Now You See Me

Forty-Nine: Déjà Vu

I was dreaming, I was sure of it.

I dreamed that I was falling a long way, but I couldn't see where I was going. I could only hope there was water beneath me, because I was in pain. I was so dry.

Dying would have been a mercy.

I hit the ground.

-

I jerked awake. My whole body throbbed with the imagined impact, with blood running through my veins in bone-shaking throbs. But I couldn't have fallen; I was in bed. It was just a dream, and like every deep dream, once I became aware of its lingering presence, it slid inexorably away from me, and soon I couldn't even recall what had scared me so much.

I opened my eyes.

At first, I experienced the most bizarre sensation that I'd fallen from one dream into another. The déjà vu I felt almost winded me. I looked around at the blank hospital room, with the aqua paint and bad curtains and the lumpy mattress underneath me. The tubes were back in; I could see the bathroom – it was the same bathroom!

"Mr Smith?" I had clenched my hand around the tubing in my arm, but relaxed my grip at the sound of a voice. I let go; in the panic, it had somehow seemed like a good idea to rip them out. Now, thinking more rationally, it made me queasy.

The nurse who'd come in at that moment smiled at me quizzically, but there was alarm in her expression which wasn't well concealed. Her eyes darted from the tubes to my face and back again, before she visibly forced herself not to make a deal out of it.

"Not planning on a trip out, are we?" she said, bustling in and letting the door slap shut behind her. She carried a big brown folder in the crook of her arm which she put down on the bedside table. When I turned, I almost expected to see the yellow post-it note with Courtney's number on it stuck to the headboard. "You mustn't remove these, love. Not until we've got you onto solids again."

"Where am I?" I demanded instantly. She raised an eyebrow.

"You're in hospital, sweetheart."

"I can see that," I snapped, panic rising again, "Which hospital? What happened? How long have I been here?"

"One at a time, dear." The nurse sighed, and from behind her pulled a trolley with a load of wires in the tray to sit next to her. She spoke as she wrapped the blood pressure sleeve around my upper arm. "You collapsed on Tower Bridge yesterday morning. You almost went over the railing, but a workman nearby grabbed you before you fell. He was...a little rough. You hit your head on the pavement quite badly." She sighed. "You're at Charing Cross. I don't think you were on this ward all that long ago, were you?"

I frowned. "But how did I get onto the...."

I stopped. I'd been on the bridge in my head; surely my body hadn't been running to the same places as my mind had been? That was madness. But then, how else could I have fallen on the bridge? I was so certain that my body had either been stuck at St Martin's or in the custody of Rella and Vashde. The idea that I had been doing some kind of zombie circuit around the city made me want to vomit.

"So where's Chris?" I asked. An image dominated my head at that moment; Chris's terrified expression as Rella dragged me away. "Is he here too?"

"Chris?" the nurse repeated, looking up from noting my blood pressure. "There aren't any Chrises on the ward right now."

"Maybe another?"

"Is he supernatural?"

This stumped me for a minute, until I remembered that the hospital staff were aware of our existence. "Yes."