Graham
“Who’s there?” Graham Williams sat up in bed – well, he raised his head as far as he could; his bed was already set in a semi-seated position; the best thing for his lungs, or so the doctors had said on their last visit. Personally, he thought it a pile of fresh bullshit, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Not anymore.
No answer came back to him, only the echoing footsteps of the night porter walking the linoleum hallways, his mind not on the job but rather following Monday Night Football. The playoff positions were filling up fast, and his team needed just one victory to clinch their spot, and with it the chance to gain redemption for the painful defeat at the end of the previous season.
Despite the lack of an answer, Graham could hear the intruder, his lumbering footsteps heavy on the cheap carpet; he knew the sound of heavy boots when he heard them, unforgiving, uncomfortable. He had been trained to hear them as they snapped a twig or crunched on a pile of leaves. It was the smell he didn’t recognize; a sweet, meaty aroma, like a cheap butcher’s workroom in the heat of summer. He would have retched at the stench, but his stomach had long ago given up its uses, now nothing more than a shriveled bag inside his decaying body, possibly the only organ that the cancer hadn’t eaten away.
He hadn’t drunk anything since Sunday morning, not that anybody who ‘cared’ for him would have noticed. They had all written him off long ago. As soon as the illness entered what they call end-stage, he had been moved to a new room at the end of the terminal wing, where he was then as good as forgotten. Sure, they visited every now and then, but only to check his pulse. He hadn’t had a change of clothes for three days and, while he wasn’t certain, he thought that he had pissed himself at least once.
Graham opened his mouth to call out again, his throat dry and scratched raw, his lips paper-thin. He stuck out his tongue to wet them, but that too was dry, swollen, and heavy in his mouth. He heard his own breathing; slow rattling breaths as if his lungs had filled with water. Yet still he heard the approaching footsteps. It was as if death himself had come out tonight to claim him. Not that Graham cared: he was ready to go, had been ever since his wife died and the government shoved him into a nursing home. He had been more than capable of looking after himself, still would have been if not for the disease – he was only seventy-six, for God’s sake.
They wanted to sell his home and build some cheap houses to give to all the fucking foreigners. Graham had no living relatives and so was an easy target. Within seven months of entering the home he was confined to his 8x5 cell, or ‘room’ as they all called it. It was en suite, but they insisted on giving him a commode in the corner to use. He wasn’t allowed to walk anywhere, instead, they wheeled him to and from the dining room where frozen TV dinners were served lukewarm at best. To top it off, twice a day Graham was transported into the recreation room, which was a plain whitewashed room with large windows that overlooked a supposed garden and fish pond, but looked more like an overgrown wasteland with a large muddy puddle in the center. There were no fish in the pond, that was a certainty, and the only thing that ever dared enter the garden was the occasional bird, but it wouldn’t stay long. Nothing ever stayed in Golden Acres nursing home long.
There were a few bright pictures on the far wall, modern art they called it, but to Graham it looked more like the artist had farted while painting something else and that by-product of his misdirected bodily function had been the better piece. The other occupants of the recreational room were just as exciting, either parked in front of the television, which seemed to broadcast nothing but old black and white movies – as though people over a certain age watched nothing else. Graham couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the news or read a newspaper.
It looked and felt, to him at least, not like a retirement home but a hideaway, a pre-burial storage compound. Food and water was given and they were just left to wait for their clock to run down.
Now, lying in the darkness, hearing the footsteps of an invisible enemy, Graham looked back on it all with no feelings other than a strange and consoling acceptance. A readiness, willingness to go with the strange visitor regardless of what it held in store for a man who had killed the Germans with a song in his heart, before teaching children for the majority of his life, including more than just a few of German descent. He wondered then, for the first time, if any of them still had their grandparents at that time, or had he taken them away from them? Then again, wasn’t that why he became a teacher, to educate, to stop kids rushing off and joining the military simply because it was the easy option, the safe bet that if you failed in your studies you could still go away and be the best that you could be?
