Box Set - Chapter Twenty-Six

I open my heavy eyelids. My vision is unfocussed to the point that all I can see is a collection of dots swooping overhead. It’s as if I’m watching a dance through a pane of translucent glass.

I raise my hand; it feels dirty, gritty, as if it had been lying in sand for days on end. My lips are to the ground, with sand between my teeth. My tongue feels useless in my mouth, as parched as a wrinkled old piece of paper.

The sun beats down on me, its orange rays shimmer in the sunset still scalding hot.

I keep on expecting my memory to return. That’s what usually happens isn’t it? The flood of recollection after sleep - the end to that blissful honeymoon period when all is right in the world.

My head pounds as I try to sit up, so I lie back down again on the sand that I’m sure is cooking my areas of exposed flesh. Slowly my vision returns. I gaze around slowly. The dots, still circling overhead, are vultures waiting for me to die of starvation and despair. This feels like the time I died.

Everything rushes back to me. It’s like being in the crash all over again. I raise my hands to my temples and struggle to handle the onrush of information. Elle, Yates, Teague, Thacker. The Council. Everything that has happened to me in my year of death. And now I find myself here of all places. Where has the old woman sent me?

This truly is a hellish place.

Very tentatively, I sit up. I cry out as it feels like my head is splitting in half. My bones ache as if they have been taken apart, individually beaten to a pulp, and then rammed back together by someone with no perception of pain or mercy.

The landscape is barren, flat in all directions, punctuated by the scorched carcass of a dead tree that had long forgotten the feeling of life.

I feel a groaning, aching hunger in my stomach like I haven’t eaten for days. I haven’t eaten for days. I don’t need to, I’m dead. The only times we eat are the times when we feel like indulging ourselves, one of the benefits of death. Food without consequence. Now I feel the pain of a hundred starved days.

I clutch my stomach. The awful, hollow, sick feeling grips me and takes over my thought processes. I cast around for something to eat. There is nothing. Just terracotta coloured sand dunes in all directions. I stand at the precipice of one. Far away I see the setting sun and the sky turn an orchestra of oranges reds and pinks fading to indigo and black high above me.

If I feel hunger then I’ll feel the cold of night in the desert. I make for the dead tree, wondering how it got here. I marvel at the idea that it ever grew here at all. I slide down the slope and I’m reminded of the beach Teague took us to. How long ago was that? An hour? How can so much happen in an hour.

Is this hell?

The thought claws at the edges of my mind. I push it back, refuse to give it centre stage. I can’t have gone to hell. I’m a man of science. Everything I’ve seen so far has been explained by cold, hard fact so that must mean that there is an explanation for this place.

I run through a list of deserts in my head and try to place myself. The Sahara? The Gobi? Death Valley? Something makes me think that this is none of those places. The feeling I have and my manner of arrival set a seed of dread deep in my stomach, buried to fester and grow beneath the layers of hunger.

I reach the bottom and stand in the narrow shade of the tree. It feels real to my touch. Rough, dry and dead. Bits of bark crumble away.

I can’t stay here. I close my eyes and concentrate.

Nothing happens. I strain to picture Yates’s house. The smell of the hay, the rolling fields behind it. The old house covered in books.

I open them again and shift my feet in the sand. What’s happened?

I close my eyes again and reach out. I try to sense the world around me the same way I’ve done a thousand times. The Edge doesn’t appear. All I see is the blackness of the back of my eyelids and the image of the sun left on my retinas.

Hello! I think. Shouting in my own head. Elle! Yates?

There’s no reply.

Turning on the spot, stranded in the middle of this endless sea of sand I come to a horrible realisation. I think I’m alive.

It’s at that moment that panic seizes me. How can I be alive? And here of all places. Thacker has that power. I know that both her and Teague can swap between the plains at ease. Is that what she’s done to me?

But the way she was talking it was like she was experimenting. Seeing if I could travel to the next plain. If this is the Great Beyond, then I definitely don’t see the fuss.

I consider my options. I can either stay here and slowly roast in the shade, or I can set off across the desert and take my chances under the full heat. There could be a town nearby, or an oasis. I fret for a second. I have no idea how to survive in the sun. I have no water and I’m already dying of thirst. It surely won’t take long for me to succumb to the heat.

But would that be better? If I die out here will I regain all my ghostly abilities? I don’t think I could bring myself to do it knowingly. Dying in a car crash is something else altogether.

I make my mind up and decide that I have to chance the desert. Dying slumped at the base of this tree would feel like failure. After everything I’ve been through I decide to strike out and face this new horror.

I clutch my stomach and trudge out into the sand. I can feel the heat through the base of my shoes.

I watch the sun on my left, setting between two enormous dunes. The sky turns a deep bloody red and I relish the opportunity to stare into the sun’s orange flame.

In an instant, it drops behind the sand and I feel the air drop a few degrees.

Over to my right, I feel a tickling warmth. I turn and there’s the sun again. It blazes into existence, like staring into headlights.

Before I can register what’s happened, our star rises in the sky and day replaces night once more.

What is this place? I have the proof now to say that I have left my world behind. No desert on earth has a night that lasts a second. This world must have a unique rotation, or twin suns. That has to be an explanation.

Or is this hell?

The words crawl back towards me again. I try to shake them free but the suspicions are too great.

I walk on as the extent of the sun’s rays greets me. Now I can see the desert in the morning light. Endless and yellow in all directions. The sky is a single sheet of blue paper over my head. The vultures swoop from over the tree and appear to follow me. Are they waiting? Do they have some sense that I’ll keel over at any second and they’ll have their feast.

