Spawn

by Shaun Hutson

  His head was beginning to throb, his nostrils and eye stinging from the odorous substances which lay in the tray with the abortion. He looked around him, at the generator, at the filthy trolleys which stood in one comer of the room, at the piles of fouled linen. There was something else too, something which he hadn’t noticed the first time. It was like a large plastic dustbin standing near to the piles of filthy laundry. Harold crossed hastily to it and lifted the lid, immediately gagging at the disgusting stench which rose from it. He looked down and saw that it was full of old dressings. Some were stiff with dried blood, others still crimson and fresh. There were gauze pads soaked with yellowish fluid, bandages that had pieces of skin sticking to them. Harold backed away, his mind churning with ideas. He crossed to the gurney and, with infinite care, as if he were lifting a sleeping child, picked up the foetus with both gloved hands. A drop of fluid burst from the umbilicus and splashed Harold’s overall but he ignored it, carrying the tiny creature towards the bandage filled dustbin. There, he gently layed it on the ground and dug deep into the mass of bloodied dressings, making room at the bottom. This done, he once more lifted the foetus and placed it in the dustbin, covering it with the used bandages and pads, hiding it from view. He wiped some pus from his glove and then hastily put back the lid of the dustbin.

  The furnace room door opened and Winston Greaves walked in.

  Harold spun round, heart hammering against his ribs. Greaves looked at him for a moment, at the dustbin, at Harold’s bloodstained hands. Then he smiled thinly.

  “I thought I’d see how you were getting on,” said the senior porter.

  Harold walked back to the furnace, satisfied that Greaves suspected nothing. After all, he reasoned, what could he suspect? Together they disposed of the remaining things on the gurney, consigning them to the blazing fire then returning the trolley to pathology.

  As they left the furnace room, Greaves leading the way, Harold took one last look across at the dustbin. The foetus would remain hidden in there, free from prying eyes. As far as anyone else was concerned, it had been incinerated along with everything else. He had told Greaves that he’d burned the contents of the dustbin along with the pathology specimens and the coloured porter nodded his approval. Harold smiled to himself and pulled the furnace room door closed.

  The foetus would be safe in its hiding place until he could return.

  Night came without bringing the rain which had threatened earlier. Instead, the air was filled with a numbing frost which glittered on the grass and trees, reflecting the light from the hospital like millions of tiny diamonds. Harold stood at his window, watching as more and more lights were extinguished in the huge building as the hour grew late. He watched with almost inhuman patience, his mind a blank; the only thing scratching the surface of his consciousness being the persistent ticking of his alarm clock. He stood in the hut in darkness, not having bothered to turn on the light and, when he glanced behind him, the phosphorescent arms of the clock radiated their greenish glow revealing that it was almost 12.36 a.m.

  Harold didn’t feel tired, despite the fact that he’d been up since six that morning. His mind was too full of ideas for him to notice any fatigue. In another twenty-five minutes or so he would slip out of the hut, cross the few hundred yards of open ground which separated his own dwelling from the main building and go through the entrance which faced him.

  It led past the mortuary to a flight of steps and a lift which would take him down to the basement and, eventually, to the furnace room.

  The hands of the clock crawled slowly to one o’clock and Harold decided that it was time to leave. He slipped silently out of the door and locked it behind him, hurriedly making his way across the large expanse of grass between his hut and the nearest entrance. The frost crunched beneath his feet but, despite its severity, it had done little to harden up the ground and Harold twice nearly slipped in the mud. His breath came in short gasps, each of which was signalled by a small cloud of misty condensation. As he drew closer he realized just how dark the hospital was. There seemed to be only a couple of lights burning on each floor and that was not enough to illuminate his dark shape in the blackness.

  He paused, ducking behind a nearby bush when he heard a clicking sound. Looking up he saw that it was two of the nurses returning to their quarters. They were laughing happily, the sounds of merriment drifting through the chill, silent night. Harold watched them until they disappeared out of sight then he continued forward, almost running the last few yards to the entrance.

