The Man of Smoke - Part 4 (Polar Bear Punches and Hospital Food)

David hadn’t seen Norman since their chat. The nurses had wheeled him away and another nurse had returned him to his bed while hissing to him that “Mr Patterson is very ill and very weak, you shouldn’t be doing anything to aggravate him!” David briefly wondered what the nurse would say if he told her to lower her voice because she was aggravating him.

It was now getting late and Norman hadn’t been returned to his bed for dinner, and evening rounds were soon so he wouldn’t be here to receive his pills either.

He was beginning to feel anxious. What if the things Norman had told him were true? It was impossible but wasn’t it also impossible for them to both be hallucinating the same thing?

Especially since David was no longer on any drugs that would cause hallucination as a side effect. He briefly considered the possibility that Norman was a hallucination, but then that means he would have had to hallucinate the nurses wheeling him away and him lying in his bed all these weeks, and if that was the case then he had much bigger things to worry about.

Despite his beliefs that everything Norman had told him was just a coincidence even despite the identical hallucinations and similar dreams, he was now trying to remember if he had ever saw the man read his chart or signify in any way that he knew he existed. As far as he could tell the man had never come near him, but what if he came when he was asleep? David felt like a sitting duck waiting here for the man to come and read his chart. But even if he did, what would happen? The rational part of his mind spoke up.

"Nothing, what Norman has told you he believes is impossible."

But what if it wasn’t, what if it was true? He needed to get out of this hospital before it is too late.

"He’s a crazy old man, control yourself David. Nothing will happen. When did you start believing in this kind of nonsense? I think those metal plates in your head are fucking with your thoughts."

His own voice in his head sounded remarkably cold and distant. He shivered without noticing. The doctors and nurses began to enter the rooms for the night time rounds before they turned out the lights. David recognised Doctor Proctor and called out to him.

“Doctor Proctor, can I speak to you for a minute?”
The doctor turned, looking mildly surprised, He looked at the sheets in his hands and moved towards David.
“Hello Mr… uhh, O’Leary right?” Impeccable bedside manner as always.
“Doctor, Where is Norman?”
“Norman?” Uhm…” The doctor looked flustered and ran a hand through his hair. He consulted the chart again and presumably found the details he was looking for.

“Oh yes, Mister Patterson. He has fallen very ill again and we have put him on oxygen as he is having trouble breathing. We fear he might be slipping into a coma, and he may not wake up from it. He is extremely old after all, I think his number might be just about up.”

Apparently patient confidentially was also something the doctor didn’t consider necessary. David felt anxiety and fear twist in his stomach, this wasn’t good at all.

“You don’t think he’ll make a recovery?”
“If I’m honest David, he’d be lucky to make it until the morning. We haven’t seen him this bad since he was first admitted to the hospital. I think he’s going to kick the bucket.”
“Thank you doctor, that was reassuring.” David said sarcastically.

“No problem David. I’ll let you know if anything happens.” The doctor was blissfully ignorant of it. The doctors and nurses continued making their rounds and chatting to the patients. David didn’t notice, he was lost in his thoughts. He was the one who had got Norman all worked up.

Norman had approached him but he had carried on the conversation and asked him questions and pushed for answers. David suddenly felt guilty. Was it his fault that Norman was in this condition? If he hadn’t of carried on the conversation would he be sitting up in his bed refusing to take his medication for the hundredth time?

Which was better? That it was his fault that Norman was knocking on death’s door or that the mysterious man who wasn’t actually there but seemed to bring tragedy with him where ever he appeared was behind it? One answer caused him to feel great guilt. The other was impossible and made him feel a strange kind of fear, as well as an icy feeling in his gut like he’d been punched by a polar bear.

He decided that the impossible would do for now. He didn’t want to feel responsible for Norman’s death; the stay in this hospital would leave enough marks on him without carrying that sort of weight on his shoulders for the rest of his life.

When he slept that night, he dreamed of the man tearing off Norman’s oxygen mask and wrapping his icy hands around the old man’s throat. The hands turned to black talons and the stranger became the shadowy monster with the porcelain white mask. He could see the claws tearing through the flesh of Norman’s neck as it strangled him. The old man’s eyes boggled and his tongue lolled out of his head. The blood pouring from his neck was slowly freezing solid and it soon stopped flowing.

As Norman stopped struggling and the life faded from him, the beast took its hand from around his neck and he turned to look at David. David met his eyes and became lost in them; he tumbled into the darkness and he could feel his soul being tore from his body. His blood turned to ice in his veins and tore them open. His heart froze over and exploded in a shower of ice.

