98.

  “Male… presented with several stab wounds…”

  “He’s lost a lot of blood…”

  “Prepare the theatre…”

  “Honey, can you hear…”

  “We need you to…”

  “Can you tell…”

  I'd expected a soft, pearly white light, perhaps a staircase made of clouds, peace, tranquility, the end of all my torment. So when my eyes fluttered open and I was being bounced around on a cold metal trolley I knew I wasn’t dead. I was being frantically pushed through the sterile white halls of a hospital, there were no soft golden lights, just harsh LEDs boring into my eyes, the sound of running feet and muffled orders being barked.

  A breathing mask was too tight around my face, my own breath cloying inside of it, and there was pain, nothing but searing, red-hot pain. Nurses desperately spoke to me, but I couldn't understand the words they were saying. One of my eyes was entirely shut, and the other flickered open and shut sporadically. I could feel cold steel against my boiling hot skin. The remnants of my clothes were being cut from me. More nurses clutched rags to my bleeding wounds; bags of blood were being set up, and then a different mask was put on me, and I was back into the bliss of oblivion.

  I woke up again. Still no pearly whites. Now I was in a dark room with blaring white lights above me, and a green-gowned surgeon with a mask on, bloody up to his elbows. Then I was unconscious again. That was my existence for some time: surgeries, anaesthetics, more surgeries, and more anaesthetics. I went around this barely conscious merry-go-round as hardworking nurses and doctors fought desperately to keep me alive. And if I'm honest, I was rather ambivalent about my own fate. I was happy to die there on the pavement, and now I just felt like I was taking up these people's time when they should be helping someone else, someone more deserving than the foolish kid who went to war with the Syndicate and got himself killed in the process.

  I don't know how long it all went on for. I remembered one of the nurses speaking to a doctor, saying something like I'd had eight surgeries and several litres of blood just to keep me alive. But modern medicine was truly a marvel, and they had done exactly that: they'd kept me alive. While I lay in my hospital bed, still on a breathing apparatus, catheters, and IV drips, while swimming in and out of consciousness, I could see the world passing me by outside my little window. I saw pigeons sitting there, just watching me, and I saw the silver-eyed cat. It came more than once, just staring at me curiously before vanishing in front of my eyes.

  I was never conscious long enough to answer any real questions. I think I told the nurses my name was Harry, that was my Grandad’s name. Whether this was a conscious lie to protect my identity or just the result of far too many opiates and anaesthetics, I don't know. But they had no last name, no address, and when the police came to interview me, I was so senseless that the fierce little nurse who looked after me shooed them away. All anybody knew was that I was some kid who'd been caught up in extreme violence. Most of them assumed I'd been jumped, or maybe it was something to do with gangs. Either way, they kept me alive and looked after me, and day by day, I crawled further away from death's jealous grip.

  *

  Two weeks had passed before the ventilator finally came off. Apparently, one of my lungs had been nicked by a blade, and they had to collapse it, fix it, and re-inflate it. I don't know how they did any of that, but they told me they'd put me on some incredibly powerful steroids and antibiotics to heal the tissue and prevent infection. Another nurse proudly informed me that I had over 200 stitches, and they were curious about the other wounds, the ones that had healed and were scarred over. Fortunately, they never probed too much as they were too busy for that. I was just the curiosity in bed 7, the weird kid who no one came looking for.

  In that quiet time, I was able to take stock of where I was, what had happened to me, and who I was. Through my drug-addled state, I had enough calm and temperance, thanks to the narcotics, to relive those final few days. My befogged brain listlessly wandered from taking on the nightmare wraith Somnix, battling the demons ever present inside my own head, to Sherbert's kidnapping, the battles with Black John, and then the horrors of Building 4.

  The final battle with Brick haunted me the most. I remembered what I'd done to him, to another human being, ripping his face open, beating him into mush, and choking him until he was at the gates of hell. I remembered that feeling, the desire to kill, to maim, to wreak vengeance upon a fellow human being, and I felt shame. Deep, troubling shame at how good it all felt. But that's the wonderful thing about hard drugs; they don't really let you be too introspective. They numb you physically and emotionally so things just don't really pierce the fog the way they would if you were sober. I think I cried at some point but even that was just a hazy memory.

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  I realised how many times I'd come so close to death. I realised how many people I'd hurt, maimed, and injured. I knew that whatever good intentions I had, or even good outcomes I may have achieved, this was just all too much. I was just some skinny, weird kid from the Mulberry estate; I shouldn't be playing superhero. At some point in that hospital bed, doped up, mentally and physically exhausted, I quietly packed away the Gutter Mage, put him in a box, and shoved him into the corner of my mind with the other horrors and traumas of my past. He wouldn't be needed again.

