The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  I needed a glass of wine or something, I find I think better with a drink, and I needed to sit somewhere and come to terms with this bout of Stockholm Syndrome that seemed to be drawing me closer to this abandoned paradise.

  I walked in silence down to the promenade. The sun was setting and casting a beautiful golden glow over the sand. The waves lapped and the breeze cooled. The lights along the strand flickered into life, as they had done the last three nights that I had spent as a vagrant, which at the time I hadn’t even consciously acknowledged. The stuff we take for granted! Never before had I thought to question where the power had come from, even back in my own country. It was just assumed that every evening, as the dark drew in, lights would automatically come on to illuminate the streets and make life as easy as possible for those who expected it. Were they automatic? Who turned them on? I pictured some small old trabajador sitting in a shack somewhere on the island, beside an electric grid station, who was employed every evening at around 7pm to glance up from his novel, check the time and lean over to press the switch that brought light to the streets of Lanzarote, then go back to his chair until sunrise. Perhaps called Juan. Juan the Light Man.

  I approached the bar in El Gordo and ordered from an unseen barman, as if I were Jack Torrance.

  “Una botella de Rose, por favour Miguel.”

  As Imaginary-Miguel nodded approvingly, uncorked and poured I casually glanced around the bar to check out the other patrons.

  They were mostly the obligatory Brits Abroad, red faces poking out of football shirts and shaven headed kids eating chicken nuggets, so I took my wine out onto the Promenade and imagined myself doing what the Spanish do best. People watching.

  The alcohol made me lethargic, almost tunnel-visioned, and I stared as the people strolled by in the early evening balm. Couples young and old holding hands, parents pushing prams with sleeping children, more trabajadors in paint stained overalls sitting on the stone walls above the beach, smoking and laughing and shouting animatedly at each other, waiters bustling around tables that extended out of open-plan restaurants and encroached onto every spare bit of the promenade that was acceptable, delivering steaming trays of cockles in wine sauce, pork escalopes and huge paellas, old men sitting on benches doing exactly the same as me, drinking wine and watching the world go by. The sound of voices was everywhere in my ears, the scent of perfume and food and sea salt stung my nostrils. People laughing, people shouting, people existing as people had for hundreds of years on this strange volcanic outcrop somewhere off the coast of Africa, but above all people! It was a vision of life as I had known, and perhaps never would again.

  And then, just as a gorgeous camarera with flowing black hair and a note pad approached me to take my order, I snapped out of it.

  And there I was, alone again, on the promenade, the waves making their incessant march and retreat on and off the sand below me in a world that nobody else inhabited, and I cried. I cried huge salty tears that streamed down my cheeks and plopped into my rose, and I still don’t know why. They weren’t tears of despair, or tears of pain, or tears of sadness. I think they were just tears of disbelief.

  Still crying like a schoolboy who missed his mummy, actually blubbing by now, the force of emotion pouring out of me like shit from a sewage pipe, the urge to urinate came over me. Rather than go there on the cobbled street I resolved to act like a human and find a bathroom. I presumed there would be one in the restaurant outside which I now sat, wishing the dark haired waitress would reappear, but as I headed inside something caught my eye. It was a flicker behind the bar, a blue neon light stuttering on and off in the shape of an arrow. It was pointing to the far side of the restaurant. It seemed so out of place, being just an arrow rather than one with a sign above it saying Aseos or something helpful, that I felt compelled to obey it and look where it pointed. There was nothing but a row of indoor plants that separated the restaurant’s main floor from what I assumed to be another dining area that had been closed off due to lack of business that evening. The urge again came over me to investigate. It was becoming a dangerous habit. The last investigatory impulses I had followed through - the hotel alarm, the phone call in the Hesperia - had led to nothing but trouble. Life-threatening trouble at that. But the impulse was too strong.

  If I don’t trust my urges in this place then I will get nowhere, I thought.

