Out of time part 2
It took them two days to set everything up. Mitchell, who after one hundred years of existence had become quite adept at acquiring things he needed, became their chief thief, making trips to the local cottage hospital where the CCTV cameras failed to pick him up stealing drugs, syringes and whatever else was on Nina’s crumpled list that he pulled out of his pocket to consult. No one even challenged him as he walked out of the hospital’s main door with a canister of oxygen under his arm. So much for security.
George and Nina spent the time as close together as they could, most of it in bed wrapped around each other, clinging to their remaining hours.
“If you don’t come back,” Nina had whispered to him in the early hours of the morning. “I’ll come and find you.”
“No you most certainly will not!” George protested, pulling away from her. “I’m coming back, Nina, rest assured of that. But if anything does happen, you have to stay, you have to live in so that you can remember me and us and everything we did together. I need you to do that.”
She’d stared blankly into the darkness, one hand splayed over his chest.
He sat up. “Nina. Promise me that you won’t give up,” he insisted. “I need you to promise me.”
She smiled up at him, and lied cheerfully enough. “Yes, I promise.”
He raised his hand and rubbed a finger along the underside of her chin tenderly. “When we’ve got Annie back,” he said softly. “Things will go back to normal. You’ll see.”
“Normal,” she scoffed at him “What’s normal for us?”
It was Mitchell who drew the bath early the next day, pouring in the bag of ice cubes Nina had bought from the local shop and staring at them blankly as they bobbed around cheerfully in the blue/green water. He shut his eyes, feeling detached from the situation and what he was about to do. He felt his fists clench in his sleeves, but they weren’t his, they belonged to someone else, and it was that someone was the killer, not him.
The door to the bathroom opened and Nina pushed her way in, ignoring him and the rapidly filling bath as she laid out her medical supplies in the space normally filled by a free-standing cabinet, which Mitchell had manhandled into the hallway to give them more space. She spent too long sorting things, getting them into place, reorganizing them. Mitchell barely looked at her, but he could sense she was stalling. He didn’t blame her. If the day had had a massive pause button anywhere he could reach, he would have pressed it the moment the sun poked its way above the trees on the far side of their house, and never let thing move forward even a second.
Then Nina got to her feet. She stood, staring at the floor, facing the wall.
“You’ll…” she began, but broke off. He didn’t prompt her. She was wearing one of the three outfits that seemed to constitute her entire wardrobe these days: jeans, oversized jumper, boots. He wondered if it was odd for someone who’d been living a wholly ordinary life three, four months ago, to suddenly be living in a world where they couldn’t even afford to buy a decent change of clothes. Though of course, that was probably the least of her worries.
He realized the bath was getting full, and quickly reached down to turn off the tap, the sound of running water dying away to leave a harsh silence between them.
He turned back, focussing on her now, inviting her to speak with patience he probably hadn’t ever shown her the whole time they’d known each other.
“Don’t…” she started again, but this time found the strength to go on. “Don’t leave him behind,” she begged lightly.
Mitchell looked confused. “No one’s getting left anywhere,” he assured her.
“No, but I’m saying,” she insisted. “Don’t get carried away in there, whatever happens. I’m begging you. Bring him back to me.”
Mitchell nodded, sincerely. “If I’m coming back,” he said. “George is coming back. There’s no argument.”
Her lips curled into a grateful smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and she glanced briefly at the bath before turning to walk away. But she came to a halt in the doorway. George was standing there. He’d taken his glasses off, but apart from that was fully dressed in his normal clothes.
They’d said their goodbyes already, and she’d been hoping to avoid seeing him again; not wanting to face it. But here he was, and all she could think to say was useless.
“You’re - doing this with your clothes on?”
He nodded. “Of course. If I do it naked, I’ll be stuck like that, and I can think of better ways to be dressed for the afterlife.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
He smiled down at her, but she just lightly touched his chest with both hands and walked quickly away.
George watched her, then took a deep breath and entered the bathroom
Mitchell could hear his heart thumping.
“George,” he said immediately. “You don’t have to do this. We’ll find another way to get her back,” Mitchell went on.
“How?” George asked, shaking his head slightly. “We’ve been thinking about it for weeks and haven’t come up with anything better than this. And what if after a certain period has passed, she really will have gone so far into whatever that other world is that we never find her? What if we can’t get her back?”
Mitchell couldn’t argue with that. But the central point of what he was saying remained the same. “You don’t have to do this,” he re-iterated firmly.
George came more fully into the bathroom. “Yes I do,” he said, his voice catching slightly in his dry throat.
“Okay,” Mitchell laid his hands on his shoulders, his concern for his friend overriding his own fears of going back into that dark corridor, into the nothingness. He’d faced it once, the terror, the judgement. Going back was something he never thought he would have to do.
Then George looked away from him towards the bath.
