I Dare You

6. Back to Reality

Chapter Six

BACK TO REALITY

The basket to my right opens in a beam of darkness and before I can think we are sucked into its cavernous depths. There are a few minutes of swirling, sucking darkness and cold harsh wind and strange voices and then - BANG! - I'm slammed onto a hard floor, still clutching my sisters' hands. I distinctly hear the sound of a door slamming behind us above my confusion.

I lie on the cold hard floor, my body aching pretty much all over from being slammed down onto rather solid surfaces three times this night. My arm is bent at an awkward angle and my nose is practically pressed into the dust on the floorboards, making it impossible to breathe without also inhaling some of the tiny particles.

But I don't care. The fact that I can breathe at all seems to matter an awful lot right now. I relish in breathing in dust. It's really quite an amazing substance. It actually has a sort of individual smell - it smells of old.

And the aches that are all over my body prove that I'm still alive. You don't hurt anymore when you die, do you?

Unless you go to Hell, I guess.

But I'm holding my sisters' hands - Jasmine on my left and Patricia on my right - and I think, for the moment, we might be safe.

I struggle up, trying to let go of my sisters' hands and stand. Something's odd though. Jasmine and Patricia's grip is vice-tight. I try to tug my hands from theirs, by using the elbow on my opposite arm, and that's when I notice how unnaturally still my sisters are. Their breathing is slow and heavy, and if they are sleeping. But they don't awake even whilst I'm practically attacking their hands with my elbows.

Their hands. There's something strange about them too. I notice with Jasmine's hand first, as I decide to bite on it to make her grip loosen, or make her wake up. My bottom lip brushes against her skin accidentally, just as I am about to bite, and I notice with an awful lurch in my stomach just how cold and clammy her hands are. I press my cheek to Jasmine's hand to see if this observation is correct, and the chill of her skin makes my heart stop cold. I draw my cheek away, and when I do my skin feels cold and sticky where it touched hers. I feel nauseous and revolted and scared; in desperation I wipe my now clammy cheek against my t-shirt in an attempt to rid it of Jasmine.

I can feel, just from holding her hand, that Patricia's skin is the same.

My throat seizes up and tightens. My stomach squirms as if bugs or spiders are crawling around in it.

                She swallowed the bird to catch the spider

                That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her …

Poor little old woman. I can completely sympathise with her now. It feels to me like I have not one, but a thousand spiders crawling around my stomach, wriggling and jiggling and tickling, weaving silver webs inside there and climbing up my throat, weaving webs there too to make it tighten up. I wouldn't be surprised if, when I opened my mouth, a whole lot of mess came out: little black spiders and sticky cobwebs and dead flies.

Suddenly I get immensely angry with Jasmine and Patricia for being asleep, or unconscious, or whatever they were.

"Wake up!" I shout in anger, tears springing to my eyes. I can see the front door, it's a mere half-a-dozen footsteps away, but I know I'd never be strong enough to drag both Jasmine and Patricia out there, never mind through the garden and out the gate and through all the dark streets to home. "Wake up, god damn it!" I cry, because there's simply nothing else I can do.