Smouldering
by Amber Averay
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He awoke to blinding darkness. It was disconcerting – bloody terrifying – but he snorted deep breaths through his swollen nose and exhaled through a mouth tasting of blood.
Stay calm, he advised himself, panic flooding him. Stay calm! But his pulsing head felt it was about to split in half and he had no recollection of where he was, how he’d got there. He girded his shaking limbs and forced himself to sit up.
‘God damn!’ he gasped, flopping back into the darkness’s eager embrace. His head spinning, ears ringing, he gingerly reached up and found the ceiling was mere inches above his face. His nose was streaming once again, liquid warmth dribbling into his ears.
Metal. He was in a metal box. A coffin. A small sound escaped him, a terrified whimper, and his bladder released. Oh, God. He wanted to wake up now, to find himself in his own bed, wrapped in sweat-stained sheets but safe, home, free from this paralysing nightmare.
What was that noise? Dripping, pattering, but falling from a distance. He groped along the sides, top, base of the – the box, he couldn’t bring himself to think the other word again – and found that holes had been drilled into the bottom plank. How high up was he? The only sound was the drip, drip, drip which must be his urine sieving from the – the box.
His stomach lurched, and he automatically made to sit up again. The lid connected with his face, pain exploded through him, and he fell back, vomiting through screaming jaws. It hit the ceiling and rained upon his head, neck.
Oh, God. Oh, God. No, no more. Please! He turned his face to the side, whimpering and mewling and fighting his roiling belly once more. The smell – of blood, of urine, of sick – was nauseating, but it was the enclosed darkness that scared him the most. Since he was a boy he’d hated small spaces, disliking the dark only a little less, and had sought to avoid any situation that would find him in such places.
‘Let me out!’ he yelled, cracking fists against the side of the metal box. For the first time he noticed it move, swaying in the air, and he froze then tentatively wriggled and moaned when his prison moved again. Yes, he was suspended in the air, and he was not well secured.
Don’t move. Fingertips sank into the holes as if it could bind him to safety. Somewhere in the recesses of his panicked mind he knew it made no sense, but it was a fool’s comfort he needed and he clung to it.
His eyes drooped shut…
Movement startled him awake, and he flung his arms out. They met the metal walls of his prison and he cried out, the sound drowned by the cranking of pulleys and rattling of chains.
He couldn’t see! He couldn’t move. He wanted to stretch the cramps from his squished body, flick a light switch. Light a torch. Something so he wasn’t blind and crumpled and scared and sickened.
Heat seeped through the metal plank at his back, leaked through the holes upon which he lay. It was so deliciously comforting for a moment that he shivered his delight, relishing the warmth filling his battered body and soothing his taut muscles.
Still his narrow prison was eased smoothly downward. The heat intensified. The metal at his back became almost unbearably hot, the sides now warming speedily too. A grim, grey light wedged through the holes, and with it streams of ashen smoke. He tried to turn, to search for the source of it, but there was no telltale gleam of fire, no crackling of flames, no glitter of embers gnawing upon wood.
Just smoke.
The heat became unbearable. The flesh of his bare arms welded to the metal box. The fabric of his filthy clothes singed, cooked, and he still was being lowered.
‘Help!’ he roared, disregarding all his fears and wriggling, writhing, kicking, shaking. ‘Get me out of here! Let me out! HELP!’ But nobody answered him, and nobody rescued him.
The metal coffin paused a foot above the smoking ground, and inside the box the haze-filled heat steadily increased until his screams were desperate, wordless, tortured.
It was a long time before silence reigned again.
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