  The row of plants shielded very little as it turned out. Just a back room with nothing in it but a row of tables and a full-length mirror on the far wall. At first I paid the mirror no attention. Maybe it was the sight of myself with 10 days of stubble and wearing nothing but a pair of board shorts and a tool belt. There seemed little in this room that would be of any use to me, but as I turned to head back to the main restaurant again I caught something in the corner of my eye. It came from the bottom left corner of the mirror… again a kind of blue neon flickering. At first I thought it may be the reflection of the arrow sign from the restaurant, but as I chanced a second glance I saw what it really was.

  They were flashing numbers, like the countdown on a bomb. I stepped nearer to get a better look, squinting my eyes as I did so to bring the numbers into focus. It was a small rhythmic pulse that flashed every second or so: 74… 73… 72… 71…

  I stood transfixed, not knowing what they meant or what was going to happen. As the numbers got lower, 62… 61… 60… they started to speed up. By the time I reached the mirror they were flashing down at the rate of three or four a second.

  As they continued their inexorable drop into the 30s I became aware of an accompanying sound. A low humming, increasing in volume, like the sound of a generator in the distance. It got louder and louder, and in that moment I knew I had about five seconds before something terrible was going to happen.

  Glued to the spot, I slowly stood and faced myself in the mirror. The droning sound reached a crescendo, and the very air around me seemed to shake. It was pointless running, but the very second before the sound peaked and the numbers simultaneously hit zero I jerked my body to the left as if to avoid an oncoming missile charging towards me.

  It probably saved my life.

  Like the sound of a head on collision, the mirror burst open and showered the room with a billion shards of glass. They tore through the restaurant, slicing open curtains and plants and whatever else got in their way. As I dived for cover one glanced my eyebrow and happily took a small chunk of skin away, and as I landed heavily on my hip the blood began to stream down my face as the nightmare sound within the mirror manifested itself.

  As if escaping the bowels of Hades, a swarm of black bees burst through the shattered mirror on the wall. The hole created by the broken glass seemed to yawn in protest at the volume of them. My eyes widened in horror as the room around me filled with thousands upon thousands of these hellish drones, clogging the air and stifling the oxygen from around me. I staggered to my feet as they swarmed over every inch of my body. I could feel their tiny hairy legs scrabbling for purchase on my bare skin, creeping up my shorts and sticking in my hair. All the while the epic hum of a million insects arrested my ears, throwing me into an inescapable echo chamber of confusion. I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as possible trying to remain calm but I knew I was screaming; screaming at the top of my lungs and yet I couldn’t even hear my own outburst above the pandemonium.

  Frantically waving my arms I stumbled through the mass of tiny black creatures, some no bigger than a fingernail, but by God the number of them! Pursing my lips to stop them flying into my mouth (which would really have sent me insane) I tried to breathe through my nose but the little critters were omnipresent, there wasn’t a spare inch of air in the room that wasn’t consumed by black insects, and my first cogent thought was that I was going to choke to death on them, clutching my throat as they raged down my neck and stung my windpipe and lungs into seizure. I reached out wildly, desperately clutching for some kind of weapon, anything that would help carve a path to the door. I grabbed a plastic dining chair,
and began to beat the air around me with a blind panic, but each swipe of clarity I created was instantly refilled by black as the bees continued to pour out of the mirror.

  I don’t know how I made it to the door, blind luck must have been smiling on me, but I tumbled through it and out onto the boardwalk just as the last of my air was deserting me.

  I landed heavily on the cobblestones on my shoulder and heard a crunch which was too loud to be anything but bad, and for the briefest of seconds I felt nothing. I just lay there in horror waiting for the pain to strike, and when it did it arrested my whole torso and took back the breath I had just regained. I howled in pain, but here was a strange thing – the bees that were now cascading out of the restaurant seemed to stop dead and hover, as if searching for the cry of anguish. Then they changed course as if seeking it out, and a line of them about a metre thick headed straight for me. As they reached my shoulder they seemed to pause, suspended in mid-air, as if testing the air around me. Then they descended and my whole upper body was suddenly swamped by hundreds and hundreds of tiny bodies. I could feel them coursing over my skin, working in unison so it felt as though I was being stroked by a huge loofah, thousands of insect legs rubbing at once. Their stingers were cocked, as if waiting for some sort of signal, suspended millimetres off my skin. Then again without warning they all froze, not a single one moved for the briefest of moments.

