by Shaun Hutson
There was more movement.
He spun round, his heart pounding.
This time it was in the loft.
Harvey struggled to his feet, squinting in the gloom. He gripped the sickle tightly, ready to defend himself.
The moon was suddenly enveloped by clouds and the barn plunged into deep, impenetrable darkness. Harvey felt a strange mixture of fear and anger. He sucked in an anxious breath.
Something brushed against his leg and he shrieked.
He heard a rustling sound from behind him and turned, blind in the darkness, striking out helplessly with the sickle. Something else touched his leg and he jumped back, twisting his ankle in the gap between two beams. He fell forward and a foul smell filled his nostrils. Something rubbed against his face. Something wet.
At that precise moment, the moon broke free of the enveloping cloud and cold light flooded the barn once more.
Harvey found himself staring into the cold black eyes of a rat. There was another one behind him. It had been their scratchings and scurryings which he’d heard. He got to his knees, grinning, watching the rat as it sat on its haunches nibbling at something it held between its forepaws. Harvey kept his eyes fixed on it, then, with a devastatingly quick movement, he brought the sickle down. Before the rat had a chance to move, the lethal point of the blade had pierced its back, the steel itself ripping through its tiny body until it thudded into the beam beneath. The rat squealed and Harvey grabbed it by the head, ignoring its feeble attempts to bite him. He pulled it free of the sickle, ignoring the blood which dripped onto his trousers. The big man held it in one huge hand, thick streamers of saliva dripping from his mouth. The rat felt so warm. So warm. The gnawing in his belly seemed to become a raging fire.
So warm. . .
He bit the creature’s small head off with one powerful bite, chewed twice, feeling bones splinter and then swallowed. With his bare hands he tore the rat open, chewing on the raw flesh, tugging the matted fur away with his teeth, swallowing the jellied pulp of intestines. He even chewed on the tail before tossing the remains away. His stomach glowed, despite the fact that he thought, for a second, he was going to be sick. But, nevertheless, he wiped the rat’s blood from his chin and, sickle in hand, went looking for another of the furry creatures. As he grabbed a second one he decided not to eat the head and lopped it off with the sickle. Blood spurted from the tiny arteries and Harvey giggled childishly for a second, watching the headless animal bucking spasmodically in his huge hand.
He ate that one too.
By the time the gnawing in his belly had been quelled, he felt drowsy, ready for sleep. He was even more satisfied now that this place was safe. They would not find him here. Not yet anyway and even if they did, it didn’t matter. He touched the blade of the sickle and smiled.
Besides, he had other things on his mind.
He went to sleep with the vicious blade held in one hand.
Six
Harold Pierce brushed away an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his white overall and swallowed hard. He was staring at the floor of the lift as it descended, listening to the steady drone as it headed for the next floor. On the other side of the cramped enclosure stood Winston Greaves. He glanced across at Harold, his eyes straying to the disfiguring scar which covered half of his companion’s face. He looked at the burn with the same hypnotic fascination as a child stares at something unusual and he felt all the more self-conscious because of this. He tried to look away but couldn’t. Only when Harold raised his head to smile sheepishly did Greaves suddenly find the ability to avert his eyes.
Harold knew that the other porter was looking at him. Just as he had felt the stares and sometimes heard the jibes of others, so many times before. He could understand their fascination, even revulsion, with his own disfigurement but their prolonged stares nevertheless still made him feel awkward.
For his own part, Greaves had only succeeded by a monumental effort of will from openly expressing his horror at the sight of Harold’s face. He told himself that, in time, he would come to accept it but, at the moment, he still found his attention drawn to the red and black mess. His eyes fastened like magnets to the vision of tissue destruction. And yet, he had been a hospital porter for over fifteen years, he had seen many appalling sights during his working life. The road crash victims (one of whom, he remembered, had been brought in DOA after taking a dive through his wind-screen – when Greaves and another man had lifted the body from the gurney on which it lay, the head had dropped off, so bad were the lacerations to the man’s neck), the injured children, other burn victims, casualties of modern day living such as the victims of muggings. The youth who had staggered into casualty trying to push his intestines back through a knife wound which he’d sustained in a gang fight. The woman who had been so badly beaten by her husband that, not only had her skull been fractured, part of her brain had been exposed. The child with the severed hand, a legacy of playing near farm machinery. The old lady with a cut on her hip which had been left unattended for so long there were actually maggots writhing in the wound.
