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Seven

Yet still it stands. Local yobs, who normally take pleasure in defacing and destroying abandoned buildings have let it be. They've let it rest, perhaps for fear of awakening whatever beast once walked its halls. Perhaps they are wiser than me.

I walk across the barely visible lines that had once marked out football, netball and basketball courts. My feet know where I am going even though they and I have yet to discuss the matter. The door to the changing rooms is in front of me. I take a breath and step through.

It's smaller than I remember. I laugh at myself. Of course it is. The whole world appears larger to a child than an adult. As we grow, our sense of scale and wonder diminishes with each aging heartbeat. My eyes are drawn, as I know they will be, to the tiles on the floor of the showers. The grout is a filthy grey now, the decades laying down a blanket of muck to lie on. The once white tiles are yellowed and cracked.

There is no blood.

I move to a sink against one wall. The mirror above it is still intact, though dust, age, and a particularly intricate spider's web, the creator long since departed, create a dark curtain I have to brush aside in order to see my reflection.

I regard myself. The lines. The grey. The diminishing hair. For a second I long to be back, wish for the years to dissolve so I can once more belong, even for a short time.

Movement.

A shadow.

Behind me.

The sink begins to fill, though I don't turn the taps. A cough of slime erupts from the plughole, and a murky, dark red liquid bubbles up. I look up and see the same liquid pouring from the mirror, as if Alice's Wonderland is bleeding out.

Then I see my face, except I don't have one. I have a smear. I don't understand how I can see myself when my eyes have disintegrated and drizzled into the space where my nose should be, but I can.

Then the movement again.

I turn.

A voice, deep and thick - a clot of sound.

"Hello," it says.

Such a simple, pleasant introduction. I could feel my heart miss a beat, the voice almost stealing the rhythm. Fear. It can spur you into action or wrap you in a straitjacket of immobility. I don the jacket, made to measure,

I don't answer.

"Welcome back."

A man steps from shadows which were not there when I entered a moment ago.

Not a man. The man. Featureless. Grey. Terrifying.

I would step back but there is a sink behind me. A wall. I can feel the blood flowing over the sink's edge and down my legs.

Again, I don't answer. What do I say? Even if my mouth would move, which I doubt, the words are whirlpooling in my mind and I would likely vomit them forth in a torrent of empty noise.

"I knew you would return. How could you not? After everything?"

I have told no one of my spontaneous decision to come back. It is a choice I'd made that morning, a chance phrase on the morning news or sound from the open window. Nothing specific. Simply a whim.

I finally manage a response.

"Who are you?"

"I am who I have always been," he says, his voice oozing from somewhere in his head.

"Who?"

But, as I feel the weight of the razor in my hand, I know. As I test the sharpness of the blade with my thumb, feeling it slide into the skin, I know.

"You," he says, fading, sliding, misting towards me, joining with me.

I watch my hand as it rises, the cutthroat blade bright in the gloom. At first I don't feel it as it cuts into my neck, drawing a line from beneath my left ear across to the right. The blood, my own this time, is warm as it soaks my shirt. I drop the razor, the strength quickly leaving my body, and I slump to the floor.

Me. It was all me. Not physically, but some part of my mind or my spirit or my essence had escaped the confines of my body and spread like a disease, taking the lives of my friends. The smothering suffocation of my mother, so magnified in a young boy who simply wanted to be accepted and, well, be a boy, had caused this black streak from my soul to break free. I didn't so much as pull the legs off a spider, so why did it have to kill? Why did I?

"Because I could," I answer. "Just because."

The blood flowing from the sink is a thick cascade now, seeming to leap over the edge towards me, eager to touch, to join, with my own.

I look down and, as my sight dims and the world becomes a dark smear, I see the tiles soaked red as my life empties into the drain set into the floor.

I think of Ian and smile.