Dead and Buried

32

Ben Cooper came round slowly, becoming gradually aware of a buzzing in his ears, a scorched smell in his nostrils, a strange light stinging his eyes. He was being bounced around violently, and his head swam with dizziness and a thumping pain. His stomach lurched, and he rolled over to vomit, vaguely conscious of someone there on the edge of the light, waiting for him to do exactly that.

Some time later, he became conscious again. He had no idea how much later it was. Only a few minutes might have passed, but it could have been days. He was in a different place now. It was completely still, no sense of movement except for the dizzy swirling in his head, the residue of some shadowy, distorted dreams.

He listened cautiously to the noises around him, all of them unfamiliar. The smells were sharp and antiseptic. He couldn’t figure out the sensations all over his body. His limbs seemed to be either too numb or too painful, and sometimes both at once.

He opened his eyes, and saw a brightly lit ceiling. He turned his head a fraction and saw someone standing over him, a looming shape, a face frowning with anxiety. He expected to see Liz. She’d been so much in his head, walking through those murky, half-conscious dreams, that for a moment he thought he was actually seeing her by his bed, and she was smiling that familiar smile that told him how glad she was to see him.

But his eyes came more into focus, and he realised the shape was his brother. It seemed so odd to be looking up at Matt against a starkwhite ceiling that he almost laughed, but found that he couldn’t.

When he spoke, Matt’s voice came from an immense distance in space and time. It was so faint and remote that it seemed to echo from way, way back in his childhood. Ben was carried away to an age when he was too small to look after himself, when he looked up to his big brother with adoration as his guardian and protector. Yes, Matt’s voice came from that past. Its distance in time was created by the tone of his words.

‘You’re going to be okay, Ben. Just relax. Don’t try to talk or anything.’

‘What is it? I don’t … Matt?’

‘Yes, I’m here. Take it easy.’

Ben felt his head hit the pillow, as if his neck muscles had given up the effort to hold it upright. He was completely exhausted, his body drained of energy, sucked of its contents like an empty plastic bag. His hands felt wrong, and his feet too. Most of all, his head wasn’t as it should be. His skin was too tight to his skull, too untouched by the air to feel natural.

‘I don’t remember …’ he said.

‘No. Well, it’s probably best if you don’t.’

There was some kind of message in the words. No, not the words, but the significance behind them. An unspoken message, coming to him directly in the way that he and Matt had always communicated, the way they used to talk without the need for speech. A total understanding. He’d thought it was gone in these past few years, but in this moment it had all come back.

Then he was shocked to hear his own voice, changed to the faint, scared sound of a child.

‘What’s wrong, Matt? Matty?’

But his mind was filled with hazy memories — images of himself flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out as if he’d become just one more shadow in the smoke.

And then there was another image. A figure in front of him, outlined against the flames. The smoke between them black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning. He heard glass shattering, a blast of air exploding the flames into a great roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling, and engulfed the room.

And then the figure was gone. In Ben’s memory, he could see nothing but the smoke, feel nothing but the crash of falling stone. He could hear only the screaming.

Then, incredibly, a deafening absence of sound. And that silence was the most frightening thing of all.

‘Liz?’ he said, his voice croaking with fear.

But there was no answer in the room now. Matt was utterly quiet. Ben listened to that hush, recognising what it meant, remembering all the times that he and his brother had used such silences to share the most difficult things, a thought or emotion impossible to put into words.

It was strange the way a silence could say so much. It could tell the truth far more effectively than any platitude or cliché, or the most eloquent of speeches. This was a silence that came straight from the heart, and Ben understood it perfectly.

‘Liz,’ he said. ‘Is she … gone?’

Finally Matt spoke.

‘I’m sorry, Ben,’ he said. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

Among sharp antiseptic smells, in a brightly lit room with a white ceiling, that was the moment. The exact moment when Ben Cooper’s world came to an end.