The Edifice

49. Take a Breath

OTIS

I'm being buried.

My chest is slowly being crushed under the weight atop me, every second that passes the pressure grows stronger and harder. It's a tight elastic band, tightening in sharp lines beneath me and spreading a burning ache from my chest to my limbs.

It shouldn't be possible. I'm Otis Creed. I can't be buried. I can't be trapped. I'm too strong, I'm too fast, I don't have a body I-

A deeper instinct that my current panic rips into control of my body and I open my mouth, my chest dilates and air fills my lungs. In the same movement my sight returns and I escape the darkness of my grave and emerge into a void of white. The weight in my chest disappears with each fresh gasp of air I take but something is still very, very wrong.

I'm no longer in the darkness, but I still can't see.

Where has all the colour gone?

The world around me is pale, blurred and drained of its colour like a sun-bleached photograph. Minutes pass as I lay trapped before I even begin to make sense of my surroundings.

I'm paralysed on my back, staring up at a stretch of white plaster ceiling above me. In my periphery I can make out a mountain of pillows to either side and a rippling sheet of grey curtains on the wall to my right. Small rays of light slip through play across the walls, the only movement amid the still quiet of the room.

All I can hear is the movement of breath passing between my lips and the faint rustling of the blankets atop me in rhythm with the rise and fall of my chest. 

Terrified of my blindness and how suddenly deaf I've become to the world, I take inventory of everything else I can feel- anything I can control. It's not much.

I can feel four limbs, each of them impossibly dense, so heavy I can't begin to imagine the strength it would take to life them. I give up trying when the exertion proves too much, exploring the other elements of my body. A tongue thick in my mouth that I can curl back and fourth. Fingers and toes- much colder than the rest of my stiflingly warm limbs. A weight between my legs. Nice.

I can move my lips in small twitches, so there I start. In greater strains of effort I can move my mouth too- tighten and loosen some foreign object in my throat. After a dozen combinations of shifting different parts of my mouth and throat while shunting air from my chest finally rewards me with a deafeningly loud moan.

Fuck.

"Otis? Otis?!"

I must have better quality over my limbs than I thought because the sudden noise sends a jolt of fear into my chest like the shock of a defibrillator. I flinch, body jack-knifing violently and against the strain of my body's titanic weight, I sit up.

Opposite me, Lee scrambles out of a small settee positioned in the far corner of the room. Untangling his gangly limbs, he rushes to my side as right as gravity hits me and yanks me back down onto the bed.

"Otis are you OK? You woke up just in time, I swear. You're supposed to be on air tomorrow and Katy's been talking about cattle prods to get you up."

I stare back at Lee uncomprehendingly. I can't place this newer, muffled voice with the face issuing the words. Goodness knows I can barely recognise Lee Noble's face to begin with. He looks like he's been cut from 2D paper- a rudimentary caricature of the warlock I know. There's no swirling aura of green and grey around him, I can't see any deeper than the swathes of green skin and his dark clothes.

Where once I saw a body of pulsing colours and muscles, lit up by a million flashes of electrical signals there is now only this stick figure image of block colour and shades.