The Last Human Thing

Have you noticed how many people die of cancer in Stephen King stories? It’s not a coincidence. The Master of Horror knows his field. King’s mother died of uterine cancer, so he knows whereof he speaks. If I was going to have one thing in common with Stephen King, I’d have rather had his book sales. But there we go.

By the time they found out my mother had cancer, it was everywhere. It was this time of year - mid October - with the leaves changing and falling, the increasingly rare glimpses of sunlight taking on a nostalgically sepia tone, and that sense of the world becoming harder, colder, darker.

I went to the hospital appointment with her. I just had a bad feeling about it and I didn’t want her going alone. I had no reason to be so sure it was bad news, but I knew. I remember showing her a cat video in the waiting room and her laughing at it, and thinking to myself, Enjoy this moment, because things won’t seem this light and uncomplicated again, maybe ever. And then they called us through to the doctor’s office, and it turned out I was right.

One of the things that stuck with me most is how bad the doctors were at delivering the verdict, how impossible they found it to be direct, unambiguous. The absurdity of euphemisms in a clinical setting. They wouldn’t use words like cancer, terminal, or death; they spoke in terms of malignancy, palliative care, and decline. It amounted to the same, but I guess it made things easier for them. That left it to me to translate the message to my mother and watch as that faint pilot-light flicker of hope faded and fizzled out in her eyes.

She went downhill fast. We sought second and third opinions, but the awful, unholy truth of the matter was becoming evident. We moved her in with us - never even a debate, my editor (also spouse, but he was my editor first and something else to me before that) doing everything he could to help out - and we fought to get calories into her, tried to keep her as calm and comfortable as we could, and given the circumstances, we weren’t terribly successful with either. I learned to make marijuana into tea, because her lungs couldn’t take the smoke, but the effect seemed to help a little with the pain and the panic. We got her a wheelchair, so we could push less and less of her each day between the bed and the toilet.

There were kindly nurses who called by in their reassuringly sensible uniforms and flat shoes. There was morphine, delivered by a friendly man in a green van who smiled and called everyone “chuck”. There was an emergency kit including a syringe and medical grade ketamine which we were told to keep locked away, just in case. Nights were hardest. My editor used to stay up late on nights when pain and fear stopped Mom from sleeping, sending me to bed to crash for a few restless hours, and he’d try to take her mind off things with conversation and re-runs of old British sitcoms. Horror can look so mundane.

Funny that the Bad Night happened to be Hallowe’en. Well, not funny, I guess, but… you know. Something.

I thought she was going to die that night. My mother never made a fuss, so if she said something hurt, I knew she must be in agony, and on this occasion she was screaming with the pain. I called 999 around midnight. A first responder soon appeared, called for a team of paramedics. I shifted gear into Crisis Mode, functioning at a suitably numb, dissociative level that allowed me to mentally document her symptoms, internalise relevant potted medical histories to disgorge to various healthcare professionals, and pack a hospital bag.

I remember little of the ambulance ride to A&E. Hopefully, Mom remembered less.

I do vaguely recall asking one paramedic if this at least made a break from tending to zombie cheerleaders needing their stomachs pumped at Hallowe’en parties, and being told that stomach pumping wasn’t really a thing any more as it did more harm than good. He didn’t say whether the zombie cheerleader look was still in vogue.

I recall being aware of my editor, following behind in our car, sensing or imagining his proximity, and being unspeakably thankful for it.

We got to the hospital in the early hours. It was an inky black night out that smelled of woodsmoke and gunpowder, in sharp contrast with the humming fluorescents and disinfectant sting of inside A&E.

The upside of how unwell Mom was: we didn’t have to wait. She was stretchered straight through to a curtained cubicle, and a succession of healthcare workers did various medical things like taking blood, doing an EKG and getting a lung X-ray done. Mom was moaning in pain through most of this, until they finally got enough drugs into her and she succumbed to a fitful sort of sleep, waking intermittently in terror when she struggled to breathe.

