Page 5 of New Beginning

He came round lying on the same hard ground, but this time with the sound of the crash replaying in his head. He sucked in a breath. It was still foggy. It struck him then that he could be lying in a hospital bed, in a coma. So I am alive. That made more sense than anything he’d come up with so far. Though how he’d survived that crash he didn’t know. But if he had, maybe the others…

For a moment, he hoped. Then reality hit again. It wasn’t possible. He’d be fooling himself if he tried to think it was. Maybe the emergency services had got him out. He could be badly injured but still alive, for the moment. Except he wished he was dead. He wanted to die. He’d had unhappy times as a child when he’d wished he wasn’t in the world anymore. But he’d carried on because he thought things would get better. He found a way through. School had helped, so had his friends.

But this? He couldn’t live with this, with the weight of knowing all those people had died and he hadn’t. The shame of it. The guilt. He cried until he couldn’t cry anymore. No matter how sorry he was, it made no difference.

Teddy pushed himself to his feet, and stared into the fog. There was no point staying where he was. If he was in hospital, his survival depended on other people, doctors, nurses. If he wasn’t in hospital, then he might as well find out where he was. He’d had his moment of panic. Come out of it. Now he had to do something. So he walked.

And walked.

And kept walking.

When he suddenly stepped out of the fog, he gasped in shock. It hadn’t slowly dissipated, it had just vanished, as if he’d walked through a door. He turned round and could see the fog behind him, a thick grey wall rising up and up, and it ran either side of him for as far as he could see. That was so weird.

When he turned his back on it and looked forwards, he stood in what he could only think of as a flat monochrome wasteland. Overhead the sky was solid grey though it didn’t look like clouds. There were no variations in the colour, no breaks, no hint of the sun. It was just a bank of nothingness. Off-white dust lay under his feet.

Where the hell am I? Or more to the point. Where has my mind taken me?

There were no footprints, no animal or vehicle tracks, no insects, no plants. It was a frighteningly empty place yet he was wary of calling out. He walked a few steps then turned and looked back. The bank of fog was still there, not following him—thank fuck for that—and he could see his footprints leading from it. It had been nighttime a little while ago. And chilly. It didn’t feel chilly. Teddy was neither hungry nor thirsty. Though that could be explained if he was in a hospital on a drip and unconscious.

He didn’t want to be in hospital. He wanted to die. Right now. He didn’t deserve to be alive. He didn’t want to spend years in a coma, a drain on the National Health Service. Oh shit. Was this his punishment for killing his friends, for killing a family he didn’t know? That car had been on the wrong side of the road but…

Except, had it? Had it been on the wrong side? Had he been so mesmerised by the headlights that he’d strayed over the line?

Doubt grew, tears fell again and Teddy kept walking. He’d not been quick enough to yank the wheel the other way. Guilt weighed him down, slowed his steps.

Is this hell? He hadn’t believed in heaven or hell, but now…

He could see something dark in the distance, some long mark on the ground. He wondered if it was a river, but when he reached it, he realised it was a crevasse, a crack in the earth about ten feet across. He couldn’t see the bottom. There were no stones to throw in. He kicked some dust over the edge but it didn’t make a sound as it fell. The crack stretched as far as he could see in either direction.

Teddy thought about the crash, thought about what he’d done and how he was feeling now, then walked forward to let the ground swallow him. And it did. He fell and fell, and after the first couple of seconds, it wasn’t frightening. He was almost happy. When he hit the bottom, that would be the end. It would all be over.

Except it wasn’t. He opened his eyes to find himself lying next to the crack on the surface. The same crack in the earth? When he sat up, he could see his footprints on the other side. What the fuck? He’d fallen down and come up on the opposite side? Teddy pushed to his feet and jumped in this time.

He fell until everything went black again. When he opened his eyes, he was back where he started. There were no footprints either side, no bank of fog in sight now, so he didn’t know if he’d crossed over the crack or not. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe that was the point. An endless trek to nowhere.

All he could do was walk, so that was what he did and his unravelling mind began to unravel further. A crater of steaming water appeared in front of him, like those volcanic ponds in Yellowstone that he’d seen on the TV. Dying by boiling to death would be awful, but no more than he deserved. He jumped in and emerged on the other side, dry and not burned.

When he found himself at the top of a cliff, he looked down to see it was a sheer drop onto jagged rock. He didn’t even hesitate. He threw himself over, and was left unmarked and not even breathing heavily.

He dragged mouthfuls of the grainy dust into his mouth only for it to dissolve to nothing, refusing to suffocate him.

It was almost as if he was mentally creating opportunities to kill himself. Not deliberately, but they kept coming. Every attempt at nonexistence spat him right back out onto the flat, indifferent expanse.

The silence began to scream. Or maybe it was him. It’s me. I’m doing all this. I’m torturing myself.

Without walls, without trees, without a horizon that made any structural sense, the sheer vastness of the place pressed against his skull. The infinite grey overhead felt like a crushing ocean of nothing waiting to collapse on him. There was nowhere to hide. No corners to curl into. No shadows to cover the shame of what he’d done. Just an endless, exposed plateau where he was the only piece on the board.

He closed his eyes, but couldn’t sleep. Nor could he turn off his mind. Panic replaced grief. He clawed frantically at the ground, trying to dig a trench, a hole, anything to lower himself beneath the terrifying wide-open space. But the earth didn’t hold shape; the dust fell back into place, smooth and unbroken.

Then the silence he couldn’t stand was broken by sounds he was even less able to cope with. The noise of the crash came back to be repeated over and over, until Teddy finally fell apart. He hugged his knees to his chest, shrinking himself into as small a target as possible, even though the only thing that was hurting him was his own mind.

“Help me! Please!”

The expanse offered no reply, no shelter, and no escape. It just stretched on—vast, empty, and forever wide open. Night never fell. The crash kept happening. And his mind continued to torment him. He looked down at his hands to find them covered in blood. He spent hours trying to rub off what wasn’t there.

What have I done to deserve this?

But he knew. All those lives lost. All his fault. He could never be sorry enough. His mother had always said ‘Sorry meant nothing unless you made things right.’ And he couldn’t make things right. He couldn’t get his father back. He couldn’t stop his mother getting ill. He couldn’t not be gay. And he couldn’t bring back the dead.