Authors: Terry Farricker
Frank stopped and looked down at the rifle that seemed to grow from his own chest, ‘Then me too.’
‘Francis,’ and Alex was touching his face now, ‘you fought bravely. No one knew, but I saw.’
And when Frank looked at Alex he seemed as helpless and lost as a small child seeking comfort and reassurance. ‘Why am I here?’
‘I don’t know, Francis; I don’t know why I am here either. I met a man, though, when I first became conscious of being here. I don’t know who he was. At first I thought he was pure evil, but then I began to understand things he told me more clearly. I think I may be here for a reason. Maybe I’m here to help you, Frank.’
Alex stood, feeling the sharp pain in her thigh protest, and moved behind Frank. She slid her arms under Frank’s and bent to whisper into his ear, ‘Ready, soldier?’
‘Ready, Alexandra,’ replied Frank. Then Alex pulled Frank off the bayonet and he groaned once and passed out.
***
Two days later Frank awoke, back inside the dugout in the firing trench, and Alex sat by him. Frank smiled and looked around the dugout.
When his eyes returned to her, Alex spoke softly to him, ‘Watch, Francis, but don’t speak, please,’ and she let her hand rock in the air like a flower bending in a breeze.
Frank watched until he witnessed small whirlpools of energy spiraling like minuscule galaxies in the air around Alex’s hand. The galaxies began expanding, bursts of light flashing from their centre like miniature bolts of lightning, and undulating waves rippled across the display, as if Frank was watching the scene through clear water.
Then Alex delicately pinched at the current and the material warped and bent like hot glass. She pulled a thread of nothingness outwards in a straight line, only its cylindrical properties distinguishing it from its surroundings.
Frank stared at the event, awe-struck, and with a diffident manner he reached out to touch the phenomenon. Alex coiled the filament of ether around itself and it followed every twist and turn of her fingers, like an obedient animal. Then, quickly, she grabbed the strand, and held it tightly between her two hands, and smiling, she began to fashion it into the shape of a crude flower.
When it was complete she passed it to Frank and said, ‘For my patient.’
Splashes of color and torrents of pure energy still danced between them as Frank took the flower from Alex. He rotated it, viewing it from every angle, amazed but somehow not completely surprised, but as he studied the attribute and profile of the flower it began to wilt. Yet it did not wither with an accelerated decay, but instead it melted into another shape, its lines fluidly restructuring themselves into a different form. It elongated and became denser, the soft contours of the flower replaced with harsher, more intricate detail, until the creation began to take shape in his hands.
It was now a gun, a rifle, but not a true replication of the Lee-Enfield he had carried in the carnage of the Great War, as it was more ornate and its curves were more fluid. It was an interpretation, created and fashioned from the pliable, esoteric substance that permeated the plane he existed on now. And it reflected nuances of his personality in its design.
Frank held the rifle in his hands, and then looked at Alex. ‘Why have I not left this place, Alexandra, and why are you here?’
‘Maybe we are here because we have not reconciled ourselves with death. The creature I told you of, the man in black, he said some of the people here still have souls. Not like the shells, they are just motor driven and the machine has some control over them and it wants to take them back to earth, resurrected as living-dead monsters, preying on mankind to fuel their own existence.’
Frank interjected, ‘Stop, Alex, please stop. Who are you speaking of? Shells? A machine? I don’t understand any of it!’ Alex took a breath and rose. ‘The man in black told me this place is populated by the shells that are left behind when souls have moved on. But they are disintegrating slowly, over centuries I think. They lust for life and the energy that can sustain them, but mostly they lust for flesh again, feelings and sensations first hand and not as the parasites they are now.’
Frank stared at the rifle and asked, ‘And this machine you spoke of?’
‘The machine, Frank, is where you come in.’
‘Come in?’
‘Where you connect to all of this. You and I. The machine is, I don’t know how to say this, is the essence of your father, Daniel Douglas, his soul is captured within it, I think, I think.’
Frank gripped the rifle tighter. ‘What has my father to do with this God-forsaken place, with any of this?’
‘I’m sorry, Frank. When you… died, your mother and father were obviously terribly grief stricken and apparently your father became obsessed with bringing you back somehow.’
Frank rose now and turned away from Alex as she continued, distress spiking her voice every time she took a breath. ‘But there was a fire and your mother and father died, although they never recovered Daniel’s body.’
