Based on a work of art of the same title by Niall Parkinson
“Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.” – Dave Grohl
“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.” – Coco Chanel
He awoke with a start, hearing his smart phone vibrating on the nightstand. In one clumsy motion Robert swung his feet out from under the covers, sat upright and looked at the phone’s display for a millisecond before pressing the ‘ACCEPT’ icon and answering with a gruff, sleepy “Hello?” The name displayed had been Sunny Rest.
“Mr. Nelson?” the professional sounding voice on the other end of the line said. Robert felt the bed move slightly as the woman lying next to him tossed, mumbled something unintelligible, farted and apparently fell back to sleep.
Robert rolled his eyes in disgust and replied into the phone, “Yes. This is Robert Nelson. Is everything all right?”
The voice on the other end simply said, “It’s time, Mr. Nelson. You had better get over here as quickly as possible. She said she’s waiting for you, but I’m afraid she has little time left.”
“I’ll be right there,” Robert said quickly, springing to life, as he disconnected the call while gathering his various articles of clothing, which were strewn all about the floor. As he bent to pick up his underwear, he felt a whiskey induced belch rising in his throat and suppressed it feeling it might actually be vomit. He could taste the previous night’s alcohol churning inside him, and he preferred to keep in down if at all humanly possible.
He staggered over to a doorway in the unfamiliar bedroom which he hoped would lead to a hallway and which in turn might get him to a bathroom. He found the bathroom and stumbled in still naked and dropped his clothes in a heap on the worn linoleum floor. Under even the best of conditions, that phone call would have devastated him, but right now he physically felt like crap which was perfect match to how he felt emotionally.
Robert splashed some cold water onto his face using some more to wet his hair. He made a feeble attempt to finger comb the unruly mess since he was unable to find a comb or brush. The bathroom was filthy and looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in months. A variety of women’s clothing were scattered about and undergarments seemed to hang from almost every possible place available. He managed to dig under some random supplies and found a tube of toothpaste but no brush. So again making good use of his digits he did his best to finger-brush his teeth.
He knew the strong-tasting toothpaste would do little to mask his morning breath which was pungent with remnants of the previously night’s binge, but he had no time; he had to get moving. He had finally gotten “the call,” and that meant there was no time to waste. Robert hurriedly threw on his underwear followed by his pants and shirt doing his best to make himself look presentable. He could only find one sock so he threw it on the floor and slipped his shoes over bare feet the hurried back out into the hall.
“Hey! Where the hell are you sneaking off to?” a slurred, husky voice said from down the hall. It was…it was his bedmate from the previous night, whatever her name might be. He wasn’t surprised to realize he had absolutely no idea. She was standing naked in the hallway leaning on the bedroom doorframe smoking a cigarette. The woman looked a lot older, a lot less attractive, and a lot more haggard than she had appeared the night before. The saying “road hard and put away wet” flashed through his mind.
“Gotta go,” Robert said, continuing toward the stairs. “Family emergency.”
“Call me,” the woman called after him.
“I will,” he replied, knowing full well that would never happen. He seldom called any of these women back, even on those rare occasions when he did happen to remember their names.
He rushed out the front door of the row house not having the slightest idea where he was. He took a look around and found his car parked near the curb halfway up the block. He realized he was somewhere in the city, and no matter where that might be he had to get to Sunny Rest as soon as he possibly could.
As he drove out of the unfamiliar city neighborhood, Robert saw signs for the bypass. Once there he’d find his way easily. Heading out of the city, he thought briefly about the woman whose bed he had just fled. How many had there been in the last month or so? He couldn’t recall and didn’t really want to. There was no joy to be gained from such recollections, no pleasant memories of sexual conquests, only gut-wrenching guilt.
His mind was swimming with a myriad of disjointed thoughts. He was still hung over and now he was heading to Sunny Rest, likely for the last time. There had been many false alarms in the past, but somehow deep inside Robert knew this was the real deal. The guilt he felt about the place he had just left was tied directly to where he was now heading. He was going to see Cindy, his wife of more than thirty years and the one true love of his life.
Cindy was in Sunny Rest Hospice Center and she was dying. She had been dying for the past year. Despite his actions, Robert truly loved his wife and their marriage had been one of the few successful ones. It all seemed so unfair. Most of their friends were divorced, separated or were staying together in rotten marriages for the sake of the children. But his and Cindy’s had been one for the record books, at least until the cancer struck.
Her decline had been quick, and only two months earlier Cindy had been permanently hospitalized, needing round the clock care. Several weeks earlier Robert was told the end was near, and Cindy would have to go into Sunny Rest Hospice Center. The hospitalization devastated Robert. During the past year, they had both known she was terminal, and they did all they could to get her affairs in order. They’d even sold their large home and moved into a small apartment and got Robert ready for his life alone after she passed. In fact, one of the things that Robert found so distressing was how they had spent far too much of her last year alive preparing for her imminent death.
