Cold Fire Page 22

  There is a shining steel pole above the bed, and from it a bag of fluid hangs. There is a brazen black skull and crossbones motif on the bag, the universal sign for poison. Beneath it CANCER is emblazoned in bold, red script.

  ‘Dad,’ says Samantha, eyes sparkling despite the black rings around them. She giggles, hoarse and harsh. ‘You’re all messy.’

  She’s the same age as when she died.

  I can’t believe I’m seeing her again. She came back, lovely despite her sallow skin.

  ‘Oh, Honey,’ I say. ‘I missed you so much.’

  ‘It’s okay, Daddy. I’m right here.’

  The tears are coming freely. I can smell her. The smell I remember so well. Softness and summer fruits.

  I walk toward her on unsteady feet. I can’t take my eyes off her. My beautiful girl. She’s perfect in every way, and alive. She’s so alive. Her eyes are bright with that inner light she always had. The light she got from her mother. Her long blonde hair shines with health and the twinkle never leaves her dark eyes as I’m drawn to her, drawn to the girl who broke my life.

  How could I have ever thought she was drawn and pale, gaunt or sickly?

  She’s radiant.

  I walk toward her on tired feet. Her eyes twinkle at me, beckoning me closer.

  ‘Come closer, Daddy!’

  I walk and walk on my tired shaking legs, but I can’t get closer.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! I can’t see you!’

  Her eyes are losing their lustre. Without the sparkle they will be dead black pools, like oil puddled in the dark.

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘Sammy, don’t…don’t go.’

  ‘Daddy, why won’t you look at me?’

  I can’t look at her, because her hair…she’s sick. I can see her blood. Lesions on her scalp run as she scratches at them. She pulls clumps of hair from her head and they drift down to the crisp white sheets as they fall from her fingers.

  ‘Oh, Sammy,’ I says. My legs are so tired. I can’t walk anymore. I stop. She comes closer. But never close enough to touch.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you look at me, Daddy? Why?’

  Tears fall in a steady stream.

  ‘I came…every day…I miss you…’ I lose the words. Tiredness wants to pull me down to sleep, but I’ve got to know. She’s right here.

  ‘Why, Sammy?’ I say, choking on my words. ‘Why did you do it?’

  She smiles and there’s something spiteful in that smile, something like biting on steel.

  ‘You wouldn’t look at me. You didn’t love me. You didn’t love me so I killed myself.’

  I shake my head. I can’t take it. I just want her back. I want my girl.

  ‘Don’t. I came every day…why did you do it?’ I can hardly bear to look at her now. Her hair is on the sheets, and I can see parts of her bloody scalp holding the strands together. She smells rotten and I don’t want to smell her anymore, but I won’t look away. I can’t. What if she goes away while I’m not looking? What if she pumps the other bag hanging on her left arm, the one I don’t want to look at?

  I can look at the bag with CANCER on it. I can see that. But my mind won’t let me see the other one.

  ‘Why did you kill yourself? You could have got better…you could have lived.’

  The other bag is growing. The letters printed on it are getting bigger. More frightening. I look down at my feet. I can’t look. If I do I’ll break.

  ‘Daddy, you didn’t love me. You couldn’t even look at me.’

  ‘It’s not true, Sammy,’ I say, but I can’t look at her, even now.

  ‘IT IS! LOOK AT ME!’

  I drag my head up. The bag looms large, the letters spelling out MORPHINE.

  *

  62.

  Something in me snaps and the room changes.

  ‘Sam,’ says my wife.

  She’s there, beside Samantha. Her voice is warm and her smile is heart stopping. My daughter just smiles. Her smile is beautiful enough to light up the darkest of days.

  They’re sitting on my wife’s couch, like in the old days, before Samantha died.

  One minute my daughter’s full of cancer, the next she’s radiant. I feel sick, and my ears are dull from my screams. I am covered in the thing’s sickness. I can hear it beating, outside the walls of this room. This room that lives in the heart of it.

  ‘Helen…’ I want to tell her to come with me. But do I want that? Is this her?

  ‘She came back, Sam,’ says Helen. ‘We’re whole again.’

  I walk across the room.

  Pause.

  ‘It’s OK, Daddy. We’re all here. You can rest now.’

  I want to. I’m so tired. I hurt all over.

  Sam.

  ‘Sam, come here. Come and sit with us.’

  My legs feel like lead. I walk toward them. Hold my arms out. I want to hold them so much. I can’t get any closer, then all of a sudden they’re rushing toward me.

  Sam!

  Samantha’s stroking Helen’s hair. There’s a flash of something in her eyes.

  SAM!

  I stop and cock my head. Helen and Samantha aren’t speaking, but someone is calling my name. Urgent. Insistent.

  ‘Wait,’ I tell them.

  ‘No, Daddy. We need you.’ Samantha’s imploring. In my heart, I want nothing more than to go to her.

  ‘Wait,’ I say.

  ‘Sam, come to us. We can be a family again. Honey, please. Please don’t go away again.’ Helen’s voice cracks and my heart is so full of need for them, for my family. I put one foot in front of the other. The weakness in my legs is gone. I’m whole again.

