Guyanese horror fiction…Sandra dreams of flying (also published as The Ring)

Aug 26, 2019 News

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By Michael Jordan

The night after he stole the ring, Maxwell Lewis dreamed of the old woman for the first time. She came floating up to his window like the full moon rising up over the horizon; an old woman whose reddened eyes were fixed on his. She moved closer, and he saw the scars on her face and shoulders. She pressed her face against the window, still staring at him, and he felt a strange desire to let her in, even as he stifled the urge to scream.
Suddenly she began to pluck and scrape at the window, fingers moving with the frenzy of a trapped spider, but soundlessly.
He awoke. He stared at the window, then looked around the darkened room. He knew that something other than his nightmare had jerked him from sleep.
There it was again. A sound from his son’s crib.
Maxwell groped for the light switch. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he stared at his two-year-old son. The child was standing at the furthest end of the crib. He was whimpering, and he was staring at the bedroom window.
Maxwell glanced around quickly. Only the pale full moon stared in at him. He shifted carefully off the bed so as not to disturb his wife, Sandra, then went over to his son. He raised the mosquito net, placed his hand on the boy’s head. “What happen, big man, bad dreams?”
The boy glanced at him, then his eyes shifted back to the window. He remained at the corner of the crib, still whimpering. Maxwell glanced towards the bed at Sandra. She was usually a light sleeper, but now she lay on her back, snoring softly. No sense waking her, he thought.
“Want to sleep with Daddy?”
In response, his son, stubby arms outstretched, came silently over to him. He placed the child beside Sandra, and almost immediately, the boy was asleep. Maxwell stretched out for the light switch, but then paused to stare at his wife. She had shifted, pulling askew the bedsheet that had covered her, and now he could see the ring, the ring that he had taken from the dead woman. The woman he had dreamed of…
They had brought the old woman to the hospital at around two a.m.
A hire-car driver had found her some miles from the city. She was unconscious, her black dress was torn, and there were bruises on her head and body.
They had assumed that she was an accident victim, and were preparing to have her admitted to the Female Accident Ward after treating and stabalising her in the Emergency Unit.
They were short-staffed because of a prolonged strike, and Maxwell was the only nurse on duty in the A&E treatment room.
It was while he was setting up the saline drip for the woman that he noticed the ring. It was on her wedding finger; a gold ring with tiny figurines worked into it and a ruby-like stone at the top. He had never been interested in jewellery before, but now he found himself staring at the ring; at the fires that seemed to be burning within the depths of the ruby—or whatever stone it was. There was something ancient about that ring, reminding him of movies he’d seen of Egyptian or Aztec treasures.
He’d been monitoring the old woman’s condition regularly. At around 4:00 a.m., he was sitting at a desk near the little cot they had placed her on when he heard a pinging sound, as if someone had dropped a coin. The sound came from near the old woman’s bed.
She had shifted, and now her left hand dangled over the side of the cot. Her eyes were open but with the glassy stare of death. He positioned her hands together and was about to call the doctor when he noticed the ring. It lay on the floor, its fires twirling in its red stone.
He picked it up. It felt surprisingly cold, sending a disturbing thrill up his arm, and, before he knew what he was doing, he had placed in his pocket.
He sighed. What had gotten into him? Why had he taken the ring?
But he knew why. He had looked at it on the woman’s withered finger and he had imagined how it would look on Sandra. He had looked at it and felt a deep regret that he would never be able to give her something so beautiful—not on his nurse’s salary, anyway.
He switched off the light. But he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, guilt gnawing at his insides…
He was groggy next morning when Sandra called him to the table for breakfast. She was almost ready for work, and to take Wayne to the day-care centre. As Maxwell sat that the breakfast table, Wayne broke away from his mother and attempted to sit in Maxwell’s lap. Maxwell lifted his son, tickled him under his lap. “You alright, big man?”
Wayne giggled, then nodded.
“Tell me what frighten you last night. Bad dreams?”
Wayne shook his head, then wriggled out of Maxwell’s arms and darted back to his mother.
“Talking ‘bout dreams,” Sandra said suddenly. “I had a funny one myself last night. I was flying…flying above a set of houses somewhere in some countryside…”
Maxwell swallowed mouthful of tea. “You never had a flying dream before?
“Yes, but this one was different. It was me, and yet it wasn’t me. I was an old, old lady, and I had on this funny black dress.”
He turned to her, almost spilling his tea. “You had on a what?”
“A long black dress. And—” she frowned, glanced suddenly at her watch. “Shucks, I late.” She went to Maxwell, gave him a quick kiss, then hurried to the front door with Wayne in tow…
He thought about Sandra’s dream on his way to work that night but apprehension about whether anyone had noticed that the old woman’s ring was missing pushed the dream from his mind. However, no one looked at him suspiciously or asked him anything. He learned that the woman was still unidentified.
A heavy work schedule pushed thoughts of the woman out of his mind. But that night she came floating up to his window again, pleading with her red, beady eyes to be let in. and suddenly she was oozing herself through a crease beneath the window, her thin, green-veined hands first, then the rest of her slithering through. And in his dream, he was a little boy again, lying in bed and screaming.
He awoke with the screaming in his ears, and then he realized that the cries were Wayne’s and he could see his son pressed against the furthest end of the crib.
And someone was standing, with arms outstretched, near his son…
He fumbled for the light switch, then trembled with relief as light flooded the room. It was Sandra who was standing near the crib. She was trying to hug Wayne, who was cringing away and screaming.
“Okay, okay leave him to me,” Maxwell said. Sandra turned to him. For some reason she seemed to be angry. She walked past him without a word and returned to bed.
He glanced at her, then turned back to his son. Tears were streaming down the child’s face. He was trembling.
Maxwell lifted him from the crib and pressed the child to his chest. “Okay, okay big man, daddy here—”
“Lady…” Wayne said suddenly in a trembly voice. “Lady.”
Maxwell swiveled to the window, but there was nothing there, of course. He placed the boy next to Sandra, who was already asleep, the ring glinting on her hand…
***
“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 quizzically. “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…dread. 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.”
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)
Michael Jordan is the author of the supernatural novel KAMARANG, which is on sale at Austin’s Book Store and also available on AMAZON (Kindle version)

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