Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales Read online

  I force my clenched jaw into a semblance of a smile. No point in causing a fuss just yet. I’ll get my revenge once I’m back at their house and miles away from this place. I’ve a whole campaign of domestic disobedience planned to make their lives an utter misery for the next couple of months. ‘Can’t complain,’ I say. ‘This is a nice wee room and the staff have been very kind. Best two weeks I’ve spent in a long, long time,’ I add spitefully.

  Both of them smile at each other. There is something in that shared smile which makes me feel uneasy.

  ‘I’m really glad to hear that, dad. You see, we were thinking of these last two weeks being a trial run for a more permanent arrangement. We’ve been finding it hard to cope with your condition and think it’s for the best if you moved in here on a long term basis. What do you think?’

  Sunlight is reflecting from a small picture frame beside the door and I feel my thoughts slowly begin to unwind and slither around my feet like a long length of unbound hair. Not now! Dear God not now, I scream inside my head. The fuckers are planning on giving me a life sentence in this miserable dump and I can’t find the words to shout and spit my defiance.

  There is another memento hidden away at the bottom of my case that I haven’t seen fit to mention so far. A memento mori to be precise. A reminder of mortality; a long-held souvenir from the days when I ran with the old Glasgow street gangs. I fight against the mental palsy that threatens to immobilise me and stick my hand inside the suitcase, my trembling fingers slipping beneath the false panel at the bottom, groping until I feel that familiar length of mother-of-pearl secure in my hand. A man of my generation isn’t complete without a straight razor for emergencies.

  They don’t notice what I’m doing, so relieved are they that I seem to be accepting the inevitable without a shouting match. I nod towards the en-suite bathroom and shuffle woodenly towards it.

  ‘Desperate for a slash,’ I manage to croak as the door closes behind me. Even as I stand before the mirror with the razor held against my skin, I can hear them unpacking my things from the case. I imagine they’ll be puzzled when they discover my hidden cache of mementoes. I just wish I had the time to write a letter of explanation for each object.

  When the honed steel slices through unresisting flesh and the dark, bitter blood fountains across the mirror, I have one last thought.

  I’ve just given that despicable pair of selfish cunts one holiday memento they’ll never manage to lose or forget.

  The Driving Examiner

  Second hand cars are always a risky investment - a sure-fire way of inheriting a previous owner’s mechanical problems, or as it turned out in my case, the previous owner himself. Just my perishing luck to buy a suicide’s car. I even knew the poor bleeder. He was my old driving test examiner, Len Cassidy, or as he was better known, ‘No-Pass-Cass.’

  I remember reading about the scandal in the local newspaper. Len was notoriously strict over passing learner drivers, but one day a pretty girl offered Len a ‘backseat special’ in return for a favourable test result. No-one need ever have known, but the stupid girl blabs about it on Twitter and suddenly it’s all over the papers and ends up in court. Len was looking at six month stretch in prison, so he goes and tops himself. Parks right outside the test centre in the middle of the night with a rubber hose connected to the exhaust pipe.

  I got the fright of my life when Len suddenly materialised the first time I was driving the car after dark. He wasn’t looking too good - a fair bit of green mould growing on his cheeks, and his eyes already sunk deep in their dark sockets. He smelled bad too. Before I could even object to his presence, he says in a bleak monotone, ‘What’s the average stopping distance when travelling at 30 miles per hour?’ I put up with this nonsense for a whole week with Len’s incorporeal form putrefying a little more each night. I bought half a dozen air fresheners and still had to drive with the windows down. Then there were the swarms of flies to contend with. Anyone would lose their rag after a while, but any time I ranted at Len to sod off he just mumbled annoying stuff like, ‘When I slap the dashboard with my hand please perform an emergency stop,’ and ‘Please perform a three point turn using forward and reverse gears.’ Infuriating wasn’t the word.

