After school Johnny made his way to University, studying in Cork. Johnny was half-way through his final year and the Hilary term was just ending. March and April were very warm and balmy that year. The College was looking beautiful. Spring was a time of year when everything seemed young and vibrant, alive and full of promise, Johnny thought and this was a particularly lovely Spring.
He woke up one Tuesday morning, just as Dawn began to nudge the night over the horizon. He had been in the middle of a bizarre, morbid dream which had started with him flying over a darkened,sleeping landscape. The sensation of flying had felt so real, so tangible, that he could remember the physical sensations vividly and with rare precision. He had been flying for some time, when up ahead he saw a silvery-grey line on the horizon, the sea. The lights of a town began to appear, It looked familiar, very familiar. Then he had it. It was Kilkee. He had spent many a summer holiday there as a child.
He began to lose height, and came in low towards a caravan. Everything else faded into a homogenous grey mass. Buildings, lights, trees all greying out and blurring until there was only the caravan. As he approached it, the roof and side of the caravan closest to him dissolved into nothing and he could see inside. There was a coffin in the middle of the caravan. It was lying on a table, with its top open. Sean was lying inside, his arms crossed on his chest, and his face as white as his shirt collar. An odd thought came into his head. "Where does the shirt begin, and the neck end?" Johnny wondered. They seemed as one, so pale was Sean's flesh. Bleached as it were in preparation for Death's coming. He could hear an old man's voice repeating quietly, "Puir Springer, the puir man." Then the corpse opened it's eyes, and raising it's heavy arms, slowly extended them toward Johnny as if expecting an embrace. He became aware of a whispering inside his head. A thought not his own, alien to him, put there, not born, not innate. "Here, come here. Closer Kid. Come and talk." Johnny recoiled. Fear seized him, sudden and vicelike and he fell from the sky.
He bolted up, awake but still in the grip of this falling sensation and grabbed the sides of the bed in terror. His mind full of what he had just experienced. He got up and dressed quickly went downstairs and out. He got into his small, white car and started to drive, heading for the coast. When he reached a large, wide beach he knew well, he pulled up. Johnny rested his chin on the wheel, and looked out at the distant waterline, now at it's farthest out point. "Sean's dead" he thought . Convinced of this, after a moment he got out and strolled along the deserted beach, alone in his sadness. Sorrow walked beside him as he mourned the death of a man who, in a strange and intangible yet very definite way, meant a great deal to him. Some hours later, when the sun had fully risen, he returned to the city and went to his lectures. All through the day, at the back of his mind, was that sense of forboding that is peculiar to those who are cursed with foreknowledge of an imminent, inevitable event, and are powerless to avert it.
At 9pm that evening, in the bar of the University's Men's Club, he glanced up from his drink and through the circle of his friends, saw a face on a newspaper that he knew too well. A terrible dread overwhelmed him as he stood up and walked over to the girl with the paper. He stood behind her and, looking over her shoulder, quickly read the obituary. His face went white and he left the bar immediately, unnoticed by his friends. Once outside Johnny kept walking and didn't stop until he reached the "Lee Fields", a large , open , grassy area upriver from the University. The river was high that night, and he stopped and stood watching the murky water flow swiftly by with scarcely a murmur.
He thought that he understood it a little better now. If Sean had never meant anything to Johnny, he wouldn't have dreamt about him. As it was, when Sean's life was snuffed out like a candle Johnny had felt the absence of it's heat, it's light.
"There was a sort of link between Sean and I," he thought. "So when that was snapped, I felt it, the way twins can sometimes feel each other's pain and joy, each other's emotions." He felt like a man groping his way in the dark towards a distant light, and it was going to take a while to get there, and, finished grieving, he began to miss Sean, his brother.
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