Another synthetic sunrise. A plastic dawn. How long has it been now? It’s amazing what you can forget when you’ve spent so long chained to a bed, with webs of bloody tubes to tie you down. Each time I breathe, I feel the drain in my chest as it struggles and strains to filter the fluids from my reeling lungs.
They tell me I’ve been in an accident. My memories of the whole thing are practically non-existent. It seems that a part of me has a deep-seated instinct for self-preservation and has scoured that morning from my brain.
All I remember are flashes: the frost on the road, sirens wailing through the icy air, petrol and glass and bodywork scattered across the tarmac like some kind of cruel mosaic. Then came the fear, the concern raining down on me from worried faces, those silent streams in storms of pain.
“Am I going to die?” I remember whispering into the blackness that hung over me.
“Of course not,” came the reply, though I’ve got no idea who said it.
Now I’m here. In this dying-chamber. The atmosphere of the sickroom is a thick, almost solid thing. It’s like trying to breathe cotton wool. If I get too much air, I begin to choke and the spasms start again, and the burning shoots through my chest, and I start slamming my sedative button to flood my veins with blessed relief.
Sometimes, the nurses open the window and let the cold winter air rush through and cleanse us all. Those are my favourite moments, when I consider the freedom that the open window represents.
All around are the older people, the grey-haired who cough and sputter in their beds and speak amongst themselves of days gone by. My neighbours. I can see them glancing at me when they think I’m not looking. They’re probably thinking to themselves “who’s this young’un here, with his long hair, not saying a word to anyone?”
(Just an idiot with too much time on his hands.)
I want to tell them, but I can’t.
So, I sigh and turn a tired eye to where streams of wretched wires lie. Catheter, bloods, IV drip, chest drain. The things that are keeping me alive and as comfortable as I can be, apparently.
Right now, I feel like a robot in for repairs, wired up to a diagnostics machine. Each of my pained gasps and bouts of unconsciousness are just pieces of data to add to the report. No, they aren’t doctors that are looking after me. They’re engineers, peering at my vitals through safety goggles and taking technical notes on their clipboards.
What? Oh, another sponge bath? I let the nurses get on with that indignity. In my real life, I might’ve made a pass at one of them, a little flirtatious remark to prove some vague confused vanity to myself. But not now. After all, how could anyone find this stinking, sweaty mess an object of desire? I’m not a man to these women. No, I’m nothing but an ill to try and remedy, a broken bone to make all right again. A wound that moves.
“Are you okay?” the blonde nurse asks.
I blink back the tears and do not remove my stare from the flaking ceiling above me. They reach under my gown and begin to clean the grime from me. My face twists in a sullen snarl, because it’s of course far easier for me to change my fear and gratitude into impotent anger than feel what I’m really feeling.
When they’re done, the prickling shame rises to my cheeks. I’m sure I can hear one of the older, less injured patients let out a titter. Or was it a cough? It doesn’t really matter.
After these morning ablutions, the rest of my day is set. I lay and gaze up at the yellowed ceiling tiles for a few lifetimes, before I close my eyes and wish the familiar wish that this would all be over.
The sound of a fan being turned on close to my ear draws me back from wherever I’d just gone. The room is a lot darker now, and there’s far less going on. What time is it? I must’ve passed out again.
Through the blinds at the far end of the ward, I catch the sight of the nurses and porters stood in the hallway, laughing with each other, joking. But my vision’s pitching and wheeling in every direction, and I find it difficult to keep my eyes from crossing and becoming unfocused.
With all the effort I can muster, I turn my head to face the opposite direction, to look out through the huge window panes and onto the sodium-lit labyrinth of the hospital’s grounds. But something is blocking my view. In front of the window is a massive shape.
Each time I try and home in on what exactly it might be, the details of the thing melt away like oil slipping across the surface of water.
It’s definitely moving, though, an enormous bulk, ever-twisting, writhing in the heavy air. Too difficult to get a good… I put a hand over one eye to try and keep my vision from dividing and spinning away.
In the dim half-light, I make out that it’s roughly human-shaped, but… Are those its arms trailing behind it on the floor? If not, then what?
It looks like it’s leaning over the bed nearest to the window, the one with the old guy with the handlebar moustache in it, who hasn’t woken up once. And whatever that thing is, it’s doing something to him.
It makes no sound – well, none loud enough to be heard over the fan anyway. It seems to be… No, it couldn’t possibly be doing that.
