Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Readers’ Club

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  One

  He looked down and was half-blinded by the white glare of a huge overhead light. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was as if time had slowed down, and his shock and disbelief were stalling any attempt to understand what was happening. It was simply not possible that the face of the patient on the operating table was his own.

  John Logan’s eighteen years of life had been without major incident or injury. In fact, recently, he had never felt more alive, never happier. It seemed like only moments ago that he had been holding Jennifer Miller––the girl he had fallen in love with as they danced in the heaving atmosphere of O’Donnell’s pub on a band night. His last memory was of her face close to his, the scent of her perfume hanging heavy in the damp air of a New York summer’s rainfall, the sparkle in her eyes, the parting of her lips and his desire to claim them, to claim her. Then, abruptly, darkness had fallen over everything, and he could remember nothing more.

  Now all he could smell in the forced air of the operating room was something far less pleasant, like that of burning hair but many times worse. He felt as though he was standing in the center of the operating table, in the center of all the activity. Except he wasn’t standing, he was floating, just looking, observing. There was nothing to him––just space, just air––yet somehow, he was there.

  He looked down, disbelieving, at his body on the table, his view framed by the tilted heads of the huddled surgical team, their scrubs seeming to merge into the drapes over him and the linings of the instrument trays, forming a sea of pristine green material. At the center of it all, directly below him, was the focus of all the seamless, urgent, and precise interactions in the room: an exposed and brightly lit section of his once-perfect adolescent skin now marred by a vicious, rip-like wound.

  The lead surgeon, differentiated from her team by both her obvious command and brightly colored scrub cap, was slicing through and cauterizing the flesh of his abdomen with some kind of heated scalpel. As she cut, the acrid fumes curled upward, and metal clamps pulled apart the seared edges to expose the extent of the damage beneath.

  John tried calling out to her for help, for an explanation. But to no avail; with no voice, his attempts were silent, as he was invisible to her and the others in the room. His astonishment was forced to give way to fresh memories. They reared up unexpectedly, disjointed and fragmented: Jennifer falling to the ground; his own collapse with sudden, burning pain in his midsection; the sight of his pooling blood and Jennifer’s immobile body; the feel of the sidewalk against the side of his face, gritty, wet, and still warm from the day’s sun. Then, more and more voices, the wailing of sirens and bass-deep air horn blasts, pulses of colored light all around him, illuminating faces, uniforms, and the backs of dozens of smartphones raised by a thickening crowd of onlookers.

  Shouts of “BP?” and “96 systolic” dragged his attention back to the harsh brightness of the operating room. Still looking down onto his body beneath him, shock and confusion dulled any revulsion he may have had to the sight of his open abdomen. A strong metallic odor had replaced the smell of burning as gloved hands, sheathed crimson from his blood, stitched together the sides of a gaping cut in a flat, shiny-brown organ. He recognized it as his liver and looked back at the patient’s face. It was still his face––shut down and bleak with the corner of his mouth pulled down by an invading tube. To think, just three months earlier, he had worn a constant smile of excitement about his and his father’s life-changing move from Dublin to New York. His biggest concern had been about how he’d fit in as a high school senior at his new school in Brooklyn.

  An alarm suddenly sounded.

  “BP dropping,” warned a technician.

  “We’re losing him,” the lead surgeon said as she quickened the pace of her stitching. “If I can just close…” she added.

  Long minutes passed. The alarm continued. John looked on helplessly, his fear mounting.

  “BP dropping. Systolic now 80,” the technician advised.

  The lead surgeon finally closed the knife wound to the liver with one last suture and ordered the release of the clamps.

  “BP still dropping.”

  “Shit! There must be a wound somewhere else. I’m not losing this boy! Clamps!” the surgeon demanded as she noticed a rupture in the hepatic artery, which was spewing blood now that it was no longer deprived of it. “Re-clamp here,” she said, directing an assistant, who quickly re-administered the clamps.

  “BP still dropping!” the technician informed her.

  The words caused John’s state of shock to be compounded by a sudden and terrifying realization about his new state. He was the patient and yet he was completely disconnected from every action occurring in the room. The sound of the frantic activity below him seemed to fade away as a profound emptiness and silent panic engulfed him.

  Although he couldn’t possibly know it, John was on the precipice of extraordinary change.

