Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  I reassure Kathy as much as possible, sit with her as a sedative soaks through her struggling veins.

  Edie’s pulse is almost gone when I check her again an hour later, breaths so far apart every one seems certain to be her last. I call her son to tell him he needs to get here, but his phone goes to voicemail. I leave a message imploring him to hurry if he can.

  I pull the chair up beside her bed and take her fingers in my palms, rest my forehead against the back of her hand. Her frailty wafts into me and I soak it up, gather that insipid, creeping death into my cells. It can’t hurt me. I don’t know why, but it can’t. So I collect it. I don’t know why I do that either. Because I can. It doesn’t heal them or ease their suffering, but at some level I like to think they know I share their pain and that offers some subconscious solace.

  Edie’s pulse weakens until I can’t feel it any more. Her breaths are tiny, sharp intakes, almost imperceptible, more than ten seconds apart. Her exhalations are silent, air leaking from lungs little more than deflated sacks of inert offal.

  Fifteen seconds apart. She’s going.

  Her life leaks into the air and the shadow of her sickness, her fear and loneliness, washes through me and she’s gone. I shudder with the gift she’s given me. My hands tremble as I stand and move away to mark her chart, dimness swimming behind my eyes.

  Her son is hurrying along the hallway to her room as I emerge and his face falls when he sees me.

  “I missed her?”

  “I’m sorry. Only just. She passed moments ago. But she didn’t wake again since this morning.”

  He barks an uncontrollable sob and tears tumble over his cheeks. We’re all five years old when our mothers die. “I can see her?”

  “Of course.”

  I’ll send the counsellor down with the relevant pamphlets after he’s had some time alone with her.

  * * *

  Not much else happens through the day, which pleases me. It’s terrible when more than one patient dies in a day, as the first one feels somehow cheated of their time in my mind.

  Jake is parked outside when I get home, an embarrassed smile twitching his lips. “Hi.”

  I’m so pleased he’s there. “Hi.” I had wondered if I might not see him again. Our few faltering dates that led to our first night together had been cautious but full of hope. When something got in his way last night, I worried it would frighten him off.

  “Try again?” he says, holding up a bottle of red.

  “I’d really like that. I have some steaks in the fridge and wait till you try my potato rosti.”

  * * *

  We gently fumble at each other’s clothes, clumsy with nerves and the dull edge of the wine. Edie’s death still floats around me, within me, but that helps. I embrace it. Nothing makes me hornier than death. Something about mortality reminds us at a level beyond thought of the importance of contact, of touch, of the life within lovemaking.

  I’m not too proud to admit I usually masturbate a lot in the privacy of my home after we lose someone. It’s unavoidable, the desperation to feel alive—to feel life—especially when I’ve absorbed the death into my marrow like I do. I hope Jake can see it through this time.

  I’m as gentle as I can be, as caring as I know how. He shivers and stiffens with nerves as I run my hands across his shoulders. He looks into my eyes, a nervous smile. “It’s okay, I’m sorry. I want to.” He reaches back and unclips my bra, lets it drop beside the bed.

  “You are so lovely,” he whispers.

  There’s tension, fear, but he keeps assuring me I should continue and so I do and he eventually performs. It’s soft and urgent, but electric. Afterwards he grabs hold of me and hugs me against his chest so hard I have to gently force a breath into my constricted lungs.

  “That was wonderful,” he whispers, his hot breath tickling my ear.

  “It was,” I say. “I’m glad.”

  He holds me tight and his breathing changes. He turns his face away. I push away to look at him and tears stand in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, really. It’s hard to… this is difficult for me. But please, don’t feel bad. I just can’t help it.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  He smiles, leans down to kiss me. “Just keep being so nice to me.”

  “That’s easy.”

  I settle beside him and turn to let him spoon me, push myself back into the curve of his body. He’s so warm and strong and vibrant—the opposite of poor Edie’s hard, cool, frailty, all jutting bones and oxygen tubes.

  “Was someone less than nice to you?” I ask, biting my lip the moment it’s out. Probably not the thing to say.

  “Something like that.”

  I stroke his hand, not game to risk saying anything else, ask for any more of his secrets.

  “I’ll tell you one day,” he says, voice thin with pain.

  He holds me tight until we fall asleep. It’s good to have someone so alive to hold on to, a beacon against the shadow of all the death in me.

  * * *

  The days at work pass slowly and my hours rotate to nights. I prefer the solitude and peace of the night shift, and most deaths happen then. It’s strange how people who have been unconscious for days or weeks almost always seem to slip away in the depths of the night, like they know somehow that leaving while the sun shines is unusual. I remember Edie dying in the middle of the morning; her shadow still drifts through me, the echo of her disease. It’s all that’s left behind, her life and body far away now.

  We haven’t lost anyone for nearly a week. The orderlies are taking bets on how much longer it’ll be. Sam’s aiming high, reckoning another few days. Marek is less confident, thinking Mr Patel will die tomorrow. They’re both wrong. Jack Oswald will die tonight, maybe in the next two hours, three at the most. I can feel it. I’ve always been drawn to death, always offended by the hopeless indignity of it. And I’ve always sought to care for the dying, take into myself something of their pain, a memory of their suffering. I was destined for this career.