  A blue sign to his right proclaimed:

  MORTUARY

  He pushed open one of the swing doors and moved as quietly as he could into a short corridor which led to a staircase. He blinked hard in the darkness, for no light had been left on. Indeed, as he reached the top of the stairs, he grabbed the handrail to guide himself, so impenetrable was the darkness.

  It seemed even colder inside the building than out and Harold shuddered as he made his way tentatively down the stairs. How he wished he had a torch. He was completely and utterly blind, unable to see a hand in front of him and this sensation made him feel all the more uneasy. He could feel his body trembling and, as he put his foot down to find the next step, he stumbled. Harold gasped in shocked surprise and fell hard on the base of his spine. The impact sent a pain right through his body and, for long seconds, he sat where he was, moaning softly, one hand still gripping the handrail, the other massaging his back. He slowed his breathing, afraid that someone might hear him, worried that his little venture would be halted because some conscientious pathology assistant had decided to stay late and finish some work in the labs. His trepidation grew stronger when he noticed that there was a light burning at the bottom of the staircase. He had to round a comer to reach the base and that was still a dozen or more steps down. As yet the light was indistinct but, hauling himself up, Harold moved on, drawn towards the light like a moth to a flame.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs, emerging in the area before the lift. The doors to all the labs were closed. Perhaps, he reasoned, someone had left and forgotten to turn out the light. But another part of his mind told him that the men who worked down here were too thorough to let such a minor thing as a light escape their notice. Heart pounding against his ribs, he walked to the door of the first lab and pressed his ear to it.

  There was no sound coming from inside.

  He twisted the handle and found that the door was locked. The same procedure was repeated with the other three labs and Harold was finally satisfied that the light had simply been overlooked. For that, to some degree, he was grateful. Although it lit only the area near the lift, it did provide at least some light for him as he made his way up the corridor.

  In the furnace room the heat was as powerful as ever, but this time he welcomed it for it drove some of the chill from his bones. The generator kept up its ceaseless humming. Harold crossed quickly to the plastic dustbin and lifted the lid, pulling the used dressings aside, ignoring the blood and other discharge which sometimes stuck to his flesh. He finally felt something soft and jellied beneath his hands.

  Very carefully, he lifted the foetus out, holding the tiny body before him for long seconds. Even in the half-light, he could see that the skin was already turning blue. He turned and laid it on one of the soiled sheets which were stacked on the gurneys behind him, then, as if he were wrapping a fragile Christmas present, he carefully pulled the dirty linen around the foetus. A rank odour filled his nostrils but he tried to ignore it and, with his “prize” secured, he made his way back towards the door, holding the small thing as a mother would hold her baby.

  Harold ran across the open ground towards his but finally slowing down when he reached the flimsy dwelling. He leant against the wall, trying to catch his breath, his one good eye squinting through the gloom to the doors he’d come through. No one had heard or seen him. There was no one following. Harold smiled thinly and closed his eyes. He took great gulps of cold air, trying to ignore th
e rancid stench which rose from the sheet and its dead occupant but that didn’t seem to matter any longer. He had completed the first and most hazardous part of his venture, the second step was merely a formality.

  The hut in which Harold lived stood about ten yards from a low barbed wire fence which marked the perimeter of the hospital beyond it lay large expanses of open fields, some of the ground was owned by the hospital but it was fenced off nevertheless. In the far distance, Harold could see the lights of Exham and, occasionally, the headlamps of a vehicle travelling along the dual-carriageway which led into the town. He headed towards the fence and cautiously stepped over it, catching his trousers on one of the vicious barbs. The material ripped slightly and Harold pulled himself free.

