Her expectations were dutifully met.
Bedpans were emptied and cleaned with a solution of carbolic acid. That was the extent of the care the patients could expect to receive. Or at least, the extent of care they would receive from Nurse Mary. No opiates administered for pain; no wounds cleaned; no dressings changed; no words of tender comfort.
Private Legg was her last patient.
“Good morning…” She slapped him hard across the cheek, “coward.”
“How are you feeling today, Private Legg?” She slapped him again, harder this time, the unregistered sting echoing off the bare walls. She placed her face, with its dark moustache and hint of a beard, a few inches from his, bile rising in her throat as she looked into his dead eyes. “Shell-shock, indeed. You’re nothing but a coward.”
Another sharp slap.
“Look at these men around you, why don’t you? Look at them!”
The Private’s gaze never flinched from its unseen, distant focus.
“Arms gone. Legs gone. These two…” she pointed at the feverish men, incoherent as they tossed and turned, “…probably won’t last the week.”
Another slap.
“I’ve lost three brothers in this god-awful war. Three fine men, two with wives and families…”
Slap.
“…but you! Look at you! Not a scratch on you, yet here you are, far away from the front line…pretending to be…mad. You’re nothing but a coward! You hear me? A cowardly, malingering…bastard!”
A final slap. So hard, a few of the other men turned, but nothing was said.
Two A.M.
The ward was silent save for the delirium induced mutterings of the fever-stricken and the snores of the sleeping, the room almost dark. Nurse Mary dozed on her own bunk in the corner, an oil lamp turned down to a dull glow on the desk beside her.
Private Legg uncrossed the limbs that bore his name and stood up. He walked slowly, silently, towards the dim light, his eyes fixed on the bulky form of Nurse Mary as she slept. As he drew close, a floorboard creaked beneath his foot. The white whale suddenly shifted position, the bunk groaning under the strain and he glanced down accusingly at the offending board, two dark knots in the grain staring back at him in the gloom. Pausing a few seconds longer to make sure the nurse was still immersed in slumber, he eyed the instruments on her desk: scissors; thermometer; scalpel.
Satisfied, he crept forward and cautiously plucked the scalpel from the table. The tool felt cold in his hands.
Not to worry, it would soon be warm…
He thrust the blade deep into the woman’s throat, slicing back and forth through saggy skin and gristly cartilage before finally opening her trachea and carotid artery, unflinching as a spray of crimson fluid soaked his arm. Nurse Mary’s eyes snapped open as blood choked and bubbled in her gaping windpipe, her somnolent gaze registering a wide-eyed disbelief. But only for a few seconds; her lids flickering shut once more as her consciousness, along with her life, drained into dark pools on the floor boards.
Private Joseph Legg returned to his bed, crossed his legs and stared at the wall, listening to the dripping of blood - ticking like some infernal clock.
As the last few drops plinked onto the varnished boards beneath Nurse Mary’s bed the wall seemed to shift momentarily under the Private’s gaze, the white-painted bricks appearing to bend slightly further away, the wall behind him grating faintly at the same instant. Private Legg cocked his head to one side, his brow furrowed, unable to quite grasp what he had just witnessed.
It was as if the building had…as if the building had…
It was as if the building…
…had just taken a breath.
1
For a Friday afternoon, the weather was miserable. For a Friday afternoon that doubled as the last day of the summer term, it was terminally depressed. Rain poured from a grief-stricken sky, the unrelenting torrent instantly drenching anyone caught in it. The deluge birthed gushing rivers which purged the pavements of their dust and dirt, sluicing it away into choking drains. A group of schoolchildren ran through the street towards the large, red-brick building that stood ahead of them, its weather-worn façade glistening darkly like freshly spilt blood as the downpour saturated the brickwork.
For over a century, Chillingworth House had stood at the western end of the main street, the imposing structure casting a stern shadow over those entering or leaving the town whose boundary it governed. Since its founding in the 1900’s – financed by the generosity of the Reverend W.E. Chillingworth – it had provided a roof over the heads of the children confined within its embrace, their young minds to be shaped and sharpened, hammered and beaten by the tools of education. First as a boy’s school - with a break during the First World War when it served a tour of duty as a place of convalescence for wounded servicemen - then amalgamated with a crop of newly erected classroom blocks nearby to form a grammar school, it was now the oldest building in a comprehensive establishment that took in a catchment area of all the villages in a ten mile radius and boasted a register of over a thousand pupils.
For more than a hundred years its walls and floors had echoed to the sound of myriad footsteps, shouts, cries, laughter and tears. A constant theatre of life being played out on stages of brick, wood and plaster. But today that performance was coming to an end, the building’s final curtain. Construction work on brand new classrooms was due to be completed during the summer break and lessons currently taught in Chillingworth House were to be transferred to the new buildings at the beginning of the next school term. According to rumour, a developer was already lined up to demolish the property and