Something moved in the corner of the room, to the left of the door. It was his chariot; a worn out wheelchair. Its rusty wheels creaked, its carriage moved back and forth as if some hidden weight had taken a seat, testing it out for after he had passed.
“Who’s there? I know your there?” he croaked, his body objecting by starting a chain reaction that began with a violent coughing fit and ended up with a mouthful of bloody phlegm being spat into a basin positioned on the floor beside the bed for that very purpose.
“It’s me, Sarge. Edwards,” a scared voice answered him. It wasn’t a physical sound, but rather a whisper carried on a breath of wind. In fact Graham doubted he had heard anything at all, only it was that name... Edwards, why had he heard that name?
Graham couldn’t speak further; he was too exhausted, and his body racked with pain. His every muscle ached as it fought just to take the next breath, to see a sunrise that he couldn’t be bothered to see. Ever since his wife died, Graham had asked for death, begged for it, yet it was years before the cancer took hold of him, and now not even his own body listened to him: it just kept on fighting.
“I think we made it, Sarge. I’ve been hiding in the bushes, but I don’t think the fuckers saw me. It’s been so lonely, but now I’ve got you here... Hey, you want to play a few hands? I’ve got a deck in here somewhere. I traded them with a guy from the Airborne a while back.” The voice set off alarm bells inside Graham’s head. Triggering memories he had long since forgotten, or that had simply been deleted by the grey masses that had now spread through his body.
There was a small reading lamp on the table beside his bed – not that he read much anymore. Occasionally he could make it through a few lines before his eyes gave up; his glasses were long lost. He fumbled with his trembling hand, his body covered with a cold sweat that had soaked his sheets.
Do I really want to turn it on? Graham thought, his hand recoiling as it reached the switch.
He looked around once more in the darkness, a comforting place, one that erased the confines of his room, the lack of decorations; other than the picture of his wife on the table beside him, the lamp and ceiling light, there was little in the room. There was a rickety closet that housed his few meager possessions, a wheelchair and a cord that could be pulled in emergencies to call the nurses. Other than that, the room was bare. His bed was located in the center, in front of the small, barred window that offered him a view of either blue sky or cloud. Every now and then an airplane would move through his view, giving him something real to look at; but all too soon, it disappeared from his life the way everything always seemed to do.
Graham closed his eyes, trying hard to block out the footsteps that he could hear approach his bed. The room grew cold. He clamped his eyes shut and focused. He saw his wife. She was young back then. It was the day of their wedding, the war was long since won. They were in love, inseparable. Graham never understood why she stayed with him. His impotency, brought on by the war – although, despite it all, they had certainly enjoyed several passionate moments together – would have pushed many women away into the arms of another. Not his Marjorie; no, she stuck by him, through the barren years, though his nightmares, the childless decades after which old age approached fast and with it the knowledge that a lonely and bleak future lay in wait for whoever was the last one to go.
The image began to flicker. Something somewhere was hurting. The pain came in waves, distorting the image like a satellite broadcast being interrupted by some foreign transmissions, and Graham could make out the hint of an image underneath but not clear enough to tell what it was.
He focused harder. Marjorie stood in her wedding dress, not in the chapel, but outside in the cemetery. They were in the cemetery of the small, rural church where they had gotten married. It was a beautiful day, the odd wisp of cloud in an otherwise deep blue ocean above their heads. A cool breeze blew, but not hard enough for them or their small wedding party to feel the need to reach for their jackets.
Something was wrong with the scene, however. A muffled sound came from inside the church; a strangled yet delicate sound. It took several moments for Graham’s cancer-ravaged brain to realize it was song; the wedding party were already inside.
Praise, my soul the King of Heaven,
To his feet thy tribute bring,
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven
Who like me his praise should sing.
It was a hymn that Graham knew well: it had also been the final hymn sung at his wife’s funeral. She requested it just before she died; she said that it reminded her of the best day of her life. They had been close to her final words, and when the song began during the service Graham had broken down in uncontrollable sorrow.
