Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

I grabbed her shirt and pulled her down close to my face. Through my disorientation, I opened my mouth wide enough, so she could see. So she could really see.

“Vengeance is a door,” I said, my voice rippling through cities of teeth, forests of muscle, miles of esophagus. “You can go out and you can come in, but you always have to pass through vengeance to get there.” I reached up and circled the knife’s blade with my hand. “So pick your door.”

She left me, alive, in an alley in a neighboring city, upright next to a dumpster. “There are always windows,” she said as she got back into her car, but I couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself, or to me.

Picture me on an island supply boat, one of the old Clyde Puffers seeking to deliver me to my new post. This was 1947, just a couple of years after the war, and I was a young doctor relatively new to General Practice. Picture also a choppy sea, a deck that rose and fell with every wave, and a cross-current fighting hard to turn us away from the isle. Back on the mainland I’d been advised that a hearty breakfast would be the best preventative for seasickness and now, having loaded up with one, I was doing my best to hang onto it.

I almost succeeded. Perversely, it was the sudden calm of the harbour that did for me. I ran to the side and I fear that I cast rather more than my bread upon the waters. Those on the quay were treated to a rare sight; their new doctor, clinging to the ship’s rail, with seagulls swooping in the wake of the steamer for an unexpected water-borne treat.

The island’s resident Constable was waiting for me at the end of the gangplank. A man of around my father’s age, in uniform, chiselled in flint and unsullied by good cheer. He said, “Munro Spence? Doctor Munro Spence?”

“That’s me,” I said.

“Will you take a look at Doctor Laughton before we move him? He didn’t have too good a journey down.”

There was a man to take care of my baggage, so I followed the Constable to the Harbourmaster’s house at the end of the quay. It was a stone building, square and solid. Doctor Laughton was in the Harbourmaster’s sitting room behind the office. He was in a chair by the fire with his feet on a stool and a rug over his knees and was attended by one of his own nurses, a stocky red-haired girl of twenty or younger.

I began, “Doctor Laughton. I’m…”

“My replacement, I know,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

I checked his pulse, felt his glands, listened to his chest, noted the signs of cyanosis. It was hardly necessary; Doctor Laughton had already diagnosed himself, and had requested this transfer. He was an old-school Edinburgh-trained medical man, and I could be sure that his condition must be sufficiently serious that ‘soldiering on’ was no longer an option. He might choose to ignore his own aches and troubles up to a point, but as the island’s only doctor he couldn’t leave the community at risk.

When I enquired about chest pain he didn’t answer directly, but his expression told me all.

“I wish you’d agreed to the aeroplane,” I said.

“For my sake or yours?” he said. “You think I’m bad. You should see your colour.” And then, relenting a little, “The airstrip’s for emergencies. What good’s that to me?”

I asked the nurse, “Will you be travelling with him?”

“I will,” she said. “I’ve an Aunt I can stay with. I’ll return on the morning boat.”

Two of the men from the Puffer were waiting to carry the doctor to the quay. We moved back so that they could lift him between them, chair and all. As they were getting into position Laughton said to me, “Try not to kill anyone in your first week, or they’ll have me back here the day after.”

I was his locum, his temporary replacement. That was the story. But we both knew that he wouldn’t be returning. His sight of the island from the sea would almost certainly be his last.

Once they’d manoeuvred him through the doorway, the two sailors bore him with ease toward the boat. Some local people had turned out to wish him well on his journey.

As I followed with the nurse beside me, I said, “Pardon me, but what do I call you?”

“I’m Nurse Kirkwood,” she said. “Rosie.”

“I’m Munro,” I said. “Is that an island accent, Rosie?”

“You have a sharp ear, Doctor Spence,” she said.

She supervised the installation of Doctor Laughton in the deck cabin, and didn’t hesitate to give the men orders where another of her age and sex might only make suggestions or requests. A born Matron, if ever I saw one. The old salts followed her instruction without a murmur.

When they’d done the job to her satisfaction, Laughton said to me, “The latest patient files are on my desk. Your desk, now.”

Nurse Kirkwood said to him, “You’ll be back before they’ve missed you, doctor,” but he ignored that.

He said, “These are good people. Look after them.”

The crew were already casting off, and they all but pulled the board from under my feet as I stepped ashore. I took a moment to gather myself, and gave a pleasant nod in response to the curious looks of those well-wishers who’d stayed to see the boat leave. The day’s cargo had been unloaded and stacked on the quay and my bags were nowhere to be seen. I went in search of them and found Moodie, driver and handyman to the island hospital, waiting beside a field ambulance that had been decommissioned from the military. He was chatting to another man, who bade good day and moved off as I arrived.

“Will it be much of a drive?” I said as we climbed aboard.

“Ay,” Moodie said.

“Ten minutes? An hour? Half an hour?”

“Ay,” he agreed, making this one of the longest conversations we were ever to have.

The drive took little more than twenty minutes. This was due to the size of the island and a good concrete road, yet another legacy of the Army’s wartime presence. We saw no other vehicle, slowed for nothing other than the occasional indifferent sheep. Wool and weaving, along with some lobster fishing, sustained the peacetime economy here. In wartime it had been different, with the local populace outnumbered by spotters, gunners, and the Royal Engineers. Later came a camp for Italian prisoners of war, whose disused medical block the Highlands and Islands Medical Service took over when the island’s cottage hospital burned down. Before we reached it we passed the airstrip, still usable, but with its gatehouse and control tower abandoned.

The former prisoners’ hospital was a concrete building with a wooden barracks attached. The Italians had laid paths and a garden, but these were now growing wild. Again I left Moodie to deal with my bags, and went looking to introduce myself to the Senior Sister.

Senior Sister Garson looked me over once and didn’t seem too impressed. But she called me by my title and gave me a briefing on everyone’s duties while leading me around on a tour. It was then that I learned my driver’s name. I met all the staff apart from Mrs. Moodie, who served as cook, housekeeper, and island midwife.

“There’s just the one six-bed ward,” Sister Garson told me. “We use that for the men and the officers’ quarters for the women. Two to a room.”

“How many patients at the moment?”

“As of this morning, just one. Old John Petrie. He’s come in to die.”

Harsh though it seemed, she delivered the information in a matter-of-fact manner.