I couldn’t deal with it. It was too much. The book fell from my hands, forgotten, and hit the floor with a thump. I fled the room at high speed, not looking back.
That couldn’t have been true. It couldn’t have happened. It just couldn’t. She was… No. She was definitely gone. She couldn’t have been there. It was just the tiredness in my mind playing tricks on me. Just the exhaustion.
I flew into my room and slammed the door behind me. I sat down on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes, trying to compose myself. I was hyperventilating; my heart was pounding. I could hear the blood pumping in my ears, and my senses were keenly alert.
What had just happened?
I took some deep breaths — in… out. In… out. In… out. I felt my pulse slow a little, but I still felt on edge, like something awful was about to happen, or something dangerous was about to “get” me.
The rational side of my brain said to me that this was ridiculous; even though what I saw should have been impossible, it wasn’t dangerous, it was only my sister, after all. There wasn’t anything strange about her, just that…
Just that she shouldn’t have been there at all.
My mind kept coming back to that point. She shouldn’t have been there. There was no way that she could have been there. It was impossible. Physically impossible. And yet I was finding it difficult to believe that right now, because if it had been some sort of hallucination, it was a damned realistic one.
I didn’t have much experience with hallucinations. I’d had a couple brought on by tiredness, but there had been nothing with such clarity — in most cases the rational side of my brain had been able to win out and convince the irrational part that what it was seeing was, in fact, complete nonsense. It hadn’t stopped me from hiding under the bedclothes in a panic, of course, but when I eventually emerged and found myself alone with nothing but my own thoughts as usual, I was able to relax… somewhat.
This felt different though.
I clenched my fists and opened my eyes. I had to know if what I had seen was real or not. Was I going mad? It was possible. I hadn’t had any proper human contact for a few days now, so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that my mind was conjuring up imaginary people for me to interact with, but…
I stood up, opened my door with an attempt at confidence and walked down the hallway, back towards my sister’s old room. My hands were trembling. Every sound the creaky floor of the upstairs hallway made felt amplified, and the journey — one of just a few steps — felt like it was going on forever.
Eventually I arrived at her door. It was still slightly ajar from when I reached it, but there did not appear to be any light coming from within. Had she simply turned out the light and gone back to sleep? Or had I imagined the whole thing?
There was only one way to find out.
My hand hovered over the doorknob once again as I prepared to push it open. I felt uneasy and tense — my hands were still trembling slightly — but this was different from before. I didn’t feel the same palpable sense of anxiety and fear that I did last time.
No more hesitating. I pushed the door open a little more forcefully, causing it to bang into the wall with a loud “thump.”
Inside, the room was just as I expected it to be — the bed neatly made up, the lights off, nothing out of place.
And no sign of my sister.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it all. I sat down on the edge of the now-vacant bed and tried to clear my mind, tried to make some sense of what had happened. But there wasn’t any sense to make of it. It absolutely did not make sense. At all.
“What is happening to me?” I said out loud to no-one in particular. The empty room did not answer. I rubbed my face and eyes in frustration and looked around the dark room, the small pool of moonlight creeping through the gap in the curtains still casting its eerie glow on the floor.
That’s when I noticed something odd.
I remembered why I had originally come into this room in the first place — to get a book — and I suddenly remembered dropping it when I fled. But looking down at the floor right now… where was it?
It wasn’t there.
I got down off the bed and onto my hands and knees, and crawled around on the floor, feeling around to see if I could find the distinctive lump that was the hardback book I’d pulled randomly out of the shelf before. I was too afraid to turn the light on, as it would confirm my suspicions beyond all doubt.
It wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. All I could feel everywhere on the floor was carpet. There was nothing there. The book had gone.
I stood up and walked to the shelf where I had taken it from. I felt along the row of books on the top shelf — sure enough, there was the gap. But where was the book?
I swallowed deeply. My throat was dry again, but this time from fear rather than dehydration. My stomach was churning and I felt nauseous. I couldn’t understand what was happening here. It was all too much.
I ran out of the room, back to my bedroom and hid under the covers. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, trying as hard as I could to will myself out of this strange and terrifying world that the night had become.
It wasn’t long before I eventually succumbed to exhaustion and fell into a dreamless sleep.
