OCTOBER TERROR – “Power Cut” by Christopher Law

Power Cut

Christopher Law

 

It took me a few minutes after waking to realise where I was, my mind still muddled by sleep and the drugs in my system. Then I became aware of the antiseptic smell and the soft hum of the machines I’m connected to, the distant sound of people talking quietly beyond the curtains and the crisp feel of the sheets and blankets, the unmistakeable firmness of a hospital bed. I might have realised quicker if I could see but I was born blind; my world is one of touch and sound.

I wasn’t alarmed, although that might have been the drugs. My entire life before that moment was jumbled and distant, as if I had slept for years. I wasn’t in pain and, so far as I could tell, I was physically intact. I thought about calling for help but it seemed like something that could wait and I drifted back into sleep, certain everything would be explained in due course, my sleepy mind dismissing the whole experience as a vivid dream, strange but benign.

The second time I woke, my wife was sitting beside me, her perfume cutting through the hospital smell. My thoughts were much clearer and I tried to say hello to her, belatedly realising that whatever had happened to me might have involved her as well. The guilt I felt at not thinking of the risk to her sooner was washed away by the simultaneous relief that she was okay.

That was when I realised there was a tube running down my throat, working my lungs without any involvement from me. The alarm I hadn’t felt the first time I woke arrived, hysterically focusing on the tube, the plastic taste and feel of it. Physically, I still felt perfectly fine, but if I was on a ventilator that clearly wasn’t correct. I tried again, hoping to make some kind of noise to alert my wife, since talk was impossible. No sound emerged, my lips and tongue immobile.

I’m a solicitor, my days spent in the intricacies of inheritance laws in Britain and beyond. I get paid to sit and think, trusted to find the best way around the tax regimes and idiosyncratic laws of a dozen countries. I pushed my panic down, forced the fear into a corner and tried to raise my hand, reaching for my wife.

I couldn’t move my hand, couldn’t even twitch a finger. I felt the command leave my mind, travel down my arm, but nothing happened at the far end. My emotions harder to control now, I thrashed and screamed within the confines of my mind, trying to wake myself from the dream. I lay motionless, able to feel the blankets over my body and the IV tubes in my arms, the bunged-up sensation from the catheters dealing with my waste. I could feel everything, I just couldn’t move.

I was still trying when I heard the chair scrape as my wife stood up, felt her kiss me.

“I know you are in there, sweetheart. I’ll be back later, I love you.”

After she left me alone with my thoughts I continued to try until I was worn out and drifted back into sleep, my dreams dominated by increasingly clear and coherent memories of my life before this bed. On the verge of sleep I thought I could sense someone come to my bedside; if so, they were silent and left before I woke again.

 

The day when everything changed was almost like any other – the first day of the three weeks annual leave I’d taken for our silver wedding anniversary. The actual date wasn’t until ten days later, by which time we’d be in the Seychelles, and my wife still had a full week before her own leave started. I’d taken the extra week to take care of the last few bits and bobs before our flight on Saturday, as well as devote a few days to working on my book. It’s a collection of the quirkier cases that have come before British courts I’ve been working on since my post-grad days. I like to claim it would be finished by now if it didn’t take so long to get Braille copies of the source material, or I had the money to pay a team of full-time transcribers. That’s probably not true but procrastination, excuses and the written word are ancient bedfellows.

I allowed myself a lie-in that morning, waking long enough to kiss my wife goodbye as she left and then allowing myself to doze until almost eleven, Scrabble and the cat beside me on the bed. Scrabble is my guide-dog and the cat is a stray that chose us a few years ago, an elderly queen that likes to groom Scrabble, my wife and sometimes me. My wife says the three of us look adorable when we’re all asleep, Scrabble by my feet and the cat on my chest.

