Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

was in a coma? He listened in to a conversation struck up between the remaining staff, now stitching and cleaning him, to garner a clue regarding his condition, but with a feeling of despair he found they were discussing their personal lives. Then he realized that his body wouldn’t be of any interest to them. This was, after all, just another day at work to them, and he was just another patient in a long list.

As he was considering this, their voices seemed to weaken as he gradually became aware of a gentle rhythm coming from where he would expect his chest to be, except he had no chest; he had nothing of himself to see or touch. It was a rhythm intimately known to him and that had been with him his entire life. It was the beat of his heart, with an elevated rate reflecting his heightened anxiety. His real heart, of course, like the rest of his body, still lay below him, where the final sutures to his abdomen were now in progress. The beat he could now hear, and feel, was out of step with the beeps and peaks displayed on the monitor screens, a beat being produced not by his body, but by something else, something alien.

A faint orange glow appeared at the center of the pulsating energy. He watched as its light intensified and strands of orange energy moved outwards, weaving together at a quickening pace. They formed two larger and two smaller chambers, which contracted and expanded to the rhythm of the beats. A functioning heart appeared, perfect in every detail except for its color––a glowing, vibrant orange. The strands of energy continued to simultaneously spread and interlace in all directions, now forming major veins, arteries, and starting to reveal more organs, the largest of which, the lungs, appeared heaving and sponge-like. Minor veins and arteries, capillaries, the lymphatic system, then bones, muscles, fat, skin, hair, and nails were all manifested in intricate detail, each layer covering the previous one and all with the same orange radiance. Next, tiny light-carrying fibers meshed and spread like waves in all directions, forming precise copies of his clothes and sneakers. What emerged––the sum of all these parts––was a perfect, glowing facsimile of the flesh-and-blood body beneath him.

Before John could wonder at the change that he had gone through, his physical body was being transferred by the surgical staff from the operating table to a stretcher.

“Wait! What’s happening!” he called out, discovering his voice had returned. But still nobody could hear him. His words fell on deaf ears as the staff hooked up his unconscious body to a portable ventilator and other monitoring equipment on the gurney. The OR equipment was powered down and the light from the dish-like surgical lamp killed. He called out again and tried to follow them as they disappeared out of the double swinging doors with his body, but he found he couldn’t move. His new form was rooted to the spot. What had always seemed like a simple, automatic reaction––thinking about moving, and then actually moving—was not happening. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, he realized the floor seemed to be slowly giving way beneath him. He was slowly sinking into it as though it was no longer solid but made of some kind of dense liquid. He could no longer see his feet. As he felt them penetrate through to the other side of the floor, he seemed to gain momentum and his descent quickened.

John had never been religious, but in his increasing state of panic, he couldn’t help but think he might be descending to hell. But if that was the case, he had no idea who he could have wronged in his short life. He was only eighteen! The floor rapidly approached his eyeline and then disappeared over his head. As he passed through it at eye level, he saw the make-up of the floor in cross-section: concrete, then a void with ductwork, pipework and light fittings. Then, suddenly, his view was of the room below. Dimly lit, it appeared to be a storeroom. The floor of this room was now rapidly approaching but this time he wasn’t going to fully pass through it. Less than a second after his feet disappeared into it, he hit an immovable, opposing force. His legs buckled, throwing his body forward. Instinctively he shot his arms forward to protect his head from impact, his hands and knees disappearing into the floor and coming to a stop at the same depth as his feet.

Finding himself now on all fours, he had to get upright so he could start to try and figure out what was going on. At least he had stopped falling. Something below the floor was supporting him and so he pressed his knees and feet against it as he leaned backward to pull his hands out and get himself in a kneeling position. His hands came out slowly, the floor having the same strange, syrupy quality as the floor of the operating room. He appeared to pull part of the floor upwards with his exiting hands, almost coating them before it snapped back with a slight ripple. Shocked by what he had seen, and in an attempt to avoid touching the floor again, he rocked himself backward onto the soles of his feet, liberating his knees, and stood up using just his legs. Pain just like real pain from a real fall, with a real body, coursed through him as he did so.

He had been correct in his deduction, that the room was a storeroom. Right in front of him was a group of floor-polishing machines, and the walls were lined with shelves containing cleaning products. Then he noticed something unnerving in his peripheral vision. It was an orange luminescence, just like his own. John immediately turned his head toward it and saw another perfect facsimile of a human being: a glowing, three-dimensional image of an elderly man in overalls