*
I awoke several hours later as the alarm on my phone went off. I no longer trusted the old clock radio to wake me up reliably, so I tended to set my phone’s alarm to be as loud and obnoxious as possible, then leave it on the other side of the room so I had to get up to make the noise stop. This morning it was some sort of awful klaxon noise. Groaning, I hauled myself out from under the covers into the welcome sight of daylight and staggered over to my desk where my phone lay, bellowing its obscene noises to anyone who would listen. I silenced it and just leaned on my desk for a moment.
I really didn’t know what to make of last night. The only explanation I could think of was that I was so exhausted I had conjured up the whole scenario from my imagination. That had to be the case.
But it didn’t explain the book.
That book. I didn’t even know what book it was, having picked it up in the dark and dropped it in terror before I’d even seen the cover. I knew it was a hardback, slightly oversized volume, but that’s it. It wasn’t important what book it was, of course, but I found myself wondering whether even that was something my addled brain had imagined.
Was the whole thing a dream? I didn’t think so. It felt far too vivid and there were far too many details that were still all-too-clear in my mind. Details that didn’t make any sense, of course, but details nonetheless.
There was nothing to do, though; the weekend was over, and I was going to be late if I didn’t get moving.
I pulled on the clothes that I’d left hanging semi-neatly over the back of the chair and made my way downstairs to get some breakfast. Laura would be here soon, and I didn’t want her worrying about me any more than she already did. At least I’d managed to actually get some sleep last night for once, but I felt — and probably looked — like a wreck.
Laura was one of a few people who’d stuck by me through thick and thin. We’d been friends for a long time, and she’d been a particular pillar of support ever since that night. She came by every so often to make sure I was all right; sometimes I didn’t want to see her, and she’d learned not to argue when that was the case. The fits of irrational anger born of my own sadness and frustrations had subsided somewhat recently, meaning that I hadn’t yelled at her for a very long time — and still felt guilty about all the times I had — but still she watched out for me.
On weekdays, when I felt up to it, I went with her to college. The one thing I had refused to give up on even in my darkest hours was my own future, so I was determined to get through my course intact. I knew that the teachers and my peers trod carefully around me and tried not to do anything to put me out due to my circumstances. I kind of wished that they wouldn’t. As cold and detached as I’d become — even more than I used to be — some days I just wanted to feel like I “fit in,” that I had a normal life.
That was never going to happen any more, though. The idea of “normality” had been taken from me that night along with those dear to me. I’d come to accept it — mostly — but it was occasionally painful to be reminded of it.
As I sipped my coffee and put the last of my hot, slightly-burnt buttered toast into my mouth, the doorbell rang. I glanced up at the clock on the oven to see that Laura was right on time as usual. I drained my coffee cup and swallowed my toast hastily before walking out into the hallway, throwing on my coat and picking up my bag before opening the door.
“Hey,” said Laura, her kind, gentle face looking up at me. “You ready?”
“Yep,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I closed and locked the door behind me and we walked together to her car, which was parked just outside on the road.
“You all right?” she asked as she fumbled with her keys in an attempt to unlock the door. I’d told her a thousand times that she really didn’t need to lock her car for the minute it took to come and pick me up and walk back to it, but she never listened.
“Mm,” I said, my mind elsewhere. The cool, early morning breeze was feeling surprisingly good today for some reason.
“You sure?” she said. “You look knackered.”
“Didn’t sleep well,” I said. “I’m all right, though.”
“Uh-huh. If you’re sure,” she said with a kind smile. She knew not to press me any further for now. If I felt like talking about it, I’d talk about it.
To be honest, I did feel like talking about it, but I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t explain the strange events of the previous night at all. And I wasn’t even sure that they’d actually happened. People probably already thought my mental state was fragile enough as it was; I didn’t need Laura thinking that I’d gone completely nuts.
I resolved to try and figure out a way to bring it up later. For now, I’d just try and occupy myself as much as possible with college work and deal with it later.
I leaned back in the car seat and let the music on the stereo wash over me as Laura pulled away and we set off on our daily journey. I closed my eyes and tried to relax; I tried to smile.
But that smile wouldn’t come. Moments after I closed my eyes, my mind just started picturing her face — that face I never thought I’d see again. My sister.
Where was she? Was she really out there somewhere? Or just in my mind?
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