K is for Klutz (A-Z of Horror Book 11)

  BOOK SUMMARY

  Fireman, Mark Gunn, is a hero. That’s what sends him racing into a burning building to save an old man.

  But it might have been better if Mark had left the old man to his fate, because people have a strange way of dying whenever he is around.

  “To me death is not a fearful thing. It’s living that’s cursed.

  – Jim Jones

  “I’m not clumsy. I’m accident prone!”

  – Daniel Radcliffe

  -1 -

  There was a tipping point in every fire when it became uncontrollable. Once a structure became more fire than building it was usually lost.

  This cottage was lost.

  The ancient thatched roof had gone up like a tinderbox and fuelled the fire throughout the entire space. There was no way to stop the inferno now until it had run its course. Lucky that the house was surrounded by wet grass and weed infested gravel, or the flames might have crept towards neighbouring properties. As it was, the cottage would eventually fall flat and the fire would burn itself out. All the Fire Brigade could do was keep things contained.

  The fire would win this time.

  But there was still a chance to save the property’s occupant. Nobody had to die today.

  That was why Mark Gunn, veteran fireman, rushed into the blazing cottage with little regard for himself. The neighbours across the road had spoken of an elderly man who lived there – a man who rarely left his home and was probably still inside when the fire started.

  Mark pulled down his visor and kicked in the smouldering front door, immediately racing across the disintegrating carpet. Fire raged on either side of him, biting at his skin even through his retardant clothing.

  But the way ahead was clear. The corridor was still a corridor for now.

  Mark made it into the kitchen and found the old man slumped on the tiles, unconscious. There was no time for CPR or First Aid. The only chance the old guy had was by being outside of that house.

  Mark scooped the man up easily – his weight no more than a child’s – then turned and left the kitchen. The corridor was narrower now. The flames had increased in length and now filled the corridor. There was nothing Mark could do but drive forwards, ignoring the agonising heat against his skin and the thick layer of soot accruing on his visor and threatening to blind him.

  Something fell behind him: a lintel cracking or the ceiling falling in. He should never have entered a building so far gone, but that was why he was a firefighter. His job wasn’t to salvage property; it was to save lives.

  Couldn’t just let an old man burn to death.

  Mark burst out of the open doorway and was immediately received by his colleagues. They threw blankets over him and the old man he had just rescued.

  Mark stumbled away from the burning cottage before falling to his knees and rolling the old man onto the long grass.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he enthused, pulling at the man’s earlobes and trying to get a reaction. When he got no reaction he started slapping the old man’s cheeks. “We’ve got you. You’re safe. Wake up.”

  The old man’s eyelids fluttered and he woke. Mark smiled reassuringly but received only an expression of abject horror in reply.

  “What…? What is happening? Where am I?”

  “There was a fire at your home,” Mark explained. “An ambulance is going to take you to-”

  “Get away from me,” the old man bellowed, more forcefully than he should’ve been able to. “G-get out of here. I’m...I’m…”

  The smoke in the old man’s lungs took over and he started coughing and hacking.

  Mark sat the old man up and patted him on the back. “Everything is going to be okay, sir. You are safe now.”

  “Get…get away…”

  Mark frowned but did as the old man wanted. He stood up and moved away just as two paramedics arrived to check the victim over.

  “Get away from me,” the old man shouted. “It’s not safe.” He kept saying it over and over again. “I’m dangerous. I’m dangerous.”

  Mark shook his head and frowned. It wasn’t unusual for someone dragged from a fire to be confused and disorientated; it was the lack of oxygen to the brain. Much longer and the old guy might have died.

  Mark congratulated himself on a job well done and decided to go get himself checked out by another paramedic waiting by the ambulance, but, before he got there, he slipped in the mud and cracked his skull on the side of a little stone well. He died instantly.

  It was extremely unlucky.

  -2-

  Doctor Isabelle Keating heard the patient shouting from the other end of the ward. It was turning into one of those days. One of those days where every patient either wanted to vomit on you or fight you.

  She hurried to the opposite end of the ward and found two of her nurses, Kate and Michelle, struggling with an old man. The patient was covered in soot and had bright red skin all down one arm.

  A burn victim.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Keating asked calmly.

  “You need to let me go,” the old man demanded. He pointed a finger and waved it around the ward at several annoyed looking patients in the other beds. “These people are in danger.”

  Keating cleared her throat. “What danger?”

  The old man opened his mouth to speak again but paused a moment, before eventually saying, “I can’t explain it. Just trust me. If you don’t let me leave these people will get hurt.”

  “Are you making a threat?”

  “No! I don’t want to hurt anybody, but it’s not my choice. You should have left me to burn in my home.”

  Warning signs were beginning to make the hair stand up on the back of Keating’s neck. “Did you intend to kill yourself, sir? Are you thinking of hurting yourself now?”

  “If I could hurt myself, I would, but it won’t let me. If I were to jump in front of a car I would bounce off onto my feet. I am unkillable.”

  “What’s your name,” Keating asked, choosing not to indulge the man’s delusions.

  “My name is David.”

