Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead Read online

  I looked back at the room and for the first time I noticed the military uniform laid out carefully upon a chair. It was a fine olive green and perfectly ironed, with several service pips along the shoulders and medals lined carefully along the breast. On top of the uniform there rested a crisp parade cap with a well polished peak. I had no idea what rank the man had achieved but he had obviously taken great pride in it. Next to the chair was a small table with a service revolver laid out on a couple of sheets of neatly folded but sun-faded newspaper. I picked it up, and after a bit of experimentation I managed to pop the chamber, finding it fully loaded. As I tipped the bullets out onto my palm I saw that four of them were still live and two were spent. I carefully placed them back in the same order and snapped it shut, placing it back on the table for the time being.

  There was a large chest of drawers and a few boxes to the right of the room, with a wardrobe to the left, nestled in an alcove next to where the roof started to slant down. I checked to see that the others were still sleeping before opening it. The door creaked. I grimaced involuntarily and glanced towards them again but they were still curled up together, eyes closed, silent and still.

  Inside there was a wide selection of clothes: well tailored suits, summer shorts and short sleeved shirts, cold weather clothing, pyjamas; all men's. There was also a small cardboard box containing a few more bullets, taped up with yellowing sticky tape. I took it down and put it on the floor so I wouldn't forget it later. After selecting some new attire I finally undressed, peeling off my foetid clothes, the same ones that I had worn for... I had no idea how long. Well, it was definitely long enough that I thought nothing about quietly opening the window and tossing them to the elements, a sacrifice for the clouds to do with as they pleased.

  As I reached for the new clothes, I felt overcome with an even more self indulgent thought. I padded out onto the landing and into the bathroom. The taps on the bath were still functional, if a little rusty. The water that came out spluttered, spat and eventually ran cold. I didn't care, submerging myself up to the neck, the chill making me gasp a little for breath as I reached for a bar of soap and started to clean the grime and salt from my body. My frame was still quite wiry, lean muscle over bone, with a few scars here and there from scrapes and falls on the island. My ribcage stuck out above an almost concave stomach and I realised I felt starving. I quickly finished washing and escaped the freezing water, before drying myself and even squirting a little toothpaste on my finger, scraping it against my teeth as I glanced at myself in the mirror. I was certainly a sorry looking specimen. With my much needed hygiene ritual out of the way I headed back to the bedroom to dress. I had chosen a set of clothes tailored for the bad weather, made up of a pair of tough looking brown belted work trousers, a vest, a check shirt and a warm cream coloured Aran sweater. I had also taken two pairs of thick socks to wear and a third stuffed in my pocket for emergencies. I wanted to go as long as I could before having to walk in wet socks again. The sensation somehow always managed to chill me to the core, no matter how warmly the rest of my body was dressed.

  I picked up the box of bullets and dropped it into our bag. I also took the revolver, which I slipped into my left pocket. I paused to think a moment, before shifting it to the other pocket, until finally I settled on placing it under my shirt at the back of my trousers. Whatever else I had been, I clearly hadn't been a professional gunman in my earlier life. My forehead had started to sweat just from touching the thing, its cold metal encapsulating a terrifying potential for damage and death. I thought for a second about taking the bullets out but I had no idea how quickly I'd be able to load the gun if we got into a situation where we would need it.

  I could still hear the rain drumming in the broken bedroom as I headed downstairs to the kitchen, my stomach rumbling audibly.

  The garden outside was grey and gloomy but my mood was becoming buoyant as I contemplated the feast to come. In the stark morning light I pulled a few cans out of the cupboards and laid them out on the counter, savouring the pictures on the labels, my mouth already salivating. This was food, real food, healthy vegetables, meats and carbohydrates. Yes they were preserved, squashed and not as good as fresh food, however all I had eaten for the past... time... was fish and seaweed, with the occasional bird if Marcus had been lucky with his stone throwing. I finally settled on a tin of mandarin segments in syrup and clattered noisily through the kitchen drawers trying to find a tin opener. Eventually I found an old style knife edge opener and quickly cut around the tin in uneven jagged strokes. When it was open I lifted a couple of segments out and held them over my mouth, tasting the syrup as it dripped...

