Into the valley of death by Rory ffoulkes
I’ve spent my life gripped by fear of dying in a dream ever since Richard Wells – a grown man in a boy’s body – told us in the playground one break time that ‘if you die in a dream, you die for real’.
How could anyone possibly know that?, I reasoned to myself, too timid to ask the question out loud.
Heart pumping, throat parched, spittle around my cracked lips, I’m now galloping downhill at breakneck speed into a biblical plain under the pounding hot sun.
I’m terrified. I’ve never been on a horse, and don’t know how to make it stop.
I try to force myself awake, telling myself it’s just a dream: ‘I drive an electric car and live in a newbuild house with chrome plug sockets and integrated USB ports for our smartphones’. It doesn’t work.
Hooves thundering beneath me, we’re rapidly approaching a body of several hundred soldiers on horseback. Resplendent in gold-embossed dark blue tunics, high bearskin hats and cherry red breeches, they’re advancing – slowly but assuredly – towards the mouth of an inviting green valley.
My stomach tightens with the unbearable tension.
Everything’s moving too blurringly, uncontrollably fast. There’s no chance to catch the soldiers’ faces or what they’re murmuring as we hurtle past them towards the front. There’s a purpose rising irresistibly within me that I can’t control or understand.
A startling trumpet rings out and there’s a clamour as the cavalry break into an initial trot, and then a determined cantor. As one body, they jerk to the left upon command and, raising their swords in a synchronous metallic swish, charge at the gallop towards a new target. The air compresses with impending doom.
Heavy guns thunder in our direction. We’re fully exposed. Fleshy and defenceless. Cannonballs obliterate the ground all around us, pitching horses and their riders headfirst into the implacable earth. There’s a hellish symphony of indiscriminate explosions, whinnying horses, and the anguishing cries of war-hardened men – limbs torn, teeth shattered in bloody mouths and eyes hanging from sockets – howling for their mothers.
I want to vomit but still I ride on, headlong towards the guns with a reckless courage I don’t recognise. And when I reach the front, I boom at a man upon a towering horse ahead in a voice that’s not my own: ‘Move your men to the right, damn you: to the right!’.
As he swivels and rears the horse, the rider leers mockingly at me with a skeletal face stripped of all skin.
I’m about to scream but something thumps my chest and burns white-hot inside. I grab at it helplessly, breathlessly, dropping my reins and falling from the saddle. A foot catches in a stirrup as my cheekbone smashes against the rock-hard desert. The horse bolts.
And as I’m dragged along, one eye open, I hear my wife’s disembodied voice over the horizon, desperately pleading for me to wake up.
But I know by now that I can’t. And never will.
Rory ffoulkes writes grown up short and flash fiction that draws on the darkly macabre and absurd for inspiration. He’s also, conversely, the author of the rather more wholesome children’s illustrated book, Sarah the Spectacular Squirrel.
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