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. As casually as I could I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door but suddenly I wasn’t even sure which way the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard: away from the coffin, half-convinced that I must be dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor because the sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.

The doors loomed into my field of vision and I took another step towards them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd too. Hot air which must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper and I couldn’t move, couldn’t move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back towards that hot mouth behind me – pulling me back and down into the dark.

Someone shouted a name – a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own: only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything else. And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a window-pane.

Then suddenly the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable, irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always lets you find your place. I fell into her arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with which she took my weight. The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into mine, a little surprised.

She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.

Castor. Yeah, of course: I knew that.

Voices came towards me across a fractal landscape of synaesthetically throbbing shadow. They were raised in argument.

Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.

Juliet telling Todd in a calm and neutral tone that if he didn’t step way back out of her face he was likely to lose some internal organ that he couldn’t do without. No more from Todd after that.

The foxy priest asking if everyone would please, please sit down again so that the cremation could continue.