At first I couldn’t make anything out. There seemed to be some kind of bleeping in the background, and a low voice but not talking direct into the mouthpiece, it was a background conversation of some sort. It was a female voice, an adult voice, but it was talking so quietly I couldn’t make anything out.
Then somebody spoke direct into the earpiece. It was crystal clear, the only human voice I had heard in days. A child’s voice, maybe four or five years old, lilting and incredibly beautiful. I only made out one word before I fainted clean away.
It said “Daddy?”
80%
In the dream I was paralysed. I lay on my back unable to move, sweat pouring from me and pooling on the floor under my bare back, whilst shadows stepped over and around me.
Were they people?
I couldn’t tell. They were puffs of black smoke, shadows that moved like remnants of coal fires dissipating up a chimney, cold and unrecognisable.
Could they not see me?
The smell was back, the tangy scent of bleach, like when you step into a leisure centre and you instantly catch a whiff of the swimming pool, chorine infused with human perspiration. It was a blur to me. I knew people were there but I couldn’t discern their shape to tell whether they were male or female, old or new, friend or unknown. I swam in and out of sight, but when I could see it was still just a blur. Some of the time I was aware of the voice from the phone, the little boy or girl saying ‘daddy’ over and over, and I knew it was directed at me but I couldn’t answer. I tried to speak and the words simply failed in my mouth, they didn’t even form in the back of my throat but I knew what I wanted to say. It was as if I was having some kind of out-of-body experience but I was still trapped in my own body. It was an in-body, out-of-body phenomenon. Then the numbers began flashing again, bigger and bolder that ever before, a luminous flashing ‘80%’ that filled my whole field of vision, and with it this time a rhythmic bleeping in the background.
Then something new happened. They started to countdown, slowly at first, from 80% to 75% to 69% to 64% to 60% in the space of what felt like a single percentage per second. A single beep accompanied each decrease, as if it were a bomb counting down to the moment of detonation. Then suddenly, terrifyingly, it got quicker. The numbers sped up, or accurately sped down, faster and faster, and the beeping got louder and louder, and I was suddenly aware of what it meant. It was my life counting down before my very eyes. The numbers grew bigger the lower they got, 36%, 29%, 22%… 18%… 12%… and as they hit 10% they turned red and the light behind them became blinding until the noise and the light became total and I charged inexorably towards death and the bleeping became one giant shrill screech and the light finally consumed me and everything I knew.
77%
The stench of burning filled my nostrils as I came round. I was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, wisps of black smoke curling around the light fittings. The phone receiver was still in my hand, curled around my arm as I had gone down. The floor was rock hard and cold, and I gingerly raised the receiver to my ear as I remembered the reason I had blacked out. Instead of hearing that sweet voice again, there was nothing. Not even a ring tone. The phone had fallen on the floor as well and cracked open. A chip board emerged from the central seal in a kind of mocking salute that seemed to say ‘you will never get me to work again.’
I got to my feet as quickly as the stiffness would allow and tried to gather my senses. I had fainted in sheer shock at hearing my daughter’s voice, and I was sure it was my daughter, how could a father mistake their own child’s voice?
Then the burning smell registered in my brain and I sensed the change in the air quality. It was coming from the restaurant, and in a moment of horror I realised I had left the gas burner on and it was still boiling the soup.
Black smoke poured out of the entrance doors to the restaurant but I could just make out the shape of the buffet and the large copper soup terrine that I had eaten from earlier. How much earlier I couldn’t be sure, but it must have taken a good half hour for all that soup to burn away and the terrine to start getting very angry at the persistent gas flame underneath it.
I definitely needed to get in there to stop the flame before it started to spread, but the smoke was thick and billowing and I needed some sort of filter to block it out. I grabbed a table cloth from a tourist display in the lobby and plunged it into the fountain nearby. Once it was thoroughly soaked I wrapped it around my nose and mouth as tightly as possible, took a deep breath and ran back to the restaurant.
The smoke stung my eyes and made them stream with water and I could feel tendrils of it creeping through my rudimentary mask, threatening to stop my lungs as I kicked past tables and chairs in a blind frenzy. I barked my shin against one and cried out as a bolt of pain shot up my leg and resolved itself somewhere in my chest.
I reached the copper pot and saw it had turned red hot in the flame, the soup inside long melted away and just a charred mess welded to the sides as the heat continued to cook it. Shielding my eyes from the heat I managed to reach under the table it sat on to get at the gas canister underneath. The tube running up to the hob under the terrine had already started to melt, and I realised that if I had remained unconscious for even a few more minutes it could have gone completely and exposed the contents of the gas canister to the open flame. I didn’t want to think about what kind of explosion that could have caused.
The handle atop the canister was also red hot and I had to lean down and loosen a portion of my tablecloth mask to wrap round it and try to turn it off. It hissed in protest as the wet cloth closed around it and I felt the heat rapidly start to transfer to my hand. Whether it had melded shut with heat or whether it was just a quirk of fate I don’t know, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to turn and shut off the gas. Meanwhile the feeder tube was getting slicker and slicker as the rubber melted away. I surmised I needed either to shut the thing off or get the heck out of there in the next 30 seconds. I twisted the handle with all my might, but it would not close, and when I felt the searing pain as the heat worked its way through the wet cloth and started to bite into my palm I knew I had to give up and get out. With one last ditch attempt I tried to kick the soup container off its housing, but was screwed in place and didn’t budge an inch.
The smoked clawed at my lungs, acrid and choking, and I kept low as I made my way to the exit. Visibility was slightly better in the reception area, and thankfully I had left the lobby door open when I had come in earlier.
I emerged into the bright sunshine of the afternoon and just as I sucked in my first lungful of fresh air a huge bang forced me to instinctively duck and hit the ground, seconds before a wave of heat and smoke and flame blew out of the doors behind me.
Had I been inside I would have been toast.
I stayed low until the heat subsided, crawling away from the entrance to the hotel on my hands and knees, half dazed and half choked. The heat from the blast combined with the heat from the midday sun meant the sweat was lashing off me, and my eyes were still stinging from the smoke as I made my way to the far end of the car park.
As I reached the pathway that led down to the beachside I glanced behind me to see a grey cloud billowing out of the Hesperia’s entrance lobby. A combination of smoke inhalation and mild shock caused me to hurl my guts up on the spot. It was then I decided I had never needed a beer so badly in my life.