“We should go inside, love, we don’t want to miss it,” he said; his voice was youthful, deep and commanding. Both were qualities that it had long since lost. She didn’t answer him; the words never reached her ears, rather they fell dead into the grass as if the cancer had eaten them the way it had eaten Graham.
They had never stood outside on their wedding day, not before the service. It was bad luck to see the bride, and after they had posed for some photographs in the back of the church, they left relatively soon after.
Marjorie turned towards him, her face streaked with tears. They reflected the sun, which made the salty liquid sparkle like the diamond bracelet she had worn to both her wedding and funeral. It had been a gift from her mother, which in turn had belonged to her mother and so forth back through the generations. How it came into her family’s possession was shrouded in both mystery and scandal, the most plausible explanation being that it had been a gift bestowed upon her great-great-grandmother by a married dignitary who had taken a shine to her. The bracelet had been a gift meant to initiate an affair. Nobody knew what happened thereafter, but the lack of further jewels in the family line gave way to a rather uninteresting outcome.
Graham saw then that Marjorie stood before a fresh covered grave, the earth still wet and dark from its churning. Graham looked down. The tombstone was a simple wooden cross – handmade and held together by what on first inspection looked like shoelaces. It was exactly the sort of grave marker seen in any half decent western. A name had been carved into the horizontal bar, the penmanship shaky. Another series of cold-sweat shakes racked Graham as he squinted hard, trying to make out the name, his eyes failing him. It grew warmer, or so it felt. The sun burned low in the sky; it was as if it, too, strained to read the words carved into the wooden marker.
The name on the tombstone was clear enough to Graham and it made him stumble backwards. He reached for Marjorie’s hand, a loving gentle hand that had helped him through many bad days and nights during the years, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t being offered at least, for Marjorie had turned to face him, her hands on her hips, her head thrown back in a fit of violent laughter. Her skin was pale. The veins that ran beneath the surface shone a bright blue as if injected with phosphorous.
GRAHAM WILLIAMS
R.I.P.
“No,” Graham said in an uncertain voice. Not because of the tombstone, or the old-fashioned, uncared for approach that had been behind its creation, but more because he had long ago arranged to be buried in a shared grave with his wife.
“We should be together, Marjorie.” His throat hurt to speak, as if the words were wrapped in barbed wire, and each uttered syllable carved deeper chunks of wet flesh from his mouth.
Marjorie stopped laughing and stared at Graham. Her eyes were rattled in the sockets, withered like prunes. Her skin was pulled tight against her face. The wrinkles of age were gone, replaced by the shriveled onset of decay, wet rot hard at work peeling the flesh from her body in putrescent strips. Marjorie opened her mouth, and a groaning, screeching sound erupted from within her bowels. Her skin began to bulge; it stretched thinner and thinner as if something was trapped inside, desperate to escape.
Graham watched in stunned silence as his beloved wife split open, her skin simply pulling apart like a piece of rotted fruit. A strange black liquid spilled from the slit that ran vertically down her body – a thin watery substance blacker than the night. The screeching sound grew louder and louder – and was joined by a strange rustling, like feathers beating against themselves. Graham had been to his uncle’s chicken farm more than once in his younger days, helping out around the farm for some extra cash, and what he then heard coming from within Marjorie’s decayed body made him think of just that place where the birds were cramped together in pens, separated and ready for the slaughter.
Then it stopped, and Marjorie simply exploded. Her skin tore open with a dry dripping sound. A deep vertical gash appeared on her, splitting the wedding dress she was wearing. A rush of stale, putrescent air came first, hitting Graham and making his head spin.
Then, out of nowhere, with the same sound of rustling wings, the frantic scratching of the stiff legs and the squawking of long silenced beaks, a swarm of blackbirds exploded from within Marjorie’s body. The birds’ wings were wet with blood; thick clots fell to the ground as the birds began to spread their wings and fly away. Thousands of them erupted from her body, and when it was all over her skin lay in two even piles on the ground. The birds continued to climb into the air until the sun was hidden by them; they moved en-mass. They flew towards it and covered its light, creating an artificial dusk. Graham watched helplessly; he watched as the birds ascended into the heavens and on towards the sun. He could hear their cries as their bodies began to burn and singed feathers fell down around them like a charcoal snow.
