Near Death Read Online Free Page B

the sickening crinkle of his polyester jumper melting away, the sulfurous smell of vaporizing hair and a moment after the searing anguish began, everything changed.
    He was no longer in the car.
    He was no longer in pain.
    He was floating above the motorway, looking down with an overwhelming sense of childhood curiosity.
    The good old family car was pretty well bashed up and flames were licking through it. Joe was on the grassy verge, crawling away from danger. “Go on Joe!” he wanted to shout. “You can make it!” Cars were stopping and men were approaching.
    The scene below blurred and went dark as if a fog had rolled in. Now he was hovering over a two-dimensional, perfectly circular disc of blackness that became three-dimensional at once. Though he could see nothing, nothing at all, he had no fear—remarkable, since he still needed a night-light to fall asleep. There was a sense of movement and narrowing, as though he were flowing through a long funnel, like motor oil during a top-up.
    Now his ten-year-old body was moving with incredible speed, or maybe he was stationary and the black tunnel was moving around him. There was a sound of whooshing wind akin to a winter gale whipping in from the Irish Sea. He blinked in wonder as the indistinct walls of the tunnel began to come alive with brilliant flashes, redolent of light glinting off embedded clusters of polished diamonds.
    A pinpoint of real light ahead grew larger and larger into another perfect circle, until finally he was spit out into a soft landing of pure whiteness—as comforting as emerging from a bubble bath into one of his mom’s oversized fluffy towels fresh from the dryer.
    Whiteness faded into translucency and he found himself on an expanse of green terrain that seemed to yield slightly to his footsteps, though he was quite sure it wasn’t grass. The sky, if that’s what it was, was the palest blue, as though an artist had mixed a thimbleful of azure into a gallon of white.
    He heard something evocative.
    With a sense of excitement reminiscent of rushing down stairs on Christmas morning he moved toward the beckoning sound of gurgling water.
    It didn’t look like any river he’d ever seen. In fact, it didn’t look like it was even made of water—more likerapidly moving streams of shimmery light broken into whirlpools and jetties by a path of shiny stepping-stones. The stones stretched from bank to bank, traversing a span of fifteen yards or so, about the distance of Liverpool’s tragically blocked penalty kick.
    When he first glanced across the opposite bank he saw nothing but a limitless plain of cool greenness merging with that pale-blue sky. Though featureless, it seemed to possess infinite promise and he was drawn to the other side with rising excitement.
    On his second glance, he saw a man.
    A big man, waving his arms wildly and happily.
    “Dad?”
    “Alex!” He could just hear his name over the sound of the rushing river.
    “What’s happening, Dad?”
    “I’m dead, son.”
    “What?” He cupped his ear to better hear the reply.
    “Dead!”
    The word didn’t strike him as scary. He made his hands into a megaphone. “What shall I do?”
    “Come over! Come to me, lad!”
    Dickie was waving his arms as he had done when the boy took his first clumsy steps on the sitting room carpet or his first wobbly pedals without training wheels.
    The stepping-stones snaked across fast-moving light beams. They looked slippery but he was certain he could make it and wanted nothing more than to be enveloped in his father’s waiting arms. He gingerly and eagerly placed his left foot onto the first stone.
    His father looked so happy at that moment, as though Liverpool had come back to pull off a 2–1 victory. And he felt happy too, overwhelmed by a feeling of pure bliss more powerful than anything he’d experienced in all his young life.
    He was about to transfer his weight and push his right foot off the bank but he couldn’t.
    He was being pulled