At that moment, halfway through a violent intake of breath, time suddenly slowed. His breathing lost its spasmodic quality, he noticed, and all became calm and steady. He lay quite still. As the second’s duration of a breath expanded to an eternity, he heard a swelling roar.
‘No!’ said someone, possibly Jonas himself, and he surfaced once more.
He ran a hand over his sweaty face.
And tried hard to think. If the Sleeper alone was responsible for all that had happened in the last few days, this was mere shadow-boxing. No one could shut himself up in a coffin and bury it. If the Sleeper had incarcerated himself, there must be a way out.
He kicked and pushed. To no avail.
How long would he take to use up all the oxygen in such a confined space? Two hours? Half a day? What would happen to him? He would become sleepy, then confused. He would probably be unconscious by the time he died of suffocation.
Sleepy? He was sleepy already. Utterly exhausted.
*
He opened his eyes. Total darkness.
His limbs ached with tension and from lying on a hard surface. His feet had gone to sleep. His hand was clutching the handle of the knife.
He had no idea how long he’d been asleep, it might have been ten minutes or four hours, but he still found it hard to keep his eyes open. This indicated that he hadn’t slept for long. Besides, he hadn’t suffocated. A space as confined as this couldn’t contain enough oxygen to last him many hours, that much was certain.
Unless there was some hidden source of air.
Unless things weren’t as they appeared.
The knife in his hand … A friendly invitation? More of a prop in a comedy, perhaps? The Sleeper certainly wouldn’t entomb himself of his own free will.
Or would he?
No, he must have overlooked something.
He investigated his prison once more. There was no scope for movement on the side his head was resting against, nor on the opposite side. He tapped the wall on his right. No form of aperture or lock — or, if there was, he couldn’t find it.
It was different on the other side. The left-hand wall felt the hardest. Above all, though, it wasn’t the same all over. There were cracks in it.
Laboriously, he switched the knife from his right hand to his left and began to probe these cracks. The wall didn’t seem to be a proper wall, it consisted of two overlapping metal cylinders. He dug and probed away in the hope of finding a gap. The blade snapped, leaving him with the useless hilt in his hand.
He fought back his feeling of resignation. This was a game.
He ran his fingers over the upper cylinder. There! Between the cylinder and the roof was a gap just big enough to admit his fingertips. He exerted pressure on the metal and pulled. The cylinder moved almost imperceptibly. Gripping it further down, he pulled some more. Once again he felt a slight movement.
Painstakingly, little by little, he shook the cylinder free from between the roof and its counterpart below. This brought more and more of his body beneath the massive metal component. He tried not to think about this.
He slid the cylinder over himself, panting hard. Once he had distributed the weight of the load better, he could breathe. He managed to raise the lower cylinder and squeeze beneath it. This created enough room on the right for the first cylinder. He rolled the second one over himself and, after much pushing and pulling, placed it on top of the first.
On the left, where he now had some elbow room, he felt something soft and rounded: an expanse of cloth. When he applied pressure with his fist, it sank in.
That was when it dawned on him.
His hand felt for the crack and found it. Felt for the catch and found that too. Pulled it and, at the same time, gave the cloth-covered wall a push. The seat folded forwards. He crawled out of the boot and onto the back seat of the car.
It was night. Stars were twinkling overhead. He seemed to be in the middle of a field. No road or track ahead of him. He looked to his right. Saw the tent but failed to catch on right away. It didn’t dawn on him where he was until he recognised the motorbike with the slashed tyres.
*
At dawn Jonas stopped at a filling station and heated up the contents of two tins on a squalid gas stove in the back room. He drank some coffee and drove on.
He was so tired he kept nodding off. On one occasion he would have hit the crash barrier if he hadn’t yanked at the wheel at the last moment. Undeterred, he drove flat out, racking his brains for some way out of this trap. Nothing occurred to him. His only recourse was to keep trying, to keep heading for Scotland and hope that he would get there before sleep overcame him.
Pills were a possibility, but where to get them? How was he to know which ones to take?
He drove on, jaws aching, eyes watering. His joints felt as if they were filled with foam. His legs were two numb stilts.
The M25. Watford. Luton. Northampton.
At Coventry he was so overcome with fatigue, he wondered what time of day it was. He saw the sun but didn’t know whether it was climbing or declining towards the horizon. He felt feverish. His cheeks were burning, his hands trembling so badly, he couldn’t open the ring-pull on a can of lemonade.
*
He was trapped in a limbo in which he dreamt and drove, dreamt and saw, dreamt and acted. He perceived sounds and images. He smelt the sea. He read signs that were transformed an instant later into scraps of memory, into dreams, into songs that were sung in his ear. Many of these dreams he retained for a while, wrestling with them or doubting their existence. Other, more abstract ones were of such short duration he doubted he’d had them at all.
Spacey Suite.
He thought he’d read the words, but they turned into a building under construction by workmen. The walls melted, dissolved, engulfed him. ‘I’ve nothing to do with this,’ said his inner voice. Feeling constricted for a moment, he coughed up some crystalline bubbles and breathed freely once more.
He dreamt he was climbing a flight of stairs, many hundreds of them, higher and higher. Then it seemed to him that, instead of dreaming it, he was recalling a dream, or an actual event from minutes or hours or years before. The effort of deciding which was right almost tore him apart.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ said his grandmother.
She was standing in front of him, speaking. Her lips didn’t move.
‘Stop that,’ said his mother’s voice. He couldn’t see her and didn’t know who she was talking to.
He saw the sun complete its day’s trajectory within a few seconds. Again and again it appeared on the horizon, glided across the sky, one two three four five, and sank in the west, leaving night behind it. Then it reappeared, only to speed on its way again and vanish. Night. Night lingered. It lingered and did its work.
*
He was roused by the cold and the whistle of the wind. He opened his eyes, expecting to see a road. Instead, he was flying. Or hovering in the air with an immense open space in front of him. He was at least fifty metres above the ground. Below and ahead of him glistened the sea.
After a few seconds he realised that he wasn’t flying or hovering; he was on board a ship, an enormous liner lying at anchor in a big harbour. He had no time to reflect on this, however, because another realisation hit him.
He was sitting in a wheelchair, unable to move his legs. Draped over his knees was a rug of the kind seen in films when paraplegics are taken out for an airing.
He made another attempt to move his legs. They didn’t move a single millimetre. He could wriggle and flex his toes at will, but that was all.
The wind was blowing a gale. He shivered. At the same time he was hot inside. He was too appalled by his crippled state to speak or think. Before long his mood changed. Horror gave way to dejection and dejection to fury.