Frank inspected his rifle again, detaching himself from Alex’s words. He did not now believe she could say anything more that could push his mind any further into the barren no man’s land it now stumbled through, shot at and blasted from every angle.
Although Alex wanted desperately to stop, she continued, ‘The man in black told me that your father constructed a machine, a machine to try and tear a hole in the fabric of the physical world and the afterlife, and then drag you back through to him.’
Tears flowed from Frank’s tired eyes and he shivered against the biting wind that had risen. ‘I apologize for my weakness, Alexandra.’
‘No. I’m so sorry, Francis, I truly am.’ But Frank’s mind was now bullet-ridden and deep into that wasteland and he could only weep and listen without hearing.
So Alex went on, ‘The man told me, Daniel and the machine became… fused, spliced together, and now they are promising the shells a route back to earth, a way of being resurrected so they can carry on living and the machine will not have to be alone.’
Frank’s face was suddenly animated and he spoke, his voice low and empty, ‘Why would my father do such a thing, Alex?’
Alex moved towards Frank and embraced the man like a mother would embrace her hurt child, and said, ‘He must be so lost and confused, Francis. The machine part of him is feeding on that, telling him he needs to help the shells so they will always be there to keep him from being alone. I think we need to somehow separate your father from the machine.’
Frank did not struggle against her embrace, even though he would have been unable to envisage such a scenario before this moment. ‘Alex, there must be a reason why I am here. And why you are now?’
‘I think we need to get to the hospital.’
‘Hospital? Which hospital?’
‘I think I died with my son in an accident, and I think I was taken to a hospital. When I woke in this world I was still in some kind of hospital. I had the strange feeling it was the Douglas Institute, or an interpretation of it. I told you my husband, Robert Douglas, inherited the institute?’
Frank seemed to have regained his composure and left Alex’s embrace, nodding his affirmation with no trace of inhibitions left.
Alex grabbed his shoulders. ‘My son, the spirit of my son is still in that hospital. I may be making a massive leap here, but maybe there is a reason the institute is also here.’
Frank seemed lost in thought again but spoke through it, ‘During the war my father admitted servicemen with trauma and nervous illnesses to the institute; that may be the connection?’
‘Maybe, Frank, maybe. There was a nurse, a wicked, evil woman. She may have been an inmate originally and is tied to the place now. But my son said there was a good nurse too, maybe that is Eve, your mother, Francis, I don’t know really. But just maybe you still have a connection to the hospital, a kind of umbilical cord for a reason you have forgotten now?’
Frank looked confused. ‘How? The institute is thousands of miles from here!’
‘No, Francis. It can be ten feet away if that is how you have created it, even unconsciously. That may be the key to something that is about to happen.’
She looked around the trench again, as if she might discover a sign that would display the legend “ANSWERS THIS WAY” with a big arrow telling her where to go.
‘The trench ends in this section, Frank, but it seems to stretch away in the other direction. Maybe it eventually connects to the hospital? Have you ever followed it, can you remember? Maybe you created this trench and have forgotten where it leads?’
Frank retreated into the dugout that was carved into the side of the trench and Alex stood in the rain, tilting her face to the sky. The rain was warm but the day was cold.
Shortly afterwards, Frank re-emerged with his kit bag, still holding the rifle, and he showed Alex a photograph of a beautiful woman with raven black hair and deep, sad eyes. ‘This is Eve, my mother, and if your son is with her, he is indeed safe. We will follow the trench as you say and establish where it leads. Indeed I will follow you, Alexandra, because I believe you may have saved my soul.’
Alexandra smiled softly and turned, walking into the rain, followed by Frank.
Chapter Seventeen
Mary stepped away from the operating table. The figure that lay there was softly singing a collection of mindless words, tuneless and nothing more than a whisper. Mary moved to the small pedestal sink and placed the severed hand in the basin, along with the small saw, washing her bloodied hand and drying it on a small, soiled towel that hung from a rusted nail above the basin. The water falling from the tap was foul and polluted and it replaced the blood, tissue, and bone on her hands and on the saw with dirt, rather than removing the mess. The figure giggled and prodded the stump where its hand had been removed, watching the small jets of blood leap into the air, captivated as if by a firefly.
