Theater Macabre (5 page)

The chill crept into my clothes and made a home there. Wrestling with my underwear until I could walk without them carving a groove in my thigh, I stumbled on as far as the Causeway, where I stopped and leaned against the chain to look out over the dark water.

Boats undulated silently on unseen waves.

Somewhere out there a buoy clanged a funeral toll.

Somewhere out there my friends had taken a breath and the tide had filled their lungs.

I started to imagine it, then bent over the chain and retched. There was nothing left of me to offer the sea, so I straightened, wiped tears from my eyes and moved away, whispering a fond farewell to my fallen comrades. Quickly followed it with, “Fucking eejits, the two of ye,” and stepped back.

Right out onto the fucking road.

The last thing I remember are a pair of blazing lights.

Attached to them, a car.

*

Anyone who wakes up in a hospital and says he doesn’t know where he is, is a daft prick. There are clear indicators.

The smell of shit floating in a bottle of bleach.

All the people walking around with stiff smiles and white clothing, oozing rehearsed concern from every pore.

The machinery. If you find yourself hooked up to anything, you’re either a junkie, or a patient.

The sheer cleanliness of it. Everything is white, like a practice run for Heaven, if such a place exists. The staff here clearly thinks so.

After coming to and surveying my surrounds, I closed my eyes and ran an internal diagnostic, as they used to say on
Star Trek
, hoping I could get at least a passing idea of how bad my injuries were before the doctor had a chance to tell me.

I was breathing. That was a start.

I could move my head, my hands.

Couldn’t move my legs.

Fuck.

When a doctor finally arrived, he looked me over, stuck a light in my eye, hummed thoughtfully, prodded my legs with what looked like a pencil, hummed again and stood at the foot of my bed jotting something down on his clipboard. I measured the length of his silence by the beeps from the machine to my left.

“Well…?” I asked after what felt like an hour.

He peered at me over his glasses. “You’re lucky to be alive, Mr. Kelly.”

“Call me Ger.”

“Ger.”

“What happened?”

“Hit and run, they’re saying.”

“Bollocks. What’s the damage?” I could have been talking to a mechanic about repairs to my car.

“You’re paralyzed from the waist down. I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound it.

“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “Fix it.”

“Not sure we can,” he replied in that same emotionless tone, the same one I imagined him using to tell family members their loved one had died.
Nothing more we could do. My condolences.

“Not sure?”

“You broke your back, Mr. Kelly.”

“It’s Ger.”

“Ger. There’s extensive trauma to the vertebrae, multiple lacerations to the spinal column. T-2 ab—”

“Hey Doc?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t watch
ER.
”

“Excuse me?”

“Speak English, or so help me, legs or no legs I’ll throw this fucking machine at you.”

“I’ll have to ask you to keep your voice down.”

“And I’ll have to ask you to tell me the long-term diagnosis before I realize the potential my dead legs have as bludgeons.”

He screwed up his face as if I was some curiosity just off the boat from the Galapagos. “We’re going to keep you here for a while. See what we can do. But for now it’s best to be realistic. The chances of you walking again, barring a miracle, aren’t good.”

I stared at him for a moment, brushing aside the awesome implications of what he’d just told me in favor of anger.

“I bet you’re a real treat at parties.”

*

I was there a day and a half before I had any visitors.

My family.

Gathered around me, wailing and sobbing and praying like a bunch of religious fanatics whose lilac bushes had caught fire and delivered to them instructions on how to save the world.

They fawned over me, all my sins forgiven, asked me if there was anything I needed.

I said, “Yeah. My legs.”

They smiled sadly. “We’ll pray for you.”

Told them, “Thanks.”

When they’d left, I instructed the nurse to take all their flowers and cards and toss them in the trash.

“Maybe someone else would like them?” she suggested.

I had been about to tell her where else she could put them, but registered how pretty she was, and how genuine her smile looked, so said instead, “Sure. If you can find another “Dear Ger” in here, feel free.” She was pleased, and with the help of another nurse, gathered up the flowers and cards and made off with them.

