Am I Dead?
A Gripping Psychological Thriller
(Please note this book is the sequel to
‘Who Stole my Life?’,
which was originally published as
‘London 2012: What If?’ )
By
IAN C.P. IRVINE
Published by Ian C. P. Irvine
Copyright 2021 IAN C.P. IRVINE
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright observed above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the copyright owner.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
For my Wife and my Children
And dedicated to all the carers at the View Park Care Home in Edinburgh.
And in loving memory of all those we lost in the pandemic 2019 -2022.
And with thanks to Mark Robinson for his ideas on how to start the book, always the most difficult part!
Also with thanks for help with this book to:
Sue Alexander
Melanie Billows
Sandie Pavey
Other Books by Ian C.P. Irvine
Who Stole My Life?
The Orlando File
Haunted From Within
Haunted From Without
I Spy, I Saw Her Die
Say You're Sorry
The Assassin’s Gift
Remember Me
Time Ship
The Sleeping Truth
The Messiah Conspiracy
Alexis Meets Wiziwam the Wizard
Get Writing!
©Ian CP Irvine 2021
Table Of Contents
Click Here to go to Table of Contents
Chapter One
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This book is the sequel to ‘Who Stole My Life?’
If you have not read that book, you can download it for free from Amazon.
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I’m possibly dead.
There is no sound. My eyes are open but around me it’s pitch black. I think I may be floating. But then it occurs to me that since I’m thinking, I am therefore not dead.
Perhaps, maybe, I am blind.
Or am I just somewhere where it’s very, very dark?
My ears strain for sound. At first I hear only the loud thump, thump, thump of my own heart, but then I begin to make out some other sounds.
Soft, small, fast. Whatever it is, there’s more than one. I listen to them for a moment, but then I hear the sounds disappearing away from me. Soon the sound is gone.
Other senses seem to be returning to my body. My back is cold. My head is pressing against something hard. I begin to feel my fingers again. Soon I’m able to move my hands, arms and legs, and I realise that I’m lying down on a cold, hard, surface.
I push myself up into a sitting position, my legs extended out in front of me. My nose tingles. I am sniffing the air vigorously now, trying to detect any clues as to where I am, using whatever senses I have available to me. I detect the pungent odour of damp. Damp that you’d expect in … a cave? The cellar of an old-house… a castle, or a dungeon, perhaps?
Am I in prison? In solitary confinement? No lights, no water? No human contact?
My nose tickles. I cough. I’m immediately shocked by how loud it is, the sound pressing back down on me from all around, catching me by surprise.
I cough again, deliberately this time, and I listen to the pattern of sound that comes back at me. Like a beached dolphin, I find that I’m able to map out a rough sense of my surroundings from the way the sound bounces back from whatever it is that’s around me.
It seems that there are walls somewhere on either side of me, but beyond my feet, the wall seems to be far away. My cough is sucked away from me, with no sound reflected back from that direction.
I cough again, to confirm what I just heard. Then I twist my body around, and cough into the darkness behind me. Once again, the sound reverberates from whatever is enclosing me on either side, but behind me, the sound loses itself in the darkness which seems to extend away without end.
I turn back to how I was before and lie back down on the ground. Adrenaline is coursing through my veins, and I feel the first twinges of fear. Where on earth am I?
And how did I get here?
I’m struggling to think clearly…every thought comes to me as if through a dense, suffocating fog.
‘How did I get here?’ I ask myself again.
It’s a good question.
I try to remember the last place I was, the last moment before the world disappeared and I was swallowed by the blackness which is around me now.
Dimly I remember a woman’s face…and her words…spoken slowly, almost comically, as the words seemed to draw out for an eternity before the syllables came rushing together in an instant and I realized what she was saying: ‘I’m pregnant!’
The woman’s face is instantly conjured up in my mind’s eye, and a name is spoken inside my head: ‘Sarah’.
The name is immediately followed by a rush of emotions, and my heart skips a beat. Then another. It loses its rhythm, jumping and skipping erratically, and for a moment I worry that it’s a heart attack. I clench my fist and bang it on my chest to jolt it back to normal and cough several times. I breathe deeply, gasping for air.
I lie back on the ground and try to think.