  I pad into Oswald’s room, put a hand against his cheek. It’s very cool, his eyes flickering gently behind thin, pale lids. I was wrong—it’s happening already. No one to ring for old Jack; he has no one to come. “Last of a line and good riddance,” he said to me when he arrived three weeks ago.

  “You can’t be all bad,” I’d said, and he laughed.

  “Not bad, really. Just not much good either. Never had kids, wife died twelve year ago. Worked fifty years for fuck all and here I am being tucked away in a corner to die alone.”

  “We all die alone, Jack,” I said, an attempt to soften his hurt.

  “Yeah, but there’s alone and alone, ent there.”

  Darkness swells up in him. He hasn’t woken in five days. He had a drip in his arm feeding him a bare minimum of hydration, anti-nausea medication and painkillers—a poor simulation of normal life while he dies—but we took that out a few days ago. He’s a skeleton under linen stamped with the name of the hospice.

  He’d asked me the week before to speed it up for him. “Can’t you jab me wiv somefing, make it happen? What’s the fucking point in hanging on?”

  I’d told him I wished I could, and I meant it.

  We wouldn’t let our dogs and cats suffer like this but we’ll happily put our own parents away to wither and waste into ignominy and despair. They deteriorate to frightened babes again as everything they’ve ever been deserts them, and we think it’s the humane, moral thing to do, to let that happen. To watch it happen while we tell them everything will be okay. Which is the worst line of bullshit we ever try to sell in a world powered by lies and deception.

  Jack’s eyes pop open, a flood of panic blanching his already ivory face. After a moment he focuses on me and nods, a tiny movement of understanding and he’s gone. His darkness swells into me, the entropy of his illness drawn up through my hands where I hold his. It adds itself to the blac
kness I carry inside, that I’ve carried for so long. Will I fill up one day, no room for any more, and then what?

  With trembling fingers I close Jack’s eyes and fill out the paperwork. Marek will win the bet. His guess was closer even though they were both wrong.

  * * *

  “I want to tell you why sex is so difficult for me.” Jake’s face is creased with what looks to me like grief.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know, but I want to. We’ve been together a couple of months now and it feels serious. It is, isn’t it?”

  I nod vigorously. “Oh, I hope so.” I really do hope so.

  Jake draws a deep breath that shudders on the way down. “I never knew my real dad. He left when I was too little to remember.”

  I open my mouth to say something, I’m not really sure what, and Jake holds up a hand.

  “Let me get this out in one, or I may not make it.”

  I nod and he smiles, squeezes my hand across the table.

  “I don’t mind not knowing him. My mum was young and irresponsible. She’s always been fucking useless, so I can hardly blame my dad for leaving. It’s what I did, first chance I got. She should have protected me, but she couldn’t even protect herself.” He draws another breath, sips wine. “My mum shacked up with Vic when I was about six years old. She’d knocked around with guys before then but never for long. She did her best by me, even though her best was bloody rubbish. But when Vic came along, everything changed.

  “He drank heaps, was always on the edge of violence. Mum told me how much she loved him, but it was clear she was terrified of him too. She said how we needed him to pay the bills and he wasn’t such a bad guy. Even with two black eyes and a split lip she’d tell me how he wasn’t such a bad guy.”

  Rage flares in me and Jake can see it in my face.

  “Let me finish.” He reaches out, strokes my cheek. “You’re such a good and decent person, the way you care for the dying. You’re so good to me. You couldn’t be less like Vic fucking Creswell.” He drinks more wine, his hand shaking. “Anyway, it wasn’t long before Vic started… touching me.”

  I let out a soft sound, part growl, part moan of dismay.

  A tear breaches Jake’s lashes. “I’m sorry, I need you to know this.”

  My knuckles creak as my fists clench in my lap. “I want to hear. You shouldn’t carry this alone.”

  Jake nods, sips. “Anyway, he went from fondling and making me do things to him to raping me in very little time.”

  “You were six?”

  “I was probably eight by the time he started that.”

  He says it like that makes it somehow better than if he were six. “What a fucking…”

  “He ruled my mum and me, did what he liked to us. My mum should have protected me, but she was trapped too. He would beat her if she tried to intervene. Beat me if I threatened to tell. We lived in terror. When I was fourteen I told mum we had to go, we had to run away. She said we had no money, where would we go?”

  “There are shelters,” I start to say and Jake nods again.

  “Of course, but that wasn’t the point. You know what she said to me, after years of beatings and sexual assaults?”

  I sigh and shake my head. “She told you she loved him.”

  “Yep. So I ran away. I have no idea what they’re doing now. He could have killed her for all I know. I haven’t spoken a word to her since I left. I was on the street at first, then in shelters and care. A foster home took me in when I was sixteen and I was a bastard, doing all the things my mum did and worse, acting like her boyfriends, thinking I was different.”

  “You’re nothing like that,” I say. “You’re amazing.”

