I’m sorry. I’ll be okay in a bit. It was the confined space in there. I just have to sit it out.
Ever had an acid flashback? When I was at school I dropped tabs a few times. I don’t know why I did it. I hated the stuff, it really freaked me out while I was doing it, and then one day I said that’s it. That’s enough. ‘You’ll go cold turkey,’ somebody told me. But there were no cold sweats, no screams in the small hours. I felt fine, and I felt free. Then a week or two later, I was walking to Latin and –
A flashback is a physical thing, you see, much more than just an hallucination. It reaches up out of the flagstones and gets its clammy hands on you. You could be doing anything and there it is suddenly at your shoulder, saying, ‘Together forever.’
And that’s why I say what I’ve got isn’t claustrophobia. That’s fear of confined spaces, but it isn’t the confinement I’m frightened of. It’s what’s in there. It’s the fear of what you’re shut in with. Forever.
No, really, I want to talk about this. It might help.
We went down, a bunch of us, last year to my aunt’s holiday home in Littlehampton, which is - not really a town, just a collection of holiday homes and a shop, about twenty minutes along the coast from Bognor. We went into Bognor first. You’ve seen one Georgian crescent and you’ve seen the lot, but Sammy wanted lobster bisque or something and so we wandered around for hours looking for a café.
You know what the Prince Regent said about Bognor? He was really ill and Beau Brummel or somebody said, ‘Never mind, your Majesty, when you’re better we shall visit Bognor’ and the Prince Regent said, ‘Bugger Bognor’ and died.
Anyway, it was dark by the time we got to my aunt’s place. Once off the road and under this little lich gate there’s nothing but the sound of the waves to guide you across the lawn to the cottage. The sea’s just the other side of the hedge and down a beach of ankle-breaking pebbles, so there you are with neat little suburban lawns all around and the smell of brine thick in the air. In winter there’s nobody around and it’s great. Rubbish in summer of course – then it’s all greasy chips and ice cream and kids shrieking like they’re being drowned.
I fumbled around with half a box of Swan Vestas until I found the key, and then of course the electricity wasn’t on because it was out of season so the rest of the box went on finding the stash of candles under the sink. It’s one of those old cottages with low beams and bits that sag all over. The floorboards creak when you walk. The carpets are the same ones my aunt had when the place flooded in the storms a few years back, threadbare as Tuareg rugs. By candlelight the place didn’t look quite real.
The others were all excited but after the drive I was knackered. I got a can of beer and a joint and flopped in the armchair, and let everyone else deal with getting a fire lit and whatever. By the time Sara started with her séance routine I was half asleep. It’s so old, anyway. ‘Wake me when you’ve all grown up,’ I said before I dozed off.
Sometimes you get a dream like a film. That joint helped. This was one of those swooping shots, down over rooftops and then veering down narrow streets. No sound. No streetlights. No-one about.
Then, turning a corner in the cobbled street, there was a boy running. I thought he was fleeing from something, but he held a torch that trailed a long tail of fire and sparks and behind him came two men carrying a box. Not a coffin, a sedan chair. I flew right past the boy like a ghost. I could see his wide eyes and the way his nostrils flared as he ran. And then the men jogging across the cobblestones, and the sedan chair screen came towards me. Now I was inside the chair and it was me they were carrying.
We passed along deserted streets until we reached a door and here I knew we’d stop. The boy knocked and then plunged his torch into a bucket of sand to extinguish it, stepping aside so that the men could get the chair up the steps and in through the door which was opened by a footman in black high-collared jacket and tight breeches like from a costume drama. Through the gauze screen I saw him look sidelong at where I sat hidden in the depths of the chair.
They didn’t put the chair down in the hall, they carried it right through and up the stairs. I heard whispered voices like when someone has died, and there was the click of a door closing off the landing. I was taken through to another room and they set the chair down while the footman and the link-boy hurried about lighting candles. They didn’t like the dark, I thought at first, but that wasn’t it. They were in a hurry to be gone.
Then they were at the door. I was still in the chair. I went to open the screen and it was hard to do with fingers that felt stiff and clumsy. I eased myself out as you do in dreams, like I was weighted with lead. The men drew back into the hall but they said something to the boy and maybe he expected a tip, because he edged back in nervously and came slowly towards me, gaze pinned to the floor.
I was trying to unwind the scarf around my face that made me feel hot and choking. Seeing the boy was frightened, I tried to give him a farthing for his trouble but there wasn’t a coin in my hands. He glanced up at my hand and then he screamed -
Or actually it was Sammy screaming. I sat bolt upright and apparently said something, but I can’t remember it and no-one caught it with the racket the silly cow was making. The first thing I did was take a sip of beer. It tasted foul. I must have used the can as an ashtray while nodding off.