Mary collected the dismembered hand and walked to a small table located near the main operating table, where she laid it with the palm facing up. The fingers still wriggled and grasped at imagined things and the figure on the operating table glanced at its detached hand and smiled, believing it to be waving at its former owner. Mary had made the cut above the wrist and now overlapped its flesh with the ruined remains of her own amputated hand. Where the two overlapped, she drove a nail through the skin and bone, flipping the hand over to bend the protruding end of the nail flat against the inside of her forearm. She lifted her new hand and watched the fingers twitch and curl erratically and she smiled a devious and insane smile of satisfaction. It was a smile born in a mind that sat alone somewhere, frozen, childlike and shrinking from reason, as if reason was something dangerous in the shadows. The figure on the bed had left now, shambling along another corridor, humming its senseless song.
Jake hid under the mummy-man’s bed. A figure passed by, its feet scraping against the tiled floor, nails long and looped. It had one hand missing, like the bad nurse, and the blood dripped bright and runny from the space left behind. The blood splashed onto the floor in regular little droplets, like breadcrumbs being left as markers for a way back out of the enchanted forest. The mummy-man stirred again. His muffled protests, if they were protests, were suppressed by the bandages swathed about his head. When the small boy judged it to be safe, he stuck his head out from beneath the trolley bed. This was a bad place. But if he wanted the fruit, bread, milk and jelly he had found in the kitchen, he had to come this way. He would take the good things back to the nice lady and keep waiting with her until his mummy came for him. The nice lady with black hair and deep, sad eyes.
Jake did not know why he was here. He did not like this hospital and he did not feel poorly. And he was frightened of the bad nurse with a hand missing. The first stopping place on the return journey was the mummy-man’s bed. Then the big room with lots of beds and the people that cried a lot, then across the big hall and down one last corridor to the nice lady’s room.
Jake slid out from under the table and ran as fast as he could to the end of the corridor, where he stopped and peered around the corner. Sometimes there was an old man standing by the big window here and Jake did not like him. When he saw Jake, he always started shaking very fast and made a noise like the tools that Daddy used to mend things with, a whirring, fast noise. But he was not there today and Jake could run past the big window. The big room was next.
There were poorly people in this room and they cried all the time. Jake did not know what they were so sad about and why they lay next to each other like the puppies Jake had last year. But Jake did not think these were nice people, not nice like the puppies, and when they got down from their beds they were all stuck together with not enough arms and legs. Jake walked slowly through the big room. It was dark and smelt of horrible things, old things, wet things. He could hear soft weeping and things moving awkwardly, but he kept his eyes down, concentrating on the dull red line that ran from one end of the room to the other like a train track.
Jake was about to push open the big doors and leave the big room when he heard a noise and he stood very still. The sound was coming from the other side of the big doors. Within seconds, he was under one of the last beds. He tried to stop breathing, as he knew what was coming next. On the bed above him, two people moaned, sighed and sobbed. A limb was draped over the edge of the bed and Jake could see it was two arms melted into one arm.
He could count all the way up to ten, so it was quite easy to add up the eight fingers and three thumbs on the one hand. Then the big doors opened.
‘Jake, Jake, are you in here child?’ It was the bad nurse with a hand missing. ‘Do you want to see my nice new hand, child? It’s very pretty!’ she called as she travelled down the row of beds, further and further away from Jake.
As she moved, she admired her nice new hand, turning it this way and that and sighing. The fingers clawed and fisted themselves without her prompting, as light from the line of high, deep-set windows pierced the gloom at regimental intervals and lit the flesh from different angles.
Jake watched her shoes and listened to the clink of their heels as they carried the bad nurse with a new hand away from his hiding place. Then there was silence. Jake waited. Silence could be as frightening as noise when it was the wrong kind of silence, the kind of silence after a bolt of lightning and before a clap of thunder. The waiting silence was always full of fears and dreads and wild imaginings, mostly worse than the things that came next. Mostly, but not always. Time moved on and Jake waited.
Why had the shoes stopped clicking? Had the bad nurse left? Was he alone, a small boy hiding from nothing? She had gone, he knew it. Absolutely knew it, no doubt at all. Then Jake saw a flower fall to the floor; a single daisy, still blooming, soaked in blood and folded heavily. The delicate petals were cleaved, torn and bleeding as if they were made of ripped skin. He clenched his fists bravely and pulled back the blanket that hung down from the bed.
‘Hello child.’ The bad nurse’s horrible face was there, inches from Jake’s own face, staring at him, smiling like a wicked witch. The flowers were dropping from the big hole in the back of her head, like blooms cascading from a tree, with blood for sap, and the nurse’s new hand was stretching towards Jake, twitching and grabbing.