The Dead Place

‘Ben, calm down. The senior nurse came to the hospital with her and stayed for two hours until I sent her back. The manager’s been on the phone twice to see how Mum is. They’re all concerned about her.’

‘So they should be. They’ve got some questions to answer.’

Matt took a drink of his coffee, but Ben didn’t even lift his cup. He found that his hand was shaking with anger, and he knew he would only spill it.

Someone had left a copy of the evening paper on the table, folded to the top half of the front page. Ben could see only the first inch of a photograph above the fold, but he recognized it straight away. He’d been looking at it for a large part of the day. At least Media Relations had done their job properly.

‘When will Mum be awake?’ he said.

‘They want to keep her sedated until they can do the X-rays and get her into theatre. Tomorrow we can talk to her, perhaps. But we can go and sit with her for a few minutes, if we ask the sister.’

Ben stared at his cooling coffee. It looked particularly unappealing now that the steam had vanished.

‘Let’s do that, then.’

‘It’s just a fall, Ben. A broken hip sounds bad at first, but she’s not all that old.’

‘Don’t you know what head injuries are like? Even a minor knock –’ Ben stopped, took a deep breath. ‘OK, I’m sorry. You think I’m overreacting.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Sorry, Matt,’ he said again. ‘Work, you know …’

‘Getting you down again?’

Ben didn’t like the ‘again’ part. As they walked back down the corridor towards the ward, he felt another surge of anger. He put his hand on Matt’s arm.

‘What’s the name of the manager at Old School?’

‘Robinson. Why?’

‘When I leave here, I’m going to go and see him.’

‘Ben, you wouldn’t do any good.’

‘I need to know exactly how this happened, and what they’re going to do about it.’

Matt took hold of his arm, gripping a little too tightly. His face was flushed a deeper red than usual, and he was breathing too heavily.

‘I’m warning you – don’t start lashing out at everyone you can find, Ben. You can’t get rid of your guilt feelings this way.’

Broken earth lay under her feet, like shards of glass. Two days of rain had splashed her legs with mud, and now it lay dark and damp in the cracks between her toes and in the line of an old fracture on her left thigh. Ants had emerged from the leaf mould on the woodland floor to wander among the stiff folds of her dress and crawl across her hands. One of them paused at her scentless flowers before climbing upwards. But it didn’t seem to know what to do when it reached her head. It wasn’t aware of the sky, or even of Alder Hall Woods. The ant saw only its own tiny patch of her body – an inch of her neck, its surface white and hard, and smooth to the touch.

That afternoon, someone had come into the woods. It was a figure wrapped in a coat and scarf against the wind, hands thrust into pockets, a canvas bag over one shoulder. The visitor had followed the path from the bottom of Alder Hall Quarry, crossed the stream and climbed the slope through the trees. At the edge of the clearing, the figure stopped for a few moments before moving into the open, then forced a way through the tall swathes of willowherb, oblivious to fragments of stem that caught on sleeves and clung to jeans.

Reaching the plinth, the visitor opened the canvas bag, took out a spray of flowers and placed them at the feet of the statue, then stood back to admire the arrangement. The sight brought a smile of satisfaction. The flowers were white chrysanthemums, suitable for a death.

* * *

MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE ONE

No one told me that the worst nightmares would come while I was still awake. No one ever warned me that I’d lie in my bed in the darkness, eyes wide open, praying for sleep. Those were the hours I spent counting faces in the wallpaper, seeing the shape of a monster where my clothes lay strewn on a chair. Those were the times I listened to the noises outside the house, listened as hard as I could, hoping I might make the noises inside go away. Finally, as the hours went by, there would be nothing left but the sounds of the night – the slither of the darkness as it crept across my roof.

Something lives in that darkness. It’s our greatest fear, and it’s called the unknown. Everyone knows this fear, but few of us dare to think about it. We’d never be able to go on living our lives if we really saw the grinning presence that waits behind our shoulder. It’s far better to pretend we don’t see the beast. We turn away our eyes and convince ourselves it’s just a shadow cast by the sun. It’s only a draught from an open window, a rustle of dead leaves on the other side of the door.

It’s the same fear for the child whose bedroom door has to stand open at night for a glimpse of light and for the old woman whose hand trembles as she draws back the bolts. In the end, we’re all destined to fall into the claws of that darkness we glimpse in our dreams. The great snatcher of souls, the unseen lurker on the threshold. What threshold would he lurk on, if not on the threshold of death?

Do you see that shadow now? Do you feel the chill, and hear the rustling?

These days, my dreams are different. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I see bodies moving inside their coffins. Their mouths twist, their limbs writhe, their hands open and close like claws as they reach towards the light. I try to make them settle down, to lie still so they can be buried. But it never does any good. In my dreams, the dead just won’t stop squirming.

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