They tried to put pajamas on me. I refused them. The stripy cotton reminded me too much of prison blues, though I didn’t bother telling them that.

My world became a monotony of beeps and catheters and runny food and sponge baths. The latter ritual I might have enjoyed if the part of me that could appreciate such things hadn’t been out of order.

Three weeks to the day I’d been admitted, Mick Molloy came to see me. I’d been expecting him, and said as much as he drew a folding metal chair close to my bedside and sat down.

“Why’s that?” he asked, and set another bloody bouquet down on the table. Orchids. There was a small white card stuffed among them.

“Well, because I’m sure you couldn’t wait to see the result of your handiwork.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The Murphy brothers. Drowned. Roger Kennedy. OD’ed. Me, paralyzed. The four fellas who beat you to a pulp years ago. You going to tell me you had nothing to do with it?”

He spread his hands. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“The fuck you don’t. You’re a sick bastard, Molloy, and when I’m back on my feet I can promise I’ll be paying you a visit. You had a score to settle and you settled it, but I’m still alive and now I have one of my own. And believe me, you’re going to be sorry for what you’ve done.”

He sighed. “You know my father taught me how to fight?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“I was fourteen and the school bully’s favorite target. I got tired of being beaten, so I told my father. He took me down to the basement and toughened me up. The beatings he gave me made the bully’s look like an Indian burn. Taught me how to fight back. And I did. Hit the bully with a left hook, right in the mouth. Then he broke my arm.”

“I’m not interested in your sob stories, Molloy. You’re a pathetic waste of space, and you’re lucky I can’t stand right now.”

“Do you think I did this to you?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

“What if it was just karma, or fate?”

“I don’t buy into any of that hippie bollocks.”

“Maybe you should. Things have a way of working out in favor of the kind.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.” There was button on a lead next to my bed. I reached for it, thumbed the button, summoning the nurse. I’d had it with Molloy. My temper demanded I at least try to hurt him, but the lingering shred of reason that ran like a vein of silver through a hard mountain told me I’d be the one who suffered most. The painkillers were doing a good job of making me feel damn near invincible, but already I’d felt the sheer enormity of the pain that came without them, so I restrained myself. I’d heal, I promised myself. I’d get better, and when I did, I’d tear this fucker to pieces with my bare hands.

“Bad men meet bad ends,” Molloy said, rising. “It’s not always the fault of their victims.”

“Oh you’re some victim all right,” I seethed. “Fucking psychopath is what you are.”

He smiled, almost serenely. “I’m sorry for you. Get well soon.”

“Better hope I don’t, you prick.”

He was gone before the nurse arrived with her faux concern, and by then I didn’t need her. She looked frustrated, so to give her something to do, I instructed her to dump the flowers Molloy had brought. She obeyed, but paused as she was leaving.

“There’s a card.”

“Big deal.”

“Want me to read it?”

“No.”

“It’s sweet.”

I sighed, looked out the window at a construction crane hoisting girders over the city. “Sweet,” I echoed, and said nothing more. The nurse interpreted it as a cue to continue.

“It says: ‘Hope to see you back on your feet soon. Catch you later!—Mick’.”

She gave a little hum of approval, then I listened as her soft-soled shoes squeaked away. I clenched my fists, willed the tension in them to run down to my legs, to infuse them with the life they’d forgotten, demanded they remember.

They lay there, useless. Not so much as a twitch.

I thought of Molloy’s card and grit my teeth.

The ambiguity of his words was not lost on me.

He would be waiting for me when I got out.

They always were, the bastards.

Always. Ready to raise their arms to show you the old wounds bleeding anew, to remind you how far your shadow stretched behind you.

I looked down at my legs. Thin bodies beneath a shroud. Unmoving.

Felt tears clog my throat at the memory of Molloy’s words:
I’ve always had this wounded animal thing.

I wept freely, bringing nurses to my stricken form like firemen to a blaze. My anguished cries echoed for a long time.

Catch you later.

Ravens

A fluttering.

