Jordan Gravette Part 2 of 6

He is drowning at the bottom of a deep dark sea, the pressure is squeezing his body and threatening to force the air from his lungs. The more he tries to swim upwards, the more the weight of the water works against him, pressing down even harder. He is full of fear and dread and desperation. This is the end, he thinks, but something within him drives him on to continue to resist, to fight to reach the surface. Slowly he begins to rise, but the effort is weakening his desire to survive. The end was close. Soon, exhausted, his limbs would cease their frantic waving, he would surrender the precious air he held captive in his lungs to the water engulfing him, and he would begin the long drift down into the murky sediment below. That was how he imagined it would be, but instead that was then he broke through the surface into a glaring light, where he released the air from his lungs in one great explosive gasp.

He was lying in a in a small windowless room. Wires, secured by surgical tape, trailed from his chest, connecting him to a battery of monitors, and strange machines surrounding his bed.

In those first waking moments, he knew nothing. Not his name, or how he had come to be where he was. He lay still and let the dark waters from his nightmare recede while he waited for someone to come. There is no sound of human industry, something he finds at first remarkable and then disturbing. He waits and waits, listening for the sound of voices and approaching footsteps. No one comes, and all he hears are the machines around his bed, beeping and clicking and whirring as if they are talking to each other.

While he waits, his memories begin to bob back to the surface, one by one, like flotsam from a sunken ship. He remembers the airport and not feeling well, and he remembers why he was at the airport in the first place and suddenly he feels the urgent need to make a phone call. Not to his wife but to his overseas clients who would understand and forgive the delay to their meeting if only he could speak to them. Wealth beckoned. It was time to make a sacrifice.

He eases himself upright and swings his legs over the side of the bed. There is a bellpush on the wall. He presses it. A buzzer sounds somewhere beyond the confines of his room, but still no one comes. He is annoyed. He is not used to being ignored. He rips the tape and wires from his chest, and the drip feeding into his arm. Ignoring the crimson rivulet trickling over his wrist, he shuffles to the door, opens it and looks out into an empty corridor.

‘Hey, is anybody out there.’ His words echo briefly off the bare walls and are swallowed by the silence. ‘Hello. Anybody.’ There is no response. He goes back into his room. There is a sliding door in one wall. He opens it and sees his clothes, freshly laundered, hanging neatly from a rail. At least some of the idiots running this place got something right. A short while later, he is dressed and ready to leave. He finds his phone and his wristwatch in his jacket pocket. The phone its battery is flat. His watch has stopped at four thirty-eight. He does not know what time it is or how long he has been there. The need to make that phone call becomes even more pressing. There is no way I am going to lose that deal, he tells himself.

He makes his way along the corridor, opening every door he passes, rehearsing in his mind the lecture he would give to the first nurse or doctor he bumped into. Behind every door there is a room, exactly like the room he has left, and each one is empty. He turns a corner into a deserted reception area, with precisely aligned rows of empty seats, and low tables with neat, untouched piles of colourful magazines. There is an unmanned reception desk with a telephone. He picks up the receiver, stabs at the buttons. The line is dead.

Further on from the deserted reception area he comes to a lift. He steps inside and selects the button for the ground floor. A recorded female voice announces, ‘Doors closing.’ It startles him. It is the closest he has come to a human voice since he awoke.

When the doors re-open they reveal a vast expanse of marbled floor, bathed in natural light flooding through a glass façade, beyond which he can see a city street. This cannot be right, he tells himself. There is not a soul to be seen anywhere. Not in the building, nor in the street outside. He is struck by an unexpected primeval desire for fresh air, as if perhaps he might be safer in the open. His footsteps crack like gunshots as he hurriedly crosses the empty space, heading for the revolving doors that would eject him out onto the street. Once outside, his anxiety only increases. The street, like everywhere else he had come across since waking, is completely empty. 

While he is standing, confused and perplexed, wandering what on earth, if anything, he was supposed to do next the phone in his pocket, despite its dead battery, began to vibrate and trill.

How can that be, he asked himself, when it is out of battery. In an excited frenzy at the thought of conversing with another human being he pulled the phone from his pocket and with trembling hands he pressed to accept the call. 

Go to your right for two hundred yards. You will reach a café called The Haven. I’ll be waiting for you inside.

Before Jordan could enquire about the caller’s identity, the caller hung up. Not that he needed to enquire. The hairs on the back of his neck were bristling. It might have been twenty years and more since his funeral but Jordan could recognise his late father’s voice anywhere.