I’d spent so much of the day asleep that despite the unsociable hour, I actually felt surprisingly alert. I sat straight up after seeing the time, and propped myself on the side of the bed. I rubbed my face and yawned, then sighed dejectedly.
Why couldn’t I just lead a nor–
No, I thought, interrupting myself. I gave up a “normal” life long ago. It wasn’t entirely voluntarily, of course, but there was always the possibility of moving in with some distant far-off relative that I didn’t really know. I had put my foot down, though; I had no desire whatsoever to do that. I struggled enough to make friends as it was; uprooting myself from the home I’d known since I’d been born would be too difficult. Enough money had been left for me to continue living here, so that is what I decided to do. It was the most assertive I’d ever been.
The money would run out eventually, of course, but that was a bridge I would cross when I came to it — and it was also the main reason I was still sticking with college and attempting to better myself. I knew that 18-year olds were supposed to prioritise socialising and getting drunk or something — judging from the conversations I often overheard in the common room, anyway — but for me, left all alone, the priority was getting my life in order. Forced to grow up too fast, as people tended to say in this sort of situation.
I sighed again. No, the “normal life” ship had sailed long ago, but that didn’t mean that I had to suffer from these constantly-disturbed sleep patterns and… whatever it was that had happened yesterday. I was trying not to think about it too much, but the more I tried to put it out of my mind, the more I remembered. The strange, sudden darkness; the feeling of desertion, of being all alone — what had happened? Had it really happened at all?
And then there was the matter of the night before, too. I still couldn’t explain what had gone on there, and I was still uneasy about it. But alongside the uneasiness, a feeling of curiosity was starting to creep in — the same feeling you get when you know that there’s a massive spider in a hole in the wall and that it will freak you out when you see it, but you find yourself wanting to peek in anyway.
I had to know. Or I had to try and find out, anyway.
I stood up. I was still wearing my clothes from earlier. Laura and I were close, but she evidently drew the line at undressing me when putting me to bed. I was okay with that. As fond as I was of Laura, I didn’t really feel comfortable with the idea of exposing myself to her like that. And she probably didn’t either.
I shook my head to eject the stray thoughts and focus on the task at hand. I had to see what was going on. Would it happen again? Or would I have just imagined it all? It could go either way, and there was only one way to find out.
I paused at the door to my room. What would it mean if it did happen again? Would it mean my sister was… alive? And if so, how? And why? And where was she when she wasn’t here? There were too many unanswered, unanswerable questions; questions that threatened to bog me down and prevent me from pushing forward to satisfy this gnawing sense of curiosity.
I flung open the door to my room rather more forcefully than I intended and stepped out into the hallway. A few steps later, I was outside the closed door of my sister’s room. My heart was pounding. My breathing was rapid. I felt uneasy. And that peculiar sense of tension I’d experienced before was back once again, and stronger this time. It was hard to describe; I felt it deep in my stomach, and it wouldn’t go away. If I had to attribute a particular feeling to it, it was as if I was being watched by something so horrifying that I would go mad if I ever saw it, that it was toying with me before it did something unspeakably awful, that it was biding its time, waiting to strike when I least expected it.
I swallowed. Concentrating on the feeling hadn’t made me feel any more confident about what I was going to do. In fact, it had made me freeze up in terror. My hand hovered over the doorknob to my sister’s old room and I found myself unable to move.
Keep it together, I thought. Keep it together. Come on. Come on. You can do this. It’s just a room. Just a room.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. I opened my eyes again, grasped the doorknob firmly and pushed it open.
Inside, the room was dark, and I couldn’t make anything out. It was a cloudy night, so the moonlight was far fainter than it had been previously. I considered turning the light on, but thought better of it. Instead, I simply stood in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.
Vague shapes gradually started to swirl into view as my eyes adjusted themselves. I could see her bed resting against the far wall, but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone in it from the doorway. I couldn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean anything.
What was I expecting to find? What was I hoping to find? Did I want to find my sister in that bed, or would it be better to find just empty covers? What would it mean if she was there? What if she wasn’t? Should I wake her if she was? Should I try again if she wasn’t?
The questions started coming thick and fast in my mind, and they weren’t helping with my already-frayed nerves. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath again, trying to clear my mind; in, two, three, four; out, two, three, four.
