Epitaph (10 page)

Paul Crane realised that even if he remembered how he’d got into his present situation it would still do him no good. Even so, he forced himself to think about how this could have happened but there was a cold, hard knot in his stomach that he knew would only be removed by him being released from his wooden prison and, if he was honest with himself, he could see no way that was possible. But he still racked his brains for answers, no matter how futile and pointless.

That knot in his stomach seemed to be growing. He rested his hands on his belly for a moment, wondering if he might actually be able to feel the knot. Could you physically feel fear? Obviously you could experience it but could it manifest itself as a tangible, somatic entity? Was that what he was feeling in his gut? Not a tangle of constricted muscles but a lump of manifested fear? People spoke of the taste of fear and the smell of fear; could it grow like a cancer, too?

Interesting but not really very helpful.

The inner voice was being irritatingly logical again.

Get back to the matter in hand. The reason why you’re in this coffin can wait. The most pressing thing is getting out of it.

Paul nodded gently, acknowledging the inner voice and at least accepting that it was perhaps correct in its prioritisation. Getting out was the most important consideration. Everything else could be worked out later.

There was the time factor to consider as well. How long he’d been down here. Down here in the grave.

The thought made him breathe more rapidly and he attempted to think of the predicament in different terms.

It doesn’t matter how you phrase it. You’re still fucked. There isn’t a nice way of putting it really, is there?

He couldn’t, he told himself, have been in the coffin for that long.

And your brilliant logic for this is?

Paul doubted that he’d been in there for more than a couple of hours. Surely he couldn’t have been in there for more than a day, could he? Wouldn’t the air have run out by now if that were the case?

He let out a small murmur of despair. The thought of the air around him running out hadn’t struck him before but it did now with sledgehammer strength.

You’re going to suffocate.

His breathing began to increase in pace and he fought desperately to control it. If he were already running out of air then hyperventilating would use up the precious oxygen even quicker. He had to get a grip. Slow his breathing right down to a crawl. How long did it take to suffocate? Had there been studies done on this subject? Did he really want to know the results even if there had?

He felt a tightness in his chest.

You won’t have to worry about suffocating. You’ll probably have a heart attack first.

Again he sucked in a deep breath and shook his head as if the action would force the thoughts away. The tightness across his chest, he assured himself, was caused by tension. Muscles tightened when people were stressed. It was the old fight or flight routine, wasn’t it? If the body couldn’t run then the adrenaline that it pumped would cause muscles to tighten in readiness for a fight, be it real or imagined. Yes, that was it; the tightness across his chest was due to fear. That all-embracing emotion that he was coming to know so well. In fact, he was now on intimate terms with it. He and fear were more than acquaintances by this time. They were practically related.

Paul let out his breath slowly, his fingertips sliding un consciously over the satin beneath him.

Why did they line coffins with satin? It was almost like an attempt to make them comfortable and welcoming. Wasted on the occupants, he thought. Well, in normal cases it was.

Not in this one, though. You can feel everything, can’t you? So, do you feel at home? Comfortable? Suitably welcomed?

Paul tried to stop the inner voice as surely as he tried to stop the thoughts bouncing around inside his head. He just wanted to put them in some kind of order so that he could deal with them adequately. When thoughts ricocheted about inside his mind the way they were doing at the moment it was impossible to produce any order or discipline.

What the fuck are you talking about? What does it matter if
the thoughts are random? You’ll be dead in a couple of hours. There can’t be that much oxygen in a coffin.

That one thought stuck in his mind like a splinter in soft flesh and it would not move.

Exactly how much oxygen did the average coffin contain?

How much longer did he have?

Frank Hacket felt the mobile phone vibrating in his trouser pocket and he reached in to see who was calling.

Whoever it was he’d have to call them back. Mobiles were banned within the confines of the hospital. Frank wondered who would be calling him at this time. They knew what time his breaks and his lunch hour were. Whoever it was should know better than to ring during work hours.

A nurse hurried past him carrying a urine sample. Frank watched as she disappeared down the stairs leading to pathology, then he pulled the phone from his pocket and inspected it.

He frowned when he saw what was displayed on the screen.

GINA-HOME.

Frank waited a moment longer, double-checking that he’d read it right, then he pushed the phone back into his pocket and continued on his way. However, as he walked, he could feel the phone vibrating constantly. Perhaps, he thought, he’d just nip outside and check what she wanted. Better that than have her moaning at him when he got home. It was probably just to tell
him to get some extra shopping on the way home. Something trivial. It usually was.