  “Were you going to hog it all, eh?” came Marcus' voice from behind me. Even though he had always been there to help me through all my trials on the island, his voice still raised hackles on my neck. I turned around and saw all three of them. Marcus was in the foreground wearing a crisp new shirt while the others stood behind him, clean and washed in their own new clothes, although it seemed Cato couldn't find anything to fit his emaciated frame, as his new sweater hung off him like a second layer of skin.

  “No, of course I wasn't. I was going to share it,” I said, dropping the segments back in the tin.

  “With Marcus. You know he needs it more than you do,” said Cato, his nostrils flaring.

  “What about you Perdita, would you like some? You look awfully thin. How about just a small taste?” I asked, proffering the can. She shook her head slowly, wrapping her arms around Cato's wiry body.

  “Marcus first,” said Cato, grinding his teeth with each word.

  “All right, here you are,” I said, feeling a little chastened. I passed the can to Marcus and his eyes lit up. He tipped his head back and poured the contents down his throat, his jaw working fast and almost distending as he swallowed every last morsel within a few moments. He sighed a little with contentedness and wiped a dribble of syrup from his lip.

  “More?” asked Cato, gesturing towards the cans. Marcus nodded hungrily and I opened another can, this time of pineapple. Again he swallowed the food almost without chewing, as Cato sang a little tuneless ditty in his ear. “Eat your fill, it won't be long, 'til hunger comes again...”

  I opened a tin of spaghetti with tomato sauce and found a spoon in the cutlery drawer, ready to begin my own breakfast. We all sat down on the kitchen floor, Marcus and I eating until finally our hunger was gone, with the other two watching us, Cato with approval, Perdita with curiosity. As I lay with my back to a cupboard, eyes closed while I savoured the flavours still in my mouth, I heard a quiet but insistent scratching.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked Marcus, who was lying on his back on the terracotta tiles. He pulled himself up onto his haunches, poised and alert as if he was a waiting predator on the Serengeti. His eyes flicked back and forth as he listened. The scratching continued.

  “Yes, I hear it. What could it be, where...” he looked around, tense and excited. He stood up, sniffing the air, his hair bristling and almost unfurling from his head like a lion's mane. Cato shrank into a corner.

  “We didn't check it all, did we. We missed a room, you know we did, you know it,” he said quietly, throwing his hand out and pointing towards the cellar door. It was still partly open, showing nothing beyond except darkness.

  “Why didn't you say anything?” hissed Marcus, kicking out at Cato's legs. “You're responsible for keeping us safe too. You can't just drift behind us like a tethered Zeppelin of depression.”

  Cato quailed in the face of Marcus' wrath. “I thought we all knew, we all saw the door. Why is it my responsibility?”

  “It just is! That's your role,” said Marcus, again clenching and unclenching his hands as if he were going to squeeze the life from the little man.

  Cato was shrinking away into the corner, his limbs and head diminishing rapidly until he was almost smaller than Perdita. He had done it before, when there had been a particularly violent storm over our little island shack. We had foun
d him cowering under a rusty cooking pan.

  “No wonder you were hiding under that rock, a perfect place for spongy little creatures without a backbone,” yelled Marcus, sharp black hair sprouting from his face. He slammed his fist hard into a counter, sending a crack along the wooden surface. I stepped beside him and whispered into his ear, trying to soothe his rage.

  “Please calm down. It's too loud, too much. Let's forget him and have a look in the cellar ourselves. The sooner we look down there the sooner we can know we're safe,” I said. Marcus rounded on me, his eyes burning red as the black spikes pushed their way out of every pore.