It was a glorious day in mid-April, full of the promise of a glorious summer when spring’s riot was done. After a lazy, indulgent morning I listened to the one o’clock news on BBC One, unable to look away from the interminable wars in the Middle East and the fallout of Trump’s election. It would have broken my father’s heart to see what has become of his home country. He always thought it probable after the incompetence of Bush-Clinton-Bush. It’s a blessing he died in two-thousand-nine.

After the news I left, as much because Scrabble needed to do her business as the errands I had to run. We went the long route into town, through the park and then along the seafront. It was half-term and the park was noisy with children, the swings and skatepark bustling. I sat on a bench for an hour or so, my fingers running over the patterned dots of my book – a so-so police procedural. If it had been quieter, I might have paid more attention to the insults sent my way by the group of thuggish malcontents but not by much. I’m disabled and I look more like my Arabic father more than my English mother. I’m used to the abuse.

When we finally reached town we went to the bank first. I got the foreign currency needed for our holiday and double-checked that our travel insurance was adequate. It took the kid who served me almost fifteen minutes to find a Braille copy of the terms and conditions but he was so mortified that I had to let him off. I expect things to take a little longer, be a little more difficult, because I experience the world a little differently to most. The delay gave me time, as an afterthought, to get some Travellers Cheques. We weren’t travelling anywhere unstable or dangerous but I like to have a few cheques with me just in case.

After the bank I ran a few more errands – the chemist for the collection of pills my ageing wife and I require, then the dry-cleaners. The night before our flight we were throwing a party for our friends and families. It was going to be a big affair, all the money we might have spent on university fees for our children just sitting in our account, earning more interest a year than we tended to spend.

We’d both have rather had the children. We tried for years before we had to give-up, both of us scoring badly on the fertility front. Another round of IVF was financially possible but we’d failed so many times neither of us could face it again, even if the doctors hadn’t advised against it. After that, we looked at adoption but the agencies and government never liked my blindness. They couldn’t explain why it was a problem, it just was.

The situation couldn’t be changed, not without going to lengths neither of us was willing to contemplate. So, with more money than we’ve ever known what to do with, our gaggle of nephews and nieces have tidy sums waiting for them when they hit eighteen and more in store when my wife and I die, like a lot of other people. We update our wills every couple of years, if nothing requires it sooner. No-one will be left never needing to work again but, if they’re wise, they’ll live a whole better than they would have.

Finally, feeling good, I went to The Leg for a pint and cigar. I’m not really a smoker or a drinker, my father was the one with the problem, but occasionally I like to indulge.

 

“I don’t care what the tests say,” my wife is speaking in the low, controlled way she does when she’s truly angry. She’s holding my hand as she speaks, her perfume not as strong as usual. I can tell from the way she’s squeezing my hand that she’s upset. I’m doing my best to make my fingers move, to squeeze her hand in return. “He’s still in there. I know it. I’m not going to let you. I won’t.”

It has been months, almost a year, since I first woke and I’m in a different hospital bed – a private room where the flowers and air-fresheners are almost enough to overpower the bleach and phenol. I was moved here when the NHS couldn’t afford to keep pursuing a lost cause and, unless I’ve forgotten how to count and analyse since I became trapped, I know the private health insurance has also declared me gone. Everything keeping me alive is being paid for from our savings. No matter how she juggles, the money must be almost gone. Everything I’ve suffered, trapped in my own mind, screaming and begging before gods and demons I’ve never believed in, can be no worse than what she is going through, left alone in the world.

“I understand,” the doctor is on the other side of my bed. His English is good but there’s a trace of somewhere Eastern European in his accent. His voice comes from above me, my wife’s from one side. The doctor is a tall man, barrel chested from the depth of his voice. “He seems like he’s just sleeping, like he might wake at any moment, but he isn’t. I hate to say it, but he is gone and all any of us – me and you – can do is prolong his suffering. We have to let him go. Honour his wishes. His living will.”

I’m in here! Your tests are wrong! Your machines are wrong! I’m in here! I don’t care what I signed!

