Clive Barker - Everville

"It was an accident. I was the one stuck the fork in him, not Joe. If you're going to arrest anybody, it should be me."

"I saw what he did to you," Jed said, a little embarrassed, "knocking you around like that. I reckon what we got here is some wife beating, some assault, and," he looked Phoebe in the eyes, "a man who's been in trouble with the law before, and who's maybe a danger to the community."

"That's ridiculous."

"I'll be the judge of what's ridiculous and what's not," Jed said. "Now I'm asking you again: do you know where Flicker is?"

"And I'm telling you straight," Phoebe replied, "no I don't."

Jed nodded, his true feelings unreadable. "I'm going to tell you something, Phoebe, that I wouldn't maybe say if I didn't know you."

"Yes?"

"It's simple really. I don't know what the story was between you and this guy Flicker. I do know Morton isn't the friendliest of guys the way he beat you around this afternoon," he shook his head, "that's a crime all of its own. But I have to consider your boyfriend dangerous, and if there's a choice between his safety and the safety of my officers-2' "He's not going to hurt anybody."

"That's what I'm telling you, Phoebe. He isn't going to get the chance."

Without a vehicle, Joe had been presented with a limited number of options. He could steal a car and drive somewhere isolated then come back for Phoebe after dark. He could find somewhere to hide within the city limits, and bide his time there. Or he could climb.

He chose the latter. The stealing of a vehicle would only add to his sum of crimes, and the city was too small and too white for him to pass unnoticed in its streets. Up the mountain he would go, he decided; at least far enough to be safe from pursuers.

He'd left the apartment with the barest minimum of supplies: some food, a jacket for later on, and, most important, given the condition he was in, the first-aid box. He'd only had time for a perfunctory self-examination Oust enough to check that he wasn't going to bleed to death) before making his escape, but the pain was excruciating, and he only got as far as the creek before he had to stop. There, he slithered down into the ditch where the creek ran, and, out of sight of all but the fishes, washed his bruised and bloodied groin as tenderly as he could. It was a slow, agonizing business. He could barely suppress his cries when the icy water ran over his lacerated flesh, and several times had to stop completely before the pain made him pass out. At last, against his better judgment, he resorted to chewing two painkillers he'd stored with the kit, the last (but one) of ten odan he'd been prescribed for a back injury. It was powrful stuff; and had induced in him a kind of blissful stupor which was not to his present advantage. But without it he doubted he'd be able to get much further than the creek. He sat on the bank for a while and waited for them to kick in before he finished with his ministrations, his trousers and blood-crusted underwear around his ankles. The blaze of the day was over, but the sun still found its way through the ferns and gilded the sliding water. He watched it go while the pain subsided. If this was what death was like, he thoughtpain receding, languor spreading-it would be worth the wait.

After a few minutes, with his thoughts fuzzier than they'd been and his fingers more clumsy, he returned to washing his wounds. His balls had ballooned to twice their normal size in the last half-hour, the sac purplish in places and raw-red in others. He felt the testicles gently, rolling them in between his fingers. Even through the haze of Percodan they were painful, but he felt nothing separated or clotted. He might yet have children, one of these distant days. As to his cock, it was badly torn in three places, where Morton had ground his heel upon it.

Joe finished cleaning the cuts with creek water and then applied liberal dollops of antiseptic cream.

Once, during this delicate procedure, a wave of nausea rose up in him-less at the sight of his wounds than at the memory of how he'd come by them-and he had no choice but to stop and watch the sun on the water until the feeling subsided. His mind wandered as he waited. Twenty-nine years on the planet (thirty in a month's time) and he had nothing to show for it but this pitiful condition. That would have to change if he was to get through another twenty-nine. His body had taken enough punishment for one lifetime. From now on, he would chart his course, instead of letting circumstances take him where they would. He'd put the past behind him, not by denying it but by allowing it to be part of him, pain and all. He was lucky, wasn't he? Love had found him, in the form of a woman who would have died for him this afternoon. Most people never had that in their lives. they lived with compromise where love was concerned; with a mate who was better than nothing but less than everything. Phoebe was so much more than that.

She wasn't the first woman to have said she loved him, nor even the first he'd replied to in kind. But she was the first he was afraid to lose, the first he knew his life would be empty without; the first he thought he might love after the fierce heat was gone, after the time when she'd cared to spread her cunt for him, or he to see it spread.

A sharp pain in his groin reminded him of his present state, and he looked down to see that all was not lost. His cock had risen to respectable erection while he'd pictured, Phoebe's display, and he had to concentrate on counting flies until it had subsided. Then he finished putting on ointment, and bandaged himself up, albeit roughly. It was time to move on, before the search spread as far as the creek; and before the effect of the painkillers wore off.

He pulled up his pants, buried the litter from his salvings, and wandering a little way up the bank found a place where the creek was narrow enough to be crossed in a hobbled leap. Then he clambered up the opposite bank and headed off up the slope between the trees.

At six-seventeen, while Phoebe was at the hot drink machine getting a cup of coffee, Morton opened his eyes. When she got back to the room, he was babbling to the nurse about how he'd been on a boat, and fallen overboard.

"I coulda drowned," he kept saying, clutching at the sheets as though they were lifelines. "I coulda. I coulda drowned."

"No, Mr. Cobb. You're in a hospital-"

"Hospital?" he said, raising his head off the pillow an inch or two, though the nurse did her best to restrain him. "I was floating-"

"You were dreaming, Morton," Phoebe said, stepping into his line of vision.

At the sight of her the memory of what had brought him here seemed to come back. "Oh Christ," he said through clenched teeth, "Christ in Heaven," and sank back onto the pillow. "You bitch," he muttered now.

"You fucking bitch."

"Calm down, Mr. Cobb," the nurse insisted, but fueled a sudden spurt of rage, Morton sat bolt upright, tearing at e drip tube in his arm as he did so. "I knew!" he screamed, jabbing his finger in Phoebe's direction.

"Do as the nurse says, Morton."

"Please, give me a hand, Mrs. Cobb," the beleaguered woman said.

Phoebe put down her coffee and went to assist, but the proximity of his wife threw Morton into a frenzy.

"Don't you fucking touch me! Don't you-"

He stopped in mid-sentence, and uttered a tiny sound, almost like a hiccup. Then all the venom went out of him at once-his arms dropped to his sides, his knotted face slackened and went blank-and the nurse, unable to support the weight of his upper body, had no choice but to let him sink back onto the pillow. It did not end there. Even as the nurse raced to the door calling for help, Morton began to draw a series of agonizing breaths, each more panicked and desperate than the one before.

She couldn't watch him suffer without trying to do something to calm him.