  I stared in amazement at my body which had been rendered totally black, coated in a thick dark moss by insects that had come from nowhere out of a fucking mirror, and in that split second of silence I knew what was about to happen. Before I could draw breath to scream, each and every bee on me plunged its stinger down into my skin, littering my arm and upper torso with a million poisonous injections. My scream erupted from me as I processed the sheer horror of it, but instead of the burning, searing heat I knew was coming, the pain in my broken shoulder actually began to deaden. I could feel it sliding away as if I had been given a dose of morphine, and what I felt then could only be described as a kind of wonderful euphoria and sense of wellness. Life started passing in slow motion. The bees simultaneously withdrew their stingers and began to rise soupily into the air, creating an effect like floating treacle all around me.

  Then I swear they all smiled.

  I could see their little proboscises wiggling at me as they hovered inches from my eyes, and my head began to swim with a pleasure I never knew possible. Every nerve in my body seemed to be alive with it and a feeling of wellness passed through my whole frame as I lay there.

  To a bystander it must have been an astonishing sight; a semi-naked man propped up on one shoulder staring with a moronic grin into a swarm of black bees hovering in front of his face.

  I felt invincible, like I had drunk from the holy grail, the exotic elixir of life was flowing through my veins as I lay with the bees. They rose again, in perfect harmony, like swallows dancing against the yellow twilight sky, softly buzzing in the haze before they were gone.

  My eyes watered with the beauty of it, and as the bees collectively flew away into the distance my whole frame weakened. I felt as though I was sliding into a cool, fresh linen bed after a week of sleep deprivation, and yet again consciousness deserted me as the nectar coursed around my system.

  The last thing I saw as I gave in to the ecstasy of sleep was the bees drifting away in three groups, etching onto the sky the figure: 70%.

  68%

  Purgatory. That’s where I was, I swore. This was some kind of Catholic purification ritual that I had been unwillingly entered into after death. It was the only explanation. Didn’t the Jews also believe in a state of life between death and heaven or hell? I was sure it was a common religious belief and racked my brains to recall my sixth-form theology classes.

  It played in my head enough to make me try and hunt down a library. If I could figure out where I was maybe I could work out what the damn flashing numbers meant every time I woke up. Even if the books were all in Spanish I might be able to discern enough from them to explain the idea of a soul being forever trapped in a median world between life and death. It was what motivated me as I ate a breakfast of cold sausage, grapefruit and bread rolls in the cafeteria.

  Inexplicably (but then what was explicable in this place?) I had awoken back at the Sun Royal, this time in room 213 in the front section right beside the reception area. My shoulder was still tingling, not in pain but with the kind of pins of needles you get after sleeping in one position for too long. I had no recollection of returning there, and I awoke feeling utterly refreshed with the familiar numbers swimming away out of my eyeline. This time 68%. They were going down a few percentage figures each time, and each time it put me in mind of the ubiquitous battery icon on a cell phone. The flashing signal that posed two questions: one, how long have I got left, and perhaps more importantly two, when does one start panicking? I was certain it would hit me when the numbers dipped below 50%. Why? Because then I would be halfway through my ‘charge’. And by simple deduction, by gauging how long I had been here so far, I would be able to tell roughly how long I might have left.

  If things continued the way they did, what would happen when I hit the big zero? Would I just drop dead where I stood? Would I go to sleep and never wake up again? Or would I awake to find myself back home, in my own bed, with my little girl shaking me awake in the middle of the night to wipe her bottom? Maybe the numbers would just reverse and would start increasing instead of decreasing. In which capacity would I be stuck here for eternity, in an endless run of zero to 100% and back down again?

