmonised it I suppose, made it one of them. Now it isn’t part of me. It’s fighting me to get out. Every time my heart beats my blood screams to be free, begs me to open up my veins, so it can be rid of me and join its sisters. That’s why I’m on suicide watch.”

  “You think your blood wants you to kill yourself.”

  “Not kill myself, though I will die if it gets its way. It wants to leave me, to become something else, something deranged and malevolent, a blood being aligned to the darkness.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I tried to fight back but I ended up here. Do you know what it’s like to feel your blood turn against you, to develop thoughts of its own? To know that it’s plotting your death as it moves through your body. I couldn’t give in to it so I decided to poison it. I was walking in the woods near my home and I found a rotting badger. I picked it up, took it home and stuck a kitchen knife in it. My plan was to stick the knife in my body and give myself septicaemia. If I poisoned my blood then I’d kill the blood being, deny the Heolfor their new sister. I was standing at the kitchen sink with the rotting beast when my dad came in. We still share a house. He saw what I was about to do and he tried to get the knife off me. He probably thought I was having another of my episodes. I’ve had problems on and off since my mother died when I was twelve, that’s why I still live with him.

  “He nearly took the knife off me, but he’s getting weak and old and I was angry. Angry that he’d try to prolong my suffering, try to stop me kill what was festering in my veins. So I lunged at him instead. He didn’t expect that and the knife went straight into his chest. I remember the tiny ‘clunk’ the handle made as it hit his ribs. How he coughed and gurgled as the blood from his lung caught in his throat. He stepped backwards and reached for the kitchen counter to steady himself, but he missed it and toppled over backwards.

  He reached out to me as he was lying there, slumped against the dishwasher. “Jan love,” he said. “For God’s sake, please . . . call an ambulance . . . please . . .” I looked at him lying there, crumpled pathetic and bleeding. This wasn’t the man who’d raised me since my mother died. Who’d sat with me when I got ill, comforted me when I was sad and put a roof over my head. This was a vulnerable old man who’d just been infected with septicaemia. So I pulled the knife out of his chest and I rammed it into his left eye. He kicked a few times, went into spasms then he lay still. It was a mercy killing, that’s what I told myself. Septicaemia is a hell of a way to die and I’d just saved him from that.

  “I felt really cold after that. I couldn’t stop shivering or keep my hands steady. I knew I had to hide the evidence and I knew I had to get back to this hospital. So I went to the garage and I got a can of petrol then I doused the house and set a match to it.”

  Jan held up her bandaged arm. “That’s how I got this. I think I was cutting off all ties to my past life, limiting my options so I couldn’t avoid the inevitable. A neighbour called an ambulance and they took me here, like I knew they would. It’s a new moon tomorrow night. I don’t have much longer. I can’t fight my own blood anymore. A police man came to see me this morning, full of questions and insinuations. It won’t be long till they find out what really happened. But I won’t be around to face them.”

  Stephanie had no idea what to say. Jan’s story had knocked the wind out
of her, like a blow to the solar plexus. “You told me I could trust you,” said Jan. “Well, I have. I don’t think you’ll judge me either, because I think I know what you’re planning to do. Even if you don’t yet . . .”

  ***

  Stephanie winced at the pain shooting through her palm. She looked away from the blood to her hand and saw that she’d stabbed herself with the scalpel to stop the vision. How much longer could she struggle with the blood before she gave in and saw what it really wanted to show her?

  More blood trickled from her palm. She held her hand over the tiny pool and let the fresh blood add to it. It ran along her palm and down the length of her thumb, dripping from the tip into the pool.

  Stephanie sighed, the release she felt was almost orgasmic. Her heart beat faster in anticipation, spurred on by the blood pushing its way through the organ. It sang in her ears, rising in volume as each drop joined the pool.

  Stephanie’s eyes drifted back to the pool as the drips rippled its surface, churning up new visions. Stephanie saw herself in a different part of the hospital. She was carrying a tray with blood samples on it . . .

