Dead Men's s Boots

The chill in the room was creeping into me, and the half-floral, half-chemical smell was turning my stomach. It didn’t help that beyond the walls the dead souls were massed thickly, sounding to my overdeveloped senses like a swarm of desert locusts.

There was another soul here, too: stronger, or at any rate closer. It hovered around our heads like an invisible cloud, making the lights in the room suddenly seem a fraction dimmer. But a cloud suggests something dispersed and diffuse, and this presence was localised: as my gaze panned across the room, it reached the coffin and stopped as if the coffin was a black hole, pulling light and matter and everything else in towards it.

The priest’s voice had taken on a hollow echo. There was an arrhythmical vibration rising behind it like a pulse, and the vibration danced against the surface of my skin, wave after wave, as though it was looking for a way in.

Neither Carla nor Todd seemed to be aware of any of this: they were both watching the priest, whose lips were still moving although I was damned if I could hear a word he was saying now.

For a moment I wondered if I was just imagining the whole thing – if the nightmare and the lack of sleep were all just taking their toll – but then the feeling of general, overall pressure narrowed in on the front of my head and intensified into one of actual pain.

Todd slipped something into my hand, and I found myself staring down dully into a hip flask a little like my own, except that this one was slimmer and cased in black leather.

Reflex ceatariively I raised it to my lips and took a hit. The liquor was very potent and very bitter, and it took a real effort not to gag. I passed the flask back to Todd and he slid it away into some recess of his suit where it didn’t spoil the hang.

The priest pressed a switch on the catafalque, and the coffin moved forward on its rollers. The waves of pressure in my skull built to a new crescendo as John Gittings’s body trundled towards the double doors like a very short wagon train rolling over black plastic prairie.

The doors slid open on either side to receive him into the furnace beyond.

The pain was so intense now that I actually gasped. It was as if John had thrown out an invisible grapnel, trying to keep a purchase in this world, and one of the flukes had embedded itself in my skull.

Carla looked around at me in surprise. She put a hand on my arm but I waved it away: I had to get out of there.