At some point, a doctor with sad, sympathetic eyes behind very neat, oval glasses led me away to talk to me about my mother’s lung X-ray. He had the image pinned to a little lightbox while he spoke. If anyone ever shows me a Rohrschach blot and asks me what it is, that’s always going to be what I see: lungs full of cancer.

Afterwards, a nurse guided me to a ward down the corridor, where my mother had been installed in a private room. My editor was in a seat beside her, leant forward with his head resting on the hospital bed by her elbow. He was lightly holding her much smaller hand which was bruised from all the blood tests and skeletal from weight loss, and both of them were asleep. I watched them from the doorway for a moment, then backed out of the room, closed the door and wandered off in the other direction down the corridor.

I should probably have mentioned before, but my mother and I were no strangers to this particular hospital. I’d had meningitis as a teenager, and we’d spent - the pair of us - the best part of several weeks here, with her refusing to leave my side for more than a couple of hours at a time until I was out of the woods. And now we found ourselves here, roles reversed, with me helpless, desperate and afraid of losing her, and her in pain, in danger, delirious on morphine. As fate would have it, my aimless journey soon took me past the paediatric ward where I’d convalesced.

Along empty, early-morning corridors, with the world outside the windows utterly blacked out, the glass reflecting back just my face looking gaunt and ghostly under the fluorescent strips, and my footfalls sounding hushed and slightly sticky on the linoleum. Occasional eye contact with a patient being rolled towards me, brief and apologetic, before they passed me by, wheels squeaking off into the distance behind me. And then I found myself at the Chapel.

As a committed atheist, I must admit I felt conflicted. I hadn’t consciously planned on coming, but I wasn’t surprised when I found myself there. It seemed fitting, almost inevitable, that I had unconsciously retraced the steps my mother had taken when I had been sick and fate had been out of her hands, and - a long elapsed Catholic - she had falteringly learned to pray again.

The Chapel was quiet, which is not to say it was empty. Empty rooms are just silent, whereas this was hushed. Hardly a large space, but its other occupants were oddly far away, occupying private islands of worry and grief, separated by a chilly, uncrossable sea. There was a small altar set up, beyond which a modest arched window of stained glass glowed optimistically. Behind the window, there was just blank wall, and electric light bulbs provided the illumination. Miracles seemed few and far between.

A journal lay open on a cloth-covered table, with a biro in the fold between its open pages. Previous visitors to the Chapel had written in it; the preceding pages were covered in prayers, hopes, platitudes. Holding the biro too tight in fingers that felt deadened and distant with exhaustion and dread, I wrote simply the word, “Please,” because it was all I could think of to put.

It was after I put the pen down and took a seat on one of the wooden benches that I saw him for the first time. Saw it. At first I figured I was imagining things. I hadn’t slept at all in almost 24 hours, and hadn’t slept well in weeks. I was tired, but I wasn’t crazy, so I blinked and rubbed my eyes hard and looked again, but it was still there.

It was standing on the other side of the Chapel, at the shoulder of a woman in a lilac hoodie, who didn’t seem to be aware of its presence. It was hunched, making it hard to gauge its actual size, and it looked ragged and leathery, although I couldn’t tell if that was shabby clothing or just loose, wrinkled skin. Its body was inexplicably shrouded in shadows, even though the room was fairly well lit, its outline indistinct and shifting like filthy smoke. It had a long, almost birdlike face, with sad, dark holes where its eyes should’ve been.

The woman in lilac was crying, but in polite, muted gasps, conscious that her anguish should not intrude upon the comfort of strangers. Her arms were crossed in front of her, as though cradling her own breaking heart, or well… cradling something. Just briefly, in her arms, I could have sworn I saw the shimmering outline of an infant. A faint gold sparkle, shaped like a baby, one arm reaching up towards a tress of hair that hung at the side of her face. Then the gold turned to silver, to pewter, to the dullest gunmetal grey, and vanished completely.