  I begged a priest to perform an exorcism, but he said no, as suicide was a mortal sin, and besides, Len Cassidy had failed him six times when he was learning to drive and fully deserved to spend eternity in purgatory. I even phoned the RAC for help but they laughed in my face, then tried to sell me insurance. One of my mates, a grease-monkey who works at Nifty-Fix, said he’d come across this problem before. It seems modern catalytic converters are to blame for trapping the souls of exhaust pipe suicides and I needed to have my converter stripped out and replaced, a costly business, especially when he told me I also needed new shock absorbers.

  But Len is finally gone - although the stench of rotting flesh did linger for a few weeks. But if you’ve recently had a second-hand catalytic converter fitted by those rip-off cowboy merchants at Nifty-Fix, I’d wait until after dark and see if Len appears. If he does, remember my advice. When pulling out into traffic, always mirror, signal, and manoeuvre. That never fails to shut him up for a while.

  Cherries for Lady Jane

  The Stokes-Hinchley Sanatorium loomed like a dark, brooding totem at the centre of a hundred acres of woodland and meticulously manicured private gardens. It housed over seventy patients in the main part of the building, mostly those suffering from diseases of the lungs such as tuberculosis, bronchitis, and chronic asthma. This was where ailing family members of the rich and influential came to cough and wheeze and gasp for air, and more often than not, fade slowly out of this world while their loved ones kept themselves safely removed from the risk of cross-infection miles away in their town houses.

  I took a porter’s job at the sanatorium shortly after the Great War. In a way it was the perfect position for a man like me. Towards the end of the war, I’d been caught in the blast of an enemy artillery shell exploding and suffered serious burns to one side of my head, losing an eye and an ear in the process. Although the pain from the burns mostly faded in time, I had to endure a different flavour of pain when I saw people staring in my direction, not seeing a brave soldier who’d fought for his King and country, but a scarred, charnel house golem prowling the streets looking for children to scare. Some would gape then whisper behind their hands, while others openly mocked my facial disfigurement, and I constantly fought against the urge to teach them some manners with my fists.

  I was drinking more than was good for me, spending my meagre army pension on bottles of cheap gin. With my looks, a normal job was out of the question. Drinking was how I survived the new war of attrition I’d been thrust into. Instead of the enemy wearing a uniform and charging across the battlefield with a fixed bayonet aimed at my heart, it now shadowed me in the form of a deep depression that sapped my spirit one drop of blood at a time. The doctors said this malaise was merely the lingering effects of the war and I’d soon snap out of it. I was having nightmares filled with carnage, men being ripped apart by gunfire and screaming brass shells, bodies in torn uniforms hanging limply from barbed-wire fencing, trenches filled with corpses and the stink of the rotting dead. But while other men were afforded the luxury of once more picking up their everyday lives with careers, marriage, and starting families, I was busy digging myself a new trench, this one in my head, a safe place to hunker down and hide from the insults and looks of horror my burned face inspired among my fellow city dwellers.

  I was thrown a lifeline when I bumped into my old army captain. Although coming from a privileged background, Whittaker had always seemed a decent sort. I was drifting aimlessly along the street after nursing my way through a bottle in an alleyway when he hailed me from the door of a tailor’s shop. To be frank with you, I was at that point mulling over the option of loading my pockets with scrap metal and chucking myself in the Thames. My landlord had told me earlier that morning to pack my belongings a
nd vacate my lodgings before the end of the week due to the serious rent arrears I’d run up. The terrible malaise already threaded through my soul like a dark cancer was actively flexing its muscles and constricting what little fight I had left within me. If I had been walking in the opposite direction I might not have heard Whittaker hailing me as I was completely deaf as well as blind on that side.

  ‘Jenkins! Corporal Jenkins!’

  He strode towards me and pumped my hand. ‘How goes it with you…?’ he started to say, then gave a lingering look at the damaged side of my head. To give the man his due, he didn’t flinch. ‘Good heavens, old chap. That’s certainly a bit of a mess, but much better than having your whole head blown off. So tell me, how goes life for you now that blasted war has ended?’

