The Furnace of Hell by Richard Wilson

Author:Richard Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784627102
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It started slowly, one night when I thought I was having a restful night’s sleep. The nightmare was so vivid that I woke trembling, with a hoarse cry. It had seemed so unbelievably real that the transition from sleep to wakefulness took several minutes as, with agonized slowness, I wrenched myself back to reality. There was no question whether I remembered the dream. Every detail seemed as fresh as if I had truly experienced it. There were hands reaching for me, voices crying, “Take him Take him,” and then I was thrown into a concrete dungeon filled with spitting cobras who slithered around my legs before coiling upward to aim their venom into my eyes. I was screaming, and yet no one heard me. Somehow, in the way of dreams, I saw a severed head with sightless eyes staring at me, a face I thought I recognized, and on the floor and wall a blanket of blood. I struggled, my arms and legs pinioned by thongs so tight I could barely move, and then, slowly, I woke.

In the days and nights that followed I repeated that dream, sometimes as a nightmare and sometimes during the day as a vision. It was so real I could barely distinguish between my conscious state and the other world into which I plunged. Once or twice at my office, Kay shook me back to reality, telling me I had gone white and was making strangling noises. She was worried and wanted me to see a doctor, but I assured her I was all right. I thought these dreams would surely pass, that with time I would begin to put the horror of those last days in Nigeria into some closed box in my mind. It didn’t happen. Indeed, they became, if anything, more vivid and more frequent.

I was also obsessed with the hint in Mike Boyle’s letter that Mei Li might have been taken north into the trackless expanse of the Sahara. Over and over again, I replayed the last stanza of the poem I had read in the King’s College library in Cambridge. It was engraved in my mind.

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