I shudder slightly as a feeling begins to coalesce in the recesses of my consciousness.
I feel like I should definitely call a nurse in here, but my head’s ten times heavier than it should be, and I can barely coordinate myself. Thus, I settle for the easier option, as I have a habit of doing.
My hand slips into the crumpled mass of the duvet, and curls around the morphine remote: my holy grail. I press the button many times. The drugs flood through me and I’m once again falling back into the endless ocean, gracefully, down, down into a warm and peaceful sea.
There is nothing.
Is it morning again?
Sunlight streams into the ward, and the blotches of grime on the glass panes make odd amoeba-shaped shadows on the floor. It seems to be much the same as every other day in this place, but the faces are sadder.
I’m told by one of the Filipino porters – Frederico, I think? – that the old man next to the windows has died. At first, I take the news with the same indifference I’ve taken most other things recently. But then, something begins to form in my half-awake mind. In the night, by the window. Didn’t I see…?
The beeping from my heart monitor speeds up as I try to catch a nurse’s attention. One hurries over. It’s the blonde one again. Verity, the one with the kind eyes, who I wish I could be kinder to, but never quite manage it.
“Yes, Al? Is everything all right?” she asks with a pitying smile.
I sputter and gasp and wave my arms around. There are the words–I know there are–building inside of me, bouncing around the pressure chamber of my lungs. But as I try to release them, as I sit up and stare into the nurse’s sparkling blue eyes, frantic hands gesturing towards the window, my throat closes up and the words break and shatter into tiny pieces.
The web of wires and tubes that I’m tangled in seems to have caught in my vocal cords. No matter how I try, I can’t make a sound other than a confused whine.
I must look very distressed, because in an instant Verity is beside me, holding my hand, telling me everything is going to be alright.
“It’s okay, Al, I know it can be a bit of a shock,” she says.
(No, you don’t understand!)
“Mr. Taylor was a very ill man, and unfortunately we can’t save everyone.”
(But the thing! There was something there-)
I begin to grip her hand quite tightly.
She extracts herself from my panicked grasp and turns round to speak to one of her colleagues, a small male nurse with little circular glasses. He hurries off and returns with a syringe.
(Oh, come on, that’s the last thing I need right now! You have to listen to me!)
“We’re just going to give you this to calm you down, alright?” Nurse Verity says as if she were talking to a three-year-old. “You’re becoming a bit agitated, Al. This’ll help you sleep.”
(But I’ve only just woken up!)
I don’t even get a chance to stop her, because a couple of the porters come and help hold me down. The pain! My smashed ribcage buckles under the weight. The agony of it forces me to sink back into my pillows and whimper like a beaten dog.
Before the needle’s kiss sends me to a new kind of oblivion, I look over to the windows at the far end of the room, and there, in the farthest lower corner of the farthest one, I’m sure I can make out the hideous suggestion of some blurred, abstract shape, creeping into view.
And I know–somehow, I know–that it’s there watching me, with demonic intent.
The next time is one of emptiness.
There’s no balmy, sun-kissed sea for me to ease into and within which I can dissolve.
Instead, I lie broken in the void. The cold, uncaring void. Perhaps my body is awake and reacting to stimuli like a working fleshy machine, but I reside here for the time being.
The blank walls of non-existence.
The infinite nothing.
“Oh, I think he’s with us!”
The first things I see when I open my eyes are the faces of my parents. It takes me a moment to recognise mum’s watery eyes, dad’s grey skin and scruffy stubble. There’s something on the TV by the bed, as well. Blackadder, I think. Baldrick’s just done something idiotic, and my parents are chuckling about it.
Have I been watching this? And when did they get here?
“We’re so glad you’re awake Alfred,” Mum says with a catch in her voice. “You kept drifting off there.”
“What’s the matter, boy?” laughs Dad. “Hospital food that bad, is it?”
On the table next to my bed is a bouquet of flowers, with a price sticker on the packaging from the shop next to the hospital. They probably grabbed it on the way in, as an afterthought. I suppose Dad thought this is the sort of thing people do in these situations.
I try to rally my will to give them something, anything, a little smile to let them know that everything is going to be all right.
I fail, but they don’t seem to notice.
They talk for a while about mundane things. The little concerns that fill up their lives, brought up to provide a sense of normality to distinctly abnormal proceedings such as these. I try to listen, but it’s a long and bitter fight to keep my eyelids from drooping down beneath the chemical swell.
