Nightbleed, Peter Fehervari [short story to read .TXT] 📗

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Nightbleed – Peter Fehervari

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Sepulturum’

A Black Library Imprint

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Nightbleed

Peter Fehervari

‘Needle-bright, needle-dark,

Will you, won’t you unstitch the light,

And switch out the stars to blackest night.’

The Needlesong

No, the Grey Woman says – or tries to say – when she enters the white ward. No.

As is so often the way with dreams, her words go unspoken, but not unheard.

Yes, the ward replies in a shimmer of gleaming tiles, drawing the newcomer forward. Yes.

The long room opens out around the woman as she advances, its walls falling back to either side like retreating tides, carrying rows of dark windows and vacant beds beyond her reach. Fresh tiles hatch from their neighbours to sheathe the widening expanse of floor and ceiling, breeding in orderly swathes that mock her confusion. Glancing down, she sees she is wearing a trim white tunic striped with blue. There is a tightness about her head, indicating the peaked cap containing her hair. This is the uniform of a life that slipped away years ago, along with her youth and every spark of hope she once nurtured.

This is where I lost myself, she realises, recognising the ward despite its strangeness. It is an abstraction of the reality she once walked, stripped to the bone then sharpened to a merciless point. Her unease curdles into fear as a lone bed rises smoothly from the floor ahead, like a puzzle piece slotting into place. Unlike the others, it is occupied.

No, the dreamer protests again, urgently this time. Please, no.

Yes, the ward insists, its breath caustic with disinfectants. Yes.

The woman’s legs obey the decree, carrying her onward, caught in the room’s invisible, inevitable currents. She realises her feet are bare and terribly cold – surely too cold for a mere dream? Like poison, the chill spreads up her legs as she nears the bed, numbing her body but leaving her mind raw and receptive to revelation.

There is a girl in the bed, sleeping, her breath coming in ragged, wet gasps. She is scarcely past childhood, yet her face is gaunt and her scalp hairless. Evidently the sickness in her runs deep – probably too deep to expunge, though nobody will ever know for sure, for she will never be given the chance to heal.

The bed’s brass footboard is embossed with the Gothic numeral ‘XVI’. A note is taped to it, bearing its occupant’s details, but the dreamer cannot decipher the handwritten scrawl. Those words are not part of her memories. She neglected to read them when this scene was real, so they elude her now. Nevertheless, she knows this patient’s name as intimately as her own.

Rozalia Temető.

The Grey Woman is not a killer by nature, so killing has left an enduring scar on her soul. She will never forget the girl she murdered.

No, she pleads, raising the hypo-syringe in her left hand. It has been there since she entered the ward, primed to play its part in this tragedy. I won’t… I won’t do it!

Yes, the bed exhales in a waft of budding decay. Yes.

Surrendering, the Grey Woman is rewarded by a rush of sudden, spiteful eagerness. As she leans over the sleeper she notices the serum in her hypo is black. It isn’t a natural darkness, but the stain of absolute nothingness. Of the void…

A moment later another aberration becomes apparent. She isn’t holding the hypo in her hand. The hypo is her hand.

Chel snapped out of the nightmare with a violence that shook her bed’s rickety frame. Her heart was pounding furiously, as though she’d been running hard. Sweat clung to her like a second skin, though the room was cold. Shivering, she peered at her fingers through the gloom, half expecting to find the hypo there. She could still feel it, but her hand was empty.

‘A dream,’ she murmured, closing her eyes. ‘Just a dream.’

And a lie, she added, fearful of speaking the denial aloud, though she didn’t know why. The dream had lied. She had never wanted the girl’s death – and certainly never delighted in it. So why was she afraid to defy the dream’s narrative?

‘I’m not,’ she whispered. But that was also a lie. She was no stranger to nightmares, but they’d stopped mattering years ago. Most washed over her like dirty water, leaving a stain without pain, like all the other detritus that passed for her life. These dreams were different, as sharp as any part of her waking experience. Sharper.

More real.

When had she ever felt anything so vital as the eagerness with which she’d administered the poison? Or as bitter as the shame that welled up inside her during yesterday’s sleep cycle, when she’d revisited her dismissal from the medicae service? A court of faceless obsidian giants had judged her, their verdict infinitely more damning than the condemnation of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. And when had she known anything like the terror of the nightmare before that, where she’d stepped into a lift and plunged into a shrieking abyss? Or the black despair of the first of these torments? That had been the subtlest, yet most unnerving of them all. There she had wandered her city as its lights expired one by one, leaving hungry shadows in their wake.

When had she ever felt so horribly, nakedly alive?

‘Never,’ Chel answered herself. Could that be a coincidence?

No, she decided, thinking of the VLG-01. The liquid in the dream hypo had been the same lustreless black as the tarry sample waiting in her lab. And these dreams had begun four days ago, after she–

Chel shook her head. This wasn’t the time or the place to brood on that choice. Let the worrying wait until she could do something about it. She was no longer a medicae, but the methodology of observation, analysis and treatment endured. It would probably be the last part of her to fade away.

Opening her eyes, she saw pallid light leaking through the window’s blinds, painting