  It took them two more weeks to wean me off the drugs. They had pumped so much into my system that they said pulling me off all of them at once could have disastrous side effects. So, I was slowly weaned off, and with that, the pain returned. I hope you haven't ever been stabbed or had deep invasive surgery, but there's nothing like the bone-chilling, internal pain of it. Getting cut on the skin or bruised on the surface of your body just does not compare to feeling deep trenches of pain inside your gut and chest. They don't stop; you can't get used to them. They just pulsate endlessly and make you want to curl into a ball and scream. Fortunately, I'd become quite familiar with pain, and I had the pigeons and the cat to keep me company.

  One day, Ruku, the black pigeon who'd assisted my assault on the Greenwich dockside warehouse, stopped outside my window. I was still too frail to get out of bed and open it, but he stood there, and we passed a look of recognition between us. I was glad to see he had survived that battle, and, as weird as it sounds, I think he was glad that I survived mine. Every night, the silver cat came, and every night it would mew, and I would feel that resonating chime of kindness and warmth come from it. It would spell me to sleep, even when the drugs were taken away and the pain was unbearable. The cat was probably the only reason I got through my withdrawals.

  Then the police came again. Thankfully, they weren't particularly bothered. They asked some perfunctory questions—who I was, where I'd come from, what had happened to me. I told them nothing but lies, said I'd been jumped and didn't know why. When they asked me why no one had come to visit me, I just shrugged my shoulders. After all, being a weird loner isn't actually a crime. The police took my statement but didn't sound very hopeful of ever catching the criminals, and then they left.

  It was only after another day or so that I found out Brick had died.

  He died in this very hospital, maybe two or three floors above me, perhaps at the same time that my life was being saved. It was a curious feeling to know I'd murdered a man. When I was finally able to talk to a nurse about it, she found the inquiry quite strange. But she humoured me and said that Brick had died of a heart attack. In that instant, I felt absolved of his death. He hadn't died from his wounds. He probably died from all the drugs and alcohol he'd been consuming during his time on the run. But there was still a small corner of my mind where I knew, whether by my hand or not, I'd played some role in his death. But Brick was gone. He'd never be coming back. There was no chance of a mistrial or early release for good behaviour. Brick had faced the ultimate justice, and he was gone, and the world felt just a little bit safer.

  It was perhaps a month after my battle with Brick and my admittance to the hospital that I really got back on my feet. I had no clothes, so I was dressed in the flimsy, overly revealing hospital gowns I'd been given. I limped to the bathroom in the dark of night. Hospital wards at night are strange places, oddly calm but unsettling at the same time, dark with the strange tinges of green lights and only the beeping machinery to keep you company.

  I hobbled into the disabled toilet and locked the door behind me. I let the gown fall to the floor and looked at my ruined body. Probably the most eye-catching was the enormous zipper-like scar running down my abdomen, where they had to cut me open to fix the internal damage. It looked like something out of Frankenstein's monster. I had another incision just above my hip, intersecting the very first fatal stab wound I'd received, which felt like decades ago. But the drugs, the steroids, and everything else that modern medicine had for me had healed my body. Maybe "heal" was the wrong word. It fixed it, I guess.

  For one, I was no longer covered in bruises. I hadn't seen my torso a single color in so long. The laceration on my forehead had scarred over, neither of my eyes were swollen, and my nose only looked a little bent. Most of my teeth were still all in place somehow. But as I inspected my body, I saw the reality of what I'd survived. I counted no less than six different stab wounds and about five vicious slashes and cuts, including one that ran all the way up my pec and across my shoulder, three in my thighs, and then two in my torso.

  I looked at my hands last, and there was a reason for that. It wasn't because of the puckered pink flesh of my knuckles, but because of my left hand. I hadn't told the doctors or nurses, but I had very little feeling on the palm of my left hand where I had carved the rune. I looked at it now and saw the remnants of the scar. It was fairly faint, but as I poked at my palm, I felt nothing. The Pigeon King's warning echoing in my brain: flesh magic quite literally eats away at you. Whatever had been there in my palm, whatever life essence had connected it to the rest of my body, was severed. I twiddled my fingers and was thankful to see that they worked okay. It was just the palm and the inside of my wrist had gone completely numb. I wondered if there was any more permanent damage from using such forbidden power. My legs were shaky, so I returned to bed, broken but not defeated.

  It was only a couple of days later when the bill collectors came in. In my Grandad’s youth, hospitals were free in the UK. Now they cost so much it wasn't even worth going. They came to me, quite pushy and severe, because, after all, they didn't even know who I was, and they'd spent hundreds of thousands of pounds keeping me alive. I fobbed them off with lies and fake names just long enough to distract them and send them away to verify my identity. With that, I, the noble Gutter Mage who went to war with the Syndicate and won, hobbled from my hospital bed and out the front doors, wearing nothing but an all too revealing hospital gown. I disappeared into the traffic of the city, wondering, what do I do next?