The vibrating stopped and Frank breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. He carried on down the corridor, taking a right towards the lift that would carry him up to the first floor where he was supposed to clean up some vomit from outside the matern -ity ward. The store cupboard was on the same floor and he made a mental note to pick up some extra disinfectant from there before attending to the spillage.

Frank stood before the lift and jabbed the call button.

His phone rang again.

This time he pulled it from his pocket without thinking and once more saw the same letters and numbers displayed on the screen.

GINA-HOME.

Frank felt his irritation growing. What could possibly be so important that she needed to bother him now? She really should know better.

The lift arrived and the doors slid open to reveal an empty compartment. Frank prepared to step inside. He looked at the phone again. It was still throbbing as he gazed at it.

What was so important that it couldn’t wait?

He hesitated, then, almost against his better judgement, he turned away from the lift and headed towards the main entrance of the hospital. This would, he told himself, take only a couple of minutes. Find out what she wants, remind her not to call again other than during lunch and breaks and then get that vomit cleaned up before someone gives you an ear-bashing over it.

Frank Hacket moved swiftly through the reception area of the hospital and out of the main entrance into the sunshine. He shielded his eyes from the blazing orb as he wandered towards
some bushes nearby and stood next to the wooden bench there. There were some cigarette ends strewn around the seat and he looked down almost yearningly at them, remembering how long it had been since he’d smoked one himself. He’d promised to give up but it certainly wasn’t proving to be easy. Laura was always coming home from school with leaflets about good health for parents and she’d made him promise that he’d give up. He’d agreed half-jokingly but, as she’d reminded him, he’d never broken a promise to her in his life and this was important. He had to give up smoking.

Frank thought about his daughter for a moment, looking forward to the moment when he could see her again. She’d probably be in bed by the time he got home but he’d still go into the bedroom and give her a kiss, like he did every night. Even the thought of her brought a smile to his face.

The insistent buzzing of the phone removed it again. Frank sighed wearily and inspected the screen once more, as if by looking at it with such resignation would somehow make it stop.

It didn’t.

He checked to see that no one was watching then flipped the phone open and pressed it to his ear.

What he heard almost made him drop it.

For the first time since waking up, he thought about death.

Strange, since he’d been encased in a box designed specific ally for the storing and disposal of the deceased, but the thought of his own demise hadn’t hit him so powerfully up until now. To see it slipping away second by second, breath by breath, was almost unbearable. If the coffin contained enough air for a thousand breaths then the clock was running. Each inhalation was bringing him closer to the end. Five hundred breaths and he was halfway to death. How many times did an average person breathe in one minute? How many breaths did they take? Was his end to be measured in minutes?

‘Stop it,’ he snapped. ‘Stop it.’

He didn’t know to whom the words were directed. At his internal voice or his own mind. Either way he wasn’t too hopeful of blotting out the less than savoury thoughts zipping around inside his head or of silencing that irritatingly logical and insistent voice that seemed impervious to all admonishments.

Everyone thought about death in his or her darkest moments, he was sure of that. Anyone who’d been on a plane when it had hit a patch of bad turbulence, or anybody who’d been in a car that had inexplicably swerved on a wet road must have entertained brief and terrifying thoughts of their own mortality. Any person admitted to hospital for an operation must consider the possibility that something would go wrong and they’d never leave the place. It was human nature. Unavoidable. One of the perils of being the most intelligent species on the planet. With that intelligence came the ability to contemplate your own death. Then again, dolphins were supposedly intelligent. Did they give thoughts to being attacked by sharks? To getting caught in the nets left for tuna? Cows were supposed to be stupid but he’d read or heard that they sometimes became more agitated upon entering a slaughterhouse. Were they really more astute than people gave them credit for, or was it just that they smelled the blood of others of their kind at that time and sensed their own fate? No one knew and no one ever would.

He himself had even given it a passing thought before now. But only ever in passing. Never in this way. Never in a situation where what life he had remaining was literally being sucked away moment by moment.

Then again, he’d never been in a coffin before with nothing else to think about other than his own demise. It focused the mind, the thought of slipping helplessly into eternity. And then, after the coughing and choking and the pain and the suffering were over, what then? Where to?

Heaven or Hell?

Don’t start. Not now.

A sea of clouds or a lake of fire?

What do you think you deserve?

He clamped his jaws together as tightly as he could, until they ached, until he wondered if he might crack his back teeth. The thoughts drifted away slightly. They didn’t leave completely, they just retreated a short distance. He knew they’d be back.

