ten-hour shift was punishingly busy; enough to push the events in that house out of Lucy’s thoughts. She drifted home from the depot on autopilot, her brain unable to process much more than the prospect of shit food and a warm duvet.
It wasn’t until she opened the door to her second-floor flat that the memory of the hell house crept back into her mind, sending a shiver down her spine and across her whole body; someone not so much walking over her grave as much as dancing a two-step on it.
She half expected the tall man to be there waiting for her, ready to punish her for seeing the horrors he’d made her see. But her apartment was empty save for Jones, her ginger ball of fluff and disdain. He marked her arrival with his customary flounce in the opposite direction. She breathed a sigh of relief to see him, an omen of normality to fend off the shiver still working its way down her spine.
Slipping her trainers off, she put down her bag. She closed the door behind her, locking the double bolt and putting the chain across for good measure. The shiver was still there. It didn’t leave until she’d checked each room, leaving the lights on in each just to be sure. To hell with the planet; she needed to feel safe. The light from four bulbs in three rooms was hardly going to tip the balance for the ice caps.
Her flat comprised a decent-sized bedroom, a bathroom, and an open plan lounge and kitchen. A singleton’s palace. She closed the curtains on the dawning day, pulled a pizza from the freezer, and turned the oven on. There was a bottle of white wine chilling in the fridge so she pulled that out, too, resisting the urge to down it straight from the bottle. On a normal work night, she’d allow herself only two glasses of wine and half the pizza, but tonight would see no such restrictions.
Leaning against the counter as she waited for the oven to warm, she thought back over everything. The call. Arriving at the house. The doorway. The hall. The stairs. Dread. Blood.
Cain.
The other body.
Her rational brain threw all manner of explanations and justifications at her. Cosplay gone wrong. A prank. An accident. Sexual deviancy gone awry. Every one a possibility, but none held water with the reality of what she’d faced in that room.
But that couldn’t be right, could it? Cain was no deviant. Or was he? They went for drinks together a handful of times. She really had no idea who he was.
If that man in the shadows was what she thought he was, why call an ambulance? She’d seen a lot of horror films in her life, and she didn’t remember Christopher Lee ever ringing 999.
This was ridiculous. She didn’t know what was going on in that room, and likely never would. She should chalk it up as one more marvellous memory of life as a paramedic, to be filed alongside such highlights as ‘drunk man holds own severed arm like a baby’ or ‘man with replica Eiffel Tower stuck far enough up his backside to give the people on the viewing platform an uncomfortable view’.
That was why the folded slip of paper was in her pocket, after all. She should have taken it out and slammed it on the desk on her way out the door tonight, and headed straight into town to get hammered.
She took a sip of wine. It was as tart as her darkening mood.
Whatever had happened in that room, they’d stumbled into the end of a dark chapter at the end of someone’s story.
Picking the phone out of its cradle, she thought about calling the A&E reception to see what happened to Cain, but stopped herself. It wasn’t like they were close. There was a thread of deeply unpleasant something there, and no good could come from pulling at it.
Her hand went to her pocket, fishing out the small square envelope that had spent the evening pressed to her breast, then transferred to her jeans pocket. She stared at it, its corner tinged now with the blood of a man she knew. She should walk straight into the office tomorrow, hand it over. Be done with this life.
The pizza went in the oven, came back out, got eaten. She drank a second glass, and a third. She sat in front of an episode of some Netflix show no doubt bound for cancellation and took nothing in, while the day kept swimming around in her head, the pull of the waves increasing with each sip of wine.
‘Fuck it,’ she declared to the empty flat, and took herself to bed. The ceiling span as she got under the covers. She pulled her phone out to check Twitter and Facebook for mention of the night’s grisly events, but the battery was dead. She let it drop to her bedside table.
Despite fearing endless wakefulness or vivid nightmares, the tug of sleep came quickly, her heavy eyes closing on a room well-lit by lamplight and sunlight eking through her curtains.
When her alarm went off, the lamp was still on, but the light from the curtains was on its way out. Her head pounded and her mouth felt like someone had filled it with soil.
‘Ugh,’ was all she managed to say, an utterance which didn’t raise so much as an interested flick of the ear from Jones, who’d curled up in the crook of her knees.
Wine was an awful choice. The remembrance of that came back first, followed by the memory that drove her to it. That room seemed more remote with the distance of sleep and the fog of alcohol between her and it. The portentous reality of a new day turned the thought of the supernatural into the ridiculous. It was impossible, the product of a tired mind working overtime, making connections which weren’t there.
She laughed at her own ridiculousness, and this at least roused Jones from his slumber. He showed her his arse and wandered out of the room, stopping for a second for the briefest pet from his owner.
She brushed her teeth, sank two paracetamol and rubbed at her temples for a bit. She made toast and coffee and felt vaguely more human. What remained of her post-wine fog would dissipate on the walk to work. She got dressed, her hand hovering over the envelope on the side for a second. She grabbed it. Maybe today.
Adrian beat her to the depot, and was busy readying the van in the day's last’s light.
‘Hey,’ she said, the word coming out in a cracked croak.
‘Hey.’ He looked like shit. He’d skipped his usual careful grooming regimen this morning; a shade of stubble dirtied his face and his eyes looked red. She’d always thought he looked like the living embodiment of a Coldplay song, but this morning he looked like something more ragged. A Paul Weller song, perhaps. Still cardigan rock, but with holes in the sleeves.
‘You alright?’ she asked.
‘Didn’t sleep well. You?’
She shrugged. ‘Wine helped. Weird day yesterday, huh?’
‘You could say that.’ He looked like he wanted to say more, but didn’t at the same time. She wanted to say that if it helped, she didn’t want to talk about it either, but that would involve talking about it. She guessed there’d be an enormous elephant travelling around with them all day in their tiny ambulance.
‘You want to talk about it?’ she asked, squinting at him as she grabbed a kit bag.
He said nothing for a moment, long enough for her to wonder if she shouldn’t just climb in the cab and move on from it, but he finally broke the silence.
‘That house. It couldn’t have been….’
She thought the response out of her mouth would be a resounding no, but nothing came out. She searched for the right response. ‘I don’t know. We’ve seen some weird shit over the years, but that’s just….’
‘I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s like my brain won’t let me,’ he said, his brow even more furrowed than usual. ‘I know it scared the shit out of me. Couldn’t sleep last night.’
They stood in awkward silence.
‘Look,’ Adrian said, ‘the guy was a friend of yours, right?’
‘Kind of,’ she mumbled.
‘Let’s go pick up some jobs, and when we find ourselves back at A&E we can find out what happened to him, yeah? Maybe he’ll be on the mend. We called the scene in. That’s about as much as we can do, right?’
She nodded. Maybe finding out what happened to Cain, either way, would settle the unsettle at the pit of her stomach.
As if to underline the plan, the radio squawked at them from the front of the cab.
‘Unit fifteen, you on the clock yet?’