  You can see how the mind, faced with an uncertain certainty, fixates on things. I sat chewing my sausage lost in thought. On the plus side at least I had, seemingly, some sort of end in sight. What that end would be, I had no idea, but I knew that something would happen when I hit 0%. Edmund Dantes never had that. Nor did any other indefinite captive in history; no indication of when their servitude would cease. They were just stuck in dark holes with no prospect of release but their own death. And maybe that was what I was facing, but again, looking at it positively, how many people can say with utmost certainty how long they have left on earth? If the numbers continued decreasing at the rate they were, I estimated that I had around 20 days left before my charge ran out. And was I going to just sit around and wait for that to happen?

  No. I had to find a way out. And if that meant exploring the island top to bottom then that’s what I would do. But first, I had to put my mind to rest. I had to figure out not where this place was, but what it was.

  I figured I would need some supplies so headed up to the shop on the first level behind the games room. I budgeted for a couple of days initially, if I was away for longer I was sure I would find food and water in any of the other supermarkets or restaurants on the island, and certainly within Playa Blanca as I had already discovered. I needed clothes – I was still wondering around wearing just my swimming shorts and tool belt, and had in fact been going topless since I first woke up all those days ago. I had developed a pretty nasty case of sunburn on my neck and shoulders as a result of my three day bender, so grabbed a tube of aloe vera ointment and a couple of T-shirts in the ‘clothing’ aisle. That was another thing: whoever or whatever placed me here had made it very easy to remain on the site of the hotel. The shop was filled with pretty much everything I needed to survive without ever having to leave the grounds of the Sun Royal. Food, still unspoiled, sat in the restaurant. The bread rolls were a bit stale but the beer was chilled to perfection. There was ample bottled water almost everywhere I went, from the chiller in the store to bottles in the fridges of presumably every single one of the two or three hundred rooms on site. There was fruit, salad, even the milk in the fridges still tasted fresh. How long did milk take to go off? If kept cold I surmised a week, maybe even longer, but I had been here for almost two weeks and the stuff the store still tasted udder fresh.

  I found a rucksack by the tills that must have belonged to one of the hotel employees.
It was worn, and had been lovingly taped back together where one of the seams had split, but there was nothing inside that gave away any information as to who had once owned it. I stuffed it with a few bread rolls, a two litre bottle of mineral water, some cheese, a pack of salami and a tetra-pak of four apples. I changed my swimming shorts, throwing the old ones in the bin beside the checkout, put on a pretty garish yellow T-Shirt and stuffed the other two in the rucksack. I suppose it was survivalist instinct – I intended to leave Playa Blanca at some point, but didn’t know if the rest of the island would have been left in such pristine and habitable condition. I packed light, but calorifically; high fat foods that I could ration if I found myself in a less hospitable environment. My tool belt was still stocked with my foldable knife and chisel, but somewhere along the line I had misplaced my torch. I would need another one in case darkness set in and I was miles from a streetlight. That I could obtain in town. I selected the least touristy sombrero from a rack by the door, and a pair of cheap sunglasses completed my ensemble. I looked exactly like what I was – a sunburned tourist in a foreign land. On my way out I noticed a display of maps and added the most comprehensive one I could to my rucksack, hardly ordnance survey quality but it showed the main roads and towns that ran across the island.

  For good measure I tried the computer in the lobby again for internet connection, just in case, but there was of course nothing. I tipped my hat nostalgically to the Sun Royal as I walked out of the lobby, not knowing whether I would ever return and feeling a tinge of sadness at the thought. Whatever this experience was, it was an experience nonetheless, and this three-star whitewashed labyrinth had been my base, indeed my home, my shelter, my salvation even, since I had arrived.

  ---

  I found the library by chance about an hour later. It was hidden down a back street called Calla de la Laja, in a completely different place than was indicated on the tourist map of Playa Blanca that I had been following.