I Woke Up Early the Day I Died - Kailleaugh Andersson

He looked like he had seen Hell.

His eyes were wide open, staring skyward and fixed into a gaze that perhaps even saw beyond the chipped plaster ceiling, up into the stars above the cityscape. His eyes looked like glass, and something awful was hidden there in the depths of his stare.

The man's hands had grappled with the yellowing sheets of his musty death bed. His fingers were still clenched into claws and seemed to continue tearing into the bed's shroud despite their immobility, as if in the last moments of his life he had struggled bitterly against the inner demons that had finally come to claim him. Even in his stillness he was trying to fight the inevitable.

That was the scene that welcomed ambulance men, Colin and Leonard when they answered a call from the police to attend a sudden death at a doss house. Leonard ran his fingers through his graying hair and sighed - he was worried how Colin would react to the scene inside. He wasn't sure Colin was well suited to this job. Leonard thought that he was a good lad, but he seemed uptight and too nervous for the job. In his two decades working as an ambulance man, he'd seen dozens of young, keen men and women crack under the stress of attending to accidents and suicides and murders. But Colin had lasted longer than most; some lasted a few hours and Colin had been with him for a couple of months now. He was hopeful.

The doss house was a total dive and was located smack-bang in the middle of Tillydrone, north Aberdeen city. The building's graffiti-tagged facade did not look out of place among the dilapidated council flats, the rubbish strewn street, or the burnt out shell of an old Cortina that had long been stripped and left for dead at the side of the road. One of the locals, a bedraggled old man, was slouched against the door of the neighbouring pub he'd just been thrown out of; he was covered in his own vomit from one too many cans of Super Lager.

The inside of the doss house was even worse than the outside. It consisted of a small, dingy office inside an even larger room that branched off into a series of dark and dirty halls.

A short, balding man, dressed in a sweat-stained suit was sitting inside the office watching an old Sci-Fi B-Movie on a tiny black and white portable TV. The man was puffing carelessly on a cheap-smelling cigarette that spewed ash all over the front of his suit as it burned. As the man turned his head when Colin and Leonard came through the doorway, he rubbed the ash into his suit and slowly stood up.

"You the manager?" Leonard asked.

"Aye; the name's Brian McQueen. He's upstairs. Fucken bloke's deid as a doornail."

"Is he a resident?" Colin asked.

"Nah. Just some fucken yank on a short-term let."

The man led the two of them up a flight of rickety, scuffed wooden stairs that took them into a grimy hall. Along the surface of the walls, the plaster had peeled away in places like torn skin, revealing the skeletal protrusions of bare lathes.

The inside of the room was even worse than the hall. Cigarette ends and fine gray ash overflowed from heaping ashtrays scattered around the room. There were even half-burned stubs and ash mashed into the threadbare shagpile carpet that had once been olive green. The formerly white net curtains that hung around the single large window were stained a sickening infection-yellow from years of cigarette smoke. Even on the windowsill overlooking the dingy alley below there were dozens of cigarette ends that had been crushed out in a thick sludge of ash and vomit. Empty Imperial Vodka bottles were scattered all around the room; they cluttered the coffee table, the bedside cabinet and the floor. A few broken ones lay on the once white, cracked bathroom tiles, as if they'd been tossed carelessly through the doorway. In addition, the walls were covered in a hand-scrawl from a black felt tip marker pen; the words appeared to be the random ravings of a madman.

An old Royale typewriter, a battered relic from ages gone by dominated the desk, and unlike the rest of the room was remarkably free of the fine layer of cigarette ash. A neat stack of typed pages sat next to the typewriter; they looked almost other-worldly amongst the disarray in the rest of the room, as if the dead man on the bed had worshipped the old Royale like an Idol.

"It's gonna cost a few bob to clean up this fucken mess," the manager said from the doorway.

"How long was he cooped up in here? Looks like months." Colin asked as he surveyed the mess.

The manager lit a cigarette he fished out of his breast pocket, sending a reek of fresh smoke into the stale stink of old tobacco in the room.

"Three days;" McQueen said as he inhaled the smoke, and gave an unhealthy cough. "The fucken twat checked in on Wednesday night."

"Only three days?" asked Colin. From the mess, it looked as if the man had been there forever.

"Three fucken days, mate," McQueen held three fingers out to reinforce his point. "And he only paid for one night; the bastard. I came up yesterday for the dosh he owed me, but the fucken guy widnae open the door. He just fucken well telt me to get tae fuck. So I ses to him, 'You better pay me tomorrow, or else,' so when I came up today and battered on the door, there's nae fucken answer, so I phoned the council and they telt me tae just go in and boot his fucken erse oot intae the street. So, I get in and he's mucked the place up and he's fucken well deid. On the bed. There." The manager pointed to the corpse, as if the ambulance men were not aware of the body's location. "That's when I phoned the Bobbies." The man took another drag on his cigarette and dropped it on the floor before crushing it out with a gray shoe. Colin's father had always told him never to trust a man with gray shoes. Until now, Colin had thought that statement unreasonable.

"So, what do you do now; stick him in a bin bag and haul him oot?"

Colin scowled at the manager. Regardless of the social status of the deceased, Colin couldn't abide disrespect of the dead. Just as Colin's hands began to curl into angry fists, Leonard stepped up behind him and lightly touched his young partner's shoulder to diffuse him.

"Em, something like that," Leonard told the manager. "We'll take care of him."

"I'll be doon stairs watching some telly in my office. Celtic's playing some cunts fae Lithuania, or somewhere like that, so just lock the place up when you're finished."

"Kiev." Colin corrected him. "They're playing Kiev today."