Robert had tried his best to hold it together after Cindy was hospitalized, but after several nights of barely sleeping and wondering aimlessly throughout the lifeless apartment, he went to his employer and requested a leave of absence. His boss agreed since Robert was obviously not able to focus on his duties any longer, and the man agreed he should be spending what time remained with Cindy.
During the first few weeks in the hospital before hospice, Robert and Cindy spent their days holding hands and reliving events of their past life together. But as Cindy’s pain increased so did the amount of medicines required to suppress it. Soon Cindy was spending most of their time together sleeping. Robert stayed by her side as she continued to lose weight and wither away to nothing right before his eyes. These weeks caused Robert to plunge into a deep unbearable depression the likes of which he had never experienced in his life.
Robert knew he had to do something, anything to distract his thoughts from Cindy’s worsening condition or he surely would go mad. However, no matter what he tried, it just didn’t seem to help. Finally one night after spending the day watching his frail wife sleep almost nonstop, Robert stopped by a local bar on his way home. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of facing the empty apartment again. He wasn’t normally a drinking man but occasionally would have one with dinner back when he and Cindy were able to still go out to eat. But that night he drank and he drank and damn if it didn’t feel good. Several hours later he wasn’t thinking about Cindy or his problems any longer. In fact, he was barely capable of thinking at all.
Thus began a ritual which he practiced religiously night after night. He would awaken late in the morning and freshen up before going to the hospital. Not that it mattered because most of the day Cindy was unresponsive. But he always took care to eliminate any tell-tale odors for those few lucid moments his wife had each day. He would spend his time with Cindy. Afterward, he would stop by a bar, drink until he was plastered, and go home to sleep it off and start all over the next morning. Robert knew this was dangerous as well as bad for his health, but he simply didn’t care any longer. All he wanted was to be completely numb.
After about a week or two of this routine, something unexpected and disturbing happened, and unknown to Robert at that time, it would be the first of many such occurrences. Following yet another night of binge drinking, Robert had awoken in a strange bed, naked and with and equally strange woman. He had no memory of how he had gotten there or what they had done. But regardless, he was riddled with guilt. He had never been unfaithful to his wife during their entire marriage and would have never even considered doing such a thing. And then it happened again and yet again.
Soon it too became as much a part of his nightly ritual as the drinking had been. And the closer his wife got to death, the guiltier he felt about it. And the worse he felt, the more he drank. It was no longer just a vicious cycle but had become a downward spiral at an ever-increasing speed. Now it seemed like every morning he woke up in some new bed with some new woman, and he had no idea how he had gotten there.
Now driving down the bypass, Robert saw the exit which he knew would take him to Sunny Rest. Only a few minutes had passed, but to Robert it seemed like it had been a lifetime. He felt as if he had aged ten years in the past ten minutes. He haphazardly parked his car and raced to the entrance running down the hall to the room where he knew Cindy awaited him for what would probably be the last time. His stomach was sick with grief as he walked into her dimly lit quiet bedroom. As he approached the bed, a nurse walked by him and gave him a disapproving look. He felt taken aback, wondering why this woman thought she had the right to judge him.
He looked over to his wife’s deathbed and saw her emaciated form lying there looking at him with eyes that seemed much too large for their sunken sockets. She was a living skeleton. Robert could tell she was aware the time of her passing was upon them and all he wanted to do was vomit. He couldn’t come to grips with the fact that in just a few moments his once beautiful wife would be dead. She weakly lifted her right arm and crooked a boney finger indicating that he could come to her. She tried to raise her arms to hug him as he approached but was too weak, so he wrapped his arms gently about her skeletal frame.
Cindy’s pale lips touched his ear, and he heard her say, “I waited for you.” Robert understood she was ready to pass on but wanted to say one last goodbye to him first, to tell him she loved him and to make sure he would be all right without her. But as Robert softly held her, he felt her body tense and become rigid. That was when he suddenly realized his tragic mistake.
In the past Robert had always managed to shower, shave and properly brush his teeth before visiting Cindy and most of those times they rarely had the opportunity to be this close. But in his haste and stupor, Robert had forgotten to do so, and now Cindy held him closely taking in all of the odors surrounding him; the foul stench of stale cigarettes, booze, sweat, cheap perfume and sex. She knew instantly what he had done.
Cindy released Robert and slid weakly back down to the pillow. He stood staring lamely down into those once beautiful eyes. Cindy’s face bore a look which seemed to encompass many emotions simultaneously; shock, disappointment, sorrow, grief, anger and even hatred. Here bulging eyes seemed to bore a hole right though Robert. They silently screamed, “How could you?” inside his brain. Her pale lips began to tremble and in raspy voice, she said “I waited for YOU!” A moment later she died, her eyes losing focus but never breaking contact with Robert’s.