The list was endless.
Small wonder then that Greaves’s black, wiry hair was shot through with streaks of grey. They looked all the more incongruous against his black skin. He was a small man with large forearms and huge hands which seemed quite disproportionate to the size of his body. He was a hard worker and good at his job which was probably the reason, he thought, why he’d been saddled with the task of showing Harold the ropes.
For the first week, until he became accustomed to hospital procedure and proficient in his duties, Harold was to be under almost constant supervision by Greaves. Now he looked across at his black companion and smiled again, conscious of his scar but trying not to hide it. Greaves smiled back at him and it reminded Harold of a piano keyboard. The black man’s teeth were dazzling. It looked as if someone had stuck several lumps of porcelain into his mouth. His eyes however, were rheumy and bloodshot but nevertheless there was a warmth in that smile and in those sad eyes which Harold responded to.
He had arrived at Fairvale Hospital just the day before. Phil Coot had driven him there from the asylum and helped him unpack his meagre belongings, moving them into the small hut-like dwelling which was to be his new home. The small building stood close by the perimeter fence which surrounded the hospital grounds, about 400 yards from the central block, sheltered by clumps of beech and elder.
Fairvale itself consisted of three main buildings. The central block contained most of the twelve wards and rose more than eighty feet into the air, each storey bore an A and B ward, both able to maintain over sixty patients. The children’s wing was attached to the ground floor part of the hospital and connected to it by a long corridor, thus it was effectively classified as a thirteenth ward. Also separate from the main building was an occupational therapy unit where a small but dedicated staff helped the older patients, and those recovering from debilitating illnesses, to regain some of the basic skills which they had possessed before being admitted. It was here that the previously simple task of making a cup of tea now seemed like the twelfth labour of Hercules. Also attached to this wing was a small gymnasium where patients with heart complaints were encouraged to undergo mild exercise and those with broken legs or arms underwent rigorous tests to regain the proper use of their damaged limbs. Also separate from the main building, accessible only by a brief walk across the car park, were the red brick buildings of the nurses’ quarters.
Fairvale, standing as it did about a mile from the centre of Exham, served an area of about thirty square miles. It was the only hospital within that radius to offer emergency care and its turnover of patients was large. It also boasted a dazzling array of medical paraphernalia, including a cancer scanner and many other modern devices. Its X-Ray, EEG, ECG, and Pathology departments ensured that the turnover of out-patients matched, if not exceeded, the number of those confined. But the Pathology department which the out-patients saw was the one which took bl
ood samples and urine samples. The real work of Fairvale’s team of pathologists took place in the basement of the main building. Here, in four separate labs, each containing three stainless steel slabs and a work-top, bodies were examined and dissected. Pieces of tissue were pored over. Moles, growths, even skin-tags were examined and put through the same rigorous tests. There were no secrets to be kept in the pathology labs, detailed notes were made on each specimen be it a full scale post-mortem or the examination of a lump of benign cells. The filing cabinets which held this information stretched the full length of two of the large rooms. Each one was more than twenty feet wide, double that in length. Inside the labs, cold white light poured down from the banks of fluorescents set into the ceilings but, outside, in the wide corridor which led from the lift to the labs, it seemed to be forbiddingly dark. A perpetual twilight of dim lights which reflected a dull yellow glow off the polished floor and walls.