  Two

  John’s view of the world suddenly began to change. The scene with his body lying on the operating table was dwarfed into insignificance, as if he were zooming outward on a satellite image of his location. Something phenomenal was happening––his senses and his ability to process information were expanding beyond anything he could have possibly imagined. He had knowledge of all that was going on around him—who people were, what they were saying and doing, far and near, in other operating theaters, in other departments, in other buildings of the Queens Bayview Hospital. Amid it all, he saw Jennifer, still unconscious, being pushed on a gurney toward the testing wing of the hospital. He could even read her file, which noted the need for a head scan––standard procedure for a head injury. At the ER reception, Jim Donovan, owner of O’Donnell’s bar and friend of John’s father, Tom Logan, was being informed that information on John’s condition was available only to family members. Next he saw a bird’s-eye view of his father returning from a meeting in Boston, his Maserati sports car racing into Queens, only to be halted at a junction to give way to an approaching paramedic’s truck weaving around roadworks and parting traffic on its way to the same hospital from another direction.

  His extraordinary new ability to see and understand everything happening around him had now extended past the boundaries of Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan to the entire City of New York. Agony and ecstasy, crime and punishment, greed and poverty, depravity and passion––all of it happening at that instant, in different locations al
l over the city. Then he realized he could see something more: not just the three-dimensional images his brain normally presented, but a whole extra dimension. He couldn’t have explained why, but he just knew the additional layer was energy—the energy within everyone and everything and which passed unceasingly between everyone and everything. Every human action was an energy transfer that rippled out into intricate patterns and intertwined, or caused a reaction with other energy. This principle applied to everything from the sound of words being spoken to the beat of a moth’s wings, to the flight of a bullet. He watched with a childlike sense of wonder and clear-eyed vision as a hidden sub-structure of the world mapped itself out before him. It was as beautiful in its complexity as it was awe-inspiring.

  Then, as if a veil had been suddenly lifted, he saw the energy for what it was: a conduit of information about people’s hopes, fears, ambitions, intentions, but also about the likely extent of their lifespan and their predisposition to good or evil. It was the energy that flowed in the form of actions that carried the most significant information: it carried consequences—the consequences of every human decision and subsequent activity, small or large, consequences that could affect the few or the many, that could span short distances or whole cities and continents. Each consequence provoked further actions, which carried their own repercussions, creating a seemingly infinite, expanding network.

  John feared for his sanity, and that his mind would literally explode with the onslaught of so many millions of pieces of information. He then started to notice that out of all the disembodied conversations he could tune into, a small but increasing number of voices were speaking directly to him. So gradually had they appeared that they neither shocked nor frightened him, but their persistent message started to needle him. They exhorted him to join them in the afterlife and thereby keep the new powers he was experiencing. The voices grew louder now, assailing him on all sides, drilling into him as if trying to bury their message deep within him.

  Desperate to make sense of what was happening, John found himself clinging to an explanation he had once read about but found ridiculous, however much he wanted to believe in it: what he was going through seemed to be a near-death-experience. By definition, that meant he was nearly dying but not dying, caught in some kind of limbo, not moving on to any sort of afterlife and yet not returning to the life he had before.

  Whatever this was, he still had his own will, and it was resisting the messages goading him to move on to the afterlife. The fear he had felt before was now giving way to anger. How could he accept the injustice of his time on Earth being cut short? Or that he’d never experience a full life, never know if Jennifer might have been the one to share it with?

  Like the onslaught of water after the opening of the floodgates of a dam, the information now poured in with even more force, and with it, a message willing him to accept his destiny. The latter grew ever stronger and the pressure became intense but, despite that, his anger surged in one last attempt to obliterate everything trying to compete for his attention. For a moment, he feared his mind would blow. Nothing could withstand this pressure––it seemed inevitable. Then, just as he was waiting for the tipping point to be reached, it all stopped, suddenly, like a kiddie ride needing another quarter.

  A sudden void, and then, a second later, he was back in the OR, looking at his detached body lying prostrate on the operating table. His reassuringly restricted view of the world had returned. He reveled in the release, but it was short-lived. Whatever was happening to him was not yet over.

  John noticed that the lead surgeon had gone, leaving her team to close up his body. As he watched them counting out the instruments and the blood-soaked swabs, presumably to ensure none had been left inside him, he realized he had no idea if the operation had been a success. He had missed the surgeon’s assessment and final prognosis. He had missed it because of the incredible thing that had just happened to him.

  He was still separate from his body. Did that mean whatever subsequent surgery had occurred wasn’t a success? His body was still connected to a ventilator, but the heartbeat monitor was pinging with what seemed like a normal beat. He figured he would rejoin his body at the point when he regained consciousness. It sounded reasonable. But what if he didn’t regain consciousness? What if his body was in a coma? He listened in to a conversation struck up between the remaining staff, now stitching and cleaning him, to garner a clue regarding his condition, but with a feeling of despair he found they were discussing their personal lives. Then he realized that his body wouldn’t be of any interest to them. This was, after all, just another day at work to them, and he was just another patient in a long list.