A million thoughts simultaneously rush through my mind. Pictures form, become clear, then disappear. And piece by piece I begin to put together the history of the last few moments of my life, before I ended up here. Now. Wherever this is…
My name is James Quinn. The last memories I had before now, before this black void engulfed me, were of me standing at the door of a carriage in the underground on the Jubilee Line in London. Behind me, a professor from Edinburgh University was filming me, hoping to catch the moment I was going to step through a portal from one world to another; to capture on film, the first person in history moving from one parallel world to another.
I was to be that person. And it had begun to happen… the portal had opened up between the two worlds across which my life had been split, just as the professor had predicted, and I was just about to step from one world to the other, when Sarah – my wife in one world, and lover in another, had caught me in the last few seconds before the portal was due to close. In the microseconds which followed, she had imparted to me the best and worst of news - that she was pregnant - and then expected me to make a decision.
A decision that no sane man could be expected to make: to choose between a woman he loved in one world, and that same woman, who he loved equally as much, in another.
But I had made a choice. Made in the heat of that moment, as the worlds I have occupied collided and demanded from me an answer.
“Choose!”
Choose between your wife Sarah in one world, with whom you have two daughters, Keira and Nicole, and a long life together.
Or choose the same woman, Sarah, your lover in a parallel world, with whom you will now have a child in future. Perhaps a
son. To replace the one you once lost in the other world…
The complexity of the dilemma I have occupied and that has devoured me for this past year has no bounds. The more I think about it - the more I seek to recall - and the more I know, the more I am dammed to hell.
A year ago, when this all started, I did not choose to step from one world into another, to discover that in that new world I was married to another woman, Jane, who had been a fantasy lover of mine in my former life, or to find that in my new life, I was a successful advertising executive on the up-and-up, enjoying the career path I had always only fantasised about in my former life.
But I did make that fateful step. One moment I had been on an underground train on the Jubilee Line in one world, a world where I had begun to tire of my day-to-day existence and to long for more excitement… and then the next I was on a train travelling in a new world where all my dreams had come true, and where that green, green grass I had always longed for was now under my feet.
Yet, as soon as I had kicked off my shoes and begun to walk on the green, green grass of my oh, so wonderful dream-world, I had begun to realize that beneath the grass was mud, and with every step I took, I began to long more and more for the world I had left behind.
Without a way home, with a seemingly life-long sentence cast upon me that decreed I should remain forever in the parallel world of my dreams, I had begun to make do. I had abandoned my ‘wife’ Jane and gone in search of the woman who now occupied my dreams… Sarah, in the hope that she existed in this world, as she did in the other.
The irony of the situation had been lost on me until too late: that I was once again running from a wife into the hands of a lover, who in the parallel world were reversed from the reality in the other world.
Then I had found her. Sarah. Not my wife in my new world, but the true woman of my… ’dreams’… of my other world,… my real world…
And then by overcoming all her defences and persuading her of my good intent, I had slowly lured her to bed.
Stolen her heart.
Unintentionally impregnated her.
And then, I had abandoned her. Again.
Once more I had stepped through a portal in time, from one world to another. From the arms of the woman I loved, to …
To ?
Hell?
For a moment I ponder this.
And then I laugh.
Because after a moment of absolute enlightenment, I realize where I am.
First of all, I know it’s not hell. It’s not hot enough. And there are no other people here. None of my friends. Surely if this was hell, I would be too busy talking to people from my old life to have any time to think.
Secondly, the clues were all there, and now I have pieced them together, it’s obvious where I am: the last moment I can picture in my mind before the lights went out, I was stepping from a tube train through the train doors, and onto an underground train platform.
Which is where I now must be.
Lying on the platform of an underground tunnel.
In the dark. Alone. About to be eaten by mice and rats.
Chapter Two
In the dark
What went wrong?
Where are all the people? Why is it dark? The last thing I can remember seeing before the world disappeared from view was the sight of a woman and two girls walking away from me as I stepped through the doors of the tube train. I was sure it was Sarah, Keira and Nicole. My wife and two daughters.
And where am I now? Although I can’t see it, I’m pretty sure that my guess is probably right. I must be lying on the platform of an underground station.
Then another question hits me, and I realize that right now, it’s probably the most important of all. How do I get out of here?