  The ground sloped away before him slightly, leading down towards a deep cleft in the field which looked like an open black mouth in the darkness of the night. Harold steadied himself and made his way towards the depression. Above him tall electricity pylons rose high into the sky, their metal legs straddling the field, the high voltage cables they carried invisible in the gloom. There was a smell of ozone in the air, rather like the aftermath of a thunderstorm and Harold could hear a distant crackling sound from overhead.

  He reached the foot of the small hill and stood close by the foot of a pylon. He was exhausted, both mentally and physically drained. His eye felt gritty and his throat was dry but he walked on, finally finding what he thought looked like a suitable spot. There was enough natural light for him to see what he was doing. He paused and laid the bundle of dirty sheet on the frosty grass, then he knelt and began scraping at the earth with his bare hands. He found that it was soft enough for him to achieve the necessary depth. Like a dog who’s found a good spot to hide a bone, Harold pawed the earth away until it began to form a sizeable mound behind him. By the time he’d finished he estimated that the hole must be about two feet deep and twice that in length. He was panting loudly, his hands caked in mud, his clothes already reeking from the foul smell of the soiled linen. With the hole prepared, he unrolled the sheet, exposing the foetus inside. He lifted it gently from the cover and laid it in the hole.

  For long seconds he stared down at it, tears brimming in his eye. He lowered his head, his body shaking.

  “Gordon,” he whispered. “Forgive me.”

  He felt a strange contradiction inside himself, a great sadness but also something akin to relief. Had he at last found a means of atonement? He began pushing the wet earth back into place, covering the tiny body.

  “Mother,” he said, as he continued to pile earth back into the grave. “It’s different this time. This time I won’t let it happen again. There’ll be no more burnings.”

  He looked up, as if expecting to see someone standing over him. Expecting to hear voices. There was only the far-off whistle of the wind in the pylons.

  Harold finished piling in the earth and stood up, flattening it down with his shoe. He wiped his hands on the piece of soiled sheet then balled it up and hid it beneath a nearby bush. That done, he returned to the small grave. At first, when he tried to speak, no sound would come and his lips fluttered noiselessly but he swallowed hard and clasped his dirty hands before him.

  He didn’t know anything religious. No prayers. No hymns. He lowered his head, his eyes closed.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he began, falteringly. “I pray the Lord. . .” He struggled to remember. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” A long silence. “If . . . If I would. . . should,” he corrected himself. “If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Tears were coursing freely down his cheek by now.

  “Amen.”

  He turned and headed back to his hut.

  It was not to be the last time he performed the cathartic ritual.

  Twelve

  Lynn Tyler prodded the bacon with a fork, turning it over in the hot fat. She hated fried food and the small kitchen already smelt strongly of it, the odour making her feel queasy. How the hell anyone could ever eat a cooked breakfast she didn’t know but, in about five minutes, Chris would come downstairs and devour his usual four rashes of bacon, two eggs and a couple of slices of fried bread. He was sleeping upstairs at the moment, undisturbed by the sounds coming from the room below him. The radio competed with the frying bacon for supremacy in the cramped area.

