Dangerous Games

Chapter 14 part 1

How long I was out for, I can only guess. A minute? An hour? Even to this day I have no idea. What I can say for certain was that this was not sleep. This was a deep, dreamless unconsciousness where nothing moved, nothing existed, nothing mattered any more. There were no questions any more, no answers any more, no thoughts any more. I'd always been an atheist for as long as I could remember, and, as an atheist, this was what I'd always imagined being dead to be like.

At last, the inky blackness in my mind started to clear, and like dawn breaking, I became aware of shards of dim light penetrating from above. My awareness returned to me, though at what seemed like glacial speed. Eventually, while far from complete, enough of my mind had returned for me to realise that I wasn't in fact dead, or if I was, Hell was not what I had imagined it to be.

I was lying head down on some sort of rough, hard carpet, with a nylon tread a little bit like the ridges in corduroy. Those ridges were now pressing painfully into the skin of my face, which was distorted due to the way I'd fallen, pulling my lip up over my upper gum so that my breathing made the saliva in my mouth bubble and drip. My limbs were splayed out awkwardly, my backside was poking up in the air in a most ungainly manner, and an ever more intense dull ache seemed to envelope my entire body below the neck. I gradually became aware of an unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth, which I identified a few seconds later as blood. I must have injured myself as I fell.

Slowly and painfully, I struggled to pull my limbs back into some semblance of order. As I did so, I was relieved to find that nothing appeared broken. The ache must surely have been caused by being in such an unnatural posture for such a long time. One limb at a time, I straightened myself out, then began the Herculean task of getting myself into a sitting posture.

Right, Tim, keep your wits about you. Remember, you're an officer of the Metropolitan Police Service, not a little cry-baby who needs his mother. First things first. Assess the situation. What the flip is going on here?

I felt my face, and located the source of the blood in my mouth. Both nostrils were bleeding profusely, though I was relieved to find that a severe nosebleed was the worst damage I seemed to have suffered as a result of my fall. I would have been shaken if it had turned out I'd lost a tooth or something had gone in my eye and blinded me. As it was, there was no permanent harm.

At least I had now had a plan of action – stop the nosebleed. While I was doing that, I could decide what my next step would be. As a copper, I've been on more than my fair share of first aid courses, and knew the standard practice well. You grip the bridge of your nose tightly, and put your head forward. Easy. As I sat there, my head between my knees, I finally got a chance to ponder my current situation.

The first thing that hit me was that the sickening feeling against which I'd struggled so hard was gone. The war was over, and I had won! All that sickness, all that fear screaming at me, was no more than a dreadful memory, fading as quickly as a bad dream fading with the coming dawn. A sliver of triumph slid sideways into my mind. That demon woman – for I was sure I had met her, had heard her voice – had fought to make me look at her, to drag me away to the Abode of the Damned, and she had failed! She had failed – hadn't she?

As quickly as it appeared, the sliver withdrew. Perhaps she had succeeded and this was indeed Hell. Perhaps that last sudden jerk, the uncontrolled falling forward, had actually signalled my death – my spirit being wrenched out of my body – and what I was experiencing now was the inevitable result of staring into the face of that woman. I shook my head slightly to dispel this feeling, no doubt spattering drops of blood to left and right. No, that can't be right. I just couldn't accept that I'd died without knowing it. Wherever I was, it was somewhere real.

So if this wasn't Hell, where was it? I looked up. The place was dark, but things were just about visible, as if there had been a massive city-wide power cut at midnight on a moonless night. A faint light penetrated the air, giving everything a dim, monochrome appearance, but falling off rapidly with distance, so that barely twenty feet away from me, I couldn't make out a single thing. I held my hand out at arms length. Although it had taken on the ghostly glow that infused nearby items, it was barely visible, the fingers fading into the blackness as though they had been roughly torn off.

I looked about me. To my right, there was a dark gap, like a vertical well shaft, except extending horizontally. Was this some sort of entrance to somewhere? I leaned over slightly, as far as the hand on my nose would permit, and squinted into the blackness. Nothing. Using my free hand, I stretched out my arm into the blackness, and pulled myself up short as my flesh touched cold metal. It was the lift door, and it was closed. I must have fallen out of the lift and crashed out almost immediately in front of it.

So I was in a corridor somewhere with a lift. Then it came to me. Of course, I was on the tenth floor of Lakeside House in Kingston. My God! The ritual must have worked. I had passed beyond the veil of all human experience and over into another world. For a brief instant, a memory from my early childhood transported me back into the past. As a small child, I could remember coming across a picture of a woodcut showing a traveller who had found the edge of the world. He'd poked his head through the veil of the firmament and into the realm of the stars and the planets. I could see that engraving right now, as if it were right here, brightly lit in front of me. That woodcut, which I'd learned as an adult was called the Flammarion engraving, had filled me with wonder, even as a small child, and yet here I was doing precisely that. I was that traveller. I too had found – and crossed – the edge of the world, the edge of reality.

I cast another glance around trying to fix my bearings. Very little was visible – some sort of corridor about eight or ten feet wide – maybe, it was hard to tell – the tight-weave carpet that had given me that bloody nose, the dark gap which was the lift door and one other door opposite it. What I could see was based less on what was coming into my eyes and more on what I remembered from other corridors in this building. Well, the Lakeside House I had visited back on Earth that is.

The other-worldliness of the place didn't end with the faint, undifferentiated light that permeated everything. The air was quite still and gave the feeling of being almost stagnant, like water in a scum-covered millpond. Now, you might have expected this in a tower block with enclosed windows, but even the most clinically sealed building has draughts, along corridors, from vents or under the doors to flats and cupboards. Not this one, though. This air just didn't move – at all. I waved my hand in front of my face at arm's length, and even then I couldn't feel any difference. I put my free hand clumsily in front of my mouth and blew on it – nothing. It was as though I was at the bottom of an ocean of water, special magical water that I could breathe but which refused to move.

At least I could move through it. I released my nose, and gradually felt my face to ensure that the bleeding had stopped. As far as I could tell, it had, though I expected I looked a right mess. But, then again, who was here to see me? Having two hands free meant that I was able to struggle painfully to my feet. My shirt felt damp, and reaching down indicated that there was indeed a large damp patch on my chest. Was that sweat, or blood? I didn't have the strength to care any more.