St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,55

surrounding him had formed itself into a fist and was forcing itself down his windpipe.

He experienced a rush of panic so intense he cried out, except he couldn’t, because his mouth was filled. His arms and legs flailed helplessly against the water, cutting through it more smoothly than he was expecting, as if it had taken on the consistency of air.

He’d been about to slide gently into oblivion, but now, at the last, he found himself straining every sinew to stay alive, to hang on to even a precious few seconds of earthly existence. He’d seen it before, in patients of his who’d been so mortally wounded it seemed a miracle that they had lasted as long as they did. It was the animal life force in people, the primitive drive for self-preservation.

Fin found the use of his hand, gripped the arm that was forcing its way down his throat. He noted with surprise that it didn’t feel at all as if it was made of water. If anything, it felt like plastic. He tore at it, ignoring the raw pain in his throat as it was dragged free, and flung it away.

And suddenly there was no more darkness. Instead, light blazed down on him, so shockingly that he wondered crazily if he had in fact died after all and this was some kind of afterlife located in the vicinity of the sun. But there was little heat, just blinding, painful illumination.

There was also noise, a lot of it: mechanical and electronic sounds, human voices and cries. Physical pain announced itself to him from various outposts around his body: his chest, his neck, above all his head, which pulsed with steady pounding throbs. His body was secured somehow, trapped under a layer of something that wasn’t water, but instead felt like cloth of some sort.

And then Fin knew he had died, and the afterlife was more bizarre than any religion or spiritual movement had conjectured. For in this cacophony of sound and sensation and brightness, an angelic form hovered into view before his eyes.

Melissa.

Her eyes were wide with wonder, and terror, and joy. Her beautiful mouth curved in something that seemed not to dare quite to be a smile. Around her head the light blazed from behind her, crowning her with a halo.

‘Melissa,’ he whispered. No sound came. Of course it wouldn’t - he was dead, after all.

‘Melissa.’ This time it was a frog’s croak, all too earthbound.

And now she did smile, her lips stretching back to reveal her perfect teeth. Fin stared at her mouth, then at her eyes, and wondered why, with such joy in her smile, the tears were bursting over her lower lids, spilling like rain and cascading down her cheeks.

Her mouth tried to close to form speech, failed, then tried again, until, stammering, she managed one word.

‘Fin.’

He felt his hand being grasped, squeezed tightly. He gripped back. There was a solidity there, a sense of something corporeal, not ethereal.

Does that mean I’m not dead, then?

With great effort, both because it was physically painful to do so and because he was reluctant to tear his eyes away from her face, Fin turned his head towards one particular familiar sound. It was the steady drone of a cardiac monitor.

Yes, there it was, to his left. A heart monitor showing a flatline.

The movies and the television shows all represented a cardiac arrest with a flatline reading on the monitor. It made for thrilling, dramatic viewing, but as every doctor knew it was completely inaccurate. All a flatline reading meant was that the leads attached to the patient had come off and needed reattaching.

Fin did a rapid inventory.

One or more leads on his chest had come off.

The pain in his neck was from the prick of a needle used to insert a cannula for a central venous line.

The pain in his head was from where the toppling boat had struck him.

The choking in his throat had been caused by the endotracheal tube which had been inserted in order that he could be artificially ventilated. The fact that he’d become aware of it and pulled it out meant that he had recovered the ability to breathe on his own.

Which meant that he was no longer in the river. He was in hospital, he’d been resuscitated, and he’d woken up.

Which meant he was alive.

He was alive.

He stared at Melissa, her lovely face creased now, wet with tears, and he brought his free hand, the one she wasn’t gripping, shakily up, grasping