Nobody True by James Herbert Page A

remained of my body lying there on top of the covers. The blood was horrendous. I mean the amount of it. The human body holds, what? Eight and a half pints or thereabouts, and it looked like most of it had spilt out of me. You know how it is when you drop a bottle of milk? It seems to spread everywhere. In the bottle it doesn’t look that much, but on the floor? It’s like a dam just broke.
    My blood soaked the quilt on which I lay and what wasn’t absorbed ran over the edge of the bed to puddle the floor. There was even blood on the wall behind the headboard, great arcs of it, drooling streams, as well as dramatic splatters. It resembled art from a Jackson Pollock red period.
    My eyes were slightly open in the scarlet mess that once had been my face and the pupils were like unpolished marble, frozen and lacklustre. I was dead, well and truly dead.
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    Whoever had murdered me had left me unrecognizable; if not for the hair and blood-soiled clothes I wouldn’t have known myself. Wait, I got that wrong: it wasn’t the hair or clothes—I just knew the body was mine; although the link had been broken, I wanted to get back inside myself, pure instinct overriding logical thought. I wanted to put life back into my body no matter how mutilated it had become.
    Usually, intention did not come into it; I just arrived back, kind of slipping inside like a hand into a glove, a foot into a shoe. But now I had to force my spiritual self to step into the mess and gore that was my former self, into the clumps of sliced flesh.
    Squatting over my remains, I lowered my spiritual butt into my physical pelvis; then, after a moment’s hesitation, lay back like a vampire into a coffin.
    Unfortunately, whereas at other times I’d merely melded with myself, returning to flesh and bone an easy and smooth accommodation, I now seemed alien to my own substance. I fitted okay, but I did not adhere, did not become myself again.
    I found myself lying loose inside an empty desecrated vessel. And every time I tried to move, I failed to stir my flesh; my spiritual self just parted company with its host. Frustrated and in deep despair, I began to moan.
    I had no idea how long I stayed there, endlessly sitting, then lying down, trying to “think” my way back into my body, because in the OBE time has no proper meaning, no value at all, unless you related to a living event played out before you, but I think my endeavours went on through the night and into the morning.
    One of the strange things among all these other strange things was that there was still a residue of thought left inside my battered brain; or maybe it came from my body as a whole, as if all that was experienced through life etched itself into the very meat and bone of our being, perhaps even ingraining memories into our tissue and sinews, the very texture of our bodies. Maybe the brain isn’t the all of our thinking.
    I caught glimpses of other moments in my life, never fast, yet not clear images as before, almost reflections of events and people, some from long ago, most more recent. The strongest were of Primrose and Andrea, but Oliver was also there amongst them, and so was Mother. But they were all too insubstantial and I was too distressed to pay them much attention.
    I was panicking by now, desperate to fill myself and having no success at all. No matter how mutilated, I wanted my body back. I wanted to be me again. I began to pray and pray in earnest, even though I’d never been religious during my lifetime—my God, my lifetime: I’d already given it time span—but that didn’t prevent the hypocrisy now; I prayed as if I’d been a devout religionist all my days. Help me, Lord, I begged, beseeched—whined—and I made outrageous promises about my future actions should my existence so kindly be extended. Church would be my second home, good deeds my second nature. Just another chance, dear Lord, I’m really not ready for this. And remember, dear God, I’m a Catholic.
    Yet I