Sammy stopped screaming when I spat beer and sat forward into the firelight. She looked at everyone. ‘I thought I saw somebody else sitting there,’ she said.
I felt wiped out. I rubbed my hands over my face and said, ‘Did you muster up any spirits?’
‘Found half a bottle of Black Label in the sideboard,’ said Charlie. That’s not a bad joke for him. At least it got a groan of vague approval.
Sammy was still a bit freaked out, though. ‘There was something there,’ she insisted. ‘It was horrible.’
‘It still is,’ laughed Sara as I lurched to my feet.
‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘You can all doss down wherever you find a space, and nobody better wake me up until there’s cooked breakfast on the table.’
I was still confused from coming round like that, so I stumbled off to one of the bedrooms and got half-undressed before the effort of staying upright got too much. The bed was one of those box things - what do they call them? Shut beds. I was tired enough that sleeping in a cupboard made no difference. I didn’t so much get in as just grab a pile of blankets from the drawer and then just pass out sprawled across the mattress.
As I drifted off again I remembered the dream from before. I was - well, I suppose frightened. I didn’t want to go back, but I was too far gone already. I couldn’t remember what there was to dread in sleep, or what waking up even meant. I sank down and down and down...
This time I was in my sedan chair right away. It might have been afternoon – a lightless afternoon on which the sky was dark and churned with violent purple thunderclouds. The men were carrying me along the waterfront. The quayside was a wet black flank of stone besieged by crashing grey waves, but as before everything was silent and there wasn’t another soul in sight.
They put the chair down and one of them said something through the screen. I didn’t catch it. Their expressions were full of guilt and guile. I watched them put their heads together and mutter something, and the words vibrated in the otherwise dead silence:
‘We’ll do it here.’
I wanted to get out then. I couldn’t breathe. I felt trapped, wedged inside the narrow chair. My stubby fingers pulled at the catch, but something was holding it shut.
The men picked up their burden again, but for the rest of the journey I would be travelling alone. They lifted the chair up over the wall, thrust it over the edge, and abandoned me to the waves.
The chair tumbled down and lurched as it hit the water. I was tossed against the bare wooden lid of what would soon be my coffin. The grey daylight was snuffed out and the seawater closed a bone-cold grip. I sank down and down and down... Now at last I could hear sounds. The uterine booming of the sea. And something else, whispering in my ear:
‘It is a fine and private place, so stay and know eternal peace.’
Then I felt it touch me and I knew I wasn’t alone in that box. Something with ravaged flesh and putrid heart was trying to drag me down to the sea bed with it, and I was kicking and lashing out and trying to scream if only I could get a sound out of my bursting lungs.
The thing - whatever it was - put cold fingers around my throat, pressed its grotesque face into mine and tried to suck out my breath with dead lips. Its stench made me gag. It smelt like decay. I sobbed, gasped, and then I had enough breath for one scream.
I made it count. It was the mother of all screams, the sort that should shatter windows. I burst in a cluster of bubbles through the side of the sedan chair and rose with the scream, weightlessly out of the water, a disembodied spirit soaring up and up into the sky as the thing in the chair flailed its diseased limbs and died again in the secret depths of the sea.
The storm pressed down. Could I reach the clouds? A glint of light broke through. I rose towards it desperately and broke through -
- to candlelight. I was wrapped in the blanket and my face and shoulders were drenched. Sammy was sitting on the floor. An empty glass of water lay beside her. ‘You kicked me out of bed!’ she said.
I lay back and laughed out of sheer relief. ‘I thought you were a ghost,’ I said.
She got up and limped over to perch on the edge of the bed. I could see her fury giving way to a sly smile. ‘I’ve got some practice in raising the dead...’
‘Prove it,’ I said.
She flung herself into the shut bed and ripped off the wet blankets, tossed them out onto the floor, and pulled the door closed until there was just a chink of light from the candle. We were wrapped in shadows, and each other. You see, I wasn’t afraid of confined spaces yet.
‘This is a yummy bed,’ giggled Sammy. ‘Ever so snug. I think they must have made it out of driftwood, yeah? See that crest, and the screen there?’
Her finger strayed away to trace details on the board at the back. I could have forgotten all about that damned dream, but then she had to go and say it:
‘Hey, it’s like from the museum in Bognor. It’s part of an old sedan chair.’
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