Graham fell to the floor, coughing and rasping. A large ball of dark red, congealed blood hung from the left arm of the cross like a tear. When he opened his eyes he was back in his small cell, the ball of blood on the floor beside the bed. He stared at it as it beat like the aborted heart of a fetus making its first and last attempt at creating life. His sheets were soaked with strong smelling urine that burned on bed sores.
His heart was pounding, or at least going at a normal healthy speed, which given his condition was a bad sign. Graham lay still. He swore he could feel the cancer eating its way deeper and deeper into his body. A tear built in his eye. Only one; he didn’t have enough fluid left in his body to produce more, and even this wasn’t exactly a tear, but rather a thick excretion that had simply found yet another way out of his body.
“Marjorie,” Graham whispered under his breath. The name was heavy on his lips. He looked around, and things began to clear; the light on the bedside table was on.
Did I do that? he thought. No, I couldn’t have. Then who? Graham asked himself, unsure of what had happened.
He was cold, that was all he really understood. The pain, the passage of time, from day to night, from Monday to Tuesday, had become a blur to him. The pain medication they kept him on ensured that he was only lucid for a few pain filled moments each day.
“Sarge, you alright? I don’t think Hendricks made it, Herman either – Jesus Christ, Sarge. They’re fucking everywhere,” the same voice – scared now – echoed in his ears.
Graham turned his head, ignoring both the burning cough that sat on his lungs and the exploding fireworks factory that had set up shop inside his skull over the last few weeks. He wanted to cry, to be startled, but it wasn’t possible: he had progressed beyond that stage now, and he knew it. The realization of his impending death didn’t scare him as much as he had feared it would, and that in itself terrified him.
He wasn’t alone in the room; he was, however, the only living person there. His visitor stood no more than a few feet away from him, and wore an old, dust covered – no not dust, but debris, crushed bricks and cement, not to mention a few fellow soldiers – army uniform. He had been dead over sixty years; ever since September 21, 1944. He had died in Holland, part of the group of men going a bridge too far on the march to Arnhem. The majority of the people Graham knew had died that day, men he loved like friends, like brothers.
“Hi, Bobby. How you doin’, kid?” Graham choked. The words felt as sharp as razor blades in his mouth.
“They’re all dead, Sarge...everybody. It’s a mess here. You were lucky to get out,” Bobby Edwards stuttered, a habit he had when nervous. He was only seventeen, hadn’t even finished high school, but his father pushed him into the army the first time a shout went around about the war effort. Graham had liked the boy; he himself had only been twenty-one, but he had a wise head, even back then, and saw a lot of himself in the boy.
Hawkins, Miller and Pearson – Graham could remember all of their names, see their faces as clearly as though they had all played poker together the night before, even in his current state – yet it had been Bobby Edwards, the youngest of the group, that he had considered his truest friend. None of them survived the war. Pearson had been the closest; he had taken a bullet to the leg and was shipped home minus that one limb, only to have his boat sink with American soil in sight. Still, he had been buried in his home town; a real grave that Graham had been able to visit, unlike the others, all of them cut down in a strange place with nothing to mark their passing other than a distant memory in a cancer riddled brain.
“I know, kid,” Graham said bitterly, as if he resented the fact that he had gotten home.
Of course, part of him had died in the war, and the parts that came home were covered in bits of those that hadn’t made it. Marjorie had been the one who had kept him going.
Graham wasn’t surprised that it was Bobby or one of the others in his platoon who came to take him. After Marjorie died he had broken down, been plagued by nightmares and hallucinations of them all, and now he understood. They had been calling to him, beckoning him home.
