The Ring

Jun 07, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Creative Corner

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By Michael Jordan

Part Two

“You know I had that funny dream again?” Sandra remarked. They were sitting on the bed. Sandra, half-dressed, was removing curlers from her hair.
“What dream?” Maxwell asked, but guessing already.
“The flying one. I was an old lady again and…” she paused, and now she was rubbing at the ring. “I doan understand,” she said. This thing wasn’t so tight fuh me before…”
Maxwell glanced at the ring then looked away. “You was telling me ‘bout the dream.”
“Yes. I was an old lady again…flying over some houses. But this time some people did chasing me. And I had blood on my skin…”
At the hospital, he worked in a daze, thinking about Sandra’s dream and his, and Wayne’s mention of a lady. He knew he could dismiss his nightmares as the working of a troubled conscience. But what of Sandra’s and Wayne’s?

He felt light-headed from lack of sleep, but an hour before his shift ended, the matron announced that he would have to work an extra shift, since one of the night-shift nurses had reported sick.
He was sitting in the Accident Ward office at around ten o’clock when the on-call doctor, a young gossipy chap who had worked the same night that the woman was admitted, came up to him.
“We got something more on your old patient,” the doctor said.
Maxwell tensed. “What?”
“Well, the cops still don’t know who she is. But they find some funny things when they do the post mortem. This is straight out of Tales From the Crypt.” He shook his head. “If the press get this…”
“Get what?”
The doctor leaned towards Maxwell. “She wasn’t an accident victim as we had thought. She was beaten.”
“Beaten?”
“Yes. Maybe by more than one person. With sticks. Maybe she was stoned, too. And hear this: they find some fibres embedded in she skin that suggest that she was also beaten with a broom.” He paused, then added softly: “A manicole broom.”
Maxwell felt his skin break out in goose-pimples. He stared at the doctor.
“….but that was not the biggest shock,” the doctor was saying. “They decide to check she stomach. And they find blood. Human blood. I think—“
But Maxwell was no longer listening. He scampered over to the doctor. “I gotta go home now,” he said. “I gotta go home now.”

The doctor frowned at him. “What happen to you, chap?”
“I said I gotta go home now!”
Because he thought he now knew what the dreams meant. His grandmother had frightened him with those stories as a boy. About men and women cursed to shed their skins…to fly through the night as balls of fire….to feed on babies…
She had said that the curse was passed from one person to the next. Through a touch. Through a meal mixed with blood. Through a gift.
The ring. The ring was the gift in this case. Maybe someone had passed it on to the old woman. And now he had passed it on to—
Madness! He was a nurse, for heaven’s sake!
But now he was remembering Sandra standing next to Wayne’s crib.
Had she been trying to comfort him? Or had she been trying to—
A groan stuck in his throat. He ran towards the stairs, even as the doctor shouted after him.
But Maxwell didn’t hear. He was remembering that the dreams began around midnight. That meant that he had about two hours to reach home, to tell Sandra the truth, to take the ring from her, to throw it away, to smash it, to destroy it somehow.
He sprinted from the hospital compound.

Maybe, just maybe, there was still time…
Darkness, courtesy of a power failure, hung over Albert Street when Maxwell finally arrived home. His keys, slick with sweat, were already in his hands, but he dropped them twice before trembling the right one into the lock. He pushed the door open.
He had sprinted from the hospital, had flagged down a car just outside the gate to the Emergency Unit, all the while praying to be in time.
But now he hesitated at the open door. The living room was in darkness, save for the faint yellow glow from a lamp in the bedroom.
Usually, when he returned from the night-shift, she would be sitting in bed reading, or looking at something on the television; but tonight, the same silence that had greeted him lay inside. He took a hesitant step. “Sandra?”

At first, no sound, save for his own laboured breathing. Then the light in the bedroom shifted, and Sandra emerged into the living room. Her face was yellow-shadowed by the lamplight. She was wearing only her bra and underwear.
“Max?” A sleepy, distant murmur. She passed a hand absently through her hair, and now, even in the gloom, he saw the ring. The dread that had brought him home enveloped him again.
He rushed past her straight to his son’s crib. He lifted the mosquito netting—
The boy was lying on his side, a thumb thrust to the hilt in his mouth, one arm wrapped tight around a brown teddy-bear.
The blanket covering Wayne rose and fell in rhythm to his breathing.
Maxwell leaned against the crib, trembling with relief. He heard Sandra’s soft tread behind him.
“What happen Max?”
Maxwell turned. He stared at the ring, and then shifted his eyes to Sandra. He searched her face for any tell-tale change, but all he saw was his wife, his Sandra, her eyes filled with puzzlement and anxiety for him.
He held her hand, feeling the same disturbing thrill as his fingers touched the ring. He tugged gently at it. “We got to take it off, Sandra.”
“What?”
“The ring. We gotta take it off!”
She stared at him quizically. “Max, what going on?”
“The ring, Sandra—” His voice broke as he felt the saltiness of tears at the back of his throat. Then the words came out with a rush. “I-I didn’t get it as a gift from a patient. I took it from a dead woman and I think that she’s a-a—“
“What?”

“I don’t know! But they find blood in she stomach and —oh God, Sandra, just take the ring off now!”
He watched the play of emotions on her features…disbelief…anger…fear. She pulled away from Maxwell, and then stared down at her hand. She began to tug at the ring.
“Max, I ain getting it off!”
He took her hand again, trying to ignore the strange tingling as he touched the ring. Sandra winced as he tugged at it, but the ring did not budge.
“I doan understand,” Sandra whimpered. “It wasn’t so tight before.”
DESTROY IT…SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER…
He looked around desperately, and then spotted a bottle of skin lotion on the ledge near the door.
He twisted the cover off and spurted the lotion clumsily onto the finger with the ring. He rubbed the lotion in, took a deep breath, then tugged.
Sandra gave a squeak of pain. At the same time, he seemed to hear a harsh burst of laughter in his ear. Then he was staring at the ring, glinting in his hand.
A sigh of relief was just escaping his lips when something about Sandra caught his attention. She was clutching her hand, her eyes bright with tears. And now he saw the drops of blood welling up between her fingers.

“Sandra…you alright?”
She shifted away from him. “Yes…just get rid of that thing.”
He stared at the ring. But now that he had gotten it off, he was unsure of his next move. Destroy it…smash it with a hammer…
No…leave well alone. Just throw it away…flush it down the toilet—no!—it would still be too near the house. Just throw it somewhere far…
In the end, he wrapped it in a piece of tissue and put it in a bottle on the front step. He’d dispose of it by the seawalls tomorrow.
When he returned, Sandra was sitting on the bed, holding a piece of tissue to her finger. He sat next to her. “Sandra—-”
She stiffened. She turned slightly away from him, then said softly: “The most beautiful thing that my husband gave me…is a ring that he steal from a dead woman finger…”
“Sandra—” . He stopped. How could he explain to her why he had taken the ring, when he himself didn’t quite know?

Instead he said: “Let me look at that finger.”
“Is alright,” she murmured, but allowed him to take her hand.
He lifted the tissue. He stared at the finger and felt his earlier dread return.
In the murky light, he saw that the blood was gone. But now, where the blood had been, were two deep indentations where the ring had scratched her…
But as the days passed without any untoward occurrence, his apprehension began to recede. The incident had left its mark, though. He sensed a new distance between himself and Sandra; a subtle distrust that had never been there before. But that was all, and gradually, the crazy night began to seem more like a bad dream.
And then, a month later, something happened…
(to be continued)

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