  “Oh, I'm perfectly safe. There is nothing in here or out there that can touch me,” he hissed, grabbing my neck and lifting me up, slamming my head into the ceiling. Pain shot though my skull as flakes of plaster fell down around us. Marcus dropped me to the floor, his face a mass of spikes. His eyes were little more than red pools, swirling pinpoints of colour in stark contrast to the grey surroundings.

  “Perdita can see us,” I said, my voice rasping as I scrabbled back away from this man, this thing, this potential for violence. Perdita's eyes were wide, her mouth open in a silent scream of pure terror as she watched us. She seemed to hate it whenever we fought, th0ugh usually Marcus was quite good – with Cato's help – at isolating her from any violence, except sometimes, sometimes...

  Marcus stood over me, his chest heaving as his shoulders started to relax. He looked over his shoulder, the spines receding into his skin. His brow furrowed as he closed his eyes, breathing deeply. When the last black hair had disappeared he knelt down next to Perdita and placed his hand under her chin.

  “We were just having a bit of a disagreement. No hard feelings, eh?” he asked, craning his neck to look at me. His eyes carried a warning that I heeded, my self preservation instinct coming into play.

  “No hard feelings, none at all,” I said. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet and busied myself with looking through the drawers for a torch or something else I could use as a light source, being careful not to make eye contact with Marcus. A warm trickle of blood ran down the side of my face. I pushed the pain out of mind as much as I could. Marcus terrified us all when he became enraged. Cato was slowly starting to return to his normal size, watching Marcus cautiously, his body growing in fits and starts as his fear diminished. Perdita started rolling an empty tin can under her palm, balance once again restored in her family.

  In the end I gave up. All I had found was a half full disposable lighter which would give us a little illumination but nowhere near enough to investigate the cellar fully. It had been lying under an old ordnance survey map which I opened and spread out across the floor. I ran my index finger around the edge of a small burn, maybe caused by a cigarette. It was towards the centre of...

  “Come on, get up scoutmaster. You're going first, I'm not slipping on some wet steps unless I can land on your soft head,” said Marcus, grabbing the back of my collar and dragging me to my feet. He pushed me towards the door, his hand twisting the wool of the sweater so that it tightened around my neck. I struggled and eventually shook myself free, smoothing my clothes down.

  “Fine, I'll go,” I said begrudgingly. I pushed the door open slowly, flicking the flint on the lighter. The thin morning light barely made it three feet in to the cellar, the clouds seeing fit to conspire with this house against me.

  In the gentle orange glow of the lighter the shadows in the cellar seemed even more pronounced, ebbing and flowing with the flickering of the flame. The walls of the steps were made up of stone interspersed with rough and ready shelving used to hold various cleaning products. I could see the brick steps leading down ahead a little, before turning sharply left. I was about to take another step into the darkness when I felt a tapping on my shoulder. I turned around to see the face of Cato, who was holding out a large kitchen knife balanced on his palms. I slowly picked it up by its worn wooden handle and nodded in thanks to him. The small man scuttled off and I was left alone to face the gloom again.

  Even though I was only wearing socks each step I took seemed thunderous within the chilly confines of the cellar, and I was sure that if anyone was hiding in the shadows they would know I was coming. Perhaps they were equally as handicapped by the absolute darkness, or perhaps not. If my only friends were such a twisted unorthodox family then there was no telling what things could exist in this strange new land.

  A few more steps, six, seven. I stopped momentarily to breathe, realising I had been holding my breath without realising it. I tried my best to relax my lungs slowly and quietly but my body was shaking and there was an audible wheeze. There was somehow an answering creak and rustling from below, though I had no way of telling what had made the noise. When I breathed back in I was assaulted by a rank odour that cut through my other senses and demanded my full attention. I gagged involuntarily before regaining my composure. I could feel Marcus' eyes boring into the back of my skull, forcing me downwards.

  The way ahead was both empty and horrifically full of limitless possibilities. In the faint orange light I could see there was a broom leaning against the wall on the turn of the steps and I had to step a little to the side of it to get past, which pushed my head into an overhanging web. I felt the thin wisps rush to cling to my cheek and there was the faintest suggestion of movement near to my ear. My heart pounded in the blackness as my mind ran wild with images of jointed, hairy legs brushing against my skin, pulling me towards glistening mandibles. The creaking became louder.

