The sound of her own laugh surprised her, her underused vocal cords producing a noise somewhere between a cough and a bark. Her concerns about retaining her job, when she could not bring herself to leave the house without battling waves of panic, seemed pitiful, bleakly comic.
The realisation hit her then, in the back of the cab, the conclusion she’d avoided all week as she devoured paperback after paperback and slept too long and wiped drops of blood from door handles, sinks and floors, absorbed in her new normal.
There was no going back to work.
She tried to picture it, tried to imagine the office, her colleagues; faces torn, bleeding, the thin sharp metal pulling, twisting…
Her sob did not sound much different to her laugh.
She let the cabbie keep the change from the tenner—anything to avoid more bloody coins in her hand. There was a self-service check-in system at the waiting room (good), but it was a touchscreen (bad). She used a paper napkin she’d found in her coat pocket to wipe the surface before using it, but even so, a thin film of rusty brown coated the screen and stuck to her fingertips. She went straight to the bathroom after signing herself in to wash her hands, but there was blood, dried and fresh, on the taps, in the sink basin, and all over the door handles.
She rinsed her hands, pulling her sleeve over her fingers to operate the sink, and again to pull the door open to leave. Back in the foyer, she glanced through the glass into the waiting room proper.
It was a charnel house. There were maybe fifteen people in there, mostly old, but a few her age, and a couple of young mothers with toddlers. The blood was everywhere—on the chairs, soaking into the clothes. It darkened the carpeted floor, the blackened trail of footprints reminding her of dirty melting snow. She felt a strange sensation in her head, behind her eyes, as though the world she was seeing was flattening, becoming distant. It was disorientating, but not entirely unpleasant. The distance allowed her to watch without flinching as the hooks tugged, flexed, moving a hand over a mouth here, crossing a leg there. She wondered if this glassy bubble she was in would hold, allow her to rejoin the world somehow, live with this new reality. She suspected not. It felt both insubstantial and brittle.
Still, for now, she watched. And because she watched, she finally saw the toddler. It was a boy, to judge by the haircut and clothing, and it was playing near another child, moving coloured wooden squares from one end of a wire path to another. The other child was older, and Sarah could see the hooks in the back of its hands as it ran a toy car back and forth across the floor.
But the first child, the one playing with the blocks, had no hooks at all.
She stared at the child, without thought, mesmerised by its undamaged skin.
“Sarah Meld to Room Seven, Room Seven for Sarah Meld, thank you.”
Sarah blinked, attempted to swallow, but produced only a dry click. The announcement from inside the waiting room had been muffled but clear enough. She pulled open the door (the habit of using the sleeve of her coat to cover her hand already almost instinctive) and stalked through the room and into the corridor that held the doctors’ offices.
The corridor was in some ways the worst part so far; the harshness of the overhead strip lights gave the bloody tracks on the linoleum a garish glare, especially where the darker puddles had been smeared by a dragged foot. She walked as close to the wall as she could, carefully placing each footstep as clear of the blood as possible, like a child solemnly avoiding the cracks in the pavement.
The door to Room Seven stood open.
The doctor was in profile as Sarah entered, but even a quick glance showed the redness and telltale flashes of metal in his face and hands. Blood pattered on the keyboard and corner desk as he typed into his computer. She got an impression of blue eyes under bushy salt-and-pepper brows and a bald head, wrinkles and laugh lines, a long clean-shaven jawline.
“Sarah, is it? Come and take a seat.” His Welsh accent was soft, his voice smooth and kind. The chair he indicated was against the wall next to his desk. She would be facing his direction, but not directly opposite him. She sat hesitantly, making sure her long coat covered the bloodstains on the seat. More blood was pooled at her feet, so she stared straight ahead, at the wall above the examination couch in the corner. She hoped the sunglasses would hide the fact that she wasn’t looking at him.
“So, I understand you’ve been poorly—running a temperature, headaches, that kind of thing. Can you tell me how you’re feeling now?”
She was relieved to find the rehearsed words came to her lips easily enough, as she stared at the wall.
“I wasn’t honest with my work about what’s been wrong with me.”
“I see.”
The silence sat, punctuated by a slow, quiet dripping. She quickly started talking, raising her voice slightly to smother the sound. “I’ve been feeling afraid. Afraid to leave the house. To talk to anyone.”
“Can you remember when you first started feeling like this?”
“Monday.”
“Did anything happen on Monday that made you feel this way?”
She felt her voice catch in her throat, the prepared lines momentarily refusing to come. “It… I… no. I was just…” The hooked, bleeding hand holding her money flashed into her mind, and she swallowed. “…I was just getting coffee. At the station.”
He shifted in his seat, and through her peripheral vision she could see he was now looking straight at her. She continued to stare at the wall.
“At the station?”
“Train station. I was on my way to work.”
“I see. And has the feeling been constant, or does it come and go?”
“Constant. I mean, if I read it’s not so bad. But even watching telly, I can’t… I get scared.” She’d thought about it carefully. Stay close to the truth. As close as she could without sounding crazy.
The doctor leaned forward, and all of a sudden the dripping became a steady patter, and she looked before she could help herself. The hooks in his face were making the skin bulge out, in his brows, his cheeks. The blood was running down his face in a small stream, almost flowing off his chin onto the floor.
Her jaw clenched against a sob. Trying to look away, but unable to, her eyes darted from wound to wound.
“Sarah, I have to…” The smaller hooks pulled and twisted his lips, and as his mouth opened there was a flash of silver behind his teeth, tugging at his tongue, and the shock of it was powerful enough that she lost most of what he’d said, the words senseless syllables which fell around her, empty noise.
“...glasses off, please?”
Numbly, trembling, she folded the glasses and placed them in her lap, keeping her eyes on them. She couldn’t look back into that kindly, ruined face. She could not.
“Sarah, are you feeling scared now?”
“Yes. Yes, very.”
“Is it… Would you prefer to see a woman doctor?”
“No. It wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Okay, Sarah.”
He went on with the questions. How well was she sleeping, on a scale of one to five? How anxious was she? Was work especially stressful? How were her relationships? Had she ever had anxiety or depression before? She answered them all carefully, quietly, staring at her sunglasses and trying to ignore the dripping sounds.
At length the doctor sighed, and his chair creaked as he moved away from his desk, closer to her.