The noise of an air raid siren went off, piercing the room and the peace. Ted reached out for his phone, his hand patting around the surface next to his head. There was nothing there. There wasn’t even a table; as Ted felt around, his eyes still closed against the bright light of day and the reality of the day, he realised that his hand was just feeling around a single, huge surface. One that he seemed to be lying on as well, albeit with something spongy in between. That would be his mattress, surely? But where was the bedside table? Where was the actual bed? Why was he on the floor? And how did he shut the bloody alarm off?

He opened his eyes, and was surprised to see that the ceiling above him was not the bland cream colour that his bedroom ceiling had been for the last two years. It was pure white, and much higher than his own. He also noticed that he couldn’t see a wall in his immediate field of vision, so he must be somewhere in the middle of the room. His bedroom was barely big enough to have a middle.

He stretched; a reaction, not a decision, and noticed that he felt surprisingly well rested. Completely well rested, in fact. He never felt well rested these days; a combination of early mornings stood in the cold and late nights. What on earth had happened?

Suddenly, a memory hit him. A car, travelling at speed, crashing into him, tossing his body violently across the road. Pain. Then darkness.

Which would mean that this place was a hospital; that would explain the clean white ceiling and the well rested feeling. He’d probably been under anaesthetic and pumped full of drugs while they worked on his wounds. He’d been hit pretty hard…

With a surge of panic he looked down at his feet to make sure that his legs were still there. The panic was quickly assuaged as he saw his toes causing bumps in the dark blanket that was covering him. He wiggled them, and they moved. That was a relief; he had thought he’d felt his legs stretch, but he knew that people often had phantom pain when they lost limbs. It looked like the doctors and nurses had saved him.

On that note, shouldn’t there have been someone by his side by now? A nurse, overjoyed to see him awake and whole? He didn’t expect any family or friends; no one knew who he was in Bristol, but at least there should be someone checking on his vitals. Pulling the tubes out of his arms and reviewing a chart? Why wouldn’t that siren stop?

But, he realised, there were no tubes in his arms. There were no beeping noises, outside of the siren, which he was pretty sure didn’t belong in a hospital. And the normal hustle and bustle of a ward was completely missing. He’d been in hospitals before, with some pretty nasty scrapes, and he knew what to expect from waking up in A&E or on a ward. There wasn’t a chance he’d have his own room; the way things were, you were lucky to get a bed. They also didn’t put the mattresses directly on the floor in hospitals; the NHS hadn’t collapsed that much yet. Even the sheets and blanket seemed odd, coarse and thick, as if they’d been made by hand.

He sat up and looked around properly, giving up on trying to work out the situation using logic and trying to use his eyes instead.

He was alone, sitting on a thin, single mattress in the middle of an empty small room the size of a study. The noise of the siren was being emitted from an old style loudspeaker on the wall opposite him, a loud wailing that pierced his skull and echoed around the room.

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‘All right, Christ, shut up!’ he shouted at it, not expecting a response. The speaker silenced.

‘Well. Thank you.’ he grumbled under his breath, with a hint of surprise. He hadn’t actually expected that to work. Must be voice activated, like every home speaker and helper these days. Though most of the ones he’d seen advertised didn’t respond to ‘Christ’ or ‘shut up’. They were getting smarter.

He stood up, finding himself in some loose grey trousers and top, thick white socks on his feet, protecting him from the chill that would almost certainly be coming from the dark wooden floorboards. Looking around to survey the room, he realised that barring a single, circular mirror it was empty, blank, with no character or hint as to where he was. But it definitely was not a hospital. There were no windows, no obvious light source, but the whole room seemed to be its own source of gentle illumination.

He stepped over to the mirror, to see what damage must have been done to his face. There was no way that he’d gotten away from a car crash like that without any scars.

But there was nothing; his craggy chin with a two day 5 o’clock shadow, pale cheek, dark hair, and light blue eyes unblemished by any signs of scar tissue or old blood. It didn’t make sense. He shook himself out.

There was a single door in the wall that his bed had been facing, just below the speaker, a wooden door frame housing an old, thick piece of oak with a gleaming bronze handle at waist height. It beckoned him forward. Or maybe it was the complete lack of anything else in the room holding him there. He took two steps forwards, grasped the handle, and opened the door, poking his head through.

‘Hello?’ he called out as he looked into the next room. It was an office; a very cosy one, with a roaring fire taking up most of one wall, and a desk taking up most of the floor space, a huge chunk of wood taken from an ancient tree, hewn into the shape of a cuboid to allow someone to sit behind it and write papers. This seemed to be the purpose of the whole room; to allow for the beast of a desk. The room itself was a cube, three metres by three metres, painted in rich forest greens and gold above some dark wooden panelling. It looked lavish.

Behind the desk sat a man, who looked up at Ted’s voice, unsurprised.

‘Oh, Ted, you’re here! Yes, please come in.’ he said.

Considering his options for a second, Ted followed the instruction, walking through the door and shutting it behind him. As he pushed it behind him he felt it snap closed, as if pulled by magnets, snatching it out of his hand. How odd.

‘Take a seat Ted. Best get started, eh?’ the man said. He was sat in a red leather chair, filled with padding to allow even the lightest sitters to sink in, made more for relaxing than working. Despite this, the man was clearly in the middle of some serious paperwork, with sheafs of the stuff spread all over the desk. The man himself was in his thirties, slightly older than Ted, seemingly Middle Eastern in skin tone, but with a strange tilt to all his features that made him impossible to identify. A slightly elongated forehead? Oddly small ears? A birth defect, maybe. The voice had a well spoken English accent - the Queen’s English as it was snobbily known, with the posh lilt of someone who knows how to pronounce all the words, and it’s the way that they do it. But the tone had been friendly, even welcoming. Was this the doctor? The person who’d saved him?

Ted saw the chair opposite the desk - comfortable, but not as imposing as the tan man’s desk. He sat down.

‘Well Ted.’ the man said, leaning forward as soon as Ted was seated, making it a third of the way across the desk. ‘It looks like you’ve died, my friend. Welcome to the next world.’