Hospice Belladonna II

Leonard explained the patient he had to her, and Hannah listened.  From time to time she nodded, but she never interrupted and didn’t ask questions.  Only when he’d finished speaking did she finally speak back to him.

“Matson is right,” she said.  “Your patient will be here for a different reason to the others, and while I don’t have a problem with that, I think they might.”

“Who are they?”

“The other patients,” said Hannah.  “Matson hasn’t quite told you everything about the Silver Carillon.  It steals senses, just as he says, but we’re certain now that it does so by creating a copy of the patient in a pocket dimension somewhere.  Each time they lose a sense it’s transferred to the copy of them living in this pocket dimension, and the final chime is when they transfer over there completely.  Then there’s nothing really living left in this world, just the body they were inhabiting while they were here, and that’s now vacant.”

“So you keep it alive while you search for a way to bring them back?” asked Leonard, though he wasn’t really listening to the answer.  It was obvious how the hospice worked.

“No,” said Hannah.  “We destroy the body.  There are other things out there,” she waved a hand heavenwards as vague as though she were describing the general cloud formations.  “That would like to take up residency in a body in this time.  We can’t take those kinds of risks, especially not with the scholars of the Silver Carillon.  They generally know things that it would be better not to let get out.”

“Destroy?”  Leonard looked shocked, finding it hard to believe that he’d heard what she said properly.

“Yes, we usually incinerate it.  There’s a bio-waste facility in the basement; it’s part of the tour if you’d like to take it.”

“That’s barbaric!”

“It is necessary, Leonard.”  She emphasised his name.  “Losing a mind is an easy thing to do.  If we find a way to bring my scholars back, then finding bodies for them to inhabit will be the easy part.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and Leonard looked around the room while his mind raced with the implications of what he’d just heard.  This hospice actively killed people when they reached what they considered a terminal stage.  Was that illegal, or just unethical?  He noticed a pile of magazines on an occasional table and wondered if there was a trade journal for euthanasia.

“Until they reach that stage,” said Hannah, breaking the silence at last, and trying to make eye contact.  Leonard let his gaze slide back to the magazines.  “The other patients appear to know about each other in this pocket dimension.  We think that they must situated together, and as their senses transfer over they see more and more of each other, but it becomes harder and harder for us to talk to them and reach them.  Your patient won’t be in that world with them, so he won’t make the same connection, and they’ll know he’s different.  That might cause problems.”

“You mean they won’t like him?  You make this sound like trying to keep dogs who’ve not met before together.”

“It kind of is,” said Hannah, and there was a sudden gentleness in her voice.  “These are very sick people, Leonard, who are undergoing a profoundly difficult transition.  It might even be a lethal one.  But they are, to some extent, doing it together.  Putting a man in with them who isn’t part of that might not be good for him, might not be good for them.  Is that a chance we can take?”

Leonard sat there, shaking his head.  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I need to know enough about this place to make that decision though.  I think it’s mine to make.”

“I don’t think anyone will want to take it off you,” said Hannah.  She stood up.  “Shall we begin the tour then?”

Hospice Belladonna I

Leonard walked past the Hospice three times before finding it.  It was behind a simple door in what appeared to be a row of terraced houses on a residential street.  There were numbers of some of the doors, but not all of them, though he realised that in hindsight he should have paid more attention to the house with the nameplate that read Shipwreck House.  The houses’s doors opened directly onto the street; there was no garden or front path, just the cracked and gum-marked pavement, and a bus-stop across the road with a shelter missing a panel of plastic.  The windows in the houses were grey and reflected the cloudy sky without betraying any of the secrets of what might lie inside.  A strand of greying ivy struggled up the wall about a third of the way along, looking ready to give up and die if the weather turned nasty.  Leonard finally counted numbers until he worked out which was was 113, and stopped at an Institutional Green front door, still struggling to believe that this could be the front door to an exclusive hospice.  It took him a minute to convince himself that he’d counted right and that this must be the address he’d been given, and then he knocked, slightly hesitantly, on the door.

Nothing happened for a moment except for a bus going by behind him, all black exhaust, grumbling engine and the whine of a slipping fan-belt.  Then the bus was gone leaving behind the acridity of burning oil, and he heard brisk footsteps.  A bolt snapped back, and a chain rattled.  The door opened, and a youngish woman with a scarf over her hair and sunglasses on regarded him from the doorway.