I’d scream it if I could but I’m still unable to breathe for myself, my fingers and toes as immobile as they’ve been since the first time I woke. I can feel everything as well as I ever could, maybe even better, and my mind is as capable as it ever was – I calculate immense sums and list the facts I know to keep my mind from wandering. It sounds arrogant without verification, but I’m right most of the time and, with so much free time, I find the mistakes when I review my work. It’d be harder if I could see, I’m sure – if I needed visual markers rather than mental to keep track. Arrogant, maybe, but also true.

The bits of my brain that make me who I am, the elusive corners where the soul lies, are as healthy as they’ve been since I was born. It’s the cruder parts, the animal control centres they can monitor, that have broken. They have wires and sensors all over my body, but none of them can register my thoughts. They can only monitor the electrical impulses that make muscles twitch, keep our lungs pumping and our hearts beating.

I read an article about this a while back, there’s a name for what I’m living through. All those coma patients, the ones in persistent vegetative states, who suddenly recover and rejoin the world, their waiting loved ones. You know the story, a staple of melodramas and soap operas. I’m one of those coma patients, one of the shut-ins.

In the past, we were the ones who were buried alive and somehow managed to break through our coffins, burrow through the dirt and be murdered as revenants and vampires. Now we are simply left to listen, trapped and unable to act, as we are abandoned, as our loved ones lose hope and the confines of our minds get closer and closer.

My wife read the same article, we had a long conversation with some friends about the implications and the horror of finding ourselves in that situation. At the time, my flippant best coming out after a few too many, I said I’d rather be killed and my donor card obeyed – take everything and anything that might help someone still alive and leave the rest for the worms. Now that I’m here, listening to my wife do her best to keep her hope alive, trying to do right by me, I wish I’d said something else.

My silent visitor, the one who never leaves, is happy I didn’t. I can’t tell you how I know this, given that the visitor never makes a noise, not even a breath or a sigh. I just feel the presence by my bedside, know that someone’s there, watching me die. The feeling has been growing stronger recently, feeding on my increasing fear as I know my wife’s deadline approaches.

 

“Ain’t it ‘gainst yer religion to drink?”

There was a powerful stench of body-odour coming from the thug leaning against the bar next to me, far too strong to be masked by the cheap deodorant he had sprayed over his clothes. There was also a hint of cigarette smoke and lager in the stench. Blind as I am, I could still see his bald head and red face, the gut straining at his England football shirt

I can’t say for sure if I recognised the thug’s voice as one of the ones that had shouted at me in the park. In retrospect, I have no doubt and can’t help but wish that Scrabble – who did recognise him – had been able to overcome her training and attack him first. She only rose from where she had been lying by my feet and pushed her head into my hand. She was a guide-dog, one of the best. They never bite.

“I’m not religious,” I said, working my thumb against the base of Scrabble’s ear. I could feel her trembling. “Just having a drink.”

They’d been working me for an hour, ever since I entered the pub. Perhaps I should have turned right around and taken the dry-cleaning home, cracked one of the Japanese beers in the fridge, but I’ve been drinking in The Leg since we bought our home. Our house is in my wife’s hometown and she’s been drinking in The Leg since she got her first fake ID. It’s a good, mellow place most of the time, favoured by leftists and wierdos – the sort of people who don’t get freaked by blind secular Arabs. I’ve been getting grief from bigots since I was born, I figured I’d just ride it out like I always had.

It started with the normal crap, the cheekier members of the group who’d drifted in putting bags and bottles in my way in the hope that I’d trip, probably pulling faces and making gestures – their kind always did. I didn’t respond to any of it, Scrabble leading me around the obstacles she couldn’t push aside with her nose. She was my third guide-dog and, much as I loved the previous two, she was the best by far.

