Chapter Eleven

The darkness was total, and no dreams invaded Ryan's unconscious mind, no characters from his past who rose gibbering from their temporal graves and clawed their way into the heart of his blackness.
There were colors, swirling around like gobbets of oil paint dropped into a basin of clear spring water, and specks of diamond brightness. But the patterns were displayed against an enveloping shroud of sable velvet.
" coming around"
The voice was somehow being projected from the top of a sky-scraping, star-toppling cliff that fell stark and sheer into a mighty cavern.
Ryan could hear it echoing inside his skull, bouncing from bony wall to bony wall.
"me, lover?"
A riding wave of nausea forced stinking bile into his mouth, making him cough.
"Help him to sit up, or he might choke before he comes around properly."
It was Mildred talking. Ryan recognized her voice. What he couldn't work out was what had happened to him. There was a throbbing pain behind his temples that seemed to have its source above and behind his right ear.
"Is he all right? Those scorch marks"
For a few beats of the heart, Ryan slipped back out of consciousness into the dark. Then he was sitting up, supported by someone's arm around his shoulders, still feeling sick, aware that he had another pain, a burning sensation in his good right eye.
"I think that he's back with us. Ryan, my dear fellow, can you hear me?"
Ryan's tongue felt as if it had been hand knitted, five sizes too large for his mouth. "Hear you, Doc."
"Might be concussed," Mildred said. It wasn't a question, so Ryan didn't need to speak.
"You all right, lover?"
"Fine."
But he knew that he wasn't fine. He was a long way short of fine.
To remove the blackness, Ryan had opened his good right eye. He knew that he'd opened it.
But the blackness was still there.