Dead And Buried

Cooper thought he glimpsed a movement near him in the smoke. He reached out for an indistinct shape like a hand, but grasped at empty space and found himself falling forwards into darkness, until his face hit the floor and his mind swam into swirling oblivion as he lost those last shreds of consciousness.

All around him was shouting and screaming, a muffled roaring noise. The crash of falling stone. And the screaming.

Then silence.

Arriving at the Light House, Fry and Hurst jumped out of the car, but within a few yards they were driven back by the smoke and heat.

Almost choking, her eyes running with tears, Fry saw that two fire appliances were already on the scene and were tackling the fire at the back of the pub. Clouds of steam rose from the jets of water they were directing on to the ground floor, trying to suppress the flames for a team in breathing apparatus who were entering through the rear door.

The lights of the two appliances and the arriving ambulances bounced off the columns of black smoke pouring from the building. Flames erupted from another window higher up. The first floor was well alight by now, and smoke was beginning to trickle from between the tiles of the roof.

At last Fry saw two figures stumble out of the smoke. Firefighters ran towards them to support them, and she couldn’t see who it was from the bodies in the way.

‘Becky, who …?’

‘I don’t know. No, wait a minute — Diane, one of them is a woman. And the other is Eliot Wharton.’

‘Oh God.’

A fireman in a respirator emerged from the building, stepped over the hoses and pulled off his mask. He shook his head wearily at the incident commander and mouthed something. Fry couldn’t hear what he was saying. She strained her eyes, wishing she could lip-read.

It wasn’t until the commander turned to look at her, and she saw his despairing expression, that hope began to die.

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?’