Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Suspense/Mystery

After her coffee she got dressed. She threw on the same jeans from the day before and the first shirt she found on the floor that didn't smell too awful. She grabbed her keys from the table beside the door and went out to her car, started it and backed out of the driveway a little faster than she should have and then drove toward the hospital. She didn't bother warming the car first and she regretted that fact not even a mile down the road. She blasted the heater but it still only produced a chilling artificial breeze. Fuck it. She lit a cigarette and cracked the window. By the time she finished smoking it and had flicked it out the window, she was pulling into the parking lot. Her eyes were drooping and her head nodding so she opened the small hidden compartment in the ring she always wore and snorted a generous bump of crushed Adderall that she kept in case of moments just like this one. She was already licking the front of her teeth by the time she walked off the elevator on to the fifth floor.
      The fluorescent lights were an assault on her eyes and the she hated the squeak that her shoes made on the concrete tiles. Dierdre felt a chill as she reached the nurses station. She didn't see any sign of Lilith or anyone else in the typical uniform. She clenched her teeth and spun in a circle to see what she could see. Nothing, no one around. 
     "Hey." A voice said from behind her.
     She turned to the source of the voice and was looking straight at Mr. Killian's room. She took a few measured steps forward, peering into the room. Killian sat as he always did on his bed. She saw that her mother's scarf was laid across his legs. She looked back up to his face, seeing a smile spread across it. His blue eyes were calm. It was hard for her to understand calm people. She stepped into the room, the chill of the place vanished as she crossed the threshold.
     "Hey, Mr. Killian." She said.
     "Duane, please. I've never been much of a man for titles." He said.
     "Hey, Duane. I imagine you know why I'm here then." She said.
     "I do," he said with a nod. His eyes never broke contact with hers. "Sit down a spell, if don't mind talkin' to an old man dying in a bed. I'll tell ya, if I'd known I'd never be leavin' this place when I came in, I woulda just tied me a noose and been done with it at home."
     Dierdre pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat down. The old man wasn't so old really, maybe late fifties. Even so he looked old. His disease had worn him down faster than the world alone would have, and those eyes. In them she saw age immeasurable, years of experience that she would never know. Duane's chest rose and fell in ragged gasps but his voice still had strength in it, though the rest of him was a shriveled ruin. He was all pale flesh stretched around bone. What was left of his hair was a wispy mess of white and blond. There were machines hooked into him, each for a different purpose. Dierdre nodded, understanding that dying at home on your own terms would be better than this. 
     "How did you get the scarf?" She asked.
     "Lilith brought it to me when saw you had left it behind. She knew that your mother and I liked to talk we we got the chance." He said.
     "I think that girl is on drugs." Dierdre said
     Duane Killian's eyes cut into her. She could feel how wide her eyes were, how tightly she was clenching her jaw. She noticed her hands sweating a fidgeting with one another. Her eyes darted around the room at the books stacked on every available surface. His eyes never left hers. That smile spread darkly across his crooked mouth again. His eyes seemed to be pressing straight into hers. He leaned forward with a strained breath as far as his withered body would allow.
     "Well, we all have our demons, don't we?" He said.
     With this, Duane lifted the scarf from his lap with reverent grace and handed it over to Dierdre. The scarf was long. It had to have been at least twelve feet. It was all garter stitch. The knitting skills of her mother were unmatched by anyone Dierdre knew. She couldn't help but wonder why her mother would spend her dying days knitting such a simple and impractical project. The yarn was beautiful though. It was a variegated merino wool that faded shades with a soft subtlety. Dierdre ran the fabric through her fingers. The machines around them beeped and hummed. 
     "Thank you for keeping it safe for me." She said.
     "She said it was finished, you know. She told be just the other day that all she needed to do was bind off and she'd be done. Guessing by how it's still on the needles she didn't get around to it." He said.
     "Everyone will always have things they didn't get around to." She said.
     "Ain't that the damned truth?" Duane said.
     Without thinking much about what she was doing, Dierdre took the needles in her hands and began binding off the stitches. She had always loved this moment in knitting most of the entire process. This is the moment your project goes from being a bunch of string that you looped together a bunch of times with some needles to being an object of its very own. Killian watched the young lady's hands as the manipulated the small bone needles to her bidding. It was clear to him that the skill was in the family. Dierdre looked back up to meet his eyes and her hands resumed their work.
     "Any idea who she was making this for?" Dierdre asked.
     "She didn't really say. She just always said it would help with the missing man and she would talk about the needles. She talked about them like they were magic." He said.
     Lilith entered the room with a tray of medications. Dierdre noticed her own eyes being drawn to them and jerked them away before it became a yearning stare rather than a mere passing glance. Duane took the pills and thanked her with a nod and turned his attention back to Dierdre. Lilith left the room with the swift motion of one who has many things to do.
     "She was always talking about witches." He said.
     "It was a popular topic of conversation for her. She was a smart woman ad superstitious one as well." She said. "That combination in a person has never made much sense to me, but people just are the way they are I guess." 
     Dierdre was looking down at her hands. The needle in her left had just five stitches left on it. She slid the stitches back down the needle so they wouldn't slip off and let the still unfinished fabric just sit there in her lap. She looked back up at him. He was smiling again.
     "She told me those very needles there and the other ones you left here with her carved from the bones of a witch who had been publicly executed in Germany a few hundred years back." Duane said.
     "She told us that story all the time. She told me that the woman's friends had run off with her body before the people could burn it. Could be true, I don't really know." Dierdre said.
     "She said they could do things. Make things happen that most folks wouldn't think possible." He said.
     "I don't believe in magic, Mr. Killian."
     "That's a shame." He said. "And call me Killian if you like but you'll have to drop all that Mister shit. I ain't no better nor wiser than you just cause I'm older than you by a good spell."
     Dierdre decided to just look at the man. She felt the fabric in her fingers and saw this withering life form before her. She was staring at the spots on his arms that she knew he was not born with. One day her arms would look that way if she lived long enough to see old age. She always wondered if there was enough inside of her that people liked enough to be around when she was no longer beautiful. Who would take care of her when she got old? She returned her gaze to his and his eyes were squinted and gleaming with curiosity. She could see all over his face that he wanted to ask what she had just been thinking. Duane Killian did not ask that question. Dierdre excused herself and went to the bathroom and snorted more Adderall. She flushed the clean toilet and returned to the chair next to the bed. She rubbed her sweaty palms on her dirty jeans. She replaced the scarf back across her thighs. Killian sat up like a storyteller. 
     "Your mother believed in magic. She told me that only passionate people could make magic happen because they couldn't keep all of that inside them, so they poured it all into their art, their cooking, their knitting." He said.
     They both looked down at the five stitches still resting on the needles. Dierdre picked them up and bound off the final stitches sand broke the yarn. She tied the loose piece in several knots until she could get to her tapestry needle to weave it in. It was finished. She wrapped it several times around her neck and let it dangle. The Doctor himself would have been envious. The old man sank back down into his pillows, his face strained with exhaustion. He looked up at her once more.
     "I think you should go on home girl. I think the Sandman is about to take me for bit. Don't be a stranger though." He said.
     Dierdre stood from her chair.
     "I'll come back, Duane." She said.
     She turned and walked from the room. There was still no one at the nurse's station and it was still cold as fuck. She was grateful for the scarf. The weight and warmth of it was a comfort. She ran her fingertips over her pockets to make sure she felt she shape of the needles. When she was satisfied she turned on her heels and made her way out of the hospital and back to her car where she immediately lit a cigarette. She needed to go back home.