It was not until I stared into the distance and watched the final lingering cloud dissolve into the blank ocean blue of incomprehensible eternity did the panic set in. The sky had literally surrounded me; no where to turn but the sand consuming my feet, though I was not sinking fast enough. I scrambled down the beckoning slope of the dune and tried to immerse myself in the grains of nostalgic familiarity – The Cornish Seaside 1995 – suddenly a suppressed fact, etched forever in the darkest confinements of my skull awoke with little agenda but to cause paralysing terror:
For each grain of sand on Earth, there are a million stars in Space.
What had just moments before seemed familiar now revealed itself as some fabled Magician; he replaced the sepia photograph of a sand castle in the entrance of a sunlit cavern with a sweep of his cloak - staring into those all-knowing eyes was lucid suicide. The sand had deceived me, the metaphysical imagery of Marvell flashed before my eyes with illustrious clarity and finally, with a nightmarish inevitability, I noticed the monotonous landscape which span in every direction. No shelter, no escape.
I began to whimper like a child that has succumbed to the dawning realisation of being lost in the foreign isle of a supermarket. Instinctively, I curled into a ball at the foot of the dune and ignored the stillness, imagining – praying even – that some angelic force should catch and deliver me to some warm current steering away from the emptiness. As I did this, screwing my eyes tightly, a neon white line materialised and teased the limits of my vision. It was tantalising, poised on the brink of epiphany; seducing me into false security but promising universal enlightenment.
Suddenly the line ceased to quiver, and the faint electric hum which it omitted was momentarily severed, cut short by the hour glass of time itself. In those motionless millennia I remained, scarcely breathing for fear of upsetting such unifying equilibrium. Then without warning the line fragmented, erupting outwards in a piercing shriek of celestial-shattering intensity. White sparks shot through the infinite blackness, penetrating my soul and trivialising every entrenched belief I had once held dear. My skull throbbed in strained resistance, but the intrusion was relentless; a merciless force willing to scrape away my essence and leave a hollow, nauseous shell in its wake. Seduction had turned into betrayal and now I was falling into an unchartered oblivion. I was a hysterical mute, screaming through sealed lips as the sparks smothered my senses with barbaric cruelty.
As I began to lose all previous notions of reality, a voice resonated through the barrage as if emerging from the haze of an unexplored world,
“Open your Eyes!”
I unwittingly followed this instruction with relative ease. Blotches of unaccustomed light distorted my vision but I was already vaguely aware of some extraordinary sensation. I was lying on an elevated platform – the frozen metallic slab of the morgue – but I was still in the desert. As my eyesight readjusted, I noticed how unnatural this environment seemed, in direct antithesis with the baron Saharan wilderness. The dunes still sloped into the ever-stretching distance but their composition was a unique, florescent shade of violet. In contrast, the once cloudless sky was now heaving with bulging, abnormal shapes which suppressed the thin rays of sunlight piercing the blood-red dusk.
The ringing in my ears compensated for the perpetual silence which grasped the landscape, and after several moments I began to feel uncomfortable. It was then, to my shock, that I found myself staring at a man, sitting in an armchair below my blistered feet. He was dressed in a charcoal suit and pin-striped tie, the fixed grin of a Cheshire cat exposed his perfect white teeth and his cheeks were scarlet with alcoholic merriment. He raised a glass of pink gin in response to my bewildered expression and removed the bowler hat perched on his waxed scalp in polite welcome.
“I do beg your pardon old chap,” he spoke with a refined English accent, “I’m Sir Edward Montague.”
He extended a hand and I leant up, rubbing my eyes to ensure he was not an apparition before cautiously accepting. Montague had a cold, firm handshake which seemed strange considering his bizarre persona.
“Where am I?” I ventured, trembling slightly as I noticed a large, reptilian animal soar silently overhead.
This seemed to amuse Montague, who bellowed with delight,
“But my dear fellow”, he exclaimed, offering me a cigarette from a case concealed in his breast pocket, “This question isn’t where you are, but who you are.”
I accepted a light and exhaled slowly, giving him a quizzical look,
“I’m not sure if I understand -”
He raised a ghost-like finger as if to silence me.
“All will become clear in due course.”
As he was speaking, I slowly found myself to feel delirious once more; the nausea had returned at an alarming rate. Yet as I searched those eyes - those hypnotic orbs – I found myself relaxing, as if under the majestic spell of timelessly familiar conjurer. My head swam, and the world I knew once again began to fade into numbing isolation. The last thing I remember is that trustworthy smile, and the dripping hypodermic needle.
