Ghost Stories - Lorna Bradbury [6]
I’ve been locked up for so long I forget I am no longer in my cell but a hospital room. The greater part of my life has been a succession of guarded rooms, this one no different, if slightly airier, with alternating guards out in the corridor who look in once at the start of each shift to check I haven’t been knifed on their watch, but who otherwise have nothing to do with me. Still alive, I say sometimes, just to see if I get a response. I never do. Sometimes I hear them gassing with the better-looking nurses. how much longer’s he got, the hairy one asks. Difficult to say, says the nurse. Could be another month.
Some quack came to see me a few times, irascible man, spindly limbed, expecting me to feel the need to unburden myself. Last time it was a woman who came instead, and things got a bit heated. Don’t you think it’s time you took responsibility for what you did, she said. if not for yourself then for all the families who lost loved ones. I told her to piss off. They nailed me, I wanted to say. what more do you want? in the end the other guard, the tall one, had to come and get her. Remember an old lady with red hair, you bastard? she said as he dragged her out.
I don’t.
Her mother was one of your … victims, I am told later. She should never have been able to get in here. it won’t happen again.
Which one of you is doing the jigsaw, I ask, when pieces start finding their way into the puzzle, but not from my hand. They think me delirious. I tend to agree with them. Most worrying of all is I know the picture that should be forming is one of a sunlit bridge, surrounded by sky and water, but from the bed, all I see is darkness.
A boy keeps getting into my room not long after this. I try bringing it up with the guards, but they just look at me like i’m some kind of loon. I know in an instant when he’s around because the air thickens and coils around him. at first, when a nurse appears without warning, he scuttles under the bed and hides, so I presume he is the child or grandchild of a hospital patient and think no more about it. Soon, as the morphine addles my days, I lose track of whether he is under there or not. I start calling out to him – Coast’s clear! – on tenterhooks that he might be there, disappointed when he is not.
He is no more than a stranger to me, yet gazes searchingly as if I am known to him. Though wary at first, when I come to one day he is standing over me. he is of personable appearance, wearing nondescript clothes, though not, it seems to me, of contemporary fashion, with skin as grey as the iron-clad December sky. he has absolutely no hair, I note, with a quiver of unease, and eyes of such cavernous expectancy that my own wretchedness is reflected in their mournful beauty.
Out of desperation I decide to converse with him. he clearly wants to communicate something, but no sounds ever come out of his mouth.
I don’t know who you are, I tell him eventually, when his unwavering attention becomes a source of discomfort.
Yes you do, his eyes seem to say.
To counter the one-sidedness of our exchanges, I start intuiting the boy’s responses. it makes it seem less like I am talking to myself. I used to have a little one like you, I tell him. Back in the day. Before all that other business.
What other business is that?
The more the jigsaw fills, the surer I become that he is no mere hallucination. There is something not quite right about the puzzle; in fact, it is all wrong. Somehow I feel I am under its scrutiny, and don’t like it one bit. Before long I resolve to resist its pull, though it doesn’t rest dormant in the periphery of my vision but throbs, restless, with an unsettling intensity. I will have all your attention, it warns.
He’s an angel come to