  “Okay, David. I’m going to move you into a private room. I understand that you want to leave, but I don’t think that is wise. You have severe burns on your left arm that need to be treated carefully. I also think that you would benefit from having a talk with somebody.”

  “I’m not crazy,” he said.

  “Never said that you were. You are, however, obviously in a bad place. Allow us to help you, David.”

  The old man seemed close to tears and wobbled on his feet. Eventually, he nodded his head slowly. “Okay.”

  Keating smiled. “Wonderful. We’ll find you somewhere nice and comfortable.” She leaned forward, reached out a hand to touch the old man on his shoulder, but he recoiled.

  “Don’t touch me,” he snapped.

  Keating retreated. “Okay, I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

  “It’s not that,” he said meekly. “You want to help me, don’t you? Well, I’m trying to help you, too. Make sure that nobody else touches me. It might already be too late for those who have.”

  Suddenly the two nurses present looked very nervous.

  -3-

  Keating was about to go home, when an emergency call came from Ward 9. Dr Love was nearby but he was taking blood in one of the consultation rooms. Keating stuck her head in and told him that she would respond to the call. He thanked her profusely, before she hurried off to Ward 9.

  What she found waiting for her was totally unexpected. An emergency call usually meant a patient was crashing, bleeding badly, or maybe even choking, but this was no patient. She found one of her nurses, Kate,
lying in a pool of her own blood. Her colleague, Michelle, was kneeling beside her and trying to staunch the flow coming from the ragged wound in her neck.

  “What happened?” Keating urged.

  Michelle looked up at her, pale as chalk. “We were just walking and she…she slipped. I don’t know what happened.”

  There was no time to investigate further. They rushed Kate into theatre where a surgeon worked on her ceaselessly until he was forced to call it in at after twenty minutes. Kate’s heart had seized.

  Keating was in shock. As a doctor, she was no stranger to senseless and demoralising death, but to lose a colleague so suddenly and gruesomely was enough to shock her stupid. She headed back to the scene where it had happened and found that the orderlies had already mopped up all of the blood. A hospital could not slow down for death, it must always always carry on.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Michelle, who was sitting on a bench nearby. She clutched a mascara-stained tissue in her hands and was trembling. “We were just walking.”

  Keating gave no reply. She was lost in her own thoughts and not really hearing anything else. The ward seemed to be in order; no obvious dangers standing out as she peered around. What ever could have slashed poor Kate’s neck open so badly? What had she hit on the way down?

  Then Keating spotted it.

  There was a gurney parked up against the wall and the corner of it caught the light as she stepped towards it. Sticking out of the framework was an uncovered screw. The head had snapped off, leaving behind a sharp-looking burr. A spatter of blood coated the tip of the steel.

  “She cut herself on the gurney,” Keating said out loud. “The hospital is responsible.”

  “That old man is responsible,” Michelle muttered.

  Keating turned to the nurse. “What?”

  “That old man said he was dangerous. He warned us we would get hurt. Me and Kate touched him.”

  “What? Don’t be absurd.”

  Michelle looked at Keating hard, her smudged makeup making her look like a sobbing ghost. “I’m not being absurd, Doctor. That old man is responsible. I feel it in my bones.”

  “Where is the patient now?”

  Michelle pointed her hand listlessly. “Right down the hall. Bed 6.”

  Keating left Michelle moping and headed down the hall. When she reached bed 6 she went right in, not caring if the old man was ready for her or not.

  He didn’t flinch at the sudden intrusion. In fact, he looked at Keating sadly, almost knowingly. Did he know what had happened to Kate? He’d probably heard everything from only a few rooms away.

  “Can I leave yet?” was the first thing he asked.

  “Where would you even go?” Keating asked. “The report says you were in a house fire. Do you have any family to come get you, David?”

  He shook his head. “My family are all dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Did the report tell you that the fireman who rescued me is dead?”

  Keating pulled up a chair beside his bed and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “The fireman is dead? No, I haven’t heard that. Are you sure?”

  He folded his arms and sighed. “Yes, I’m sure. He touched me.”

  “Did you have anything to do with what happened to my nurse?”

  “Just let me go home and no one else will get hurt.”

  “That sounds like another threat.”

  “It is a threat. Look, Doctor, my arm is okay. I just need to get out of here; some place where nobody can touch me.”

  Keating sat back and studied the old man. Now that he was clean of soot she could see that not a single hair covered his head, but his eyebrows were thick black caterpillars. His lips were slim but his cheeks were fat. Every facial feature was a contradiction of the next. His small ears looked odd next to his wide eyes. His chart said he was sixty-four.

  “David, are you suggesting that anyone who touches you is somehow in danger?”

  The old man let his head fall against the pillow and tears began to spill down his plump cheeks. “I’m not suggesting anything,” he muttered.

  “I’m going to have to inform the police, David. The things you have said to me are highly suspect. I don’t know if you had anything to do with what happened to Kate, but if you did…”

  “I warned you,” he spat, wiping his tears away with the back of a large right hand. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Listen to what? What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m cursed! Don’t you see that? Anybody who touches me, or even gets close enough to breathe the same air, will die. I am death.”