“No junk mail, no pamphlets from any God, and no peddlers,” she said.  “And if you’re a tradesman I don’t recognise you but the entrance is round the side and if you don’t know that you better get yourself back to your depot and talk to them.”

“I’m Leonard,” said Leonard, offering his hand.  The woman seemed to ignore it, but the sunglasses concealed her eyes completely.  She could have been looking at in with horror.

“I don’t want any,” she said.  She stepped backwards, the door swinging closed towards him.

“I’ve got a letter of authority,” he said, fumbling in his coat pocket.  “From Matson.”

The door stopped with less than an inch to go before being closed completely, and opened again.  The woman stepped forward and held out her hand without saying a word.  Leonard fumbled some more, trying to pull an envelope out that had gone in smoothly when he left the office; finally he pulled it free and realised that it had turned sideways in his pocket.  He thrust it at the woman who opened it and read it as carefully as though he’d announced that he was an angel from God returning the galley-copies of the Bible with some edits that needed making.  He tried to ignore the rankling in the back of his mind that his name had elicited no worthwhile reaction but that Matson’s clearly had.

“Come in,” said the woman, holding the letter and envelope out to him to take back.  He did, and went in.  He closed the door behind him and found himself in a long, narrow hallway with grey-painted walls and chipped skirting boards.  The woman was already half-way along it, so he hurried a little to catch up.  He noticed that he was passing doors on both sides, which suggested that the terraced houses might have been knocked into each other beyond the front-doors.  The corridor ended in a doorway that led out into a spacious kitchen that was cool and empty, and he was walked briskly through there and out into a glass-roofed conservatory.  The woman gestured at a woven armchair and sat down on a three-legged stool in the centre of the room.  She slipped the sunglasses off, and Leonard noticed that her eyes were bright and a lustrous blue.

“I’m Hannah,” she said after he’d sat down.  “I’m the nurse here at the hospice, though at the moment I’m the cook and the cleaner as well because there aren’t so many patients in.  If we get more patients we’ll hire more staff; it’s not a big deal.  It’s just that there’s not a lot to do when numbers are as low as they are.”

“Right,” said Leonard.  “Right.  I think I’m here to talk about a possible patient, though I’m not sure how possible.”

“Oh everyone’s possible,” said Hannah, allowing a faint smile to touch her un-made-up lips.  “It’s just whether it’s the right time or not.”

A heap of broken images

Phlebitis sat on an uncomfortable wicker chair.  There was supposed to be a blanket; green and white striped, thick and woollen; draped over the chair, and he supposed that would make it easier to sit on, but his blanket appeared to have been taken by the matron sat behind him.  He had turned, intending to ask her for the return of the blanket, but seeing her in profile he had recognised immediately that she was an avatar of Belladonna, Our Lady of the Rocks, and had turned back around again.  He had no wish to attract her attention.  He now planned to take the blanket from the chair to the left of him, which was ostensibly occupied by a young boy who kept standing up and running off to play with other small children behind the score board.  The boy’s parent, a woman with a lined face and scabs all over her hands, looked exhausted and was clearly about to fall asleep, and Phlebitis was waiting for it to happen.

In the near distance there was a thwock of leather striking ash and a low cheer raised from the front row of seats.  The elderly men gathered there were, to Pheblitis’s uncertain knowledge, either retired cricketers who were watching the game with a professional interest, or City Directors who were busy being seen at a City event and ensuring the safety of their Thrones.  He was aware that many of them had been to visit Madame Sosotris recently, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to talk to her yet.  Her constant attempts at flirting, which were growing ever more unsubtle, were disturbing and mildly unpleasant.  He had half a plan there too, to try and foist her on some other member of his crew, but none of them had yet done anything bad enough to warrant it.  The young boy’s mother’s head drooped, and her eyes finally closed.

“Six!” shouted an elderly gentleman in the front row, and Phlebitis’s arm snaked out and tugged the blanket over to his own chair.  The front row mostly stood up, applauding with trembling, age-spotted hands, blocking the view of the cricket game for the rest of the audience unless they too stood.  One or two men at the back did, but the remainder stayed seated, some not even aware of what had happened.  Phlebitis stood as well, suddenly realising that this was a perfect excuse, and when they all sat again he rearranged the blanket on his chair as though it had always been there, but badly laid out.