The young man took a step back from the bed. “It’s not like that, Sarge.” He was near tears as he tried to speak. “They asked me to come and get you...the boys. They want me to bring you back; we’re all still here, and maybe we can win this time,” he said with hopeful tones, although his eyes were dead and motionless, his skin pale.
Graham watched as Bobby raised his arms as if meaning to lift him from the bed – an easy enough task given Graham’s current weight. Graham looked at him, his vision blurred, colors running from his world as if his eyes had just been exposed to too much light during his years.
“Did it hurt?” he asked Bobby with a sudden burning curiosity.
“You mean getting shot? Yeah it killed, no pun intended.” The answer was short, definitive, yet Graham looked into the kid’s eyes as he spoke, and they said volumes.
A bout of coughing stopped the conversation. Graham struggled for breath. His lungs gargled and crackled like a radio trying to find a signal, and a wheezing sound escaped his lips. Bobby didn’t move: he just stood there, the dull buttons on his jacket reflecting a dirty light into the room.
Every time Graham blinked, in that fraction of a second where your vision is distorted, the calm and steady face of his old friend disappeared, to be replaced by a rotting skull. Hair hung in bloodied clumps to strips of scalp that pulled away from the bone like a peeled banana. The eyes had disappeared, and maggots filled the empty sockets; their tiny bodies writhed and ground against each other in an endless orgy of decay. They had eaten their way under the skin. Graham could see numerous bulges under the flesh. One in the center of the forehead drew particular attention; it bubbled and waved as the beasts gorged themselves full as they feasted and partied beneath the cold exterior, gorging their bodies on the sweet flesh of the dead. While above the shoulders Bobby still looked every bit the soldier, below them he looked, simply put, a mess. His jacket was open, the shirt torn, pierced first by the snipers bullet that had ripped through his sternum and out of his spine. He had collapsed instantly, as good as dead.
They grabbed him anyway, pulling him into cover, but not before another bullet had blown his gut open.
Now here he stood, the gaping holes in his skin present for all the (under)world to see. His skin was black, burnt, and putrid around the entry points, curling backwards like a flower. The wound in his chest was clean. His heart – now long since liquefied – had been cut in half by the first bullet: the kill shot. It was the second shot that had been the mess maker. It had come from a much higher angle, and had blasted Bobby’s malnourished body open, spilling his insides onto the debris-covered ground.
His dying moments had been spent holding his intestines and various other unidentifiable organs in his arms, cradling them like a father holding a newborn child. He had tried vainly to push them all back inside, as if that would somehow take care of the problem. Now, over half a century later, they still hung from the open wound. They dropped out of the festering hole in shriveled strands, black and wet with rot. They had a putrescent odor emanating from within the black, decayed gash in the young man’s body.
Graham watched as a sea of maggots began to spew from the wound, flowing out on an ocean of pus; an abscess beneath the surface had swelled and ruptured, and now it boiled over, looking a lot like oatmeal. The beasts clung to the dead meat, desperate not to surrender their bounty, yet many fell to the floor where they lay blind; some found their way back home, crawling up the booted feet, beginning their ascent towards their own decaying paradise. Bobby didn’t seem to notice.
When Graham’s body settled, leaving his throat raw and blood staining his teeth, Graham continued. “No, not getting shot, but dying. Did it hurt?” Graham asked again.
It was a question he had been wondering about ever since they told him the cancer had spread and that the best they could do now was manage the pain. He had assumed that it would, simply because living hadn’t exactly been pain free for him. He had cursed God every night since his beloved Marjorie had died. He would close his eyes, clench his hands and lower his head. “Dear God,” he would begin. “Thank you for making me suffer so. Thank you for leaving me alone. Now it’s your turn, so just fuck off and leave me be. Amen.” These would be his favorite words; short and sweet, the use of any more would—or so he felt—make the gesture seem empty, lacking a little bit of substance.
“No, it doesn’t hurt, Sarge. You need to come with me. You won’t make it to her...”
Graham’s eyes sprang open.
“Marjorie, you won’t make it to her. There’s something coming. You need to come with me, the boys are waiting for you, Sarge.”