I open my mouth to try and lick some moisture into them. The sting is unbearable as the cracks in them lock together and pull apart. My mouth is as dry as the sand around me and I don’t think I can conjure the saliva to even do that.

‘Help!’ I try to call, but my voice is strangled in my throat.

The vultures caw overhead. I notice a piece of driftwood half buried in the sand. One end is thin and the other thick. I prise it from the dust and swing it like a rudimentary club. I won’t go down without a fight. Particularly not to a bunch of ugly scavengers.

I reach the bottom of a sand dune and begin my climb.

I claw at the sand, pushing my fingers as deep as I can to gain some purchase. It burns like a newly lit fire, but after a few inches there is a layer of cold. It offers some relief to my dry fingertips.

After what feels like an hour of climbing I reach the crest. I straighten up and take as deep a breath I can in the close heat that feels thick in the air.

 

I look down the other side. For a moment I rejoice. The bricks and mortar of civilisation. After a second of inspection I see that the buildings before me crumble like they’re made of the sand they’re built on.

 

I wonder how long ago this place supported life. I see a well in the middle of the town. Dry with a long forgotten hut over the top.

 

It was a town of some size at some point in its history. Looking to my left and right I can just see the edges. The quiet desolation and the encroachment of the desert is peaceful, eerie and terrifying all at once. Nothing wins but sand out here.

 

I slide down the slope and enter the first house I come to. Some wood has survived. What looks like the remnants of a table and what might have been a cooking pot. A hearth stands crumbling on the far wall. A family once lived here. But they were caused to leave. Because of the desert? Or some other horror.

 

I exit the house and make my way to the town centre. A large square where the buildings stand taller. It’s hard to tell, but I think the biggest one might have been a town hall of sorts. Pillars stand at the top of steps and then the walls just stop at waist height.

 

I cross to the well at the centre and glance inside. A paranoid part of me expects something large and horrific to come swooping out to attack me but nothing does. All I see is a round hole of darkness reaching into the earth. I glance up to see a long rope wound around the spool that remains intact.

I look down again and think I can see something at the bottom. The white round glint of something. As I continue to stare I notice the long line of connecting joints and the cage around the middle. I think it’s a skeleton.

I grab the rope above me and wind it around my wrist. It’s old and coarse. Grains sit inside the weave and it showers down my sleeve. I don’t know why I’m compelled to see the skeleton but part of me feels like I have to. It would offer me some sort of solace to know that another person survived out here for some time anyway. Maybe it would lead to some clue as to what happened in this town, or anything at all that might lead to a glimmer of hope.

I climb up onto the low round wall and dangle my feet over. Pulling on the rope, unreeling the old rope I let it down into the well, down and down until I think it reaches the bottom.

I hook it around the handle so it doesn’t come off and take hold of it in both hands. It scrapes at my palms without any of my weight on it. I cringe and anticipate the pain that I’m letting myself in for.

I take a breath and kick off from the side. I pause for a second, frozen in mid-air with at least a twenty foot drop beneath me. My shoulders strain from the effort and I wonder – am I strong enough for this?

I remember having to climb a rope at school, in one particularly awful PE lesson where my teacher shouted me to the top. I managed it after every other person in the class and I returned to jeers and laughing at the bottom.

Spurred on by the embarrassment I resolve to complete my mission.

I brace myself and let go with one hand. I reach out with my feet and find I can brace against the side, taking some of the slack away.

My feet work with my hands in unison. I hear the vultures squawk above me again. Did they pick my new friend’s bones clean?

As I consider the possibility, the flesh torn from my bones by a razor sharp beak, I lose my concentration. My foot slips and I feel the call of empty space beneath me.

I cry out as my feet scramble ineffectually against the hot air.

I feel the stinging scrape of my hands on the rope and I pull myself to a stop. I pant, desperate for air and hold it against my cheek like that will coax my lifeline into helping me hang there.

I stretch my feet out once I’ve stopped spinning and begin my descent again.

Before long, I reach the bottom. I’m enveloped by a glorious bubble of cool air. I wonder is that why my skeletal friend decided to stay down here.

I touch, one, two feet to the ground and survey the crumpled body at the bottom. The ground is covered by still more sand. Any hopes I had of water to quench my thirst dissolve like grains through the gap in an hourglass.

I look into his hollow eye sockets and take in his gaping mouth with lines of straight teeth. Slowly, I notice that the rags of clothes he once wore cling to his bones. Blue fabric of what looks like an old hoody and some blue remains of denim around his legs.

With some trepidation, I look at his feet and see the dregs of the red converse I’ve been wearing for a year.

It feels as though someone has got a grip on my heart and squeezed. I claw at the walls and try to gain a purchase. I grasp the rope and jump up onto it. How has this happened? How am I dead? This is some trick, some ghastly, awful trick someone is playing. I have to get out of here. The walls feel like they’re closing around me and I don’t think I can last another second in here without throwing up.

I jerk my body weight onto the rope and instantly hear my mistake. There’s a sharp, loud snap like a gunshot high above me and I see the well house crack down the middle. I clatter to the floor to lie with my own skeletal remains and wait for the weight of wood and rope to land on top of my still, foetal body.

I open my eyes. The heat of the sand against my skin is unmistakable. I feel the burn of the sand against me and I know I’m outside again. I look up and take stock of the world. There’s the dunes, high as mountains, and there’s the dead tree, standing, lifeless, taunting me like the laughing skeleton.

What is this place?