Epitaph by Shaun Hutson Page A

they going to go?
    He shook his head.
    Go on, where do you think you deserve to go? Heaven or Hell? Have you been a good man or a bad man? Does it really matter? Who makes that decision anyway?
    At the moment, he wished he knew there was something beyond where he now lay. He wanted more than anything to know that lying in this box wasn’t the end. There had to be something more, didn’t there? Please God, let there be something else.
    You’re calling on God. Do you believe? Or is it just that there’s no one else to call on in situations like this? Everyone calls on God when they’re in the shit. There are no atheists in foxholes, as they say. Then again, if there were a God He probably wouldn’t have let you get into this situation in the first place. Looks like you’re fucked all ends up.
    Paul sucked in a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. Thoughts of death weren’t helping, even if there was a certain inevitability about those thoughts con sidering the place and situation he found himself in.
    He swallowed hard and tried to prevent the extraneous thoughts he had become so aware of from flooding into his mind with such reckless abandon.
    ‘Would a God that was good invent something like death?’
    It was a line from a film but he couldn’t remember which one. For much of his life he’d been cursed – if that was the word – with the ability to dredge up lines of film dialogue completely unbidden, dependent on the situation. It was, he had joked, a sign of his inferior education. Others quoted Shakespeare, Shelley, Voltaire and people like that, but he quoted lines from screenplays. Not much of an achievement really but better than nothing. He always maintained that he’d inherited his love of films from his parents. They had been staunch cinema-goers and had done a good part of their courting in and around the local fleapits.
    When he was as young as five or six, his special treat on a Friday night had been to sit up with his mum (his dad always went to bed because of getting up for work the next morning) and watch the old black and white horror films they showed on TV. A combination of that and collecting the plethora of film magazines that was available at that time had given him an appetite for cinema that had grown stronger as he’d grown up. His mother had taken him along to the local cinema more times than he could remember while he was growing up and then, once he reached his teens, he continued the odyssey alone or with friends, visiting one of the two local cinemas every Monday or Tuesday night to sample whatever was showing. It didn’t matter what kind of film it was. Crime, comedy, drama or horror, Paul was there in his usual seat.
    ‘All you can hope is that it won’t be long-drawn-out and painful.’
    Another line popped into his mind. Unwanted and unwelcome.
    He didn’t know if his own death was going to be long-drawn-out and painful. It might already be long and drawn out. If he had any idea of how long he’d been in the coffin, then he’d know exactly how long. As for painful, he tried not to think about it. Would it hurt as the air inside the box disappeared? Would the physical act of suffocating take long?
    Paul tried to calm himself. He tried to think about anything other than his impending fate but it was impossible. It wasn’t as if he could imagine what it would be like to be free again. There seemed no hope at all of ever escaping this casket. He felt himself beginning to shake again. The same kind of uncontrollable muscular spasms that he’d felt upon first realising his predicament.
    How long ago had that been? An hour or more? Or was it only a matter of minutes? Time seemed to have been condensed the same way as his environment had been condensed. Telescoped down into this one one-foot by a half-foot box. Nothing beyond it and nothing inside except despair and the inevitability of death.
    ‘Oh, God, help me,’ he breathed once more but he knew that his entreaties