“What...how do you know? No, I can’t, Bobby. I’ve got to find her. She’s waiting for me, I know she is,” Graham said, his voice wavering. He could sense how close he was to the end.
“She is,” Bobby answered him. “But you can’t get to her. The roads are blocked, Sarge. There’s no way anyone can get through.” He said each word carefully, as if there were some important message behind them.
“It’s so cold, Bobby,” he stammered at the end. Graham looked at it hands; his fingers had turned blue, as if he had been out walking in winter without gloves. He watched as the delicate shade spread onto the palm of his hand.
He looked up at Bobby. “Do you have a smoke for a dying man?” he asked.
“Sure thing, Sarge.” Bobby didn’t move, yet before Graham could realize it, Bobby stood beside the bed holding a lit match to his mouth. A cigarette rested between his lips.
Graham took a drag; a long, sweet, choking drag. The taste he recognized well. It was, in fact, unforgettable... Chesterfields: the cigarettes that started his lifelong love affair. He hadn’t smoked until he got to Europe, but after a few days of just being close to the war, he had started puffing like a locomotive and never stopped. Cut down, sure, but never stopped.
Chesterfields had been his favorite, although as is the case with war, trades were needed in order to keep your morale up, and so he had smoked Capstan Full Strength on the odd occasion. That was a real party; his head would swoon for hours after a single one of those. How ironic, he thought, that the brand of smokes that had started it all would also be the brand of smokes that would end it. Yet despite his long time love affair with smokes and strong spirits, it was neither the drink nor the smokes that had caused the cancer.
“These really were something, hey?” Graham smiled as best he could; his body had begun to slip away from him. His hands were completely blue. He looked like a Smurf.
“Yeah, they won’t hurt your throat,” Bobby offered, deadpan as ever. “Or something like that anyway. There were so many taglines around I get ‘em all confused.”
Graham took another drag. “What’s it like, Bobby?” he asked after a while.
The kid looked at him, his eyes showing a glisten of emotion – or was it just moisture from the decay that had spread through his body? “I don’t know, Sarge. We’re all still there. None of us came home. We’re all still here, standing around this fucking church. It just never comes to an end, Sarge. I don’t think any of us knew why until recently. It’s you; until you come back then it can never end...we hope.” The last sentence was whispered, near inaudible.
“They call these cancer sticks, did you know that?” Graham chuckled to himself, offering a bit of modern wisdom to the kid.
“Cancer, these things gave you that?” Bobby asked in disbelief.
“No, that’s the funny thing, kid. I smoked my whole life, drank whiskey straight up, nothing more than a lump of ice to help guide it down – and yet my lungs and liver are the two bits of me that ain’t completely dead with it.” He gasped as he spoke, a gargled rattling sound. The room began to spin, his head felt light, as if he had been strapped to a wheel and left to spin for a few hours before being cut loose. It wasn’t the Chesterfield, but something much more permanent.
“Come with me, Sarge, please. Something is coming, don’t you hear it?” Bobby asked. Once again his dead eyes gazed at Graham, and now appeared to be pleading to him.
Graham was about to say no, when outside of his window the world lit up: an explosion ripped through everything. Brick and mortar dust fell from the walls, filling the room with a thick grey cloud.
“We’re all here for you, Sarge. Just come with us. Can’t you feel it? There’s something coming,” Bobby pleaded above the din. In the background came the rattle of automatic gunfire. Graham looked through the dust and saw a large hole in the wall, and on the other side a tank – or rather the barrel of one peering through the building’s gash like one of the Tripod eyes in War of the Worlds. Graham didn’t need to see any more to know who it was behind the controls. Besides, he could hear them all calling him, beckoning him and cheering him on like friends and family waiting at the finishing line of a marathon.
“You coming, Sarge?” Bobby asked, and as Graham looked over at him he saw Bobby as more of a ghost than a figure; he could make out the shadow of the door through him
“No, kid, I’m heading home to my wife,” he answered.
It