I smoked my cigar, bought from the tin behind the counter, and drank my first pint in the beer-garden. I was feeling good and I knew my wife would be working late that day; I had plenty of time to nap away the effects of a second. I chose to drink it at the bar, chatting to the landlord. We’ve know each other for almost thirty years, in a casual way. I didn’t stop to think that there might be a problem brewing. Maybe I was too trusting.

“Ain’t religious?” the thug laughed. “All you Pakis are religious, it’s in yer DNA.”

“I’m not Pakistani. My dad was Syrian,” I can’t say for certain, having never been able to see, but I’m fairly sure Syrians and Pakistanis don’t look that much alike, beyond not being European.

“Whatever. Yer all in the same game. Ain’t they?”

The final comment was shouted out to his friends, who obediently cackled and howled, some of them calling me names and the others asking where I’d hidden my bomb. One of them started to sing Rule Britannia, but he didn’t know the words and was too drunk to enunciate.

“It’s time for you to leave,” the landlord said, his voice thick with embarrassment and disgust. “Now.”

“We ain’t leavin’,” the thug jeered. “I just got a fuckin’ round in.”

“Then drink ’em quick and get out. You aren’t welcome here.”

“Ain’t welcome? You hear that, lads – we ain’t welcome in our own country?”

My memories are still jumbled after that, I don’t know exactly what happened or in what order. The thugs took exception to the request to leave, leapt on the opportunity for violence. From what my wife has said whilst she’s been sat by my side, holding my hand, I know that they were a gang of English fascists, on the prowl for a scrap. They’d have taken on some of their own kind but they saw me in the park and then bad luck landed them in my local.

They’re all doing time now, writing illiterate Tweets on the mobile phones they smuggled in up their arses and selling the drugs brought in by drone. They could be serving their time in a Siberian Gulag, breaking rocks in the nude, and it wouldn’t be enough to compensate for everything I’ve lost. No amount of suffering could equal my inability to control my own body, let my wife know that all I want is to hold and kiss her again. My unfinished book, the labour of my life, and our luxury holiday are minor details when set against the knowledge that I will never feel her in my arms, never bury my face in her hair again.

At night, when I’m alone and the ward beyond my door is quiet, I amuse myself with the things I’d do to them if I ever could, the things I’d pay to have done if I couldn’t do them myself. Those are the times when my silent visitors feel closest, the air tense as if the right cue to speak is due.

There was a lot of shouting and yelling after The Leg’s landlord told them to go and then, delighted by the opportunity, the thugs threw me to the ground, stamped on my head and ribs. One of them pulled the landlord over the bar, his bloated heart failing halfway down so that they only battered his corpse. Glasses and bottles flew everywhere – I can hear the sound of them breaking whenever I want – and Scrabble forgot her placidity training and tried to bite and maul as she defended me. One of them attacked her with a broken bottle, lost a finger or two but still killed her.

With a double murder on their hands (they thought they’d killed me too) and cocaine mingling with alcohol in their system, thrilled by the glory of violence, the thugs fled The Leg and did everything they could to spark a race-riot. They were brought down in less than twenty minutes, unable to find enough support for their brand of murderous hate.

I was found with my skull cracked open and my lungs punctured, both of them. My arms and legs were broken and one of them had ground a jagged bottleneck into my groin before he ran into the street, screaming for the Pakis and Yids to come out and meet him. About a month ago my wife told me that, no longer fuelled by cocaine and booze, he hung himself in his cell, broken by the real hard men.

I hope he suffered, I don’t care that he was only eighteen. I hope he suffered. If my visitor chose to speak, I’m sure I’d hear that he did.

 

“It’s the right thing to do,” the doctor is talking to my wife again, standing on the opposite side of the bed from her, like I’m not even here. “I’d choose a different outcome if I could, I really would, but…”

“I understand,” I’ve never heard her sound so small, so broken. She’s still holding my hand, I’d give my soul to squeeze her fingers – I’d give it to twitch the tip of my pinky. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” she hitches, strangles a sob. “I can’t. This can’t be real, please…it can’t be real.”

