Extract From Risk
CHAPTER ONE
Thursday, March 17th, I spent the morning in anxiety, the afternoon in ecstasy, and the evening unconscious.
Thursday night, somewhere between dark and dawn, I slowly surfaced into a nightmare which would have been all right if I'd been asleep.
It took me a good long time to realize I was actually awake. Half awake, anyway.
There was no light. I thought my eyes were open, but the blackness was absolute.
There was a lot of noise. Different noises, loud and confusing. A heavy engine. Rattling noises. Creaks. Rushing noises. I lay in a muzzy state and felt battered by too much sound.
Lay . . . I was lying on some sort of mattress. On my back. Cold, sick and stiff. Aching. Shivering. Physically wretched and mentally bewildered.
I tried to move. Couldn't for some reason lift either hand to my face. They seemed to be stuck to my legs. Very odd.
An interminable time passed. I grew colder, sicker, stiffer, and wide awake.
Tried to sit up. Banged my head on something close above. Lay down again, fought a sudden spurt of panic, and made myself take it step by step.
Hands. Why couldn't I move my hands? Because my wrists seemed to be fastened to my trousers. It didn't make sense, but that was what it felt like.
Space. What of space? I stif?y moved my freezing feet, exploring. Found I had no shoes on. Only socks. On the immediate left, a wall. Close above, a ceiling. On the immediate right, a softer barrier. Possibly cloth.
I shifted my whole body a fraction to the right, and felt with my ?ngers. Not cloth, but netting. Like a tennis net. Pulled tight. Keeping me in. I pushed my ?ngers through the mesh, but could feel nothing at all on the far side.
Eyes. If I hadn't gone suddenly blind (and it didn't feel like it), I was lying somewhere where no light penetrated. Brilliant deduction. Most constructive. Ha bloody ha.
Ears. Almost the worst problem. Constant din assaulted them, shutting me close in the narrow black box, preventing me hearing any further than the powerful, nearby, racketing engine. I had a frightening feeling that even if I screamed no one would hear me. I had a sudden even more frightening feeling of wanting to scream. To make someone come. To make someone tell me where I was, and why I was there, and what on earth was happening.
I opened my mouth and yelled.
I yelled 'Hey' and 'Come here' and 'Bloody bastard, come and let me out', and thrashed about in useless rage, and all that happened was that my voice and fear bounded back in the con?ned space and made things worse. Chain reaction. One-way trip to exhaustion.
In the end I stopped shouting and lay still. Swallowed. Ground my teeth. Tried to force my mind into holding on to sense. Disorientation was the road to gibbering.
Concentrate, I told myself. Think.
That engine...
A big one. Doing a job of work. Situated somewhere close, but not where I was. The other side of a wall. Perhaps behind my head.
If it would only stop, I thought numbly, I would feel less sick, less pulverized, less panicky, less threatened.
The engine went right on hammering, its vibration reaching me through the walls. Not a turbine engine: not smooth enough, and no whine. A piston engine. Heavy duty, like a tractor... or a lorry. But I wasn't in a lorry. There was no feeling of movement; and the engine never altered its rate. No slowing or accelerating. No changes of gear. Not a lorry.
A generator. It's a generator, I thought. Making elec¬tricity.
I was lying tied up in the dark and on a sort of shelf near an electric generator. Cold, sick and frightened. And where?
As to how I'd got there... well, I knew that, up to a
point. I remembered the beginning, well enough. I would never forget Thursday, March 17th.
The most shattering questions were those to which I could think of no answer at all.
Why? What for? And what next?