  He smiles, but it’s not enough to chase away the melancholy this time. “My foster mother is a lady called Glenda Armstrong and she fixed me up. Wouldn’t take my shit, made me finish school. I was lucky. She gave me direction. I got a job, turned myself around. Twenty-five now, finally feeling like I’ve got it somewhere near together. And then I met you. For the first time I feel something real, instead of just angry fucking because I thought that’s all I deserved.” His tears have stopped and there’s anger in his eyes.

  “You should be so proud of where you’ve come, given where you started,” I tell him.

  “But I’m scared and you mean a lot to me and that’s why it’s so hard for me to be intimate, emotional. It’s always been an act before, an act of defiance more than anything else, a show of power. But with you, I have no guard and it’s terrifying.”

  I stand, move around to hug him and kiss his hair. “I’m honoured,” I whisper. “I’ll never hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  The shadows of all the people who have died with me mask my vision, make Jake a distant blur. “So many wonderful people die every day, struck down by disease or age,” I say. “And yet fuckers like that Vic get to live.”

  Jake nods against my chest. “There’s no justice in the world. We have to hang on to our luck when we find it, because that’s all there is.”

  * * *

  After nearly a week of no deaths we get two in a day. The darkness wells inside me, that delicious blackness I can’t help but gather. Sometimes I think it’s going to overwhelm me, but there’s always room for more. The journey home is muffled by the circling presence of their passing.

  Jake comes around not long after I get home, bag of shopping in hand. “I’m going to make us a great dinner tonight. Special recipe! Something Glenda taught me.”

  “Great! I’m glad we’re having a good dinner. I have to go away for a couple of days.”

  “That’s sudden.” His brow is creased in concern and it breaks my heart a little.

  “There’s a two-day course Claire Moyer was supposed to go on, but she’s come down with something. Someone needs to go. It’s about a new drug administration practice, and they asked if I’d step in. I head off early in the morning to Newcastle. I’ll be away overnight, back by dinnertime the next day. Sorry.”

  He smiles. “Don’t apologise. Work is work. Let’s enjoy tonight then, eh? Maybe you can lend me your key when you leave and I can get my own cut? Then I can have something ready for when you get back on Thursday?”

  I raise my eyebrows, give him a crooked smile. “Your own key?”

  “If you think…”

  I sweep him into a hug. “Of course I think. I’d love that.”

  * * *

  It took a lot of searching to find this place, but hours of free time in a palliative care hospice can be put to good use with a search engine and access to hospital records. Hints from Jake about where he grew up and a keen eye. Plus friends in social services to join the dots. The idea, the realisation, hit me like lightning when Jake told me his story.

  There’s a broken down car on the front lawn, leaking oil across the dirt like black blood. The house is peeling. The paint reminds me of the skin of a dying woman’s lips. I knock on the door, heart hammering against my ribs.

  A large figure shimmers through the frosted glass panel and the door swings open. A man stands there in shorts and a stained shirt. He’s a tall bastard, muscular, but a beer gut mars anything close to a good physique. He has muddled tattoos on his arms and legs, grey and black stubble across his face like a TV tuned to static. His eyes are dark and mean. “Well, hello, darlin’.”

  “Victor Cresswell?” I ask.

  His eyes narrow. “What?” He glances to my hands, probably checking for a summons.

  “Vic Cresswell,” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  I hold out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  His lip curls in a sneer and he takes my hand, squeezing too hard to assert his dominance as he puffs his chest out. “Nice to meet you too, sweetheart. What the fuck is this?”

  And I let my darkness out. It rushes through my palm, desperate to escape, and races into him. I feel it gust up his arm, into his chest to nestle in his lungs. It wraps shadowy arms around his live
r and coats his gallbladder in an inky embrace. It snakes through his intestines, finds his prostate and slips down into his balls.

  A shudder ripples through him as I break our grip and smile, turn away.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he yells as I make my way back to the waiting taxi, a tremor in his voice.

  As I tell the taxi to head back to the station Vic stands in the doorway, one hand rubbing absently at his throat. There’s a patina of fear across his face. How much does he suspect? I give him a month at most before the decay begins to set in. Before the tumours start to blossom through his organs. Black, flowering death.

  I’m empty inside, somehow hollow but with whiteness swelling into the places where I’ve collected all that dark over the years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let it all go, should make it last. It’s disconcerting. I’m a little lost without the shadows of the lonely dead inside me. I’ll have to start collecting again. No matter, at least three at work have less than a week left.

  I knew I gathered it for a reason. A shame it took me this long to realise what my purpose is. I have a mission now, giving this unfair blackness to bastards truly deserving of it.

  I’m going to be busy.

  * * *

  Jake is watching television and looks up in surprise as I enter the house. I’m glad he decided to stay at my place, not his. When the moment’s right I’m going to ask him to move in.

  “I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” he says, smiling. It’s genuine happiness on his face and that warms me.

  “We got through the training in one day and finished up in time for me to get the last train back. So here I am.” I had taken into account that Vic might be harder to find, maybe not home. It had all been much easier than I anticipated.

  “Well, that’s a lovely surprise,” Jake says, gathering me into a hug.

  I breathe deeply of the clean smell of his skin. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe there is some justice in this world, after all.”