“Never in your wildest dreams,” sang Tina Turner, but she was dreaming about love, not the things that I was dreaming about almost every night.
As with all dabblers in things supernatural, my nights were filled with visions of every kind of evil.
Flesh-eating zombies, headless corpses, blood-sucking vampires, slimy things shuffling about in the cellar in the dark.
You name it, and I’d dreamt about it!
But everyday happenings can sometimes have a far more startling effect than anything written by Stephen King and Edgar Alan Poe.
We were all about fourteen years old and it was a mad-hot Summers afternoon. My group of ragged friends and I decided to go to the local docks for a cooling swim.
We walked the two miles there and hastily stripped to our birthday suits.
Donning our home-made swimming trunks we were all raring’ to go, when the Coal Dock policeman appeared, to warn us not to go into the water.
It was dangerous in there, what with huge pieces of scrap-iron that had been dumped there over the years.
There was a serious risk of being badly hurt.
We assured him that we were only going to sunbathe, so accepting he was wasting his time talking to we morons, he pedalled off into the hazy distance.
No sooner had he disappeared from our sight than we were all diving into the inky blackness of the cooling waters.
I was by far the best swimmer in our group, and after tiring of diving into the inky blackness, I struck out for the opposite side of the dock, a distance of about two hundred yards.
Half way across I decided to practice my “world-famous backstroke” and I was surging through the water like a rocket.
Suddenly I was stopped in mid-stroke.
My left arm was trapped inside what turned out to be the inside of a man’s jacket.
The trouble was, he was inside the jacket too!.
Dead to be sure, and as I wrestled to free my arm his bloated face was only inches from my terrified face.
I had visions of him slowly sinking and dragging me under, still trapped, to a watery grave.
Eventually, after what seemed like hours of struggling, but in reality was mere seconds, my arm came free and I swam back to my friends like an Exocet missile.
Scrambling out of the water I stammered my story to them.
They all laughed, because from our vantage point there was no sign of the dead man.
A few minutes later the Coal Dock policeman came slowly pedalling into sight, so we all grabbed our clothes and ran to a nearby pier were we sat and sunbathed for the remainder of the afternoon.
When we returned home I didn’t say a word to my parents about what had happened.
A week later the local newspaper reported that a foreign seaman’s body had been found in the Coal Dock.
Kitos.