  It was too much. I jerked and stumbled, feet skidding on the brickwork in my soft, useless socks. I fell. My knee hit the floor awkwardly and the rest of my body followed, landing hard on the plastic covered bricks of the cellar floor. My lighter had gone out but not before burning my hand, forcing me to drop it. The knife clattered away into the void. As the dark crushed my senses I once again heard the creak, close by to my left. My hand moved around on the floor, almost by itself, trying to find my only salvation. I had become paralysed, the cold wet floor my only reference point. The roof could have been ten feet or ten thousand feet above me, it would have made no difference. There was only the sound.

  My hand closed around the lighter. I didn't light it, not at first. This was the turning point, the last moment I had of sweet ignorance.

  I have no idea how long I stayed there, my eyes alternating between tightly closed and wide open as I tried to make out something that would give me some clue as to what was out there, without revealing the fearful whole. The smell was truly nauseating here, almost sweet with rot and mustiness. All the time the creaking and rustling reverberated around me, never further, never closer. Eventually, because I had nothing else, I flicked the lighter into life.

  It was strange how the first thing I truly took note of was the stains on the corduroy trousers. I saw it all at the same time, of course. The brown boots, jerking towards me with spastic movements. The hands, almost black with clotted blood that was oozing from cracked and in some cases missing fingernails. The face, twisted towards me with clouded eyes that almost seemed ready to burst free of their sockets. The mouth was working, chewing the air noiselessly as the electrical chord around the thing's neck twisted and turned, spinning slowly around one way and then the other depending on the violent motions of the thing's limbs. The only sounds were the creaking from the beam that the body hung from and the rustle of its clothes against its body. It was all too much for me to take in though, so the first thought, the first true thought that I had outside of my base animal terror was that the stain on the trousers must be from urine and faeces, released when the man, this man who had taken such pride in his house, had hung himself from the neck until he was dead.

  I staggered out of the cellar, vomiting noisily onto the kitchen floor. Marcus laughed as I thrust open the back door to the garden and collapsed outside on the grass, letting the continuing torrent of rain wash me clean. My soul felt tarnished and grubby. We had stolen the house of a dead man, and he had k
nown we were there.

  Marcus followed me out, swaggering as he pulled a newly acquired coat around himself.

  “Get some composure,” he said, crouching down next to me, his boots heavy in the muddy turf. “We have to go back down there. Get a grip.”

  “Not me, no, you go. I can't...” I had said in a pitifully small voice, weaker than Cato's reedy tones. Marcus grabbed my shoulder and once again hauled me to my feet. The shock of the movement brought on a fresh bout of vomiting but Marcus held me firm.

  “This is our house now. This is our survival. I know there are questions but we'll answer them down there. After all... aren't you curious?”

  “What about?” I asked, slowly walking back towards the house under duress. Even though the clouds were moving quickly across the sky they were still the colour of deep bruises in every direction. The rain was not going to stop, not for a while.

  “About why he survived the hanging,” said Marcus, spotting a small shed nestled against the back wall of the house. Its rain soaked door flapped backwards and forwards in the wind, scattering peeling varnish. He pulled the door open and went inside, rifling quickly through the various rusting garden implements and bags of fertilizer. I turned away, opening my mouth to the heavens and letting the rain pour into my mouth, washing away the bitter taste of bile. I spat the water out and wiped a hand across my lips before replying.

  “He didn't survive, did he. He's dead, for at least two weeks judging by the level of putrefaction, even taking into account the lower temperature of the cellar...” I said, leaning on the door frame to the kitchen. I could see Perdita wandering through into the study, deciding to explore a bit more. Cato had closed the door to the cellar and was leaning against it, breathing heavily, his eyes as wide as saucers and staring right through me.