When I asked Finch how I looked when he found me, he said I was incredibly pale and drenched in sweat, but apart from that I looked reasonably normal.
‘Normal for you, anyway,’ was how he put it.
I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few minutes though, because when I came round Finch had only just called for an ambulance. He’d called Dad too, but for some reason he hadn’t answered, and Finch had had to leave a message. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time . . . at least, not in the usual sense of ‘being aware’.
It’s very hard to describe my state of awareness when all this was happening. I wasn’t actually unconscious, but I wasn’t fully conscious either. I was aware of things going on – I could see, I could hear, I could feel – but it was as if everything was happening in a different world, a world I didn’t belong to, and there was some kind of invisible and incomprehensible barrier between me and this world that wouldn’t allow me to connect with it. And sometimes it wasn’t just the world that was different. Sometimes it was me. I never stopped being myself, and I never stopped experiencing things as myself, but sometimes that self was a stranger . . . a ‘me’ I didn’t know.
And there were other times . . .
It’s hard.
All I can do is tell you what I remember.
Dad turned up just as I was being stretchered into the ambulance. I remember his face looming over me – panic and fear in his eyes, the smell of beer on his breath – and I remember him reaching out to me, his arm turning elastic, stretching down from the sky, a giant hand with giant fingers reaching down to crush my head . . .
A voice spoke.
The hand went away.
The rain was silver in the night.
I was taken to the local hospital at first – Burgess Park General, or BPG as it’s known – a sprawling maze of ugly grey buildings just off the bypass on the outskirts of town. I’d been there so many times with Finch over the years that when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics transferred me to a trolley bed and started wheeling me inside, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there. I kept asking the medics where he was, telling them that we had to wait for him, that he’d probably just gone to the toilet or something . . .
No one seemed to hear me though.
It wasn’t until later that I realised the reason that no one could hear me was that I wasn’t actually saying anything. Something inside me was speaking out loud, and I could hear my voice coming out of me, but my lips weren’t moving, and wherever the words were coming from, they died when they hit the invisible barrier that separated me from the other world, popping like soap bubbles against a wall of glass.
The barrier affected sounds coming from this other world too, but not in the same way. I could still hear the sounds all around me – voices, footsteps, the soft beeping of monitors – but most of it was distorted. It was as if each different sound had been taken apart and put back together again before reaching my ears, but they hadn’t been put back together properly, so they didn’t sound how they should. I could hear people talking to each other, for example, and I could hear them when they were talking to me – asking me questions, trying to tell me something – but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Their words were so garbled and warped that they barely sounded like words at all.
I remember being wheeled along hospital corridors – lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, watching the lights rushing past – and at one point I was wheeled into a big silver lift, and as the doors closed and the lift lurched upwards, I was vaguely aware of a babble of voices talking urgently about something. The lift stopped, the voices continued – and I think the doors stayed closed – then I felt the lift lurch again and we carried on going up.
Then more corridors.
Fewer people.
Less noise.
And into a white room.
In physical terms, I wasn’t feeling anything now. No sickness, no pain. I wasn’t hot. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t even numb. I wasn’t anything. My entire body, inside and out, had become something beyond description. There but not there. Mine but not mine. Without feeling, but not without sense. It knew when the doctors and nurses were doing things to it – sticking needles into it, attaching sensors, prodding and poking it about – and somehow it passed on something of this awareness to me. But there was no feeling involved. Just a sense of happening.
I knew it wasn’t right.
Nothing about this was right.
And the doctors knew it too. I could tell from their increasingly troubled eyes, and the way they were beginning to behave around me – uncertain, hesitant, almost fearful at times. There was something seriously wrong with me. They knew it. But they had no idea what it was, or what to do about it.
I don’t know what time it was when my skin started shivering and prickling again, but it must have been past midnight, maybe even two or three in the morning. The room was quiet – dead-of-night quiet – and the only thing I could hear was the muted presence of one of the doctors who was standing at my bedside taking readings from the monitors. She was one of the doctors who’d been there since I arrived – a serious-looking middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a downturned mouth.
I could feel everything tightening inside me now, and I knew my body was going to spasm again, just as it had in the bathroom. I tried calling out to the doctor, but it was hopeless. I just couldn’t get any words out. And a moment later it was too late anyway.
The convulsion was more violent this time – the spasm crashing through me like an electric shock, the sudden massive jolt almost lifting me off the bed – but it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, and the next thing I knew I was just lying there on my back, my heart beating hard, and the doctor was staring down at me with a look of sheer horror in her eyes.
I knew what she was staring at.
The horror in her eyes was the same horror I’d felt when I’d seen my skull in the bathroom mirror.
It didn’t take long for one of the other doctors to arrive – I think he was the most senior one, the one in charge – but I could tell from the way the woman was urging him to hurry up that I was already beginning to look normal again. I could feel it too. The prickliness in my skin had faded to a fluctuating tingle. I can’t have changed back completely though, because when the other doctor came over to the bed and looked down at me, it was obvious that he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He wasn’t quite as shocked as the woman had been, and as the tingle in my skin became more and more faint, his stunned expression gradually gave way to a look of utter bewilderment.
He’d seen enough though. Enough to believe the woman when she told him what she’d seen – her sombreness deserting her as she jabbered away at him, frantically waving her hands about and pointing at my head – and enough for him to realise that drastic steps had to be taken.
An hour or so later I was wheeled out of the room, then along the corridors again, into the lift, down to the ground floor, and out into a waiting ambulance.
I’m not sure if I was given a sedative of some kind before leaving BPG, or if I was just so tired that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But whatever the reason, I slept for most of the ambulance journey. It wasn’t a normal sleep. It was that twilight sort of sleep you get when you’re just dozing off – neither fully asleep nor fully awake – and you can’t tell if the things you’re hearing and seeing in your mind are real or not. It doesn’t usually last very long – you either fall asleep completely or wake up – but this time the twilight didn’t go away. I could hear the wail of the siren, and I could see the sound of it too. It