Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

He stumbled out of the room and back along the corridor, falling against the wall, dragging his feet along the tiled floor. He entered the ward and went straight to Vanessa’s bed, where he held her hand and stared into her eyes.

“I love you,” she said, simply and honestly.

“This is it,” he said. “This is the moment. This is what it all comes down to: you and me, in a hospital room, praying for the life of our unborn baby. Everything else is bullshit. The past cases, the crimes I could never solve, the drink, the stupid fights and arguments… none of it matters. Just this. This moment.”

She nodded, closed her eyes. “I’m sleepy, baby… take care of things while I have a little rest.”

He squeezed her hand. He knew exactly what she meant. For the first time in his life, he understood her completely. They were back together, just like he’d wanted. Every other problem in their relationship slipped away into the darkness, dwarfed by the immensity of this current situation.

Take care of things while I have a little rest…

He’d do that. He’d sort everything out; make it so that the world was ready for the arrival of their baby. Nothing else mattered.

Just then his mobile phone started to ring. He stood, glancing towards the nurse’s station, and fumbled it out of his trouser pocket. The nurse he’d spoken to earlier gave him a dark look. He shrugged, mouthed the word “sorry” and headed out of the ward, raising the phone to his ear.

“Where are you?”

It was Detective Superintendent Sillitoe, from the station.

“Sorry, sir, I’m at the hospital. It’s my wife… she’s been brought in. It’s an emergency.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know, sir, but everything’s in hand. I’m just on my way back to the station."

“Don’t bother. Stay where you are. They’re bringing her in.”

“Who?”

“Ah, yes, you don’t know… it’s Wanda.”

“Miss Wandaful?”

“Yeah. She should be there any minute. She was found on Grove Road early this morning by a jogger, in a bad way. I don’t want to say much over the phone, because you’ll need to see this one to believe it… but she’s in a really bad state.”

“Okay, I’ll head down to Casualty now. That’s where they’ll take her.”

“If she’s talking, get what you can and report back here. There’s some weird shit going down, and I have a feeling this might just be the start of it. Remember that scarecrow?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, it’s gone missing. And just to cap it off, this morning there was an identical one in the garden of each of the houses where the parents of two of those other missing girls lives… two of them: Jacobs and Warren. Royle, each of them has one of those fucked-up photographs taped to its face. It’s like some kind of twisted message. Like someone’s playing a game.”

“I’m on it, sir.”

“Let me know as soon as you know anything. It’s all kicking off at the Concrete Grove. We now have reports of gunshots on the estate. What is it with these fucking people?”

The phone went dead before Royle could respond.

Weird shit … what exactly did Sillitoe mean by that? He thought about the scarecrows and what they might actually mean. The first one could be passed off as a silly, tasteless joke, but all of them together could only be a message. Was the person who’d taken the Gone Away Girls back in town? Did he want to resume his work, and was taunting the police in the process? And what about those gunshots? Who the hell was firing rounds in the Grove, and why?

The separate pieces of some huge plot were slowly moving together, shifting slowly, like tectonic plates. Royle suspected that he would never be able to see the full picture, only these separate sections. But hopefully that would be enough to take care of things, to rearrange into the correct order those parts of his life that were currently misaligned.

He rushed to the fire exit and down the stairs, heading for the Casualty Department. Just as he arrived there, on the ground floor at the rear of the hospital building, there was a lot of commotion. Two white-coated men were pushing a sheet-covered gurney through the reception area, followed by a nurse shouting orders. He followed them, pulling out his ID.

“Police! Who do you have there?”

The nurse turned towards him, her face slick with sweat and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She was breathing heavily. “She’s one of yours… from the lab at the station. There’s severe trauma to the lower abdomen and limbs. You really don’t want to know…”

“I’m afraid I have to know. Is she conscious?”

“Unbelievably, yes… She should be dead, but she’s managed to hang on. Fading fast, though, so if you don’t mind we need to get her prepped for immediate surgery.”

He jogged after them through the building, and waited outside when they entered an examination room. Shortly, a young doctor joined him. The man was Asian, with short hair and bushy eyebrows.

“Can you tell me anything, doctor?”

The man sighed. “She’s in a bad way. She’s lost a lot of blood and the mutilations are… well, I’ve not seen anything like this before. It’s sick.”

Royle took a step closer to the man. “What do you mean? Nobody’s told me anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Shit.” The doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “She’s had the lower part of her body removed, everything severed from the waist down, and the wound cauterized by massive heat.”

Royle couldn’t understand what he was being told. He glanced at a clock on the wall but failed to register the time. Movement caught his eye over the doctor’s shoulder: a door swung open, someone scurried along the corridor clutching a bloody sheet or towel draped over some kind of container, perhaps a small bucket.

“I’m not sure what to tell you, here. This is… unbelievable. In crude terms, someone’s torn off her legs at the waist and stuffed a broom handle into the wound, making her into some kind of doll. She was found crawling along the street, dragging her shattered spine and the broom handle behind her. She should be dead, but somehow she’s still alive.”

The doctor wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Can you save her?”

The doctor looked away, staring at the wall. “I’m not sure. We’re doing all we can in there, believe me. She should be…”

“Yes, I know. She should be dead. But she isn’t.”

An hour later he was allowed into a side room, where Wanda had been put in a single bed under the window. She was wearing an oxygen mask, IV tubes were sticking out of her arms like skinned veins, and a heart rate monitor beeped by the side of the bed. Her body was covered with sheets, and there was some kind of raised chicken-wire structure encasing the lower half of her body — more specifically, the part where her legs should be.

Royle went to her and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. He groped for her hand. She grabbed his fingers, squeezing lightly, with all the strength that she had.

“What happened to you?”

The heart rate monitor increased in volume, the beat becoming more erratic. Wanda let go of his hand. She reached up, to her face, and removed the oxygen mask.

“No, don’t…” He tried to replace the mask, but she turned her head on the pillow. Her face was white. Not pale, but white.

“ Royle …” Her voice was barely much more than a whisper. He could hear her pain; he knew how difficult it must be for her to speak. “ Go back… go to the Grove… something… coming… stop it… stop it and save your baby… the last… Gone Away girl… go to her family…”