TEN

CAEN, NORMANDY. 16 JUNE 2011. 5 A.M.

There was no sun, only a forever of black cloud reaching from horizon to horizon above dark water and the dusty plain before it. Nothing grew there. A cold wind gusted across the grey dust, the ash and cinders, the still water.

His arrival in the emptiness did not go unnoticed. Because the raggedy figures upon the briny shore, where the oily waters lapped and fizzed and lapped and fizzed, raised themselves up wearily and onto their thin legs. Draped in remnants of cloth, the slender arms of these shabby silhouettes were raised to the sky and from unseen mouths came a faint wail.

There were no birds in the air; they formed the terrible flotsam upon the tide of the dead water. In their thousands they surged and flopped. A black flock of feather and bone, upon which the raggedy men descended to scoop them up with their scarecrow parts, and to offer them like treasures brought to a king by beggars.

Kyle came out of the dream, his face strewn with dried tears. He had been dreaming for hours, but only remembered the last scene of some awful torment that ended by a great dead sea. But he did not wake fully. Could not have done.

Bewildered by his passage from such strange sights, and confused by the unlit space about him, he could not understand where he was. There was a room in the distance, its door ajar. A thin brown light flickered around the outline of the doorway. From its rapid stutters the vague odour of things burned and still burning pulsed. Bonfire smells of autumn, the crackle of kindling damp with cold rain, the doused steam of blackened meats, the chill of wet stone.

He tried to move, but the thought failed to become motion. There was no feeling in his limbs; just a numbness, a vacancy inside his joints. His breath failed to come out in more than shallow sucks and pants at the blackness before his eyes, as if some weight pressed upon his windpipe. Or maybe the chambers of his lungs were now too small for the task set them.

An absence of more than light hovered in the wings of his mind. Like a descent into the great cold depths of lightless oceans beneath icecaps and skies without stars, a curious unbreathable gravity pulled him down and down and down, through himself, then out of himself.

Struggling against the nothingness that tried to snuff out the little ember of his frantic awareness, he was suddenly and profoundly and absurdly aware of his hands, his feet. They seemed to redefine themselves from out of the darkness, without so much as a twitch, but he knew from their size and weight and unfamiliar lengths of finger and thumb, that they were not his hands. Nor were these his feet. Too thin and long, the cumbersome, lifeless feet hung over the mattress, as if his body had outgrown the bed of a child.

Within a sense of his own face, different contours of cheek bone and forehead and small mouth and longer teeth suggested themselves. Long hair curled wiggish across his brow, about his jaw. It stank. Was oily, unwashed, dipped in spoiled water, rank upon the stained and musty pillow that cradled his skull. He couldn’t see it, but knew the pillow case was patterned with continents of aged stains.

He sank further into the darkness, beneath the unfamiliar body that had tremulously held him, like it tried to hold on to smoke within outspread fingers. Sank deeper into the void where the distant chaos of bird calls and the cries of men swirled around, far off but approaching. All attracted to his hapless sinking paralysis, his dropping off and away. And the swirling of this cacophony was driven from the screams of an animal within its heart. Swine bellows and guttural bleats rose from shaky jowls and a large mouth. A black tongue and yellow teeth. Wet, close . . .

And then he woke, and dropped. Fell from the air. But no more than a few inches, on to a bed. Where he bounced and snapped upright in a seizure that electrified his body into a sense of its former shape, its dimensions, its familiarity.

In the room . . . hotel . . . room . . . Caen . . . France.

He looked to his right and saw nothing. Raked his hands out to the sides and upwards. Was blind. Tried not to scream. Then saw a little LED light wink against a wall; the phone charger. Another, a red speck in the lightless space up in the air, on the far side of the room; the standby light on the wall-mounted television.

The grinding fleshy machinery of grunts and buzz-saw whines made the air in his chest vibrate, made the darkness too alien for any thought of relief. Jesus, that sound . . .

Snoring. Only Dan. Thank God. Dan drunk and snoring like an oaf.

Lurching and falling from the bed, he scrabbled to his feet and staggered into the darkness. Arms outstretched, fingers fanned, he found a plaster wall. Why is it so dark? The temple. The air of the temple is still inside your eyes. He nearly screamed. Blackout curtains. He remembered closing them the night before. They had them in hotels to cut out ambient light. That’s why it’s so dark.

Relief sang through him. The dream, a nightmare, faded like a dim and incorrectly remembered photograph. That’s all it was and nothing more. The figures upon the walls of the temple, Gabriel’s terrible accident, half a bottle of spirits, exhaustion, an unfamiliar bed in a pitch-black room, Dan’s snoring, another country, another world . . . Too much, too much. That’s why he’d had a nightmare. But why had he dropped on to his bed from out of the very air? That was new; he’d never experienced that before. Part of the dream. Like when you step off a kerb. The jolt, a shock.

He clasped his hands together, rubbed them. They were his. His very own hands, and these were his feet: broad with bony toes. His hair was shaggy, but straight, not curly and unfamiliar like some mannequin’s wig.

His mouth was dry like it had been open for hours and thirst burned inside his body.

In the bathroom, he stared at himself under the welcome explosion of vanilla light before the spotless mirror. Confirmed himself with his blue-green eyes that girlfriends had loved. Shook the last traces of limb dislocation, of bone confusion, of flesh dismorphia from his mind. Gulped at the silvery clean water that gushed from the tap. Raised his wet face and turned back to the darkened doorway that led into the room and the bed he did not want to sleep in any more. But turning towards the door, he glimpsed something in the mirror. A smudgy reflection of a mark on the wall opposite the washbasin.

Kyle turned. Moved to the series of dirty streaks above the towel rack. Shivered from what he assured himself was the cold of the tiles beneath his naked soles, tingling up his legs and across his goosing flesh, and not because of what assumed the outline of a boney thing with four skeletal legs on the wall.

No, now he was closer, it looked more like the imprint of a hand. With four thin fingers, curled inward at the last joint. Cupping, or pulling, as if from beyond the wall.

A sudden whiff of old meat, like the moist underside of a pork chop he’d left for too long in his fridge at home, assailed his sinuses. He looked down at the towels, for an incriminating stain. They were fresh, clean, unused handtowels. And under the yellow light of the hotel bathroom, his blinking bafflement broke into comprehension of where he had smelled and seen such things before.

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