  ***

  The samples came from the children’s Oncology and Haematology ward. They’d been taken from a child with MRSA. More tests were needed and a doctor had asked Stephanie to run the samples up to be despatched. As soon as she was away from the ward she knew what she was going to do. It was as if the doctor had handed her the plan along with the tray, it was that inevitable.

  She stopped off to pick up a fresh syringe and headed down to the Neonatal ICU. With the recent cutbacks, it wasn’t always fully staffed and during a shift change it could be unattended for up to twenty minutes. This was all the time Stephanie needed.

  She stood over the incubator and gazed at her sister’s child. She thought of the poor thing growing up in her sister’s care. A woman who had robbed Stephanie of everything she’d loved. If this was the way she treated Stephanie, her own flesh and blood, then how much worse would she treat her own son?

  Stephanie considered the abuse and neglect she’d suffered at her sister’s hand. She couldn’t let this innocent child fall victim to that. What sort of life would he have with that woman as his mother? Much better to show him mercy now than to inflict years of mistreatment on him.

  He was so tiny and so frail, barely aware he was even alive. Would it be such a crime to take something from someone who hardly knew what they had? Especially if you were saving him from so much misery. He came from her bloodline, she couldn’t turn her back on him.

  Stephanie took the syringe out of the wrapper and filled it from the phial of infected blood. Her hands shook as she did.

  She opened the incubator and stroked the head of the tiny boy inside. His eyes weren’t able to open yet but he stirred and reached out for her. His fingers were so small they couldn’t properly clasp Stephanie’s little finger.

  “Shh,” Stephanie said. “It’s okay, it will all be over soon.” She pinched his little thigh until she saw a vein. He wriggled and let out a barely audible sigh of complaint but she held him still and stuck the needle in his vein then pushed down the plunger.

  Stephanie heard footsteps in the corridor. She quickly closed the incubator and left the room dropping the syringe and the other blood samples in the bin on the way out. “God speed little man,” she said over her shoulder and hurried out of the neonatal ICU.

  Stephanie wasn’t certain what to do with herself once it was all over. She felt a sudden need to speak about it, to unburden herself. She realised there was only one person to whom she could talk.

  Stephanie went to look for Jan but when she got to the ICU her bed was empty. She asked one of the nurses on duty where Jan was but no one knew. The nurse said there was a shortage of beds so Jan had probably been moved to another part of the hospital.

  Stephanie went back to the bed. All of Jan’s books were still there so she couldn’t have been moved. She asked around the other patients in the ward and none of them had seen Jan all day.

  Stephanie began to get worried. She flicked through Jan’s books to see if she could find anything that might give her a clue as to where Jan might be. She scanned the pages and the indexes, looking for any reference to the Heolfor, but she couldn’t find one. The only mention of the word she found was in a collection of Anglo Saxon poetry which gave a brief translation of the word as: ‘blood or gore’.

  Stephanie remembered what Jan had said about encountering the Heolfor in the basement and decided that’s where she must be. She made her way straight to the stairs.

  The basement was musty. It didn’t have the same sterile, disinfected smell as the rest of the hospital. The service corridors were like a low ceilinged maze. There was a constant throb and hum from the back-up generators

  It was more by accident that Stephanie found the door to the subbasement and made her way down the stairs. There was only one working light flickering in the corridor. Luckily, the hours she’d spent in darkened rooms as a teenager meant Stephanie had great night vision and her eyes quickly adjusted to the dark.

  Stephanie turned a corner at the end of the corridor into complete darkness. She stumbled on with her arms outstretched until her eyes adjusted and she made out a door up ahead. As she reached for the handle the temperature seemed to plummet, as if the blood had drained from her body. At the same time Stephanie could hear a high pitched whistling in her ears.

  The room on the other side of the door smelled of copper and salt. Stephanie was reminded of the taste of old pennies under the tongue. In the centre of the room was what looked like a discarded white sack. As Stephanie peered closer she saw that it was Jan’s naked body.