  As he was considering this, their voices seemed to weaken as he gradually became aware of a gentle rhythm coming from where he would expect his chest to be, except he had no chest; he had nothing of himself to see or touch. It was a rhythm intimately known to him and that had been with him his entire life. It was the beat of his heart, with an elevated rate reflecting his heightened anxiety. His real heart, of course, like the rest of his body, still lay below him, where the final sutures to his abdomen were now in progress. The beat he could now hear, and feel, was out of step with the beeps and peaks displayed on the monitor screens, a beat being produced not by his body, but by something else, something alien.

  A faint orange glow appeared at the center of the pulsating energy. He watched as its light intensified and strands of orange energy moved outwards, weaving together at a quickening pace. They formed two larger and two smaller chambers, which contracted and expanded to the rhythm of the beats. A functioning heart appeared, perfect in every detail except for its color––a glowing, vibrant orange. The strands of energy continued to simultaneously spread and interlace in all directions, now forming major veins, arteries, and starting to reveal more organs, the largest of which, the lungs, appeared heaving and sponge-like. Minor veins and arteries, capillaries, the lymphatic system, then bones, muscles, fat, skin, hair, and nails were all manifested in intricate detail, each layer covering the previous one and all with the same orange radiance. Next, tiny light-carrying fibers meshed and spread like waves in all directions, forming precise copies of his clothes and sneakers. What emerged––the sum of all these parts––was a perfect, glowing facsimile of the flesh-and-blood body beneath him.

  Before John could wonder at the change that he had gone through, his physical body was being transferred by the surgical staff from the operating table to a stretcher.

  “Wait! What’s happening!” he called out, discovering his voice had returned. But still nobody could hear him. His words fell on deaf ears as the staff hooked up his unconscious body to a portable ventilator and other monitoring equipment on the gurney. The OR equipment was powered down and the light from the dish-like surgical lamp killed. He called out again and tried to follow them as they disappeared out of the double swinging doors with his body, but he found he couldn’t move. His new form was rooted to the spot. What had always seemed like a simple, automatic reaction––thinking about moving, and then actually moving—was not happening. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, he realized the floor seemed to be slowly giving way beneath him. He was slowly sinking into it as though it was no longer solid but made of some kind of dense liquid. He could no longer see his feet. As he felt them penetrate through to the other side of the floor, he seemed to gain momentum and his descent quickened.

  John had never been religious, but in his increasing state of panic, he couldn’t help but think he might be descending to hell. But if that was the case, he had no idea who he could have wronged in his short life. He was only eighteen! The floor rapidly approached his eyeline and then disappeared over his head. As he passed through it at eye level, he saw the make-up of the floor in cross-section: concrete, then a void with ductwork, pipework and light fittings. Then, suddenly, his view was of the room below. Dimly lit, it appeared to be a storeroom. The floor of this room was now rapidly approaching but this time h
e wasn’t going to fully pass through it. Less than a second after his feet disappeared into it, he hit an immovable, opposing force. His legs buckled, throwing his body forward. Instinctively he shot his arms forward to protect his head from impact, his hands and knees disappearing into the floor and coming to a stop at the same depth as his feet.

  Finding himself now on all fours, he had to get upright so he could start to try and figure out what was going on. At least he had stopped falling. Something below the floor was supporting him and so he pressed his knees and feet against it as he leaned backward to pull his hands out and get himself in a kneeling position. His hands came out slowly, the floor having the same strange, syrupy quality as the floor of the operating room. He appeared to pull part of the floor upwards with his exiting hands, almost coating them before it snapped back with a slight ripple. Shocked by what he had seen, and in an attempt to avoid touching the floor again, he rocked himself backward onto the soles of his feet, liberating his knees, and stood up using just his legs. Pain just like real pain from a real fall, with a real body, coursed through him as he did so.

  He had been correct in his deduction, that the room was a storeroom. Right in front of him was a group of floor-polishing machines, and the walls were lined with shelves containing cleaning products. Then he noticed something unnerving in his peripheral vision. It was an orange luminescence, just like his own. John immediately turned his head toward it and saw another perfect facsimile of a human being: a glowing, three-dimensional image of an elderly man in overalls sat in the corner smiling at him. John stared back at him in awe, uncomprehending.