  Someone is saying something.

  I can just make it out. I frown. There’s this weird voice. It sounds familiar, but I want it to go away.

  In your pocket.

  What’s the harm?

  I pull it out. The thing in my pocket is just a simple tennis ball. I pull it out and smile at the ball. For some reason it makes me happy.

  But not Samantha. She flinches and springs from the couch – the one that Samantha used to sit on with Helen that I will never use again – that used to be a hospital bed.

  Helen slumps forward and drops to the floor in a crumpled heap.

  I see it clearly.

  It’s not my little girl. She’s dead. There’s no coming back from that.

  Helen’s not dead, though. Neither am I. You can come back from anything else.

  Just not death.

  I move.

  Samantha comes toward me. I don’t back off. From now, from here, there is only forward.

  ‘Daddy,’ she pleads. She holds out her arms.

  I plough on. I hold the ball out before me. I smell the sea.

  I remember me and Helen by the sea. Her arm around me. Mine around her.

  The ball drips. Pours. Where the water hits the floorboards steam rises.

  I see yellow, and the yellow, too, drips, floats, suffuses the room.

  Samantha’s skin peels back where the sun hits her skin.

  The sun. The sea.

  It’s just a tennis ball, but it’s not. It’s so much more. I understand that, and as I do its power grows.

  It explodes in light, and Samantha is blasted away to dust, nothing but shade and ash drifting in the wind.

  I put the ball down. I don’t need it anymore.

  I need my wife.

  I pick her up off the floor. I don’t know how. Every part of my body screams in agony, but somehow I carry her to the door.

  The ball is burning behind me and it’s growing. Heat rises from it. Good heat. Spring sunrises and days beginning and sweet renewal.

  *

  63.

  I can’t think about the souls in the Eventide home. They’re gone. Free. They don’t know now, they’ll never know, but maybe if there is some kind of Heaven, they’ll understand.

  The heat is boiling down from above. I’ve got Helen in my arms. It’s all I can do to keep upright. My legs aren’t s
trong enough to get to the bottom.

  But I do it because I have no choice.

  There are only three flights on the way down. It makes it easier. I don’t think about the why of it.

  I don’t see any nurses. No carers. No one. I can hear the lost, the chained, the damned. They don’t scream. They chatter and giggle and clap. The happy sounds of the insane. They can feel it. Feel it coming.

  The front door isn’t locked anymore. I push it open, stumble over the step and dump Helen in the snow. The snow is deep enough to break her fall. She doesn’t know anything about it. She’s just a dead weight.

  The snow turns red around her, where she fell. From the slits running lengthwise along her wrists. Like Sarah, it nearly took her. But I’m here. I won’t fail again.

  I pick her up again. She’s heavy in my arms, but I don’t feel the weight. I don’t feel the pain anymore.

  The snow pulls at my legs as I walk away from Eventide. Every step is hard, getting harder. I’m tired and cold. There is no pain. The cold is enough.

  I go across the grounds. Out the same gate I came in by.

  Toward the fires, which are still burning brightly. The fire crews don’t seem to be making a dent.

  The snowfall is lighter. I skirt the estate, along the edge of the green. The Eventide home explodes behind me. The fire crews look up and see me fall to the ground, Helen tumbling from my arms.

  I hold a hand up, cry for help, but I’ve lost my voice.

  It doesn’t matter. They see us. They come running.

  The lights dim. I won’t go out, though. Not alone. I grab my broken thumb and pull it back. The pain is fantastic, blinding.

  I sit up and hold my hand, rocking, as they take my wife and call in an ambulance.

  It’s just a matter of waving it over.

  I ask how she is, when we’re strapped in. The sirens come on.

  ‘Just rest,’ says the paramedic, not turning in my direction. I can’t do anything but obey.

  His attention stays on my wife, and that’s just fine, I think, as I slip away.

  *

  64.

  The police have questions for me.

  It’s like a school test. If I fail this, though, I go to jail.

  I’m probably going to jail anyway.

  The press keep them busy. The locals are there, the nationals. Internationals, too. The news about the old people in chains, burnt to cinders in the explosion at the Eventide home. There’s a sense of outrage that covers the hospital. Probably the country, but for now the hospital is my world and that’s all that matters to me.

  The police and the press both have no idea what to make of me. I’m a wild card. I don’t fit.

  I don’t talk to the press. I keep it simple for the police.

  I’ve been an addict. I know how to lie. I stick to my guns. Never, ever waver. My wife called me. I got burnt in the fires. I was looking for her, found her in the Eventide home, dying. There was a fire. I fell, broke my ribs, cracked my head open.

  Nobody asks about the car, but they ask about the estate. They’ve got nothing, though.

  The fire crews might as well have been pissing into a volcano. The estate, the home, both burnt to the ground. Two days later, when the bricks were still ticking as they cooled, investigators felt it safe enough to begin searching. They found no sign of Frank. No body. No stain on the burnt grass, no fatty residue, no bones.

  I think he’s gone on. The whole of him. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what I want to believe.

  There’s a hole where he used to be, but I’m learning to deal with loss. It doesn’t get any easier, but as long as you remember, they don’t go. They never go.