His eyeballs froze solid and they began to crack, and then they shattered. Gore flowed from them but quickly turned to scarlet ice. Icicles formed between his fingers and his bones froze completely and began to disintegrate like they were made of glass. The monster took a step forward and grabbed his neck in one massive claw and crushed it shattering it effortlessly as if it was made of glass.

David woke up screaming in complete and utter terror. For an instant it felt like he was frozen solid and he could feel broken ice under his skin, cutting through his organs and his veins and killing him slowly. The feeling passed and was replaced by terror and bittersweet relief. Dripping with sweat, he was ashamed to discover that he had urinated himself. He didn’t notice the small shards of ice lying on his pillow that glistened like crystal in the dim light from the nurses’ station before melting.

In his own ward, Norman’s heartbeat began to weaken, and an alarm sounded. The nurses and doctors rushed to him. As they arrived he coughed out one last breath and his heartbeat flat lined. They noticed that the room was freezing and their breath clouded in front of them. Later on when they had a moment to process the events, they would figure that the heating in the room had failed and this may have contributed somewhat to Norman’s death.

What no one would ever see was that when Norman’s heartbeat began to weaken, the thermometer in his room read 0 degrees Celsius, and it was the middle of August. The temperature rose quickly as they arrived but they all noticed the chill. What they could not explain however, when they recalled the events later, was why Norman removed his oxygen mask, and why there was a black shadow across his throat, which looked almost like a bruise.

***

The rest of the fifth week in the hospital dragged slowly, as if every clock and watch had broken and ran at half speed. David felt more dejected and depressed that he did since he first woke up after the accident. He kept staring down the ward to the bed that Norman had once lain in. After his death David realised how little attention he paid to the rest of the patients in the ward and how little he knew about them.

He began to have a bitter feeling of regret that he hadn’t talked to Norman in the days before his death and had gotten to know him. David didn’t think he had ever seen anyone visit or talk to the man except for the Nurses and the doctors. It became apparent to him how lonely a place filled with so much people could be.

He had no visitors that week. The one time he really felt like he could use someone to talk to. A few nights after Norman’s death and several nights before he received his second piece of really good news (the first being that he would eventually walk again) David’s mood got even worse. He woke up from a dreamless sleep shivering; it was dark in the ward.

The darkness seemed different, like it was pressing in on him, and he could have sworn that the air was heavier somehow. He was shivering violently and the air he exhaled clouded before him like some sort of spectral presence. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. His heart felt like it was diving from the highest board (the one he was always too afraid to dive from) into icy cold water. Fear spread through him and it numbed his thoughts.

The man was back, if you could even call him a man, but where was he? David realised that his fear of this man was absurd, but humans always fear the unexplainable and this mysterious figure was about as unexplainable as things come. All he knew about the man was that he wasn’t a hallucination, and unless it was coincidence, he either predicted people’s deaths or he caused them. David’s dreams seemed to imply that he caused the deaths, but it was just a dream, right? And how was that possible anyway?
How is it possible that he was there at the accident and effectively caused it, and is here now?

But he couldn’t have been there at the accident, maybe he was just getting two different people mixed up, he couldn’t be sure what the guy at the scene looked like, maybe he was just being paranoid and they actually weren’t the same person at all?

"Even if that is the case, it still has only been seen by you and Norman he died after it read his chart, and it is still the focus of all your nightmares, this situation is FUBAR son."

David didn’t have time to dwell on how unsettling it was that he was hearing his dad’s voice in his head and how equally unsettling it made him feel that his father in his mind had begun to refer to the man as an ‘it’. The man – or the ‘it’- had appeared.

Despite his fear and his desire to not draw attention to himself, he studied the man intently in the semi darkness of the ward, trying to make out his features. The man seemed real, his feet were planted firmly on the ground and he wasn’t floating like he was a ghost or an apparition of some sort. There was a spring in his step as he strolled casually down the ward towards David’s bed.

David began to pray in the back of his mind that the man would walk right past his bed to the bottom of the ward, and then walk right back to the top of the ward and leave, without sparing him so much as a glance. The man’s features were impossible to describe; they seemed so bland and plain. He had short black hair and may have been somewhere in his early thirties or late twenties. The shadows in the ward made it hard for David to make out the colour of his eyes or the exact features of his face.