Faye nodded grimly. “He’s dead.”

Tabitha backed away, out of the headlights and into the dark, the horror still visible on her face like the moon hidden behind clouds. “Oh Christ Jesus, what are we going to do?”

“Not panic, for starters,” Faye said, and rose from where she’d been crouching next to the body.

“But…” Tabitha said, on the verge of hysteria. “But we
killed
him.”

Faye shook her head. “I don’t think we did.”

“What do you mean?”
“His eyes are gone and I’m not sure but I think his tongue might be too. There are holes all over the poor bastard I don’t think were made by gravel.”

Tabitha’s panic had faded to desperation, a need to believe. “Are you sure? Maybe when we hit him…”

“No. Someone or something maimed this guy and sent him stumbling out in front of our car.”

Tabitha moved back into the light. She almost smiled, then looked to her right, into the impenetrable darkness of the woods beside the road. “Then that means—”

“Yeah. It means I’m not feeling as safe as I’d like to. Let’s get going.”

“But shouldn’t we tell someone?”

“We will. Next town over, we’ll tell the cops.”

“Will they believe us?”

A shadow burst screeching from the trees.

Both women screamed and turned. Faye, arms raised to ward off an attack, almost laughed when she saw the raven swooping over their heads to alight on the gnarled branch of a naked pine at the opposite side of the road. Even Tabitha laughed, though her eyes were still wide with fright.

“I almost wet myself,” Faye said with a sigh. “Too much excitement for one night.”

Tabitha nodded. “Not a good omen for the rest of the vacation, huh?”

Vacation
. Though Faye merely smiled, she was still amazed at the innocent term her sister used for what they were doing. Running from an abusive father they had murdered was hardly a vacation.

“Okay, let’s get moving.” She made her way around to the driver seat.

The raven cawed, cocked its head to watch. Around it, its kin settled in the tree with a fluttering of wings.

“Peace, brother,” Faye told the bird and grinned at her sister, who slipped into the passenger seat and sighed heavily as Faye started the car. A lifetime of watching horror movies told her it wouldn’t start, but cough and splutter, leaving them stranded at the mercy of cannibal rednecks or some deranged lunatic recently checked out of a local loony bin. But it started on the first try and they drove on, the flutter of a thousand wings like imitation darkness in the rearview mirror, then gone. The headlights speared the road ahead.

“Relax,” Faye said. “It can only get better from here.”

Tabitha nodded and closed her eyes, but only for a moment. Too long and she remembered what they’d done to their father, the surprise on his face when his beloved daughters had unfolded their wings and pecked out his eyes.

Keepsakes

“You want me to wait?” the cab driver asks and Hank gives the hollow pair of eyes in the smudged rearview mirror a single shake of his head. A thick-fingered hand is thrust over the foul-smelling tweed of the driver’s jacket and Hank feeds it an uncounted bounty of bills. A hum and a chuckle of greedy approval and he is let go, out of the smoke-choked interior of the peeling yellow cab and into the cool soothing night. Around him, the myriad canopies of summer leaves hiss impressions of rain better suited to another season.

“It’s condemned, you know,” the cabbie mutters around his cheroot, an irritating trace of amusement coloring his tone. When he receives no reply, he grunts and drives away, blue ghosts swirling after his vehicle until reddened by the taillights and rent asunder by his passage.

Hank feels the chill lick his skin and shudders to accommodate it. Leaves and twigs crackle beneath his worn leather shoes as he turns slowly, delicately on a heel and looks ahead as far as nature’s arch of browbeaten walnut trees will allow. The night presses heavily against him, spectral fingers bidding him hurry. Gnarled limbs wave at him as he makes his way through the patchwork of shifting light and shadow to the steps.

“
Your wife just needs some time to think,” they told me and fool was I to believe them. “Some time without you,” they said as they led me with firm hands up the main steps to those high glass doors. The sun blinded me, kept me from seeing what lay within what proved to be a narrow but impossibly high, almost cathedral-like structure full of blacked-out windows and half-heard cries.