The Nostradamus prophecies

66

He awoke to a fearful, nagging pain in his left shoulder. Daylight had found its way through a thousand inadvertent chinks in the roof and one chink had been shining fully on to his face.

He could hear voices outside the house – shouts, orders, the hefting of large objects and the firing-up of engines.

Bale crawled out of the light, dragging the coverlet behind him. He would have to do something about his shoulder. The pain of his shattered collarbone was close to unbearable and he didn’t wish to pass out, with the risk that he might call out in his delirium and alert the police below.

He found himself an isolated corner, well out of the way of any boxes and bric-a-brac that might be susceptible to a kick or to toppling over. Any noise at all – any unexpected crashes – and the enemy would find him.

He constructed a pad for himself with the coverlet, forcing it under his armpit and then tying it back around his shoulder blades. Then he lay fl at on the planking, with his legs stretched out and his arms down by his sides.

Slowly, incrementally, he began inhaling in a series of deep breaths and as he took each breath he allowed the words ‘sleep, deep sleep’ to echo through the inside of his head. Once he’d got a satisfactory rhythm going, Bale opened his eyes as wide as he could manage and rotated them backwards, until he was staring at a point on the ceiling way beyond his forehead. With his eyes fixed in that position, he deepened his breathing, all the while maintaining the rhythms of his internal chant.

When he could feel himself drifting into a pre-hypnotic state, he began to suggest certain things to himself. Things like ‘in thirty breaths you will fall asleep’, followed by ‘in thirty breaths you will do exactly as I tell you’ – and then, later, ‘in thirty breaths you will no longer feel any pain’ – culminating with ‘in thirty breaths your collarbone will begin to heal itself and your strength will return to you’.

Bale understood only too well the potential shortcomings of self-hypnosis. But he also knew that it was the only possible way that he could dominate his body and return it to a state bordering on the functional.

If he was to last out in this loft space – with no food and with no medical attention – for the day or two that it would take the police to complete their enquiries, he knew that he must focus all his resources on the conservation and cultivation of his essential energies.

All he had was what he came in with. And those assets would diminish with each passing hour, until either an infection, an unforced error, or an unintended noise could bring him low.