The creature at her shoulder seemed to grow, to unfurl something like shadowy wings which slowly enfolded the woman. The woman sighed, and the creature sighed, and I breathed in the smell of it. It was the smell of house clearances and the forgotten, musty rails of charity shops, the smell of decaying autumn leaves, the smell of funeral-grade lilies already going over, the smell of fresh-dug dirt. The Chapel felt suddenly colder. The electric bulbs behind the stained glass window buzzed, dirty like flies, and strobed sickeningly.

I wasn’t sure what it was that I was watching at the time, but I was certain that I sensed something intangible pass between the woman and the creature. It released her from its strange embrace, wings or cloak or sentient smoke or whatever parting, folding away again into the creature’s darkly obscured form. She looked… different. Calmer, but sort of harder. Older. There was something set like concrete about her expression. She robotically raised her arm, wiped her eyes dry on her sleeve, and then stood. She looked like someone who was all done with crying.

She walked right by me without seeing me. In fact, she passed so close that she caught me with her shoulder, but didn’t break stride or acknowledge me beyond a sharp, impatient tut. I saw as she paced away down the corridor towards the car park, pausing just inside the hospital doors to take cigarettes out of her bag and light one, before disappearing out into the dark early morning. A wisp of smoke curled towards the ceiling.

When I turned back to the Chapel, the creature was still there, and it was looking right at me.

Fear requires energy, and I had none left. Please don’t think I’m claiming to be brave; I simply didn’t have it in me to be scared in that moment. I’d used up all my fuel for fear being scared about my mother dying, and the tank was empty.

It said, “You can see me.”

I nodded. Its voice was a scratchy, toneless whisper.

“People can’t usually see me.”

I shrugged. “Guess I’m just fucking special.”

The creature glitched its way closer to me. That’s the only way I can describe how it moved. Sort of like the jerky motions of flicker book animation with random frames missing, looking unnatural and grotesque existing in the real, three-dimensional world. It was far taller than me, but its head was sunken, attached to a rangy, scraggy neck that disappeared into an amorphous torso, and it stooped to inspect me. The birdlike cranium tilted one side then the other, and the empty sockets seemed to suck at me as I was subjected to their scrutiny. It sniffed. I tried to hold my breath against the waft of cadavers and damp cellars.

“Don’t seem special,” it concluded. “Just mostly broken. Not quite all the way broken. Almost ready for me, but not quite.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Humans lose things. You lose almost everything, you’re mine, and I get to take the last thing.”

“What’s the last thing?”

“Don’t know the word. Human name for it, I suppose. Very human thing. But it’s delicious. It’s warm and wet and sweet, and I want it. Hurry up and lose more so I can take yours too.”

I pulled back on instinct. The creature sounded so hungry, I couldn’t help but recoil. It noticed my reaction.

“Sorry,” it said. “Shouldn’t do that. Not nice. Don’t get to talk to humans much. Just take.”

“What are you?” I asked.

The creature shrugged its indeterminate, sloped shoulders in a way that made its whole body ripple and judder queasily. A leathery rustle and a clicking like teeth or bones rattling together in a sack. “No human name for me. Just am.”

“So are you like a demon? A monster?”

Something so utterly inhuman shouldn’t have been able to convey so visually that I had hurt its feelings, and I almost laughed.

“Not nice, either. See him?” The creature extended something like an arm and pointed at a gentleman sitting in the corner in a thoughtful reverie. “Wife has leukaemia. Found out now. Knows he’s leaving her, but still deciding how. Already doing the bad thing with her friend. Call me “monster.” Huh.” A sigh like the zipping shut of a bodybag.

The man clearly couldn’t hear us. I wondered which of us was actually occupying reality. Probably not me.

“No sweet, wet, warm deliciousness in there,” the creature continued in its death rattle voice as its nothing eyes stared at the man with the sick wife. “Nothing for me. Nothing to take.” Something that might have been a talon tapped me on the sternum. “Not like you. You’ll taste good one day. One day soon.”

That got me angry. “Fuck you,” I told it levelly, “you overgrown goth vulture.”

Confusion in the creature’s body language. Whether or not it understood the profanity, it picked up on the intent. “Me? But I am. Humans are humans and lose things, and I am me and I take. It is the Arrangement. Not monster. Humans need me. I help. Hurting stops. Feeling stops. Better for you. Easier.”