Besides, there’s something, somewhere inside me that is begging to get out. If I could only pull enough of my awareness together to figure out what it is, I’m sure I’ll feel much better.
“Listen, son,” Dad says awkwardly after he’s finished telling me about so-and-so’s new job, “I just wanted to say…”
He stops and looks towards Mum.
(Oh God, not this…)
“Well, we just wanted to tell you how much we love you, Alfred,” she finishes for him.
(I know, you’ve said before. But…)
“We know you’ve had a difficult year, and that you’ve not been feeling yourself lately.”
Dad can’t meet my eyes as Mum says this.
(Sometimes love isn’t enough.)
Mum’s started crying, and it takes her a while before she can talk again.
“But, once you get out of here, I promise we’ll do everything we can so you can get better. So, you don’t ever feel like you there’s no way… Or that you need to… to…”
(It’s not enough. Nothing’s enough.)
She doesn’t finish her sentence.
They both hug me then, and I can feel their hope and desperation roll over and through me. I close my eyes, seeking some kind of primal comfort, but find only emptiness. Under the weight of their embrace, my hand scrabbles to find the path to my release from this moment, and I push my button until the world fades away.
Once again, I am cresting the surface of a silent sea, calm, comforted. Far away from all of the hurt of the waking world. I float in a daze, content to let the soft waters lap up against my sides. Warming sunshine filters down through a hazy mist as I lay on my back, letting the gentle tide rock me to dozing.
But something’s wrong. I feel a presence underneath me, hard and angular and jagged and unlike anything that should exist in this peaceful place. I look downward, beneath the glittering waves, and see a dark mass looming below, rising, coming towards me.
I try in vain to paddle away, but my body’s far too relaxed to make any headway.
At last, the thing surfaces from the depths, and I’m suddenly being pushed out of the water and high into the air. I’m spread eagle on some kind of hard stone, with strange towers rising up through the fog all around me.
The sky darkens, and the kindly sun of before has turned into the harsh glare of an electric light. Blinking in the sickly yellow brightness, I rise unsteadily to my feet.
It takes me a few seconds to realise that I’m on the roof of the hospital. But I’m not alone. Through the window on the building across from me, I can see a black shape stalking through the wards. It stops, as if noticing me noticing it.
I try to run towards the nearest entrance, but my legs are like dead weights under me. I don’t dare look back as I make my way there, but I can hear the crashing of broken glass from behind.
I reach the door, and practically fall onto the handle. As I drag myself through the doorway, the building shakes with the force of something smashing into its side. In the last moment before the door closes behind me, I turn and see a gigantic hand of rotting flesh and metal reach up from over the edge of the building and tense as the thing begins pulling itself up.
The journey down the stairs isn’t easy. Soon, after a painfully slow couple of steps, I throw myself down the first flight. And the second. And the third, until there’s an open door I stagger through.
Splinters rain down on me from above as the stairwell door is obliterated. I can feel myself scream, then, but blessedly no sound comes out, only the bloody petals fallen from the flowers of a guilty bouquet.
I ache my way into the corridor. It’s dark. Lights are flickering on and off. There’s no movement anywhere, but lining the shadowed walls are gurneys with shrouded bodies laid upon them.
Quickly, somewhere to hide. Where? Yes, the laundry cart!
With my last ounce of will, I grab the cart’s metal frame, pull myself over and into it. But a huge grip around my waist stops me and drags me from my salvation like a child plucking the wings from a fly.
I feel my body turned in a mighty grasp, and suddenly I’m face to face with it.
Its titanic head fills my vision. The whole thing is an amalgamation of living and non-living parts, like a crazed experiment conjured up in the pits of a broken mind. Scarred flesh and machine callously welded together and dripping with hatred.
One eye is like a round computer screen, with flashes of digital code flittering across a black background. The other eye is more human, blue and crisscrossed with horrible purple veins as thick as my arm. And, as it regards me, I sense something lurking behind that enormous gaze, an awful but unmistakable sense of recognition.
I try to struggle my way out of its terrible grip, but it’s of no use.
It clenches its scabbed and rusted fingers tight–so tight that spots appear in front of my eyes, and the nightmarish vision before me begins to waver.
The white curtains descend.