  Maybe it was just Whittaker catching me at such a low ebb that unravelled what little pride I still clung to. I had faced down enemy charges without losing my nerve, crawled across no-man’s land on my belly as death erupted mere feet away, but on that sunny street I found myself weeping like a child as my former Captain looked on. I felt him gently take hold of my arm and lead me to a nearby public house where he bought me a glass of ale and listened to my pitiable tale of woe.

  Eventually he said, ‘Perhaps a change of scenery might do the trick, Jenkins. There’s a family friend of ours who owns a sanatorium somewhere out in the sticks. How would you feel if I enquired about fixing you up with a job? Probably be something below your station, but it would give you a bit of breathing space. Time to sort yourself out.’

  When I agreed in the affirmative, he took some notes from his wallet and pressed them upon me. I tried to refuse this further kindness but he insisted, ‘This is to keep your landlord at bay for another few weeks as I’ll need an address to write to you.’

  And so it was that I received a letter from Whittaker informing me there was a porter’s position vacant at the Stokes-Hinchley Sanatorium, as well as a train ticket to get there and ten pounds to buy some new clothes. I wasn’t a religious man but that night I offered up a prayer of thanks to Whittaker’s decency and good-hearted act of charity. The following day I travelled by train into the heart of the countryside where I was picked up in a rusty old flatbed truck driven by a surly older man who introduced himself with a grunt as Ted Cob, before lapsing into silence and driving the truck along a seemingly endless succession of back-roads and leafy-lanes to the sanatorium.

  When we arrived, miserable-faced Ted took me straight to the staff quarters situated in the east wing, instructing me to dump my suitcase in the tiny room that would be my living space, before whisking me off to the kitchens where a cheery Irishwoman fed me stew and potatoes. Next came a whistle-stop tour of the sanatorium conducted by the top man himself, Dr Allander. He was a dapper, lean little man who exuded confidence and authority the way some animals emit musk to let others of their kind know who is in charge. I assumed he wanted to undertake this duty personally to gauge what sort of man he’d hired strictly on the basis of Whittaker’s letter of reference. Unlike most people I came into contact with, Dr Allander studied my disfigurement openly and with great interest before asking if I was still in pain, and he seemed pleased when I told him that I was not.

  The first two floors of the sanatorium were where the patients resided in bright, well-aired communal wards where nurses and doctors bustled about looking busy and efficient. The third floor consisted of administration offices and store rooms where the drugs, dressings and medical equipment were kept. Allander informed me of my new duties which consisted mainly of the fetching and carrying type.

  It would be my job to help get the patients into bath-chairs and wheel them outside into the fresh air when the weather permitted. I was also taken on a quick walk around the rear of the sanatorium and shown the boiler room, the laundry, the incinerator and a small morgue. After a brisk, professional handshake, Allander sent me back to the taciturn Ted to be attired in the powder-blue fatigues that constituted my porter’s garb.

  For the first few months I was happy enough. Isolated in the middle of nowhere, I was no longer constantly hugging the shadows trying to hide my poor excuse for a face. The medical staff were well used to my sort of facial injuries having experienced enough of them during and after the war. The patients, too, seemed not to take much of an interest in my grisly appearance, so preoccupied were they over their own harsh lessons in mortality. In its own quiet way, my life in the sanatorium became almost as institutionalised and routine as the army had been. It was cathartic. I stopped drinking and took long walks in the countryside when my shifts were over for the day. The terrible dreams of blood and death I suffered as a result to my exposure to battle began to ease both in their intensity and regularity.

  The only thing still weighing down my spirits somewhat was the patients themselves. It saddened me to see so few visitors make the effort to visit their loved ones as they either recuperated or passed into the next life, gasping horribly for a single breath at the end. As a porter I was mostly spared having to witness the death-bed agonies, but seeing a new empty bed when I performed my duties filled me with a melancholy ache. It made me feel shamed and guilty to remember the shallowness of my thoughts when considering taking my own life.

