Thicker Than Water

I couldn’t answer. To answer I would have had to stop playing, and some instinct told me that if I did that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back out of this place.

The thing that lived in the darkness growled soft and deep. It didn’t like being ignored. Mark, it said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.

I don’t have him, I thought. He’s dead. He’s already dead.

I was starting to lose the feeling in the tips of my fingers. I had no idea what stops I was pressing, what notes I was sounding. My chest felt impossibly constricted, as though it might shut down at any moment and stop the flow of air across the whistle’s mouthpiece.

The thing moved towards me, leisurely but with a heavy weight of purpose.

Not, it said.

I tried to back away, but my body didn’t really exist here and it didn’t even try to respond to the nerveless impulse. I was just a double handful of stiff, arthritic fingers groping along the cold metal of an object whose purpose I was starting to forget: a halting bellows blowing air over a spark I couldn’t see.

leave

I took the tune out into a wild cadenza - or at least I tried to, but I’d lost the feeling for it now. Playing on autopilot is a lost cause, ultimately. And it looked like I was one, too.

The unseen thing crouched to spring. How did I know, when I couldn’t fucking see it? Because I was tracking its voice through the muffled air - a diachronic line graph expressing an equation whose solution was my spilt intestines.

this

I blew a fingernails-on-blackboard discord - the last shot in my armoury. Sometimes it stops zombies and loup-garous undead in their tracks. Sometimes.

place!

Its hot, fetid breath was in my face, and there was a hideously suggestive sound - a sound like knives being stropped on a thick leather belt. I tried to flinch back, and couldn’t even do that.

So I did something else. Since my hands were the only part of me that could still move, I punched straight forward with both of them, the whistle still gripped between them, and they made contact with something that was moving fast towards me. In fact, they did more than make contact: they sank, forearm-deep, into a rushing, blood-warm mass. A jolt of pure agony shot through me: a pain that was to the twinges of last night’s beating what crack cocaine is to Coca-Cola.

The thing’s own speed and strength carried me backwards. The darkness broke into bright staccato fragments of light and sound. There was a moment when I was weightless in a booming void, my thoughts spilling out of my head like blood as I turned towards a distant pinprick of light - attuned to its feeble radiance like a sunflower on Pluto.

Then I was falling out of the chair onto the ward’s tiled floor, with as much momentum as if I’d been pitched out of a moving car.

‘Castor!’

It was Nurse Ryall’s voice, and Nurse Ryall’s hands on my forehead, stopping me from smashing my brains out as I spasmed. Every muscle in my body was convulsing at once, and I could taste my own blood in my mouth. I was fighting for breath but the band of pain across my chest made breathing almost impossible. I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.

‘Castor, it’s all right! It’s all right!’

It was, eventually, although the violent tremors running through me felt like small electric shocks. As they subsided, they left behind an enormous lethargy and lack of volition: a feeling that the only way I was ever going to move again was if someone rolled me down a grassy bank into a ditch. Nurse Ryall took my pulse and said soothing things: I could tell that from the tone of her voice, although the words themselves were just sounds. She wiped the bloody froth off my face where I’d bitten deep into my tongue. She helped me into a sitting position when I seemed to be capable of dealing with it. And the first question she asked, although I could see she was brimming with a million others, was ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ She was waving just the one in front of my eyes to see how they tracked it.

‘One,’ I said thickly. ‘Index. Right. Dark pink nail varnish.’

‘Fuchsia. What day is it?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Currently? Fƒ">‘"juelix Castor.’

Nurse Ryall smiled in spite of herself - but sadly she also disentangled her body from mine, correctly judging that mine was sufficiently recovered now to go solo. She stood up and brushed off her uniform. What is it about nurses’ uniforms that makes men fantasise about them? Mostly when you meet a nurse both your charisma and your libido are at their lowest ebb.

‘So did you get anywhere?’ she demanded, as I got up slowly and carefully on Slinky-spring legs. The footboard of Kenny’s bed was called into service.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I got somewhere.’ But I didn’t make any attempt to say where. That night-black terra incognita was beyond my power to describe.