There was another thwock and the cricket ball flew off again and then, perhaps a second later, there was a soft thunk.  A gasp of horror arose from the front row and Phlebitis looked up in curiosity.  The cricket ball appeared to have struck a dead tree, which was awkwardly located at the corner of the in-field.  Its trunk was broad but hollow, and though several handfuls of branches still arose from it, then were blunted and stunted and no leaves or other greenery grew on them.

“The dead tree gives no shade,” muttered a man in the front row, and the rest of the row tried very hard to appear not to have heard him.  There was a garbled cry from the pitch, and the umpire, an obese, sweating man dressed in flannel whites and looking very miserable, raised a finger on each hand, giving both batsmen out.  Their heads sank and they slunk from the pitch, but the opposing team made no sound; raised no cheer, offered no mockery.  It was, Phlebitis thought, as though what had happened was too dreadful to be just the fault of the batters.  Though all they’d done was strike a dead tree, so he couldn’t really see what the problem could be.  He shifted in his seat, which was much more comfortable with the blanket on it, and slouched back a little.   The matron behind leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, “The dead tree offers no shade.”

An electric current seemed to run through his body, and his left leg twitched, a little spasm that made him kick the ground.

“I heard the man at the front, thank-you,” said Phlebitis in a low voice, hoping that this would bring the conversation to a close.

“Not well enough,” said the Matron.  “It hides a heap of broken images.  I would expect you to want to confirm that.”

He turned his head now, about to complain to her that she couldn’t just tell him what to do, but she had sat back again, and was now gazing at the game looking exactly like Belladonna once more.

*

The game ended with one side winning by several runs and wickets and Phlebitis wasn’t honestly sure which side had won, or if either side even cared.  The backslapping and camaraderie didn’t fit with his ideal for the sport, and they seemed to be walking off the pavilion both together and with the audience.  The most elderly gentlemen were supported and assisted by the others, while the rest of the audience wiped away crumbs from the cucumber sandwiches and pretended that they’d wanted to take small children with them to the match.  The young boy’s mother was still asleep on her chair, and her son was now patting her knee, trying to wake her.  Phlebitis sighed softly, stood up, and threw his blanket over the boy in a quick movement.  The heavy fabric bore him to the ground and muffled his cry of surprise so that no-one turned their heads or noticed what was happening.  The he gave the mother a gentle push, tipping her far enough forward that she slowly toppled off her chair and onto the ground, and set off at a quick jog onto the cricket pitch, towards the in-field.  Her cry of surprise as she woke on the hard ground distracted the milling crowd that had been watching the game but wasn’t going to the pavilion, and then the discovery that her child was under the blanket had them hunting about for any further misfortunes that may have befallen, and no-one noticed Phlebitis reach the dead tree and hoist himself up amongst the dead branches.  He only had to climb about ten feet to get high enough up to see down in the hollow trunk of the tree itself and see that it was partly filled with water.  As he looked at the water though he felt an invisible pair of hands pass across his eyes, and the world seemed somehow brighter, more sharply defined at the edges, and the water in the tree trunk became a pile of broken images.

He saw a woman dressed in white standing on the beach, crying.  A man crawled ashore from the water, the waves struggling to pull him back, but he clawed his way beyond them and lay there, gasping for breath.  The crying woman couldn’t see him, and she turned away, heading off the beach to a narrow, sandy track.  Clouds overhead merged together and became a lighthouse; a beam of intense light shot out from it.  Following it along, it illuminated a wicker chair on the edge of a cricket pitch, and Belladonna turned to look at him, her eyes aflame.  He shuddered, and a man on horseback rode past, wearing a leather jacket with metal studs all down the arms and a skull with flaming eye-sockets on the back.  The horse’s hooves boomed as it cantered and the beach suddenly returned, with waves taller than a man crashing on the shore and throwing white spume high into the air.  A boat tossed on the waves, some distance out, and Phlebitis could smell the unforgettable aroma of boiling frogs.  The boat seemed to come in closer to shore and then the waves calmed and he saw that the name of the boat was the Odysseus.

Phlebitis sighed and let himself slide down the branches and fall from the tree.  The grass below the tree was soft, but the tree roots that snaked through it were hard and ligneous.  It seemed somehow fitting.