  Jan’s throat and wrists had been slashed open. The cuts were deep and the edges were ragged and tattered.

  Jan’s blood had pooled in a thick red puddle in front of her. Stephanie blinked when she saw something rising out of the puddle. It looked at first like long thin drips were running out of the puddle towards the ceiling, as though gravity had been reversed.

  The drips were forming themselves into long, thin shapes. The shapes were sinuous and began to intertwine themselves, branching out like tiny underwater fronds as they formed a larger structure.

  The structure seemed to be sucking all the blood from the puddle as it formed itself. The rivulets of blood were making the outline of a body, like a wireframe image. No, not a wire frame image, it was like a life sized map of the human circulatory system forming itself right in front of Stephanie.

  Stephanie could see all the veins and arteries of a human body, of Jan’s body, as the figure turned to regards her. It had no eyes, just the capillaries that would have flowed through an eyeball.

  Stephanie recognised something of Jan in the hideous stare of this blood being. What she saw was the personification of Jan’s unhinged fury. The deranged anger that had pushed a knife, soaked in rotting blood, into her father’s chest, then killed him as he begged her for help.

  Dark red stains were appearing on the walls and the floor around Stephanie. At first the stains looked ancient but, as they spread, they began to get fresher and fresher. Blood oozed into them to form pools. Sinuous, living veins and arteries snaked out of the blood pools and formed themselves into more living circulatory systems.

  There were eight of them now, including the blood being that had once been Jan. Each of them seemed to represent a different type of malevolent delirium. Destruction, madness and denial throbbed in the living veins that composed their bodies.

  They formed a circle around Stephanie and opened their wet, red mouths to sing. The sound that they made was the high pitched whine of blood whistling in the ears coupled with the whoosh and the roar as it pumps through the heart.

  Stephanie held her hands up to her ears and fell to her knees. It did no good. She couldn’t block out their song. They weren’t singing to Stephanie. They were singing to her blood.

  Infecting it. Altering it. Converting it. Until it was o
ne with them . . .

  ***

  That had been a month ago. The images Stephanie saw in the blood sped up.

  ***

  She saw herself suffering as her blood rebelled against her. As it developed its own consciousness and became an alien entity inside her. Stephanie’s heart pumped the blood through her veins but it was no longer a part of her.

  Stephanie could feel her blood plotting against her as it circulated round her body. It longed to be free of her, to shuffle off her flesh and bones and take its true form. The vital fluid that gave Stephanie life ached to be rid of her, yearned to leave her and join its unholy sisters. Every time she saw a vein throb or an artery stand out on her skin Stephanie knew what her blood was planning.

  She fell in love with sharp objects. Ached with longing when she saw a knife. Stephanie became so desperate to feel a blade slice through her veins she would shake whenever she held one. Her heart would beat faster and her blood would sing of release. That’s why she stole and collected all the scalpels.

  Stephanie knew she wouldn’t be able to hold out past the next new moon. Her blood was wearing her down. The only thing that gave Stephanie the strength to resist was the knowledge of what a monstrous thing it wanted to become. Then she’d think about what she did to her sister’s child and realise she was already monstrous herself.

  The child died a few weeks later and the ensuing investigation pointed to Stephanie. With the net closing in on her, Stephanie gathered up her scalpels and a flashlight and decamped to the basement.

  ***

  Stephanie saw an image of herself in the blood, kneeling on the floor staring at the images in the pool of blood. The cycle had come around to the beginning. Only this time she wouldn’t be allowed to look away. This time she would have to face what the blood was trying to show her.

  Stephanie saw why the Duty Nurse had no record of her that first time she met Jan and why none of the nurses’ uniforms fitted her.

  She saw Mike hold her wrist as she tried to punch him and he said “Stephanie please, you’re in danger, great danger. You’re suffering from postpartum psychosis. You came off your pills because you didn’t want to endanger our child, remember? Like you did last time when you miscarried.”