If I am lying on the edge of an underground platform, it’s not unreasonable to worry that only a metre or two from where I might be lying are electrified train-tracks just waiting for me to take one bad step in the wrong direction.
The thought of the electricity causes a horrific, random thought to flash through my mind, which does nothing to alleviate my current worries: according to modern London folk-lore one of the most common causes of death down in the tunnels is electrocution initiated by drunken male revellers returning home late at night and urinating on the tracks at the end of the tunnel platforms. Their smoking, dead bodies are found the next morning, the tell-tale signs of their cause of death being a black, charred, crumbly, carbonized penis, left behind from the electricity as it arcs up into and through their genitals via the stream of their urine.
It’s not helpful, that just as this thought courses through my mind, I realize that I too, feel the need. In fact I’m desperate.
A slight panic follows.
What do I do?
I can’t go to the toilet here… wherever that is… it’s too risky. Although all forms of death are fatal, for some reason, I feel I owe it to my little, sorry - ‘large’ - friend, to protect him from being turned into charcoal.
My thoughts turn to escaping from wherever this place is. Escaping and finding a loo. Quickly.
Then an idea occurs to me.
Automatically my hand goes to the pocket in my trousers where my phone would normally be.
The Scotia Telecom mobile phone that I’ve been using for the past few months is nowhere near as powerful as the phones from the world I used to live in, in my real world, but it does still have a screen that lights up and can act like a very weak torch.
I find a pocket, full of what feels like tissue paper, but nothing else. As I start searching for other pockets in my clothing, I notice that the clothes I am wearing feel different from the ones I remember putting on this morning.
The cloth seems… coarser. Not as soft. Not cotton. More like rough tweed or rough denim. And two of the pockets I find have holes and are empty.
Why am I wearing different clothes? Whose are they?
Pushing that thought aside, I kneel up and lean forward, my unseeing eyes now wide open, and my fingers and hands exploring the ground around me.
Suddenly my hand touches something. Fearing it could be a rat, I instantly pull my hand back, and hesitate. Hearing no immediate scurrying away of tiny feet, I reach out again, and rediscover the object. Tentatively I explore it with my fingers, trying to build a picture of it in my mind.
A bag.
I grab a handful of it and pull it closer, examining it hurriedly with both hands.
A rucksack?
I find an opening, and start to explore its contents.
My senses are incredibly alert now, and it’s almost as if I can see with my fingertips. Worried that if I pull anything out of the bag I will lose it in the dark, I fumble around inside, searching for anything that might help. Is that cloth… clothes? A book… a knife?… A plastic bottle with a liquid in it? A can containing liquid? Something round… an apple? Tissues. A rolled up ‘something’…something long and pointed…another something long and pointed…a small box….
The box rattles as I touch it. Something inside is loose.
An alarm bell goes off inside my head. Could it be?
Gingerly, scared that I may drop it, I pull the small cardboard box out of the bag, resting the bag against my legs so that I know where it is. I carefully lift the box up to my face, with both hands, and explore its edges. I shake the box. The contents rattle again, reassuringly, and a surge of excitement floods through me.
Slowly I push one end of the small box in with what I hope is my forefinger…it moves… I feel the box protrude out at the other end of its length. Carefully, I insert two fingers into the box, and pull out a tiny stick. My fingers are shaking now…but I manage to close the box carefully, rub the edge of it with my finger to detect the side I need, then turn the box over to its edge. I readjust my grip on the box and the wooden stick and slowly draw the tip of the stick along the edge of the rough side of the box.
I feel and hear the roughness of the box catching the edge of
the stick, and I almost cry with joy, as the tip of the little stick explodes. And bursts into light.
Fire! I have fire!
I blink. It’s a miracle…! ‘I once was blind, but now I see!’
I blink again, then watch in awe as the cave around me slowly emerges from the darkness and presents its secrets to me.
I am indeed in a tunnel. A long curving underground train tunnel that disappears ahead of me into the darkness which lurks beyond the power of the flame. I’m in the middle of the platform, reassuringly sufficiently far away from its edge not to be in immediate risk of falling over and frying on the rails.
I turn around to look behind me, but at that point, the flame on the match starts to burn my finger, and I drop it, shouting loudly in pain.
Am I Dead? Page 1