Harold looked up as the lift came to a halt and saw that the line of numbers and letters above the lift entrance were now dark. Just the “B” flared in the gloom. Winston Greaves ushered him out into the corridor which led towards the pathology labs and Harold felt a curious chill run through him. He shivered.
“It’s always cold down here,” Greaves told him. “The labs are kept at fifty-five degrees. Otherwise, things start to smell.” He smiled, his teeth looking yellow in the dim light.
Harold nodded and walked along beside him, his skin rising into goose-pimples as they neared the door of the nearest lab. A sign greeted them defiantly:
NO ENTRY BY UNAUTHORISED STAFF
“That includes you at the moment,” said Greaves, smiling at Harold. He told him to wait then he himself knocked and, after a moment or two, heard a voice telling him to enter which he duly did, closing the door behind him. Harold was left alone. He stood still for long moments, wrinkling his nose at the odour which came from inside the lab. It wasn’t the familiar antiseptic smell to which he’d become accustomed, it was something more pungent, more unpleasant. It was in fact, formaldehyde. He dug his hands into the pockets of his overall and began pacing up and down before the door, looking around him. The labs seemed to be silent, if anyone was working inside there, they certainly weren’t making any noise. Harold walked past the door of first one then two. He came to a bend in the corridor.
Straight ahead of him, another twenty feet further down a shorter corridor, was a plain wooden door. Harold advanced towards it and stood silently before the entry way. There were no signs on this door telling him to keep out and, as he stood there, he could hear no sound coming from inside. Except. . .
He took a step closer.
There was a low rumbling sound coming from inside the room, punctuated every now and then by what sounded like extremely loud asthmatic breathing.
He put his hand on the knob and turned it.
The door was unlocked and Harold walked inside.
The heat hit him in a palpable wave and he recoiled. For long seconds he struggled to adjust to his new surroundings; then, as he looked around he saw just how large the room really was. It must have been a good forty feet square, the ceiling rising high above him. The paintwork which had once been white, was dirty and blackened in places and, directly ahead of him, over a bare floor, lay a huge metal boiler. A chimney thrust up from it, disappearing through the ceiling. It was the boiler that was rumbling but now Harold noticed another sound. A loud humming and, turning to his left he saw what he took to be a generator. It was covered by a profusion of dials, switches and gauges but Harold’s attention was quickly diverted away from the generator back to the boiler and its adjacent furnace. The heavy iron door was firmly closed and the metal looked rusty. The wall above it was blackened and scorched and there was a faint odour of burning material in the air. Harold shuddered, felt his hands beginning to shake, his body trembling slightly. He sucked in a slow breath which rattled in his throat and when he tried to swallow he found it difficult.
There were half a dozen trolleys in one corner of the room, each piled high with linen and as Harold took a step closer towards the strange bundles he coughed at the vile stench which emanated from them. He recognized them as sheets; some soiled with excrement, some stained dark with dried blood or vomit.
A bead of perspiration formed on his forehead and he wiped it away with a shaking hand as he moved closer towards the door of the furnace, the heat growing more powerful as he did so. He saw a pair of thick gloves lying on a ledge close to the tightly sealed door, beside them a set of long tongs and a wrench. Coal was piled in countless buckets nearby, some of it having spilled over onto the floor, its black dust swirling in the hot air.
Harold was trembling uncontrollably now and, as he strained his ears, he could actually hear the sound of the roaring flames from within.
A nightmare vision of his mother flashed into his mind. She was on fire, the skin peeling from her face and arms as the flames devoured her and she was holding something in those blazing arms. It was Harold’s baby brother. The child was little more than a ball of flame, one stubby, blackened arm reaching out from the searing fire-ball which consumed it.
Harold closed his eyes fight, trying to force the image from his mind. He took a step back, away from the furnace.
“Harold.”
He almost shouted aloud when he heard the voice behind him. He spun round, his face flushed, his breath coming in short gasps.
Winston Greaves stood in the doorway looking at him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, seeing his companion’s obvious distress.
Harold nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wandered off. I found this room.”