"Aye, Kiev." McQueen said. "From Lithuania." He turned and thundered down the hall.

"From the Ukraine, you fucking tosser," Colin said, as soon as the manager was out of earshot and stuck his Vs up at him.

Leonard grinned.

"That's the first time I heard you talk like that." Leonard said and started laughing. "That's good though; you're always so serious."

"He's a nasty piece of work. And he thinks he so superior to this poor bugger here." He looked over at the dead man. "My grandma used to say 'It's not polite to speak ill of the dead.' Everybody deserves a little dignity when they pass away, regardless of who they were."

"Yeah, you're right," Leonard said as he leaned over the body. "I suppose it's the least we can expect when we go - even if you do just get boxed up by the council and nobody comes to your funeral. Poor sod; he deserves some respect. I'd hate to think when I go somebody would think badly of me."

Colin looked back over at the dead man; rigor mortis had set in and he still stared at the ceiling, still clutched at the dirty bed sheets. The wild stare in the dead man's eyes disturbed him.

Colin liked to think when a person died that a peace would come over them and they would simply slip away into an eternal sleep. At one time, Colin believed in God and attended church regularly - ever since he was a boy. For twenty years his faith had been unwavering, and he had always 'believed,' but with the way the world was now and his few months on the job, Colin wasn't so sure anymore.

The last few years had brought a wave or terrorism and war in the world, famines, natural disasters, man-made tragedies. If that had not been enough to make him doubt, during the first few weeks of this job, Colin had seen sights that made him question his own beliefs and the existence of God. If God did exist, surely he would not allow so many terrible things to happen to so many people. Colin had seen a full range of atrocities in this job, from traffic accidents that had left people either dead or mutilated, to vicious murders and everything in between. These things had shattered his faith. At the very least, he had still believed that a peace was waiting at death, but now, with this man who lay in front of him with horror etched into the lines on his face, he was even unsure of that. It was as if the man had seen death himself - or perhaps something even worse - at the moment he died.

"This is giving me the heebie-jeebies," Colin said. "I don't know if I can take this anymore."

"Take what anymore?" Leonard asked.

"His eyes. I can't get over his eyes. It's like he's not really looking at the ceiling. It's like he's looking at something beyond that, as if he saw something when he died. What d'you think he saw?"

"I don't know, Colin. What could he have seen?" Leonard asked him. "It's not something we can know. What does anybody see when they die? Angels? Demons? Heaven or Hell? Maybe he didn't see anything. Maybe we just die. And that's it. Nothing more."

"Maybe." Colin hated to admit that Leonard may be right.

The dead man had left an old, cracked leather suitcase at the end of the bed. Out of curiosity, Leonard and Colin opened the suitcase, but it revealed very little about the man. Tucked inside the main pocket of the flap were a few wrinkled American Dollar bills and a simple change of clothes. Also inside the suitcase were pages and pages of neatly typed paper bound together with paperclips.

"Some sort of writer, obviously," Leonard said as he picked up one of the stacks of paper. "'The Dead Never Die' by Dick Trent," he read from the cover page. "It must be a horror story or something."

"This one says it's by Dick Trent as well," Colin said as he picked up the other pile. "It looks like a screenplay -'I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.'"

"Looks like our friend here is Dick Trent, then." Leonard put the papers back into the suitcase. "He must have been a hack. I've never heard of him; have you?"

"No," Colin answered. "I buy tons books every week and I've never seen one by a Dick Trent."

"At least he's not famous. I hate dealing with journalists," Leonard said. "I had to pick up one of Dennis Nilsen's victims when I worked in Muswell Hill, back down South. We had to beat journalists and photographers off with a bloody stick. Some of them even found out my phone number and called at all hours just to get a quote for an article. I've got no interest in going through that again, so, I'm glad Mr. Trent isn't famous." Leonard looked over at the dead man. "Poor bastard must have drank himself to death. I bet he's not as old as he looks. It's a crying shame."

Leonard had gone downstairs to get the stretcher from the ambulance, leaving Colin alone in the room. Even though the man was dead, Colin felt as if he was being watched by those horror-stricken eyes. Finally, he turned away from the corpse and focused his attention on the mad ravings scrawled all over the walls. The words were gibberish - the paranoid rantings of a drunken lunatic. Even as he focused his attention on the walls, the dead man's stare seemed to follow him. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end; he could still see those dead eyes, burned into his own retinas like an old photograph with washed out colours, just like the shades and tones of the room.

Colin shook his head as if trying to dislodge the image, but those eyes would not leave him. They burned into him, called out to him; he needed to know what the man had seen right before he exhaled his last breath. He had to find out what the man had seen; that would answer all his questions. Maybe, if he found out, he would not like the answer, but at least he would know what cause that look in his eyes. Perhaps he would even see his own future, know what was to come. At any cost, he had to know.

Leonard dragged the stretcher up the stairs. It took a lot of effort to get it up there, which made him wish he'd taken Colin to help. Only a few minutes had passed since he had left the room. He hoped Colin was alright - he had obviously been deeply disturbed by this death. Colin had aced all of his course work, but Leonard was still unsure of his suitability. He would have a heart-to-heart chat with him over a pint or two later on; Leonard had been meaning to do that for weeks now.

Leonard entered the room; he reeled back and smashed into the doorframe and dropped the stretcher in shock. In one hand Colin held the emergency kit scalpel and in the other hand was the dead man's eye, freshly plucked from the socket. Colin held it directly in front of his own right eye and peered into it, searching. He was ranting and raving, shouting at the eye, demanding it show him what it had seen.

All Leonard's fears about Colin were justified and his heart sank at the realisation that it was much too late for that heart-to-heart chat over a pint or two.