Suddenly, I’m back in my hospital bed. To my horror, the hideous face is still there, perilously close, grinning at me with teeth made from chunks of RTA debris. There are lights flashing behind the curtains next to me, and the beeping of a heart monitor in emergency mode.
The main lights are switched back on in the room. I recoil from their burning touch, close my eyes, and scream.
There’s the sudden whirl of footsteps, of voices all around me, the scrape of medical equipment being moved into place.
I open my eyes and the monster is no longer there, but I see the frantic silhouettes of doctors and nurses trying to pull someone back from the brink behind the curtain.
I yank the veil aside, leaving bloody fingerprints on the clean linen. Behind it, my neighbour, a thin man with an awful cough, lies in a pool of his own blood with a hellish wound carved across his chest. I yelp stupidly and let the curtain fall back.
The monster must have attacked him, and then come for me!
But then there’s porters rushing over to my bed, holding me down. I catch the sight of a dinner knife wet with blood on the floor by my bed as my ribs are crushed into submission by the attendants.
Frederico is looking at me with a fear I’ve never seen in him before. Maybe he saw it too, maybe now someone will listen and be able to stop the awful thing!
What are they doing to me though?
(Watch out, it could come back at any moment!)
Now Verity’s there, with a face like cold iron, jamming a needle into my arm. Gone is the tenderness she’s always shown me; her demeanour is the definition of clinical. I try to get her attention before the hungry mouth of the void comes to devour me, but she doesn’t even look me in the eyes.
All of my desperate warnings die in my throat, and once again I am one with the darkness.
There can be nothing of me in this cold and empty place.
But eventually, the burned-out fragments of my receptors sputter into consciousness once more.
It’s far quieter now and the room I’m in is much smaller than before, with only my bed and a counter for medical supplies down one side. There’s an empty lounge chair across from me that looks like no one has ever sat in it.
Thirst. My god, my mouth is the driest it has ever been. There’s a glass of water on the shelf next to my bed. I lean over to pick it up, but a crushing pain in my chest stops me. I look down.
Why have they tied me to the bed with restraints? Don’t they understand that if they do this, I’ll have no chance of escaping that thing when it comes back for me?
Over the next few hours, I try to call the nurse over with my remote. I don’t recognise any of the grim faces that respond to my calls. The doses of the painkillers they’ve given me are different this time and leave the naked ache of reality far too comprehensible for my tastes.
But when I try to tell them this, without words, swinging my head from side to side for emphasis and grunting with the strain of the belts around my torso, they simply give me strangely hostile glares and leave the room.
Before the night swallows the day that evening, they have moved my remote from out of my reach. But at least they’ve loosened my restraints a little.
At one point in the haze of solitude, I’m sure I can hear my parents outside, demanding to be let in with fear burning through their voices. They are answered by a quiet doctor, who says things like ‘psychotic episode’ and ‘emotional trauma.’ There’s talk of the police coming to the hospital.
After a while, the voices stop, and the word “murderer” hangs in the air where my mother screamed it in disbelief.
Once more, I am left alone in maddened silence.
It almost isn’t a surprise to me when the monster returns for me. My head is far clearer now, far too aware of the things I’ve witnessed, the things I’ve done. There’s no comforting opiate blanket stopping me from remembering now, after all.
With the return of my pain also comes the truth. The shameful, hideous truth. Sometimes the hands of a lie are less cruel to hold than those of honesty.
My mother’s voice sears through my cold, still mind like white hot knives pushed through my eardrums. That last terrible word torn again and again out of her grieving throat in crimson shreds.
Murderer.
This time, when the monster squeezes itself into the cramped confines of my cell, and swings its gargantuan face towards mine, it is my eyes that widen with recognition.
(Hello. Sorry I didn’t recognise you before.)
It leans over me, a putrid patchwork of muscle and bone and gears and screens. I don’t fight it as it undoes the restraints from around me and gathers me in its nightmarish arms. While it undoes the latches on the single window of the room, I curl my head up against its chest and feel the pus and motor oil ooze over my hair.
I look up at the horror above and smile with genuine warmth and love. The cold winter wind blows into the room and raises the goosepimples on my scarred arms. The touch of freedom. It holds me so that I am hanging out over the edge of the windowsill, with the light-splashed pavestones beckoning me from far below.
Phil M. Robinson is British author of horror, fantasy and science fiction who strives to make his voice heard amidst a sea of others.
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