  I was particularly attached to one young girl named Rachael Broom, only fourteen years old and already wasting away from the ravages of consumption. I always enjoyed wheeling her into the gardens where she would name all the trees and flowers one by one by both their common name and in Latin. She said that if she recovered she wanted to study botany, if her father allowed such a thing. She had me read to her in the evenings, telling me my voice lulled her into the restful arms of sleep that came harder and harder to escape into with each passing day. We talked of pleasant things; books and poetry, plays and musicals, holidays by the sea-side. Nothing serious or morbid. The only time she made any acknowledgement of my monstrous face was when she once reached out and ran her cool fingers down the mass of shiny burn-tissue, skirting the puckered gristle of my ear-hole and then down to the purple welt of my jaw. When I looked into her face there were tears in her eyes.

  More and more often however, I would find Rachael coughing blood into her handkerchief when I entered the ward, forcing her to cancel our daily outing to the gardens. It seemed the malign beast of tuberculosis had its foot firmly upon her frail chest and had no intention of letting its prey escape. The day before she died, Rachael whispered to me that her only regret was not having made a difference in this world. I tried to tell her that she had made a huge difference in my life, but a fit of choking saw the nurses wave me away before they pulled the curtains around the bed like the final act in a tragic opera. The following morning her slender body lay in the morgue awaiting her family to finally pay her a visit and take her home. I was inconsolable and had to be told by an arrogant young doctor to buck up my ideas if I wanted to remain in employment.

  It was the emotional blow of Rachael’s death that started up my awful dreams again. Whereas before, my dreams would be scatter-shot affairs with many different red-tinted images and themes, these new dreams would follow a precise pattern. I’d be back in Flanders walking along a trench filled wall to wall with dead comrades, each one propped up and standing to attention against the wooden planks that held the mud at bay. Overhead, the continuous sound of shells exploding and horses screaming assaulted my senses. As I passed each soldier in that dream-trench I sensed his brittle, cold eyes swivel to follow my progress along the ranks of the dead. And at the end of the trench, Rachael waited for me. Rachael dressed in her white shroud, with red stains on her breathless lips. As she held out a hand to beckon me onwards the cold, stiff soldiers would topple forwards, crushing me under their weight, dead arms holding me face down in the mud until I awoke with a cry, hauling painful gasps of air into my lungs. After several weeks of these dreams I was sure I looked more fatigued than the dying patients occupying the beds. Eventually I summoned up the courage to request an appointment with Dr Al
lander.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Allander said, after listening to my account of the dreams, ‘I fear young Miss Broom’s death has triggered a recurrence of your stress-related trauma. What we have to do is break the cycle. Firstly I shall prescribe a sleeping tablet that should help with the nightmares. Secondly, perhaps it’s time we gave you different duties away from the normal wards.’

  Allander strolled nonchalantly to the window, stroking his chin. ‘As you know by now, the Stokes-Hinchley Sanatorium also provides a service to assist special patients with mental health problems.’

  I’d been surprised to discover the basement was used to house six or seven poor souls whose minds permanently wandered or had turned in on themselves. Ted Cob was entrusted in making sure the patients’ rooms were firmly locked and no-one entered the basement without Allander’s permission. I’d also overheard two nurses gossiping over how Ted was a handy man with his fists if the loonies downstairs got over-emotional and needed to be restrained. It sounded a terrible job but what could I say to Dr Allander?

  ‘Yes, indeed, Jenkins. A change is always as good as a rest. As from tomorrow, report to Ted Cob. Ted isn’t getting any younger and it might be prudent to have you shown the ropes in case you have to take over his position at short notice.’ I thought Allander was done with me but as I turned towards the door he looked up and said, ‘Remember this. The people in the basement whose healthcare we’ve been entrusted with belong to important, highly influential families. It would cause them untold embarrassment if details of their loved one’s state of mind were to be made public. So discretion is vital. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  I nodded my head. ‘Yes, Dr Allander. I understand perfectly.’

  Allander seemed satisfied. ‘Very well, Jenkins. Off you trot, and let me know how the sleeping tablets agree with you.’