“You know I’ll probably fight you,” he said, sounding slightly calmer, amazingly matter of fact really, considering their discussion topic.
“It’s an instinctive reaction,” Mitchell told him. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be ready. It’ll be quick.”
George blew out a few breaths, and shut his eyes, steadying himself against Mitchell. Then he stepped away and put one leg over into the bath. Then the other, and sat down in the water before he could reconsider.
“Holy fuck, it’s cold!” he exclaimed, shivering instantly.
“Okay,” Mitchell said coming over. “Take a deep breath.”
George couldn’t do anything else, the cold was making him gasp.
“One deep breath George,” Mitchell said again. “Then let it all out,”
George looked at him, his face contorting with fear and cold, his body shaking as he fought for breath.
“One breath!” Mitchell said louder. “Come on.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” George stuttered, and used all his effort to draw in one long breath against his body’s instinct, and then blow it all out, squeezing the air from his lungs until there was nothing left.
Instantly, Mitchell grabbed him, one hand pushing his head under the water, the other fixed on his chest to hold him firmly down.
George fought him like a mad thing, all arms and fingers, the frigid water splashing over Mitchell, chilling him as he used all his strength to hold his friend under the water. He closed his eyes, unable to look at George’s face as he struggled to breathe, to remain alive, the vital instinct tearing at Mitchell’s arms, trying to rip them away as death approached.
As he’d promised, it didn’t take long. After maybe a minute, George’s struggles became weaker. The water stopped splashing. Still Mitchell couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to think that he was holding his friend’s dying body under the water, the coldness of the water nothing to the coldness of the lifeless eyes that would stare back at him.
Then a hand grabbed him on the shoulder, and he started and turned, eyes flaring open in abject shock.
“Mitchell?” George was standing behind him. Mitchell gaped, confused and bewildered for several seconds, before feverishly looking over his shoulder. In the bath, George’s body floated a few inches from the top of the water, eyes open and fixed.
“Mitchell?” the ghost George said again.
Mitchell tore his gaze away from the bath. “George,” he said, standing up and shaking his arm to rid it of water. “How do you feel?”
George was looking around, feeling himself, his face, his arms his body.
“Weird,” he said, his own eyes drawn to the body in the bath. Mitchell saw him start to shake
He grabbed him and stepped in front. “Don’t look,” he said. When that didn’t work, he shook him. “George!” he commanded.
His friend’s eyes snapped up. His mouth was open in shock, his new situation not sinking in.
“Don’t look,” Mitchell said firmly.
Faintly and dumbly, George nodded.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mitchell reassured him.
Barely were the words out of his mouth, when an eerie creaking noise screeched through the room.
They both turned to look, as the cheerfully painted green wood door opened out towards them from the point of the wall where there had once been a wash hand basin.
“Alright,” Mitchell said, shaking his arm again. “Are you ready?”
George looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“Right. Take my hand. We’ll go through together.”
And they took a step forward.
---
The corridor sucked them in, stretching and pulling and sinking away into darkness, and they were rushed along, all sensation gone, all feeling faded to nothing. Words had no meaning, couldn’t even be spoken or thought or considered. There was an awareness of the men, the men all around them with sticks and rope, poking them, touching them, asking them questions they couldn’t hear or answer, telling them things they didn’t want to know or consider or put into a context of anything they had ever imagined. Then terror gripped them, squeezed their motionless hearts, sank its teeth into their confused and broken minds, until, had they breath in their bodies, they would have screamed for mercy and release.
Release.
Nothing.
When George was aware of anything else, he was aware mostly only that the men were gone.
He was alone.
He looked around, confused at the absence of sensation and feeling and sound and everything else that the human mind was used to using as a focus for existence.
Realization was slow to sink in.
He was alone.
“Mitchell??” He whipped around The vampire was nowhere to be seen. “Mitchell!” He said it louder, but his voice sank away somehow, as if he were shouting into fog. And it wasn’t a bad analogy. The world around him, or the plane around him, or wherever the hell he was, did appear to be covered in fog. But not fog. It was more like an absence of anything other than fog, an absence of everything.
“Mitchell!!”
“Stand in line.”
“What?”
The voice had appeared to come from behind him, and George turned quickly. But there was nobody to be seen.
“Stand in line.” It said again, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
George swallowed, cautiously, looking around for anything that suggested movement or life.
Then, as though a wind had suddenly blown the fog away, he was standing in what appeared to be a limitless room, with people milling around in their dozens or hundreds or thousands (he couldn’t be sure.) He gasped and staggered a bit at the suddenness of the change, but recovered quickly, scanning the faces nearest him, feverishly hoping that one of them would be his Irish friend feverishly scanning for him in return.
But the faces were unknown, every colour and creed and hue, every costume and outfit under the sun, some without clothes, some were children. But none of them were Mitchell.