“You loved him, I can’t ever know how deeply, but you have to do this. Let us honour what he wanted, who he was – let us donate his organs.”

“I know it’s what I should do, what he wants,” her tears are falling now, I can feel them dripping on my cheeks as she bends down to kiss me. I want nothing more than to flex my fingers, arch my back, anything. “I know I must let him go.”

“He’s been gone for a long time. All you can do is remember him.”

It isn’t quick when they flip the switch. The hum of the machines and the static in the air fade quickly, but gradually – like slipping under the water in your bathtub. My attempts to refuse, make the machines keep me alive for just another day, all fail. My chest stops rising and falling, my heart stops beating.

My visitor finally steps forward, lays a hand on my chest and says something I can’t quite hear and for the first time in my life I can see.

The gates and walls of Heaven are more glorious than you can imagine. I’m new to colour so I am perhaps a little easier to impress than you but the gold tracery catching the sun, the pristine white of the marble look exactly how they feel, softer than kitten fur and smoother than silk. A man born with working eyes would be as incapable as I of describing what I see as I float, lighter than air, towards the gates.

I will be with my wife again behind those walls, the years that I have to wait before she joins me a time of joyful anticipation. The children we never had will join us there, the violence and hate my life ended with all wiped away. My father will be there, ready to use action-figures so I can feel the fights between the good and bad guys, my eyes closed so I can remember that the blindness is a part of me, intrinsic to who I am. I know that, as I draw closer to the gates, I will be blind again behind those walls and I do not mind – these moments of sight are all the proof I need to believe.

Then the path to the gates crumbles away and the walls become pockmarked. I feel hands and claws around my ankles, working up towards my knees. I see my wife above the crumpled gates, standing over the arch and framed by the ever higher walls that rise behind her. I almost hear her scream my name as my tongue tries to call hers.

It is a terrible fall, down towards the churning ocean of blood, flames licking the shores. All the way down, the malformed eagles and vultures scream and hiss at me, delighting in the fact that I glimpsed Heaven and they are hunting me.

I land abruptly, my new bed made of rock and inset with upturned nails that pierce my ankles and wrists, make a scattered line along my spine.

“Welcome,” I’m blind again and cannot see the monster above me, only feel the acidic sting of its warm spittle. The feel of it in the air is the same as my silent visitor. “You saw Heaven, belonged there, but things have changed, my little love.”

I hear the screams echoing all around me, feel a hundred tiny hands cutting and peeling my skin back. I try not to think of my wife, hope she never thinks of me – the connection will drag her down. I understand so much, see the futility of hope, now that I am in this place. I can’t help but think of her, all the good things and the bad. The bad loom larger and larger as the pain increases until I can’t remember what the good things were.

“Innocence burns now,” my tormentor laughs, ripping my testicles away with one hand as the other digs into my midriff. “Hell is the fate waiting for us all. Heaven is no more.”

I’d not be here if the machines were running, if my wife hadn’t let the doctors flip the switch. As I lose the last of my purity and hope, I want her to come suffer with me.


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About the author

CHRISTOPHER LAW

Christopher Law is the author of Chaos Tales, Chaos Tales II: Hell TV and the soon to be released Chaos Tales III: Infodump, plus a gaggle of other shorts and a clutch of novels he will get published.

 

You can find him on Facebook as Christopher Law Horror Writer and at evilscribbles.wordpress.com. Other than that he’s rather dull and middle-aged, still has a great view of the castle apart from the hill in the way and is thinking about getting some kittens.

 

Find him on his Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/evilscribbles/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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1 Comment

  1. A journey from a living hell to an actual one. Our unforgivable behaviour here on Earth has finally destroyed Heaven. Big themes that would normally take a whole novel to explore are successfully addressed in this confident short piece that moves disturbingly between physical and psychological torture.

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