  Lynn jumped back as the fat spat at her, some of it catching the arm of the sweatshirt which she wore. At least three sizes too big for her and with “Judas Priest” printed across it, the garment came to just below her bottom. She wore nothing else and the lino in the kitchen felt cold beneath her bare feet. She ran a hand through her uncombed black hair and exhaled deeply, looking down at the pan but also at herself. She was almost shapeless beneath the thick folds of the sweat-shirt but even that wasn’t enough to disguise some painfully obvious facts about her body. Her breasts, for so long unfettered by a bra, were beginning to droop – legacy of all those years she had spent enticing men. Ever since she’d reached her fourteenth birthday, just over five years ago, she had flaunted herself in every flimsy blouse and T-shirt she could find. There had been dozens of men in the intervening years, too many for her to count, attracted not just by her sizeable bust but by her easy manner – and easy was the operative word. She knew that some called her a tart, a slag, someone had even called her a whore once, but to Lynn Tyler the moral double-standard which governed the sex lives of men and women was ludicrous. And unfair. If a man slept around he was patted on the back and admired, earning the name of stud with each new conquest. If a woman chose to take different men to bed for her own private pleasure, she was sneered at, insulted and, in Lynn’s case, thrown out of the house. Her parents had kicked her out when she was seventeen after coming home to find her locked in a torrid embrace on the floor of their sitting room with her boyfriend of the time. Since then she had shared a three-bedroomed house near the centre of Exham with her best friend, Jill Wallace. Jill worked in nearby Camford and her job often took her away from the house for days at a time. It was during these respites that Lynn invited Chris to stay. She herself was unemployed and had been for over a year. Chris worked in Exham’s largest engineering firm. They had been together for over nine months. It was something of a record for Lynn and, during that span of time, something had happened to her which she had always consciously avoided before. She had fallen in love. All the countless other men, they had been for her private gratification although more often than not it had not turned out that way. But it was different with Chris. She had never had any intention of falling in love, in fact the emotion had proved so alien to her that at first she hadn’t been sure what she was feeling, but she knew it was ten times stronger than anything she’d felt in her life before. And she knew she wanted Chris on a more permanent basis than meetings three times a week and the odd weekend together. She wanted to marry him.

  That was why she had stopped taking her pill. For the last three months she had left it untouched in its green packet. And, finally, she was sure. She was pregnant. She’d missed two periods, and a trip to the doctor last week had confirmed her suspicions. Surely with a baby on the way Chris would marry her? But she had yet to tell him her news.

  She finished cooking his breakfast and while the kettle boiled for coffee she lit a cigarette, went to the bottom of the stairs and called him. She waited until she heard the creak of the bedsprings, signalling that he was up then she padded back into the kitchen and sat down to her own breakfast – a cup of Nescafé and a Marlboro.

  He was down in a matter of moments, chest bare to expose his hard lean body with its tangled growth of light hair on the chest and stomach. He wore a faded pair of jeans, held up by a studded leather belt. Around one wrist was a leather band, similarly dotted with studs. He rubbed his stomach and sat down in front of the plateful of food.

  “Don’t you ever wash in the mornings?” she asked him, smiling. She watched as he started hacking away at the bacon.

  “Well, I didn’t have
time this morning,” he told her, chewing furiously. “I felt hungry.”

  She shuddered.

  “I don’t know how the hell you can eat that first thing in the morning.” She took a drag on her cigarette, blowing out a long stream of smoke. She crossed her legs beneath the table, tapping her feet together agitatedly. Should she tell him now? Excuse me Chris but you’re going to be a father? She took a sip of her coffee instead.

  The DJ on the radio was babbling some hip bullshit which neither of them seemed to hear. Chris because he was too engrossed in his breakfast and Lynn because she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts. She watched him as he set about the first egg, slicing it in two, dipping his fried bread in the runny yolk. He looked up at her and smiled that warm, welcoming smile she had come to know so well these past nine months. She wondered if there was room for love in that smile.

  “What’s on your mind?” he said.

  She looked surprised.

  “Not a lot,” she lied. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re not usually this quiet,” he told her.

  Lynn smiled weakly, taking mock offence.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  He smiled again, pushing half the egg into his mouth. She sucked hard on her cigarette, held the smoke in her mouth for long seconds then blew it out in a long blue stream.

  “Chris, I’m pregnant.”

  The words came out as easily as that but, once she’d said them, it felt as if a hole had opened up inside her. Well, there it was. She’d told him, flat out. She sipped at her coffee and eyed him warily over the rim of the mug.

  He slowed the pace of his chewing, looking down at his plate, not, as she’d expected, at her. He didn’t speak.

  “I said. . .”

  He cut her short.

  “Yeah, I heard you.” There was an edge to his voice, almost imperceptible but nevertheless present. Like a knife blade in the darkness, invisible but razor sharp.