Poodle let out a soft moan of relief and sank back against the wall, her aches and chills instantly dissipating in the sublime rush of the narcotic flowing through her system. All of her troubles and concerns melted away into nothing. Suddenly being in prison no longer bothered her like it normally did. Three square meals a day and a roof over her head. Who could want for more? And the other inmates – maybe they weren’t such a bad bunch after all.
She lay slumped in the shadows with the hypodermic syringe still poking out of her track-marked forearm, her drug-taking paraphernalia scattered on the ground beside her.
She was in her favourite place – the Old Tread-Wheel House, known as such because it was where the treadmills had been located back in Victorian times. Or at least that’s what Maggie had told her one time when she’d been standing out in the yard. But the treadmills were long gone, leaving only large square bracket holes in the crumbling brickwork to indicate where they had once been fitted. In their place lay sheets of timber stacked against the walls, several piles of concrete blocks and some scaffolding poles scattered on the ground. That’s all this place was used for these days – storing building materials and other bits of old junk. It was technically kept locked, but Poodle had found a missing panel on a side door through which she managed to squeeze in.
The building was located over on the far west side of the prison complex and no one ever really went there, which meant it was the perfect place to keep her stash safe from the greedy prying hands of other inmates and the random cell searches by the prison officers.
It was comfortably dim, the small narrow windows emitting only a meagre amount of light. It might have been mouldy and musty and full of spiders, but it was quiet, there were no cameras, and no one would disturb her while she was shooting up, and that was the most important thing.
She lay there cocooned in the warm afterglow of the hit with her eyes closed and a drowsy smile on her face. Wrapped in the cosy darkness, she wished she could lie here like this forever.
But eventually the heroin daze began to recede as it always did, leaving her feeling pleasantly mellow. She sat up and looked at her watch. It was time to be getting back to her cell. Gathering up her drug paraphernalia, she placed it back in its plastic bag, rolled it up and concealed it once again in its hiding place behind a loose brick in the wall.
She stood up slowly and began to walk back towards the door with the missing panel.
And that’s when she heard the noise.
A faint scraping sound.
It came from the shadows down the other end of the room.
Poodle stopped, motionless for a moment. She scanned the murk.
Something wasn’t right.
She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She could sense another presence in the room.
In the dinginess, in the shadows, among the stacks of debris, someone or something was there. She knew she wasn’t hallucinating. She’d taken more than enough heroin to know that it didn’t make you hallucinate.
She stared intently into the gloom at the far end of the room, but she couldn’t make out what lay in the depths of the shadows.
Small tendrils of fear began to impinge upon her chilled-out mood and her heart began to beat a little faster. Was it a guard? Was it another inmate? Most importantly, was her stash in danger?
‘Who’s there?’ she whispered hoarsely. Her voice seemed to echo around the room like the ringing of a huge bell.
Her only answer was silence.
‘Who are you?’
Still no answer.
‘What do you want?’
Nothing.
She began to walk forward in the direction of the door, but with each step that she took, the more the sensation increased of someone in the shadows looking directly at her, their eyes boring into her.
She stopped, unable to proceed any further. She swallowed, her mouth dry all of a sudden. Then she began to back slowly away from the blackness in the further reaches of the room because that’s where it was.
She could sense it moving towards her. Soon it would emerge from the shadows.
She suddenly remembered now. The gossip. About that murder in the laundry. How horrible it had been. How they still hadn’t caught whoever had done it. She hadn’t paid much attention to it. She’d had more important things on her mind. Like her next shot of smack. But now it hit home with a sickening dread… that maybe, just maybe, there was something that she should be very scared about.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she begged, imploring the mute shadows. ‘You can have my stash. Take it all. Just please don’t hurt me.’
She stumbled backwards, her feet scraping the rough floor…
…And bumped into something.
She gasped and spun around.
A pile of concrete blocks. She had backed into a pile of concrete blocks.
She let out an exhalation of relief and smiled to herself. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was just jittery. Maybe just…
SCHWIPPP…
Poodle’s ears perked up and she tensed. The noise had been very close to her. It had been accompanied by a strange tight feeling in her chest. She tried to swallow but found that she couldn’t.
She looked down.
Protruding from the centre of her chest was a long glistening metal blade. A globule of her blood ran along the blade and came to the end. It hung there, crimson and viscous.
She watched it, entranced, as it swung there, hanging by an ever-extending thread, which then snapped.
The drop of blood fell to the floor in what seemed like slow motion. It seemed to take forever to hit the floor. As it fell, it assumed a circular shape, revolving and rotating, the light reflecting off its pulsating surface. Then it hit the floor and disintegrated with an audible splat.
Poodle reached up slowly with her hand to touch the blade, to see if it was real. Her slender fingers brushed the razor tip of the steel.
It was real.
SCHWURP…
The blade disappeared, sucked back into her chest. Gone, as if by magic, as if it had never been there.
Poodle coughed.
Inside her throat there was a surge of hot iron-tang flavoured blood. She coughed and tried to swallow to force it back down but the eruption was too much.
Her punctured lungs spasmed and she coughed again and this time the blood escaped her mouth, spraying outwards in a fine mist, landing on the pale flesh of her face and on her hands.
She coughed again, blood now pouring uncontrollably from her mouth.
She took a step forward but found that her legs seemed to be only partially under her control. They felt as if they were made of lead.
She took another step, weaving uncertainly. Heading towards the door. Maybe she could get to the door, get out through the panel. If only she could get into the yard…
In her peripheral vision, she saw something moving in the shadows, past her towards the doorway, cutting off her route of escape. In the darkness, she glimpsed the flash of steel.
Poodle walked towards the door, the hardest walking she had ever done in her life, the hardest walking she would ever do in her life.
Almost at the door now. She just needed to get to the door.
But then a figure stepped forward, its upper half cloaked in shadow.
Poodle gasped and staggered back two steps. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead she gurgled and more blood came out of her mouth.
Out of the darkness, the glinting blade came around horizontally, clutched in a black leather-gloved hand, the razor edge turned towards her. She noted mathematically that the intersection point of its trajectory was precisely where her throat was.
And then the blade made contact, although it did not halt. Its arc continued and terminated, having travelled almost one hundred and eighty degrees from its starting point.
The figure stepped fully out of the shadows to reveal itself as a jet of hot arterial blood gushed up the side of Poodle’s face.