  Keating stood up, stunned more by the old man’s ferocity than the contents of what he’d just said.

  “I think you need help, David.”

  There was an almighty crash out in the corridor, followed by multiple screams.

  Keating looked at David accusingly, knowing it was ridiculous to think he had done anything from his bed.

  “That will be the other nurse who touched me,” he said. “My condolences.”

  -4-

  Keating rushed back out into the corridor and found Michelle dead. No one tried to help her, because her head was on backwards.

  There was an orderly nearby, vomiting liberally in all directions. Members of staff were appearing from every doorway, doing their best to keep the public away from the scene of a second death in a single afternoon.

  “What the hell happened?” Keating demanded.

  “She slipped,” the ward’s receptionist said. “I saw it from over by the help desk. The floor was still wet from when the orderlies mopped up after Kate’s accident.” The young women covered her mouth and started to weep. “Oh, God, oh God.”

  Keating stared at Michelle and couldn’t comprehend how anyone could snap their neck so completely from a simple fall. A lump arrived in her throat and she struggled to swallow it down.

  When she spotted Dr Love coming, she grabbed his arm and pulled him aside. “Tom, did we have a fireman in this morning?”

  “No,” he answered.

  Keating sighed. “Okay, thanks.”

  “He went straight to the morgue,” Dr Love added. “Poor chap struck his head so hard that his brain matter was leaking out. Paramedics pronounced him dead on arrival. No point tying up A&E with him.”

  Keating’s stomach flipped and she almost threw up, but the anger stopped her. She stormed down the corridor and went back into David’s room.

  The old man was sat up in bed, apparently waiting for her. “Will you let me leave now?”

  “I don’t understand,” Keating said. “How did you kill my nurses? That fireman?”

  “Not me. The curse.”

  “What curse? There’s no such thing.”

  “I used to think so too, once. Until the age of twenty-eight I was as normal as anybody else. I was a travelling salesman. Used to shift vacuums back in the days when they were new.”

  Keating folded her arms, ready to call the police but wanting answers first. “How is that important?”

  The old man sighed. “It’s not, I suppose. It’s just nice to remember that I had a life once.”

  “So what happened?” Keating asked, deciding to play along. The old man was obviously senile or insane, but letting him talk was the only way she could think of to get answers. Sometimes a person’s delusions gave away the truth.

  “What happened is that I crossed a very powerful man. I don’t mean rich. I don’t mean authority. I’m talking about real power. I was selling vacuums in a small town named Redlake when I came upon a nice little neighbourhood next to some playing fields – a rugby club, I think. The houses were small but well kept, with nice green lawns and lead windows. House-proud people they were, and house-proud people was how I made my bread and butter in them days. I managed to sell three of my company’s top models before I moved onto the house at the end of the road. It was slightly bigger than the rest, with a wrought iron g
ate and tall trees in the garden. I should’ve noticed how private the house was, but I didn’t care at the time. I was a people person. No one could fail to love me if they just gave me thirty seconds of their time.”

  “When a young woman opened the door, I thought my luck was out. Her parents probably owned the house and were out – no money here – but she invited me in anyway, told me that she did all the cleaning and could ask her father to buy her a vacuum when he got home. Lilith was her name and I still remember her smiling face and jet-black hair to this day. God, I wish I’d walked away.”

  “But you didn’t,” said Keating, strangely intrigued.

  “Nope. I went right on in and sat in the living room with the young woman. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, but the story she told me was a sad one. Her father kept her a prisoner – a cleaner, a servant, a slave. He was Jewish, but old-fashioned and unkind. It wasn’t long before she told me how she would never know the touch of a man. Her father had forbidden it.”

  “You slept with her,” Keating said, finding the punch line obvious.

  “Of course I did. No man could have resisted her. I was under her spell. I couldn’t have said no if you’d offered to buy a thousand vacuums off me.”

  Keating rolled her eyes.

  David let out a weary moan, more forlorn than painful. “Her old man came home and caught me right in the middle of the act. Threw me out the bedroom and right down the stairs. Broke my ankle. He weren’t done with me yet, though. His daughter was only fifteen, he yelled at me, still at school. The story she had told me was a pack of lies, as was the porky about her being nineteen. The truth was that her father was good to her and a loving man, just trying to do his best after his wife had died of leukaemia. He wasn’t the monster she had made him out to be, not until he found me with his daughter.”

  Keating shook her head. “Fifteen!”

  “I know I know, but I swear I didn’t know. Anyway, her usually kind father was in no mood to be kind that day. He did the strangest thing to me. He slit open his palm and dripped his blood into my eyes. Said he would turn my greatest strength against me. I was charismatic. People liked me, gravitated towards me; but from that day forward my strength become a curse. Anybody who gets close to me dies. Accidents, murders, natural causes…don’t matter. They all die. Was an accident what caused the fire at my cottage – I left a tea towel on the hob – but the fireman who carried me out is dead. Your two nurses who tried to help me are dead. Anybody else who touches me will end up dead. Help me.”