The stranger strolled agonisingly slowly, turning his head all around as if surveying the entire room thoughtfully. He couldn’t see his eyes the man’s and couldn’t see where he was really looking. His steps rang loudly through the ward; though David was the only one that could hear them. The man wore boots and was casually dressed in jeans and a jacket. Each boot clad footstep sounded like a death knell to David and the man’s walk was agonisingly slow.

The man grew close to the foot of the bed. David scrunched his eyes closed so tight he thought he might squeeze his eyeballs into pulp, and felt as though he would piss the bed for the second time in the same week. He could see nothing but the strange shapes and colours we see when we close our eyes, and the only sound that met his ears was the steady thud, thud, thud, thud of the man’s footsteps, and the sound of his own blood roaring in his ears like a ferocious beast.

Thud, thud, thud, thud…

David put his hands over his eyes like a child playing hide and seek. He was sweating profusely.

Thud, thud, thud, thud…

His legs twitched as if they were urging him to get out of bed and run for his life. If he tried to then he would end up flat on his face on the floor. He hadn’t walked on them in almost six weeks and they wouldn’t hold his weight anymore, he would collapse to the floor like they were made of jelly and probably crack his skull wide open.

The steps grew louder and still closer and the echoing in the ward made it hard for him to tell exactly how near to him they were. Suddenly they stopped.

The silence was suffocating, his heart was thudding in his throat and the blood was thundering around in his ears, after several minutes of sheer terror, he had almost managed to muster the courage to open his eyes (just a little) to try and see where the ‘it’ was, and if ‘it’ was even still there.

There was a sound, like wind rattling through dead trees, and he felt a cold breeze crawl across his skin. The droplets of sweat on the left hand side of his face froze in their tracks and glistened like snowflakes. The smell in the air became putrid, it reminded him of the smell that greeted him when he discovered a bunch of dead and rotting rats in his bedroom after his parents had laced scraps of food with rat poison while they went on holiday. They were crawling with maggots and the air was heavy and humid with the foul stench of death and decay. The smell in the air now was much stronger, like a thousand dead rats, and it hung in the air like a fog. He gagged and felt his stomach begin to heave and churn like a stormy ocean of bile.

Without thinking he turned towards the source and opened his eyes. David knew he was going to die.
He was staring into the face of the ‘it’, the unknown quantity, the nameless fiend that murdered Norman Bates, tried to kill him, and was here to finish the job. There was no doubting that it had done all this, he could feel it in him, like a long forgotten instinct coming to the surface.

He probably could have seen this fact in the thing’s eyes, but it had none. The sockets were an empty, bottomless black. It was like staring into deep and endless space. Its mouth was turned up in a knowing sneer but David never noticed this, the darkness in the eyes was swallowing him.
There was a curious feeling like he was floating in emptiness.

It was freezing cold, beyond anything he had ever felt, his heart was skipping beats and it felt like it was being squeezed into pulp. This same feeling was happening all over his body, he could feel his ribs crushing under unbearable pressure; they punctured his lungs like knives, which then were crushed into jelly. His brain suddenly felt too big for his skull and he began to feel all his organs crush and his bones shatter like twigs.

He opened his eyes and he saw black and stars glimmering far away, then he saw brilliant white as his eyeballs popped like zits.

Back in the real world, he had emptied his bowels without shame and blood was dripping from his nose and the corner of his mouth. He was having a violent seizure but his eyes were open and still locked on the It. In an absurd way they were having a starting contest, despite one of them having no eyes.

As the nurses rushed in and called for doctors, they would feel a chill as they passed through the man and he would ripple like he was made of cigarette smoke. One of the nurses would swear they heard a low sound, like a cackle, but she would never tell anyone about it. This nurse would die just over a year later of an extremely malignant brain tumour. In the final days before the tumour claimed her, the man would stand at the foot of her bed and occasionally emit that same cackle, which she heard and recognised somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind.

Despite the nurses and doctors best attempts to resuscitate him, David’s heart stopped and the machine emitted the steady Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep sound.

Doctor Proctor, who happened to be on call that night, began to attempt to resuscitate him. He pushed the pads onto David’s chest. His body stiffened and jolted from the electricity but his heart remained dead. The Doctor continued to fry David’s cooling body with electricity. He eventually gave up and he touched David’s hand softly, with sadness, he said –

***

“Mr O'Leary, wake up, its time for breakfast.”
David woke gasping, trying to scream but just wheezing frantically, his throat was dry and felt like there was a hedgehog stuck in it. The nurse jumped back, almost spilling the lumpy porridge and watered down orange juice.
“Calm down! Hospital food is not that bad.”

He had to get the hell out of there, before it was too late.