DOOMSDAY
By Paul Edmund Norman

~1~

Andy Grimes opened his eyes slowly, unsure of his surroundings. A bright light, far more intense than that of the reading lamp which he had switched off the night before, penetrated the room through the chink in the curtains.

            Curtains.

            Still alive, then.

            No, that was not possible. Beside the bed, on the table, were the lamp, a book, an empty bottle of whisky and a pill bottle. It, too, was empty. He remembered them slipping down his gullet, one by one, sometimes in twos, followed by a swig from the whisky bottle.

            He should be dead.

            He should have died during the early hours of the morning.

            If he was dead, then the afterlife bore a remarkably strong resemblance to the life he had just left, with all the same material possessions, the same environment.

            The sunlight was blinding, fuelling his headache. His mouth was awesomely bad. Always was bad when he woke up. Today it was worse. Today it was much, much worse.

            The despair he had felt yesterday had given way, overnight, to what now felt like a terrible hangover. It was still there, the despair, but it was now second in the queue, so to speak.

            He reached for the pill bottle and felt a lump of vomit rise in his gullet, and threw up onto the carpet, the exact place where his slippers and socks stood in silent expectation of another day’s usage. An expression of rage suffused his face. He had thought he would have no further need of either of them. Now he would have to buy new ones.

            The pill bottle was empty, and he did remember taking them all, about thirty-five of them, though a precise count had gone out of the window by the time he had taken the tenth, or had it been the eleventh? He remembered with perfect certainty placing the empty pill bottle on the bedside table after swallowing the last pill. The whisky bottle was empty, too, and he remembered that he had needed two swallows to down two pills, one swallow for one. He recalled the suicide attempt with a clarity that penetrated his brain like a needle. The headache was bad, too. Really bad. Worse than he could ever remember a headache to have been.

            There was also a sharp pain at the top of his abdomen.

            He supposed the pills were doing some damage, even if they had not killed him.

            Despair returned, raising his temperature suddenly, uncomfortably, like a hot flush. Tiny pinpricks of needles at the back of his neck exploded unexpectedly.

            There was something wrong.

            Something wrong.

            He had swallowed more than thirty painkillers and an entire bottle of whisky ten hours earlier. By rights he should now be dead, but he knew that he was not dead, he was still alive, uncomfortably, painfully alive. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the light and the pain, but it would not recede, only remind him of what was wrong with his life, what had gone wrong so quickly, so suddenly, so badly.

            Maybe when you overdosed, death was not always instantaneous. Maybe you languished for a few hours, then died a horrific, pain-ridden death. Maybe that was why some people didn’t die, they got to them in time, in time to pump their stomachs clean of the pills. Maybe it was not morning at all, but still the middle of the night, and the blindingly bright light wasn’t the sun but something else, someone’s headlights, a torch…. No, it was the sun, it was morning. His watch and the clock on the wall both said eight thirty. A bright new morning. When he should have been dead. Half your luck, mate, half your luck.

            He didn’t think he could move. Not yet. The smell of the vomit assailed his nostrils. He became used to it. Tolerated it. It was deeply unpleasant. A little like the smell he remembered from the office…. No, he couldn’t move. Not yet. His legs felt leaden, painfully so.

            As though he were a patient in a doctor’s surgery, he began to question himself, feeling the need to do so before something inexorable took over, preventing him from making any further analysis of the situation in which he now found himself.

            How did it begin?

            The despair?

            Everything. Tell me everything. Pretend I am your best friend, someone from whom you have no secrets, someone you can tell anything to.

            Everything.

            Start at the beginning. Start with what you think started it all, the despair, or before the despair. What is the first thing you remember of your present troubles?

            The dig.

            Yes, the dig.

            We had dug down about ten feet, I suppose, and I should have taken timbers down to shore up the sides, because it was very unstable down there. The earth and the clay just gave way to a layer of flint embedded in softer earth, and where we had excavated, the walls were starting to collapse.

            You were on your own down there?

            At that time, yes. I was first down the ladder. I wanted to be first down the ladder, first into the tunnel.

            What happened?

            I saw a small hole that I thought might enable me to start a lateral tunnel. I thought I saw something in the hole, some kind of artefact, but my torch batteries were failing. 

            But you did see something?

            ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. Yes, I did see something. I wasn’t sure at the time but there was something there all right.’

            ‘But you must think that you saw something otherwise this incident would not be the one that started this whole thing off.’

            ‘That’s probably right.’

            ‘So what happened down there?’

            ‘The tunnel I was digging in opened out quickly. As though it had always been there and I was simply making it good. Then it collapsed behind me and I was trapped.’

            Trapped.

            No air.

            Can’t breathe.

            No air.

            Something in there with me.

            Hands reaching for me.

Dragging me out.

Gasping for breath.

Lungs constricted.

Airways blocked.

Blacking out.

Falling. Falling…..

            ‘You’re jumping ahead of yourself, Andy. How long were you trapped in the tunnel?’   ‘An hour. Two hours, maybe. I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.’ Andy had lain in the tunnel for two hours with just enough air to keep him alive.  That was the theory. Though the doctors attending him at the scene of the accident and afterwards, at the hospital, were certain he must have sustained some brain damage, the only thing they could find wrong with him when he came out of the coma was an impairing of the vision in his left eye.  Bruising, of course, to the back and the legs, and a bump on the head where he had banged it against the wall of the tunnel. 

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