I heard the book touch my fear
I'm not into horror movies at all, and it's a pretty rare thing when a book can give me the heebie-jeebies, but I read a passage today that touched one of my nameless dreads.
The book is by an author named Lee Child. His novels feature a protagonist named Jack Reacher; an ex Military Policeman now exploring the US and finding trouble along the way. Think of him as a sort of hero drifter with shades of The Equalizer and The Saint thrown in for good measure. I'm really liking the books and the plots are well crafted.
Today's chill thrill was while coming home on the train. Reacher is hiding from captors in an abandoned mine and his avenue of escape is cut off. He's armed only with his wits and a dimming flashlight. He spots a small seam in the rock and proceeds to crawl through it, hoping for escape. His flashlight dims and the space gets smaller and he finds himself crawling through the dark space on his belly nearly wedged in, his head turned sideways, his arms outstretched, moving forward only by pushing his toes against the rock. he's stuck like this for 3 hours.
~shiver~
My own description doesn't do it justice, but that whole "trapped in a body-sized space" thing was a childhood fear....eg. I could see out of the space in which I was trapped but the opening was too small. Very much like A Cask of Amontillado (That's for all you Poe fans out there.)
I remember exploring some caverns near Collingwood several years ago and there's one vertical passage you can slide through that's maybe 12" across and 10-15ft in depth. It's passable, but they tell you to face a certain way and that it's not for everyone. I foolishly ignored the alternate path and pushed my way through (vainly trying to impress a girl I was keen on) and feeling the brutal surge of that "trapped" fear hit me when I was about halfway through.
Nasty, nasty, nasty.
No point to this post, really. I just had to share the heebie jeebies. It's good therapy. ;-)
7 comments:
Yikes. I never thought of getting stuck in a body sized space.
DW figured it would be like crawling through an MRI machine...but with a tighter fit. Think: culvert.
I tried not to think about it at all, but you kept describing it to me: the girl who gets claustrophobic in a subway.
That sounds god-awful. Ugh.
Which book are you reading? I read "Persuader" on a plane trip last year. It ended up being much better than I thought. (I grabbed the first book I saw on the shelf at Target that didn't have some tarty, half-naked wench on the cover...) I haven't read anything else of his, though.
I started with The Enemy, a more recent book, but first in the chronology. I then went back to do the first two, Killing Floor and just finished Die Trying. This author is a real find, for sure. DT is the one with the cave sequence.
Considering my current BMI, ALL spaces are body sized spaces for me (I hope to change that soon, but...). My thing is heights and I counter that by going on the highest, wildest, freakiest rides I can.
But, don't ask me to climb a ladder.
One of the scariest books I ever read -- one of only two that actually kept me up at night -- was Michael Slade's Headhunter (you can find it on Amazon.com). Fabulous storyline, based in Vancouver, BC among other places, and RCMP based. Having been married to an RCMP Member, I can tell you that the facts in the book have been well-researched and are right on the money. AWESOME book. One of my absolute favourites.
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