James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

The sliding doors were stiff – the mechanism had seen better days – but finally they lurched open and I landed in the back room.

A heavy, waxy, sweet odor struck me – an odor that I recognized from the wound in my arm, although that was much less pervasive. Thick curtains of dirty yellow velour let only a small strip of daylight in. The wheezy rasping had stopped, and I looked around hesitantly.

And then . . . Rustling. Fluttering.

I turned to the left and saw a round birdcage on an old-­fashioned stand. Vintage, hipsters would call it, but a hell for the bird, who was condemned to lifelong solitary confinement in a far too cramped cell.

The canary’s feathers must have been yellow once, but now they were faded to an off-­white. They stuck up in all directions as though they had fallen out and were subsequently stuck back in at random. The head was crooked, as if a taxidermist had missed the mark in his attempt to model a dead animal into a live one.

Only the eyes sparkled: black pinheads that glistened in the dusky light. The animal – Frits, she had called it Frits – opened its beak and I almost expected it to start singing. Instead I heard a sort of ticking that sounded wrong and distorted.

I stepped back. Hand over my mouth.

It was a reflex, perhaps. An instinctive attempt to protect myself. As if the evil – did it already feel that way then? – would force its way through my mouth into my body.

But I forgot even that when I saw the bed in the corner and the pitiful figure in it. The hospital bed – one with those white metal bars – was slightly elevated, so that whoever was lying in it had a view of the crack in the curtains. He was covered by nothing more than a grayish-white sheet, but under it I saw the sharp outline of a decrepit body.

Thin legs, gnarled joints. A sunken pelvis and a hollow under the rib cage as if he consisted of nothing but bones.

My glance slid upwards, towards the arms on top of the sheet. I saw scabs and sores and a sickly color. His throat was sunken, the flesh around the mouth rotted away, and I saw far too many teeth, like the grin of a skeleton.

And once more it was the eyes that frightened me the most. They were almost nothing but pupil, with hardly any white, and they shone in the semi-­darkness.

My grandmother’s eyes, my grandmother’s body, my grandmother’s death, but times a hundred. I stared at the ruined body that breathed, kept breathing. At the mouth that opened and then spoke.

‘Please.’

How long had that wreck of a man lain here in the twilight of the back room? Weeks, months?

Deep down I knew that it must have been years. The way in which the skin was corroded to a leathery membrane draped over the bones, the gums that were receded to past the bare roots, even the way the sores had become ensconced until they formed part of his being, was a long-­term process.

I swallowed with difficulty. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off the figure before me. Or away from the hand which lay palm upwards on the sheet and whose index finger moved, as if he were gesturing to me.

The movement was minimal, but a cloud of cloying sweetness broke from his body and stuck in my nose. I retched.

This man was dead, I realized, or he should have been. Just like the bird, which I only now realized was as undead as the man. Her husband.

Just as undead as Dante.

Dante, who had tried to kill himself by throwing himself in front of my car, after which I had brought him back to this house where death is stretched out to a never­ending dying.

Again that almost imperceptible finger movement. Again a blast of poisonous sweetness in my nose, while the bird fluttered with lifeless wings against the bars of its cage.

‘Help . . .’

He fell silent, tormentedly gasping for air, while I could see that he wanted nothing so much as to stop breathing.

How long? My God . . . how long?

‘Oh! You’ve met my husband!’ Mrs. Gottlieb’s voice.

I turned around. She stood on the threshold of the back room, just between the sliding doors. On the walker stood a pot of tea with two cups beside it. The liquid was brewed so strong that it was almost black.

‘Yes,’ I managed to utter. ‘But . . . he needs help.’

Home care, a hospital, a hospice. Gentle hands, a place – any place – that wasn’t here, where his pain could be stilled and he could go in peace.

‘Is there someone who helps you?’ I asked, after an uncomfortable silence. And when she gave me no answer but just kept looking at me with a look that was somewhere between mildly critical and – I can’t call it anything else – eager, I went on talking. Though only because I didn’t want to hear the rasping sound of death. ‘Shall I call someone? The doctor maybe?’

My words felt laughably practical, an echo of the equally laughable words of the previous day. But what else could I say to keep the doom that threatened to close in on me at bay?

Because she smiled.

‘You’re still here, aren’t you, sweetie?’ she said. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to help?’

I swallowed down a new wave of nausea. ‘Yes, but this . . . I can’t do this.’

‘Of course you can help. Especially you. You brought Dante back to us. You have power, life. You’re as good as immortal! Don’t you see how desperate he is? How much we need you? And you’ll hardly miss it.’

‘But . . .’

‘Come on! It’s no big deal.’

She stepped forward, away from her walker. It seemed as though she was less wobbly than earlier. More energetic. Her right hand closed around the edge of the hospital bed. The man’s eyes bulged in pure panic.

‘Come on, Antonie. Don’t be silly,’ she said.

She came closer. Took my hand. Her skin was dry and wrinkle-­smooth, the grip many times stronger than I had expected. She turned my arm over with a quick movement, so that my wounded wrist was visible. The yellowish moisture from the new wound had formed into a fine layer over the thin veins that lay just under my skin.

He, her husband, Antonie, whimpered soundlessly.

‘Just look what you can do! See your own power!’

She pulled, and I stumbled forward. Two steps closer to the bed. A third. And then she had pressed my wrist against his rotten lips and I felt fierce stabs, like dozens of little syringe needles.

‘There now,’ she said. She sounded content, like a cat who has just licked a saucer of milk clean. ‘There now, my husband. My beloved.’

The rasping breath became more regular. The dilated pupils shrank again and – was it possible? – a fraction more flesh seemed to sit on his meager bones. But his facial expression was no less desperate, and I saw something else in it, something new, that I couldn’t immediately place.

Only when he turned his head and fixed his gaze on mine did I recognize it.

Remorse.

‘Drink a little tea, sweetie,’ she said.

I did. It was as if my conscious brain was disabled, for I drank the tea with mechanical obedience, just as I had unprotestingly allowed my essence – exposed by the nails of a cat – to be administered to her husband.

The bitter liquid, with a hint of ginger, flowed through my mouth, rounded my tongue, and glided down my throat. The heat burned in my intestine and spread toward my stomach, throbbing and rippling through the capillaries of my system. I felt how my heartbeat slowed, how the diffuse light suddenly became bright as my pupils opened wide.

My muscles gave up the fight, my knees went weak. And as I fell and my cheek chafed against the rough carpet, I saw Dante’s dented head in the door opening, behind the woman.

He looked at me with green-­gold mirror eyes.

There was something in my mouth.