“Stand in line,” the voice said again, and George wondered briefly if it was speaking English or if he was hearing a generic language that all those around him could understand as easily as if they were listening to their native tongues.
Obediently, and with little idea what to do otherwise, he followed the general throng of people, who all appeared to be moving in one purposeful direction. He looked about him constantly for a sign of Mitchell, but the blank faces that met his gaze were nothing to him but strangers.
“Stand in line,” the voice was getting louder now, and the crowds appeared to be slowing.
What George saw ahead of him made him stop, and he was jostled and bumped as people moved passed him, none of them commenting on his lack of movement or fighting it, but all of them seeking a way around without the same pause.
“Oh my God…” George muttered.
In front of him was a queue unlike any he had ever even imagined in his worst nightmares. It made him think, briefly, of the post office before Christmas, the line of people shuffling slowly forward, arms full of packages and parcels and faces full of hopelessness. But this line stretched as far as his eyes could see, carefully demarcated by endless barriers that folded forwards and backwards across the sizeless room.
He gulped and quickly took a place in the line, looking around to see if he could see how far it went. But it stretched on forever.
“Well Mitchell,” he muttered, facing the front and resigning himself to waiting. “I hope you were right about time moving differently over here. Because I think I could be here for a while.”
---
“Why are you here?”
Mitchell blinked, distracted by the weird sense of place and the music that was playing somewhere just in hearing. It was like lift music: vaguely similar to a song he thought he knew, but modified into annoyance. Its persistence had the same effect as a buzzing fly. He tried to ignore it and think up an answer.
“I’m - uh - dead…?” he posited.
“You’re not dead. If you were dead I wouldn’t be wasting my time asking you why you are here!”
“But I am dead,” he protested, squinting his eyes against the light that was just too bright to be comfortable. “Look,” he held out a wrist. “No pulse. You can feel it for yourself.”
“I am not feeling your pulse.”
“I’m dead! I’m really dead,” he almost laughed it out.
“John…”
“Seriously,” he went on, puffing his cheeks and feeling slightly shivery. It was cold, he realized. “I haven’t been alive in ages.”
There was a rustling of paper. “Died July16th 1917, Passchendaele, France, Mitchell, J, Sergeant. This you?” The paper was held up and Mitchell saw the last picture of him that had ever been taken, the smart young man in uniform, faded brown on the faded brown form.
He nodded.
“You’ve been dead in fact, for 93 years.”
“I told you.”
“But you’re not dead! You’re undead. It’s why you haven’t been here for 93 years. It’s why we kicked you out when you first stood before us, like we do for all your kind, like I’m about to do to you again right now.”
A stamp came out and hovered over the paper.
“No, wait!” Mitchell protested, shaking off the noise and the light and the cold in an effort to think straight. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here? You did ask me.”
“Think of it more as a rhetorical question. You’ll be much happier.”
“Look,” Mitchell was getting desperate. “Just give me a day.”
The stamp continued to hover. Then it was placed down at the side of the paper.
“A day? For what?”
He tried to come up with something. His silence seemed endless. The music played on. The stamp began to rise again.
“To - say goodbye to someone!” he blurted out.
“There are no goodbyes here, only an eternity of blackness. Besides, what are you going to do in a day? You’d need a bloody sat nav to find anyone in here. Really, you’re better off going back down.”
“Why?” Mitchell demanded loudly. “Because it’s what you’re supposed to do? Because it’s what everybody does? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if just this once you didn’t send a vampire back down?”
“What do you mean by interesting?”
“Well it must get quite boring for you up here doesn’t it? Same thing over and over again: a dead one, another dead one, oh look, another dead one. How about an undead one wandering around - just for a day? Might shake things up a little, give you all something to talk about. And then I’ll be gone and you’ll never have to think about me again, except when you want to remember back to the day you bent the rules just a little bit and let a vampire stay where he shouldn’t be.”
The music tinkled on.
“You’re flattering me.”
“No, I’m being serious, man. It must be so boring up there with that stamp and those papers and that’s all you do day after day after day. Come on, just this once, break the rules.”
No response.
“Please?”
The papers rustled slightly, and then the top one slipped out of view with great subtlety. “You’ve got until later.
“Well… how long’s that?”
“It’s as long as it needs to be and as short as you don’t want. She’s in the grey room.”
He was startled by that statement. “I’m sorry?”
“She’s in the grey room. The room of absence.”
“Who - who is?”
“The girl who died with you in her thoughts and in her eyes. Presumably the one you’ve come to say goodbye to.”
His heart lifted a little. “The grey room?”
“Take a left after the corridor to the pit. You can’t miss it.”
“Oh. Uh - cheers.” And he turned to walk away, briefly wondering where George had gotten to in all of this.
Tbc...