I took a step forward into the darkness. Then another. A floorboard creaked beneath my feet. I froze — I don’t know how long for, but it felt like an eternity. When nothing happened, I relaxed a little and took another step forward. I was nearly at the edge of the bed now, and–
Suddenly, all at once, my eyes were assailed by bright light and I heard movement. I was dazzled by the light, but could tell it wasn’t the main room’s light. It was coming from the bed.
I heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Oh my God,” came a familiar voice, little more than a whisper. “Oh my God. Oh my God. How…”
I froze again. There was no sense in running now. It would achieve nothing. My answers were sitting in front of me, shining some sort of bright light in my face so that I couldn’t see.
“Is that you?” hissed the voice, still whispering. “Is that really you?”
Silence. I didn’t quite know what to say. There was one obvious thing to say, of course, but it proved difficult to make my voice cooperate and actually say it.
The long silence was probably only a few seconds at most, but it felt as if time had stopped. Eventually, the voice broke it before I could get a word out.
“It is, isn’t it?” it said, answering its own question. It sounded like it was cracking; was she crying? “How is this possible?”
“Yes,” I managed to say eventually in a broken, dry voice. “It’s me.”
I heard that sharp intake of breath again. The bright light was still shining in my face, but it moved as I heard the owner of the voice shift. Was she getting up?
I heard footsteps on the floor coming towards me, and the light dropped as I felt a presence close to me. I heard her breathing, then I felt a delicate hand on my chest. Another gasp from her; I was too nervous to make another sound.
A moment later, I felt a pair of arms throw themselves around me and a head barge into my chest. The bright light fell to the floor with a “thump,” its glow illuminating the area around us. There was no mistake; sobbing in my arms was my sister Alice, and as I hesitantly embraced her and placed my hands on her shoulders, I felt that she was warm; alive.
We stood like that for a few minutes, Alice crying into my shirt, me standing dumbly embracing her. She eventually released me from her iron grip and stepped backwards, slumping backwards to sit on the bed. She reached down and picked up the light from the floor, using it to guide her way to the lightswitch by the bed. She flicked it on and suddenly both our eyes were assaulted by an even brighter glow than before, this time from the room’s main bulb.
I screwed up my eyes against the bright glow. The inside of my eyelids glowed red from the brilliance of the light. I gradually opened them a crack, a little more at a time until I was looking on a sight I thought I’d never see again.
My little sister Alice, her mousy-brown hair bedraggled and her face weary-looking, was sitting on the side of the bed in her nightdress. Her mobile phone — the source of the bright light from before — lay on the bed beside her. Her bare feet and legs were fidgeting uncomfortably, and she was looking to one side, seemingly trying to avoid looking in my direction. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, though. I gazed at her, unblinking, for several minutes. Neither of us said anything, but I felt a tear fall from the corner of my eye. I didn’t know if it was because I hadn’t blinked or whether it was the sheer emotion of the moment. But she was there. There was no mistaking that fact.
After a moment, she turned her head and looked up at me at last. Her eyes were red, and the bags under them showed how tired she was. Tears had left streaks down her face, and she looked like she was in some distress.
“How…” she whispered to herself. “How…”
“I don’t know,” I said to her, finding my voice finally. “But however it’s happened, it’s happened. I’m here now, Alice, and I won’t let you go again.”
I knelt down on the floor in front of her and moved to embrace her again, but she stopped me. She steeled herself and spoke.
“Wait,” she said softly, her voice wavering. “What do you mean?”
“I thought I’d lost you forever,” I said. “I thought I’d never see you again. But now that you’re here… Alice, I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.”
Her face loosened and I could see that she was starting to cry again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her voice breaking and her words coming more quickly, more urgently. “You never lost me. I never left you. You never failed to keep me safe.”
She swallowed deeply and looked straight at me, her eyes brimming with tears.
“You never lost me,” she said again. “I’m the one who lost you. You were dead, at least I thought you were, but you’re not. Why are you not dead? Why are you here now? I don’t understand!”
She broke down in uncontrollable tears and was unable to say anything else. I took her in my arms and hugged her sobbing face to my chest. But comforting her was far from my mind; I held onto her feeling nothing but a horrible sense of nauseous shock at what she had just said to me.
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