  My ribs aren’t wrapped, but they’re broken. There’s not much you can do for broken ribs. My hand’s back in a cast. My head is stitched. Thirteen stitches. Auspicious. I cracked it a good one.

  They push me about in a wheelchair. Push me to see Helen.

  She’s unconscious. She lost too much blood. But I don’t think that’s the whole of the reason she won’t come around. I don’t think that’s the reason at all.

  The bandages on her wrists are thick. When I hold her hand I can feel the crust underneath, where the stitches are. The surgeons had to stitch her tendons, too. She cut deep. She really meant it.

  It wasn’t her. I know that. It was that place. The soul of that place, that fed on despair, on sadness, on pain. It was the chaos that is the twin, or perhaps the other half of what is just one entity that some people call God. An entity that contains everything within it. An entity that I don’t believe in, but maybe one that sent me a cat, once, that guided me to do the right thing and in turn gave me back my reason for going on, the woman on the bed that is the whole of my heart.

  I’ve got to believe she’s fighting it. Fighting it inside. I want to do something for her. Something to help.

  She’s adrift. I’ve got to bring her back. I can only think of one thing.

  I get a porter to push me to the elevator. Down two floors, into the shop in the lobby.

  There isn’t much choice, but there is a stand of books. Romance novels and thrillers, mainly.

  Just standard fare. Nothing right.

  Something is out of place, at the bottom.

  It’s old. The spine is cracked. It doesn’t belong here. It belongs with Helen. I know as soon as I see it that I’m meant to buy it.

  I pay for it, go up two floors in the lift. Along the hall and into her room.

  ‘Can we have some time alone?’ I ask the porter.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Buzz when you want to go back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  I hold Helen’s hand. Put the book on her chest.

  I never bought her a book before.

  She doesn’t do romance. She does thrillers, westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy.

  She doesn’t stir under the weight of the book. Nothing. She remains motionless. Her hair is dull, her skin waxy. She looks more frail than I’ve ever seen her.

  The scar on her face is livid red. It’s the only thing with any true colour.

  Just buying the book isn’t enough. She doesn’t know I bought her a book.

  I pick the book up, off her chest, and start to read. The words swim.

  *

  65.

  They release me. Eventually. I heal. I don’t get arrested. I think they can’t do anything, because apart from being there, there’s nothing to tie me to the fire. Nobody ever said anything about the car. I don’t think they knew about the car. I don’t think it was there when they looked. Like Frank, it burned to nothing, burned so hot nothing could survive.

  I walk along the corridors, take the stairs.

  Helen’s been out, drifting, since early summer. The leaves have turned and dropped since then. She sleeps, the world turns.

  She’s shrunk, in her arms, her face. She’s lost a lot of weight in the months she’s been under.

  I take each step heavily. It’s getting harder and harder.

  Today, something ends. Something beautiful.

  I get to her bedside. Her hair’s brushed. She smells clean, of shampoo and soap.

  I kiss her lips. Take the book from her hand, where I place it each time I leave.

  I look at the mound of her belly. How big it’s become.

  I find my place and I read until I get to the end.

  “I lingered round them,” I read, my voice gaining strength, “under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heather and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

  It seems like there should be something more, but that’s all there is. I close the book. It’s hard to say goodbye.

  At some point, she’d opened her eyes.

  She’s been watching me.

  ‘Sam?’ she asks. Her voice is cracked and dusty.

  It isn’t the si
mple question it seems. I know what she means.

  Is he here?

  Of course he is. He’s always been here. He’s the part of me that’s afraid. The part that waits to protect me from the pain. The part that cries when I can’t.

  He’s here, but I know him now. He’s not a stranger anymore. He’s just me.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  She understands. Perhaps she always understood. She knows more about me than I ever did, or ever could.

  ‘I loved the book.’

  I can’t help it. I’m embarrassed. ‘I should’ve bought you a book.’

  She shakes her head.

  I don’t know what she means.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been this book,’ she says. She looks at me in a way that makes me feel small, but I look her in the eye, right back.

  She smiles, sees that I get it. She was always smarter than me.

  ‘It’s got big,’ she says.

  I just nod. I can’t speak.

  ‘Have you felt it?’

  I shake my head. I can’t explain to her. I can’t tell her why.

  She takes my hand.

  The stranger holds it above her gravid belly.

  ‘What if it’s cold, Sam?’

  What if it is, Sam? What if?

  I look into her eyes. I’ve got to live with him. So has she.

  It’s not death he’s afraid of. It’s life. Life is so much harder.

  But I look, and see her, and the bump that is our child, and I’m not afraid anymore.

  I reach out, her hand in mine, and touch her. I feel the kick. It’s warm, that kick. It chases away the last of the cold, and when she cries, her tears are my tears.

  ‘Take us home,’ she says.

  The End

  About the Author

  Craig Saunders is the author of over thirty novels and novellas, including 'Masters of Blood and Bone', 'RAIN' and 'Deadlift'. He writes across many genres, but horror, humour (the 'Spiggot' series) and fantasy (the 'Rythe' tales) are his favourites.