The Officer

Mostly, I felt lucky. The hospital had been short of beds, so I was fortunate to have a space anywhere, never mind a somewhat private room. And the guy I was sharing with was in a much worse state than I was. His head-to-toe cast made my surgical scars look like playground scrapes. And, as a result of his injuries, he wasn’t much of a talker.

But these small blessings did little to ease my mind during those six protracted days and nights. Firstly, there was the company. The man in the bed opposite me had a companion. A stern-faced police officer who spent all day staring at a space on the opposite wall as if he could see what lay beyond. Whatever had landed my roommate in that bed must have been illegal enough to earn him a round-the-clock escort.

Secondly, there was the smell. I’d done a stint on the reception of the orthopaedic department at my local hospital during my university years and I recognised the stench of an old cast. Often, when a leg or arm cast was removed, it acquired a wet, rotting odour. Imagine a food waste bin, left unemptied for too long. But my comatose companion smelled like he’d climbed from a compost heap. The smell of soggy decay permeated the room and grew even worse during the night. I took to filling my nose with cotton wool just to sleep.

One night, the second or third I spent in that place, I awoke to the sound of footsteps. The smell had grown even worse. At first, I was convinced that they’d removed the casts in the night. When I looked over, the police officer was gone from his chair. For as long as I’d been there, they’d never even twitched. I scanned the room, searching for a shape in the gloom. At the end of my bed, something moved. Up and then down. Up and then down. Between each movement, there was a clap.

I leaned out of bed for a better look. At the end of my bed, the officer was on the floor, doing push-ups. Between each push-up, at the peak, he clapped.

The bed creaked under my displaced weight. The officer snapped to look in my direction. I threw myself down and closed my eyes. The smell intensified and I realised that it wasn’t coming from the prostrate figure across the way. It was coming from the officer. Behind my eyelids, I sensed quick movement and heard inhalation, like an animal whipping its nose around to sniff the air. It came closer, from the end of my bed to inches from my face.

Then it stopped. I forced my eyes closed until it hurt.

I decided then that I’d do all my sleeping in the daylight hours. When the nurses chatted outside, the sun shone through the blinds, and visitors came and went.

The next night, I remained awake. I watched TV and read by torchlight. The officer across the way never moved. He didn’t even acknowledge me.

The following day, I had physical therapy. Two hours of crippling pain to do something that had been less than second nature for thirty years. I returned to the room in a bad mood, ready to sleep in preparation for my nightly vigil.

My eyes were closing when there was a hand on my arm. My sister. She’d come up from London to see me. I tried to keep things brief, but I think she knew something was wrong. Out of some sense of sibling obligation, or perhaps because we hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, she stayed for the entire two-hour visiting period. I wanted to whisper to her, to draw her attention to the officer behind her. To the smell. But she didn’t seem to notice either of them. We chatted about nothing much until dinner time. Then she left.

I tried to stay awake. Using every trick in the book, I attempted to remain awake. But in a hospital, one of the only activities available to you is sleep. So, it eventually took me. And the smell faded as I fell into a dreamless doze.

It wasn’t the footsteps that awoke me this time, or the sniffing. Across the way, the officer was standing above the figure in the bed. He was prising open the cast, splitting the chest covering in two. The arms and legs were already open. From my vantage, I couldn’t see the person inside. Just dull writhing shapes. A thigh, perhaps. Or a calf.

The chest cast popped open with a crack. The officer bent down towards the uncovered figure. The injured man writhed in the remains of the cast, his face remaining enclosed, not making a sound as the officer buried its face into his flesh. The smell had reached an almighty level. I screamed as the officer climbed onto the bed, sucking and gulping at the now curved-in chest cavity.

I screamed for the nurses, for nearby patients. I screamed for my sister to come back. To come back and see what I was seeing. I screamed for God, for anything up there to put a stop to the horror. Nobody answered.

I don’t remember anything else. The nurse who found me told me that I’d hit my head on the overhead swing-arm TV, apparently repeatedly. The screen was smashed. They set about moving me straight away, into a ward with a nurse stationed throughout the night. As they wheeled me out, I saw that the other bed was empty. It wasn’t even made. Bedpans and spare cushions were piled high upon it.

I vow now to only ever sleep when the sun is at its highest. They say that the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. But after seeing the nameless things that writhe and squirm under the cover of dark, I crave a return to that blind state of mystery.

***

Jack Bumby is a writer living and working in Greater Manchester. He writes whenever he can and considers short stories to be his bread and butter, particularly genre fiction. He likes to write about the people and places around him in the North West and often uses these experiences in his work. He recently finished his first novella ‘Alienation’, which is available from Alien Buddha Press.