Spawn Read Free Page A

realization spread over him and he smiled thinly.
    “I was dreaming,” he said apologetically.
    The woman smiled and nodded.
    “I know,” she said. “But you frightened the life out of all of us.”
    He apologized once more and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked up to see two maroon-coated interns standing on the other side of his bed. He recognized one as Pat Leary, a big Irishman who bore a bottle scar just above his right eye.
    “You all right, Harold?” he asked.
    The older man nodded and swung himself onto the edge of the bed. His pyjama jacket was soaked with sweat, a dark stain running from the nape of his neck to the small of his back. He pulled it off and began searching in his locker for his clothes.
    His audience left, the interns moving off towards the exit at the far end of the ward, Nurse Beaton ambling across to the bed next to Harold to wake its occupant. He was a man older than Harold, completely bald and with skin like the folds of a badly fitting jacket. In fact that was what his face reminded Harold of. Harold watched as Nurse Beaton woke the man and then took two red pills from a plastic container she held. She supported the bald man while he took the pills, wiping away the water from his chin when it spilled over his rubbery lips. He heard her ask the man if he’d swallowed them and he nodded slowly. The nurse gently lowered him back into bed and moved on.
    Harold was dressed by this time. He picked up a small imitation leather shaving-bag from his locker and headed towards the toilets at the far end of the corridor. The place smelt of disinfectant, as usual, but it was a smell with which he was well acquainted after so long.
    Harold Pierce had been a patient in Exham Mental Hospital since 1946. Apart from the first fourteen years of his life, the institution had been his only home. It had been his world. And, in all that time things hadn’t changed much. He’d seen scores of people, both staff and patients, come and go and now he was as much a part of the hospital as the yellow-painted walls.
    He reached the toilets and selected his usual wash basin. He filled it with water and splashed his face, reaching beneath to find a towel. Slowly he straightened up, regarding the image which stared back at him from the mirror.
    Harold sucked in a shaking breath. Even after all these years the sight of his own hideously scarred face repulsed him. It was a patchwork of welts and indentations, the whole thing a vivid red. The hair over his left eye was gone, as was the eye itself. A glass one now sparkled blindly in its place. His left ear was bent, minus the lobe it was in fact little more than a hole in the side of his head. One corner of his mouth was swollen, the lip turned up in a kind of obscene grin. A dark growth of flesh, what had once been a large mole, protruded from just below his left cheek bone, jutting out like the gnarled end of an incinerated tree branch. His left nostril was flared wide. What little hair remained on the left side of his head was thin and grey, a marked contrast to the thick black strands on the other side.
    In fact, the right side of his face was relatively unmarked except for a slight scar on his forehead, most of the damage had been done to the left side of his body.
    Harold took out his electric razor and ran it swiftly over the right cheek and beneath his chin. No stubble would grow on the left side.
    He turned to see two interns carrying another patient from a wheel chair into one of the toilet cubicles. The old man was paralysed from the neck downwards, leaving one intern with the unsavoury task of cleaning him up when he’d finished. The old man was well into his eighties and suffered from Senile Dementia too. A common complaint amongst most of the patients at the institution.
    One of the other patients, a man in his thirties who Harold knew as John, was cleaning the floor of the toilet with a mop, slopping the water everywhere in his