I thought back to the woman in the lilac hoodie. I thought back to the change that had come over her after the creature had enveloped her in its shadowy embrace. I thought about that grim, frozen-over resolve, the total absence of pain or sorrow in her expression, or any other profond feeling at all. I knew in that instant that the woman in the lilac hoodie would never cry again, and I understood why. And I knew what the last thing was.

My mother didn’t die that day. That happened slowly and incrementally over the next couple of weeks, and then brutally and all at once, shortly after midnight, in the middle of November. She had a room to herself in a hospice - a nice room, with big windows looking out at tall trees - and I was in the armchair beside her bed, trying to write a poem about literally anything else, as she lay dying. The nurses had told us what to look out for, so I realised what it meant when her breathing changed. And although I didn’t see it this time, I felt the creature in the room with us. If not the same creature I had met in the hospital chapel, then something exactly like it. Maybe everywhere that’s a hotspot for death and despair gets a creature of its own.

And here I was, ready for it. I had lost enough, finally, and it was here for me, ready to take that last thing from me. As I held my mother’s hand for the last time, thanked her, told her I loved her and that she didn’t owe us a damn thing, as I watched her chest rise with that final laboured breath and sag with relief that it wouldn’t have to again, I felt the demon, the monster, the creature, move closer behind me. As I whispered goodbye to her, I sensed wings unfolding.

I tried to tell myself: Hurting stops. Feeling stops. Better. Easier. In that moment, it didn’t sound like a bad deal.

The room filled up with the smell of dirt and decaying leaves, of wilting petals and mortuaries, mothballs from the wardrobes of the dead. Inside of me, something gushed like I was bleeding out; there was this hot, wet, molten anguish that was too volatile, too visceral to try to tame by naming it. It was primal and dreadful and impossibly human. And it might kill me, but it was mine. And I was prepared to fight for it.

“No,” I said.

The TV screen flickered briefly on and off again, and then I saw the creature standing at the end of the bed. It looked smaller than last time, if it was the same one.

“No?” It looked perplexed, a bit deflated. “Human doesn’t say no.”

“This one does,” I answered.

“Stupid!” The creature sounded impatient, petulant. “Human likes pain? Likes despair? Likes feeling this?”

“It… doesn’t matter. It’s not about like. It’s about being human, staying human. Something like you probably wouldn’t get it. I could let you take the pain away, but not without taking too much other stuff I need along with it. Stuff I need to be me.”

“Seems stupid,” the creature said. “Could take it, would enjoy more.”

“I’m sure you would. But I’m keeping it.”

I turned away from it. I pulled up Mom’s blankets and straightened the edges as best I could around the tangle of tubes plumbed into her. I leant to kiss her for the last time, and when I stood up, the creature was gone.

I haven’t seen it since.

Nearly three years have passed since that Hallowe’en trip to the hospital. Nearly three years without Mom, although we talk about her most days - my editor and I - and I certainly think about her daily. I dream about her most nights, and I wish I could say that the majority were happy dreams, but I would be lying. Occasionally, my editor has to wake me, and we’ll sit up with a light on until my heart stops racing, and the cats will come and join us on the bed to see why we’re awake so early.

This time of year, especially, as the dying leaves turn pretty colours and sleet past my window, it’s impossible not to think certain thoughts.

I sometimes wonder whether I made the right decision in the hospice that night. I could have been free of a lot of pain, a lot of trauma, a lot of grief. I remember the woman in the lilac hoodie and her face, implacable and unfeeling as a statue’s, and sometimes I envy her. But never quite enough.

I expect the creature will try again. In a future moment of despair and agony, I have no doubt the creature will find me, and maybe by then I will be ready to let the creature have what it wants. Life will present me with more opportunities for loss; I have that privilege and that burden. Perhaps one day I will want to be without pain more than I will want to be complete. We shall see.

For now, I’m holding onto it: this aching, bleeding, broken thing; this throbbing, angry primal thing; this fragile, desperate, hopeful thing.

This last human thing.