Where are they going to go?

He shook his head.

Go on, where do you think you deserve to go? Heaven or Hell? Have you been a good man or a bad man? Does it really matter? Who makes that decision anyway?

At the moment, he wished he knew there was something beyond where he now lay. He wanted more than anything to know that lying in this box wasn’t the end. There had to be something more, didn’t there? Please God, let there be something else.

You’re calling on God. Do you believe? Or is it just that there’s no one else to call on in situations like this? Everyone calls on God when they’re in the shit. There are no atheists in foxholes, as they say. Then again, if there were a God He probably wouldn’t have let you get into this situation in the first place. Looks like you’re fucked all ends up.

Paul sucked in a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. Thoughts of death weren’t helping, even if there was a certain inevitability about those thoughts con sidering the place and situation he found himself in.

He swallowed hard and tried to prevent the extraneous thoughts he had become so aware of from flooding into his mind with such reckless abandon.

‘Would a God that was good invent something like death?’

It was a line from a film but he couldn’t remember which one. For much of his life he’d been cursed – if that was the word – with the ability to dredge up lines of film dialogue completely unbidden, dependent on the situation. It was, he had joked, a sign of his inferior education. Others quoted Shakespeare, Shelley, Voltaire and people like that, but he quoted lines from screenplays. Not much of an achievement really but better than nothing. He always maintained that he’d inherited his love of films from his parents. They had been staunch cinema-goers and had done a good part of their courting in and around the local fleapits.

When he was as young as five or six, his special treat on a Friday night had been to sit up with his mum (his dad always went to bed because of getting up for work the next morning) and watch the old black and white horror films they showed on TV. A combination of that and collecting the plethora of film magazines that was available at that time had given him an appetite for cinema that had grown stronger as he’d grown up. His mother had taken him along to the local cinema more times than he could remember while he was growing up and then, once he reached his teens, he continued the odyssey alone or with friends, visiting one of the two local cinemas every Monday or Tuesday night to sample whatever was showing. It didn’t matter what kind of film it was. Crime, comedy, drama or horror, Paul was there in his usual seat.

‘All you can hope is that it won’t be long-drawn-out and painful.’

Another line popped into his mind. Unwanted and unwelcome.

He didn’t know if his own death was going to be long-drawn-out and painful. It might already be long and drawn out. If he had any idea of how long he’d been in the coffin, then he’d know exactly how long. As for painful, he tried not to think about it. Would it hurt as the air inside the box disappeared? Would the physical act of suffocating take long?

Paul tried to calm himself. He tried to think about anything other than his impending fate but it was impossible. It wasn’t as if he could imagine what it would be like to be free again. There seemed no hope at all of ever escaping this casket. He felt himself beginning to shake again. The same kind of uncontrollable muscular spasms that he’d felt upon first realising his predicament.

How long ago had that been? An hour or more? Or was it only a matter of minutes? Time seemed to have been condensed the same way as his environment had been condensed. Telescoped down into this one one-foot by a half-foot box. Nothing beyond it and nothing inside except despair and the inevitability of death.

‘Oh, God, help me,’ he breathed once more but he knew that his entreaties were useless. He was praying for a miracle that wasn’t going to come. Perhaps the sooner he accepted the end the better, he thought. Maybe that was how it worked. When people on a plane heard that they were going to crash perhaps that was how they reacted in the moments before impact, he mused. Rather than screaming uselessly as their deaths came unerringly closer, maybe they relaxed into an acceptance of that inevitability. A bit like people with terminal diseases. Didn’t they say that there were several stages to be encountered and endured once they’d been told of their fate?

There was the anger, the sorrow and then the resign -ation.

What else was there to do but face up to the inevitable? And yet, even now, Paul couldn’t bring himself to confront it. He could not will himself to stare head-on at the impending end of his life. So great was his desire to live, to breathe fresh air and walk on the earth again that he clung to that tiny fragment of false hope as if it were drift-wood in a turbulent sea.

‘Then do it,’ he snarled to himself. ‘Get out of this box.’

That was it; that was the answer. Get angry. Don’t lie here waiting for death. Fight back.

There has to be a way. You can’t just go down without a fight. You can’t just surrender like this. Fight back. Get out of this fucking coffin.

Paul felt a surge of energy unlike anything he’d felt since waking inside the box.

‘Don’t give up,’ he said through gritted teeth.

There had to be a way out. There had to be, and he was determined to find it.