Greaves nodded.
“The furnace,” he said. “The boiler heats some parts of the hospital and that,” he motioned to the generator, “that’s for auxiliary power, in case we get any power failures or anything, the system is wired so that the emergency generator switches on straight away.”
“What about those?” said Harold, motioning to the piles of reeking laundry.
“Some of it is kept here until the laundry department can take it away,” Greaves told him. “Some of it is so bad, we just have to burn it.” The black man turned and motioned Harold out of the room, closing the door behind him. They made their way back down the corridor, back to the lift. “I would have showed you that room anyway,” said Greaves. “That was what I came down here for in the first place. You and I have got some work to do in there this afternoon.”
Harold swallowed hard but didn’t speak. He gently, almost unconciously, touched the scarred side of his face and remembered the awful cloying heat inside the furnace room, the terrifying vision of his mother and brother flashing briefly into his mind once more. Greaves had told him they had work to do in there. What sort of work? His mind was spinning.
As they waited for the lift to descend, Harold felt the perspiration clinging to his back.
For some unfathomable reason he felt terribly afraid.
For the remainder of that first morning, Greaves took Harold on a conducted tour of the hospital, telling him what his duties would be, showing him where things were kept, introducing him to other members of staff all but a couple of whom managed to disguise their revulsion at the sight of Harold’s scarred face. Greaves chattered good-naturedly about all sorts of things, the weather, hospital work, football, politics, and Harold listened to him. Or at least he gave the impression that he was listening. His mind was elsewhere, more specifically on just what he and Greaves had to do in the furnace room that coming afternoon.
The two of them went along to the hospital canteen at about one fifteen and ate lunch. Harold managed a couple of sausages but merely prodded the rest of his dinner with his knife and fork. Greaves, on the other hand, between mouthfuls of fish and chips continued to babble happily to his new companion. But, gradually, the extent of Harold’s worry filtered through to the other porter.
“What’s wrong, Harold?” he asked,
sipping at a large mug of tea.
Harold shrugged and looked around him. The canteen was full of people, nurses, porters, doctors, all sitting around tables eating and chatting. The steady drone of conversation reminded him of the hum of the generator.
“Is it about the furnace?” Greaves asked, cautiously.
“I’m frightened of fire,” said Harold, flatly.
Greaves studied his companion over the lip of his mug.
“I’m sorry to ask but. . .” He struggled to find the words. “Your face. Was that . . . is it a burn?”
Harold nodded.
“I’ve had it since I was fourteen,” he said but didn’t continue. The rest was knowledge for him alone. He tried to smile and, indeed, his tone lightened somewhat. “I suppose I’ll get over my fear sooner or later.”
Greaves nodded, benignly and took another hefty swallow of tea. The two men sat and talked and, this time Harold found himself contributing to the conversation instead of merely acting as listener. The images of the morning began to recede somewhat. He relaxed, telling himself that he was tense. After all, it was his first day at work. His first ever day at work. Greaves asked him, coyly, about the asylum but Harold answered his questions candidly not wishing to hide anything. He felt no shame about having spent over thirty-five years in a mental home. No, his shame was reserved for that particular subject which Greaves had touched on briefly just moments before. Fortunately the coloured porter didn’t ask how Harold had come to be in a mental home since he was fourteen and he himself certainly didn’t volunteer the information.
Greaves finally finished his meal and pushed the plate away from him, downing what was left in his mug as well. He patted his stomach appreciatively and smiled at Harold who returned the gesture with more assurance. He looked around him and saw a group of nurses sitting nearby. They were all in their early twenties, pretty girls tending towards plumpness as is the habit of their profession. Harold found himself captivated. One of them, the youngest of the group, her brown hair tucked up beneath her white cap, noticed his obvious interest and smiled at him. Harold smiled, lowering his gaze, one hand reaching up to cover the scarred side of his face in a gesture which had become all too familiar for him. He coloured and turn back to face Greaves who was smiling.