I couldn’t move, not even a little finger or a flicker of an eye. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.
I struggled, as hard as I could, to move the huge heavy hulk that my body had become but I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving was impossible.
My eyelids were welded shut. My eardrums broken. My vocal cords snapped off.
Pitch dark and silent and so heavy in there; a mile of black water above me.
Only one thing for it, I said to myself, thinking of you, and I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the black ocean.
I swam upwards towards the daylight with all my strength.
Not a mile deep after all.
Because I was suddenly in a white room, brightly gleaming, smelling pungently of antiseptic. I heard voices and my name.
I saw the body part of ‘I’ was in a hospital bed. I watched a doctor holding my eyelids open and shining a light into my eyes; another was tipping my bed back, another putting drips into my arm.
You won’t be able to believe this. You’re a man who dams rivers and climbs mountains; a man who knows the laws of nature and physics. ‘Hogwash!’ you’ve said to the telly, when anyone talks about anything paranormal. Although you’ll be kinder to your wife, not consigning my words to be fed to pigs, you’ll think it’s impossible. But out-of-body experiences do happen. You read about it in the papers; hear people talking about it on Radio 4.
But if this was real, what should I do? Push my way through the doctors and elbow out the nurse who was shaving my head? ‘Excuse me! Gangway! Sorry! My body, I think. I’m right here actually!’
Thinking ridiculous things because I was afraid.
Sick, goose-bumps, shivering afraid.
And as I felt afraid I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
The school was on fire.