Robert was heartsick realizing not only that his wife was gone but that instead of the peaceful passing they had always hoped for, the last living realization she had was that her husband was a lying cheating drunken whore monger. His memory of their last moment together would be that he had been out carousing with women while she lay dying thinking only of him. Robert fell to his knees next to his wife’s death bed and wept uncontrollably.
***
Sitting on a chair in his tiny apartment, which now seemed even bigger than before, Robert sipped his whiskey on the rocks already halfway drunk at two in the afternoon having just come back from burying his wife. The funeral had been a small, private affair with only a few friends and relatives in attendance. Robert and Cindy had no children, but a few nieces and nephews had stopped by to offer their condolences.
Robert wished it had been he who died and not Cindy. He could feel his guilt eating away at his insides as the cancer had devoured his wife. And worst of all he was happy for the feeling. As far as he was concerned there wasn’t a death painful enough to make him suffer for what he had done to her. In the past, the alcohol had always managed to numb him and block out all of his thoughts but now it seemed to have the opposite effect. Now all he could think about was Cindy and how what he had done to her was beyond unforgivable.
He clumsily lifted his glass to polish off the last of his whiskey when he noticed something strange on the wall across the room. It appeared to be a solitary black dot forming on the surface of the wall. Robert had no idea what might have been causing the stain, but he staggered over to the wall and sat down on the floor to get a closer look. By the time he arrived at the wall, a second dot had appeared.
Within a few seconds there were ten dots evenly spaced in two semi-circles. Beneath the dots, two shapes began to form appearing like the palms of two hands. They reminded Robert of when two hands are placed on the surface of a heavily fogged mirror and the area around the image even seemed to be liquid like and trickled downward.
“What the hell!” Robert exclaimed. The image on the wall continued to grow. Above what now looked like two black blood dripping hand prints, a haggard bloody face began to appear. At first Robert couldn’t tell if the image was that of a man or a woman as its features weren’t recognizable. But after a moment, it became much clearer. He could see the hate-filled eyes bulging from sunken skeletal orbs, and he knew instantly it was his dead wife Cindy returned to take her vengeance.
Deep inside his mind he heard hear dying raspy voice crying, “I waited for YOU,” over and over as it increased in volume with each horrifying repetition. Next, the wall seemed to become fluid, and the image began to stretch out coming ever closer to him. He was paralyzed with terror and the horrifying sight before him.
“I’m so sorry, Cindy,” Robert began to wail as the wall stretched out toward him, the blackened image reaching for him. He felt the icy cold tips of the fingers touch the sides of his face, and the inside of his brain screamed with the words, “I waited for YOU!” He felt a stabbing pressure in his chest and a pain shooting down his left arm just seconds before he collapsed in a heap onto the apartment floor.
***
The police investigator and EMT stood outside the apartment discussing what they had found inside.
“God! That smell was unbearable,” the police officer said. “How long do you think he was dead?
The EMT thought about it for a few moments and said. “That’s hard to say. The medical examiner will have to make that final determination but to be honest with you; I’d guess it had to be a few weeks; especially based on the decomposed condition of the body.”
“Yeah. That was pretty bad. So what do you think?”
“You mean the cause of death?” The EMT said, “Not sure but my guess would be either a stroke or heart attack. From what the neighbors said he and his wife only moved into the place a few months ago, and apparently she died a few weeks ago. Maybe the stress of losing her was just too much.”
The policeman said, “I’ve heard stories of couples dying within and few days of each other when the surviving spouse simply can’t live without his mate. They often call it dying of a broken heart.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” the EMT said, “but he definitely died of something. It looked to me like he might have been sitting on the floor looking at that water stain on the wall.”
The police officer said, “Could be. I checked with the super, and he told me with all the rain we’ve been having lately there’ve been leaks in a number of the apartment units. Apparently the roof needs to be repaired, and the water’s leaking down between the walls and has caused the stains.”
“Not surprising,” the EMT said. “This is an old building. But did you notice anything unusual, you know, about the stain?”
“No. Not really,” the police officer said. “It just looks like a big old stain to me.”
The EMT said, “You’re probably right. But to me, if you look at it a certain way it resembles the backs of two people’s heads walking away. You know, like a man and a woman.”
The police officer looked at the image closer. He scratched his head and said, “I don’t know. I don’t see it. Oh, well, I guess with a spot like this, anyone might be able to see just about anything they wanted or needed to see.”
“You’re probably right,” the EMT said. “Well, we’d best be getting the remains out of here.”
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #8 ‘I Waited For You’ by Thomas M. Malafarina @TomMalafarina – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
