The Pathologist

[Content Warnings: Death, murder, violence]

By the time the neighbour found old Mrs Ramsey, the smoke had already made its bed on her body. Alone in the house, the smoke had found its victim, wrapped its arms around her and whispered goodnight, and no one at all had seen.

When Gerald, forty-three and balding, knocked on the door that night to check on her, he received no response. Odd for a woman with few visitors - but her hearing was going.

And then he looked down and saw the smoke.

It was snaking under the doorframe, seeping out into the corridor, a dark grey cloud that only grew larger and larger as he stared, a shapeshifting creature with no eyes and yet all-seeing chaos. Without thinking, he ripped off his sleeve and pressed it to his mouth, and found his hand turning the door handle. He took a breath. 

Mrs Ramsey was inside.

The door opened, and a wave of grey mass poured out from the haze inside of the apartment, wrapping itself around him, engulfing him, welcoming him in. Something in him told him to close the door behind him, not to let the smoke out to escape down the hall, for no one else deserved to be taken in by its tendrils. His eyes streamed as he began to walk through the darkened hallway, his footsteps the only sound in the silence while his mind screamed Mrs Ramsey Mrs Ramsey until that was all he could think.

If he hadn’t been there before, he would never have known that the hallway opened up into a larger living room, whose red sofas reminded him of his childhood home, their fabric frayed just like the furniture in that house from all those years ago. Last time, Mrs Ramsey had offered him some tea, a permanent tray of biscuits sitting on the table, waiting patiently for guests.

He was on his hands and knees now, tracing his way through the apartment - he knew that when he reached the end of the hallway rug he would reach the living room, and the familiar tug of the rug on wood panelling in the darkness signalled to him that he was in the right place. He pushed further on, to the left, to the balled-up shadow in the centre of the haze.

At ninety-three, Mrs Ramsey had tried everything not to look her age. A full face of makeup every day, hair dyed and curled without a strand out of place, ensuring that those who did see her saw her only at the best angle. But now, crumpled up on the smoke-stained carpet, the years seemed to have crept up and overwhelmed her. 

Kneeling next to the body, Gerald peered over to see her face. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing, caught in permanent shock, glazed with betrayal. In her last moments she must have brought her wrinkled hand up to her mouth, a belated effort to stop any more smoke from consuming her from the inside out, but she must have underestimated its power. It could reach into the smallest of crevices, of course, but perhaps at ninety-three she had thought she could block it out just as she seemed to have done to most of the world for the past thirty years. And then the smoke must have gotten to her before she even had the chance to consider the two-foot walk to the door.

Gerald could look no longer, and he glanced upwards. Behind the woman stood the coffee table, laden with biscuits as always. A lump grew in Gerald’s throat as he glanced at the chocolate digestives, their colour paled by smoke. Mrs Ramsey’s words echoed in his mind as he tried to find the courage to rip his eyes away and back to the body. He had to look at it again.

Help yourself, dear, I don’t get many visitors these days. The words were barely a few hours old, echoes in the silent room. 

He tore his eyes away and back at the body. It looked so similar to his mother’s, and he could practically see the soot lining her throat, an entire chimney inside of her. Just inches away, he could picture her airway collapsing, could feel her corneas screaming, invisible burns throbbing still. A rasping scream, lodged in her throat forever.

A joy as hazy as the smoke around him snaked its tendrils up through his body, the pathologist in him jumping at the chance to unravel this woman and see the burnt tissues and oxygen deprivation and marvel at the ruins of the human body that had merited this death. It shocked and scared him, that joy - it was that which had labelled him so strange to the boys at school. The boy who had laughed while his house had burned.

The woman’s eyes continued to stare back at him, unseeing, unthinking, their only purpose in that moment to pull him back to reality. In a second he was back kneeling in the darkened apartment, in the eye of a tornado of smoke. 

He needed to find a window - open a window, Gerry, open a window and all the smoke will disappear - there had to be one somewhere in this place. His mother’s words echoed in the darkest corners of his mind.

He got to his feet slowly, slowly, swaying as he did so, reaching out his hands and grasping at the smoke to hold on to but grabbing air every time. The window was close, just past the tiny television, draped in yellowed lace curtains.

Come on, darling, please, open the window, a voice pleaded in his mind and his mother’s voice combined with Mrs Ramsey’s voice until he was at the window and his hand was hovering on the latch. He could see so clearly what he should do, and the voices of the women who he once believed had loved him were ringing in his mind. Open the window, breathe, call for help, let the smoke filter out. Open all the windows in the apartment and hope to God that the woman on the floor wasn’t dead even though he knew she was.

He knew what to do. He had memorised these steps since he was twelve years old in the smoky house of his childhood and even then he had not done it. Even thirty-three years later, something deep inside him anchored him to the floor, refusing to let him join the outside world.

A familiar feeling swept through him and the nausea began to swell through his chest, making its way up into his head once again. 

One of his dark spots was coming on. Perhaps it was brought on by the smoke, perhaps by the horror of seeing Mrs Ramsey like this. Its source, as always, he couldn’t say. The spots caught him as they always had and whenever he next woke up consciously himself was never up to him.

He had to leave before the darkness caught him.

A feeling of guilt circled in his stomach as he surveyed his options. He couldn’t leave Mrs Ramsey alone like this, couldn’t abandon her after the second mother she had been to him, couldn’t leave even after the argument.

But if he stayed in this apartment soon there would be two corpses on that rug.

It was as if that thought pulled everything back into motion again. Suddenly he was stumbling backwards, past Mrs Ramsey, glancing at her one last time as a final sorry crawled its way up his throat and rested on his lips, never to be uttered. He moved towards the door, standing as tall as he could, the distance growing yet again between him and the crumpled heap on the rug.

He placed his arms on the wall as he walked down the hallway, still grey, the fabric of his shirt gone - he must have forgotten it next to the body, he supposed, a morbid laugh ripping its way through his throat. In a way, then, Mrs Ramsey wasn’t entirely alone.

Regret flashed through him as soon as the thought crossed his mind. Something deep within him questioned who he had become. His mother’s voice in the deepest chambers of his mind, cursing the son she had raised.

He could see the front door now, just like the one in his memory. He stumbled towards it, his hands still spread out on the walls on either side for stability. He could feel himself weakening, going.

The dark spot was coming to swallow him up whole again.

His right hand caught onto a small plastic box on the wall, and he reached out of the darkness up to the box, his fingers painting a physical picture of the smoke detector.

Off. No wonder no one had heard Mrs Ramsey die.

I’m so sorry, Gerald. We couldn’t save her. A twelve year old boy, face grimy from soot, staring wide-eyed as an officer ripped his world apart and then looking past her at a stretcher holding a body that no longer even looked his mother. Memories, flooding through - his mother yelling at him, his mother pleading with him to help her, him closing the door behind her and walking out onto the street, a key clenched in his fist. That anger that scared even him, that she will pay for what she did to me that I hate her I hate her I hate her feeling that grew inside him until he could no longer breathe and the smoke had followed him outside and all he could do was laugh.

And all because the smoke detector hadn’t been on. It could have all been avoided, but Gerald’s mother had not deserved to be saved. And it was too late for old Mrs Ramsey.

The door was a few inches away but it was closed, and the darkness was so large, so welcoming. The haze seemed to whisper to him, telling him it was okay to let himself fall into it again. He would wake at some point, the darkness having moulded him anew.

At forty-three, Gerald had accepted that this was his life, full of smoke and vacant laughter, living in the gaps between one dark spot and the next. What he had done lay in the darkness, waiting patiently until the next time it could descend like a cloud of smoke.