We stopped outside a door.
“Is she lucid?” I said.
“It varies. Sometimes she recognizes people and seems to understand vaguely where she is. But more often it’s like she’s in a different place and time.” She pushed open the door and spoke more softly. “Ah—here’s our girl.”
I followed her into the room, bracing myself for what I was about to see. But the sight was still a shock. A hospital bed rested against the nearest wall, with wheels on the legs and controls to elevate and change its position. To the side of it, there was more machinery than I’d been expecting: a cart with a bank of monitors, and a stand of clear bags with tubes looping out, connected to the figure lying beneath the covers.
My mother.
I faltered. I had not seen her in twenty-five years, and, as I stood in the doorway now, it looked like someone had made a model of her from wax, but one far smaller and frailer than the old memories I had. My heart fluttered. Her head was bandaged on one side, and what I could see of her face was yellow and motionless, her lips slightly parted. The thin covers were barely disturbed enough to suggest a body beneath, and for a moment I wasn’t sure she was even alive.
Sally seemed unperturbed. She walked across and then bent over slightly, checking the monitors. I caught the faint scent of the flowers on the table beside the machinery, but the smell was corrupted by a hint of something sweeter and more sickly.
“You’re free to sit with her, of course.” Sally finished her examination and straightened up. “But it’s probably best not to disturb her.”
“I won’t.”
“There’s water on the table if she wakes and wants it.” She pointed to the bed rail. “And if there are any problems, there’s a call button there.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She closed the door behind her as she left.
And then silence.
Except not quite. The window nearest the bed was half open, and I could hear the peaceful, soporific buzz of a lawn mower coming from somewhere in the distance. And then, beneath that, the slow, shallow breaths my mother was taking. There were long stretches of empty seconds between them. Looking down at her, I noticed the pink floral pattern of the bedsheets for the first time, and the sight of them delivered a ghost of memory. They weren’t identical to the ones I recalled from childhood, but close enough. Sally must have brought them from the house to make my mother feel more at home here.
I looked around. The room reminded me of the one in the residence halls during my first year at college: small but comfortable, with an en suite bathroom built into one corner and a desk and cabinets along the wall opposite the bed. There were a handful of objects spread out on the desk. Some of them were clearly medical—empty bottles, popped pill cases, and torn strips of cotton wool—but others looked more ordinary, more familiar. There was a pile of carefully folded clothes. Eyeglasses in an open case. The old photograph of my parents’ wedding I remembered sitting on the mantelpiece when I was a child: here now, and angled so my mother could see it from the bed if she woke.
I walked over to the desk. The photo should have been a record of a happy occasion, but, while my mother was smiling and hopeful, my father’s face looked as stern as always. It was the only expression of his I could remember from childhood, whether illuminated by the constant fires he would build in the backyard or shadowed in the hallway as we passed each other without speaking. He had always been serious and sour—a man let down by everything in his life—and we had both been glad to be rid of each other when I left here. None of the phone calls from my mother over the years had featured him. And when he died six years ago, I had not returned to Gritten for the funeral.
I glanced along the desk and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. A thick book, placed cover-down. It was old and weathered, and the spine was slightly twisted, as though it had been soaked in water at some point and then left to dry crooked. My mother had never been much of a reader; my father had always been sneeringly dismissive of fiction, and of me and my love for it. Perhaps my mother had discovered a passion for it after his death, and this was what she had been reading before the accident. A nice gesture on Sally’s part, although it seemed fairly optimistic to imagine my mother was going to finish it now.
I turned the book over, and saw the red, leering devil’s face on the cover—and then pulled my hand away quickly, my fingertips tingling as if they’d been burned.
The Nightmare People.
“Paul?”
I jumped and turned around. My mother was awake. She had moved onto her side and was propped up on one elbow, staring at me almost suspiciously with the one eye I could see, her hair hanging down to the pillow in a thin gray stream.
My heart was beating too quickly.
“Yes.” I spoke quietly, trying to calm myself. “It’s me, Mom.”
She frowned.
“You … shouldn’t be here.”
There was a chair by the bed. I walked slowly across and sat down. Her gaze followed me, as wary as that of an animal primed to flee.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said again.
“I kind of had to be. You fell. Do you remember?”
She continued staring at me for a moment. Then her expression softened and she leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially.
“I hope Eileen’s not here.”
I looked around the room helplessly. “She isn’t, Mom.”
“I shouldn’t say that, really. But we both know what a bitch that woman is. Poor Carl.” She looked sad. “And poor little James too. We’re only doing this for him, aren’t we? You know that, I think. We don’t need to say so, but you understand.”
It’s like she’s in a different place, a different time.
This was a place and time I recognized.
“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I did understand.”
She lay down carefully again and closed her eyes, whispering.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Do you want some water?” I said.
For a moment, my mother did nothing. She just lay there breathing steadily, as though the question were taking time to work its way through the confusing labyrinth of her mind. I had no faith that it would reach its destination, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say right now. And then suddenly my mother lurched awake again, jolting upright at the waist, and reached out and grabbed my wrist so fast there was no time for me to recoil.
“You shouldn’t be here!” she shouted.
“Mom—”
“Red hands, Paul! There are red hands everywhere.”
Her eyes were wide and unblinking, staring at me in absolute horror.
“Mom—”
“Red hands, Paul.”
She let go of me and collapsed back on the bed. I stood up and staggered backward a little, the white imprint of her grip on my skin. I pictured a jungle gym and a ground patterned in crimson, and her words repeated over and over in my head in time with my heartbeat.
Red hands, red hands, red hands everywhere—
“Oh God, it’s in the house, Paul!”
And then my mother’s face contorted in anguish, and she screamed at the ceiling, or perhaps at something out of sight above.
“It’s in the fucking house!”