Surrounded
by midnight darkness, she wrapped herself in quiet and in warm bedsheets. With
closed eyes she tried to will herself into the blissful tranquility of peaceful
sleep. Beneath the blankets and the nightgown, her body ached with the
tiredness of the day, the gnawing exhaustion she knew, she already knew, that a
few hours of fitful sleep could never remove. Her eyes itched with that
horrible insistent need for sleep, that terrible hunger for nothingness she’d
fought daily for who knew how many years, would fight daily for who knew how
many more?
Sometimes,
hovering on the gray misty borderlands between sleep and wakefulness, the
in-between space where thought somehow grew more muddled and more clear all at
once, she wondered why she fought so hard. In those torpid frontier moments,
she waveringly felt that she’d gone to war against herself, her body, its
limitations, its irreducible and inescapable weakness. She felt, at times, with
a rising terror she didn't like to examine directly, that her body was her
absolute enemy, that if she let her guard down for the barest instant it would
collapse, dragging her with it into the primordial formless goo that spawned
it, so many billions of years ago. Only constant vigilance could save her from
herself, from that unthinkable dissolution.
Once in
a while she wondered why she felt so anxious in dreams.
“Amelia.”
Her
eyes snapped wide and she bolted upright, tossing the sheets aside. She rapidly
scanned the darkness of the room, the desk, the dresser, the locked door, the
window, opened just a crack to let in the cool evening air. It seemed that she’d
heard, no she couldn’t have heard…
but still her eyes darted through the black night, hunting for the source of
that voice, that quiet voice whispering her name.
It must
have been the wind, she decided, something blowing in the air through the open
window. Not her name, never her name. She stretched her arms, yawned, and laid
down on the bed once more.
Sleep
eluded her still. Her mind raced with the busy demands of tomorrow, the
insistent echoes of yesterday. So much to be taken care of, so much that ought
to have been done already, so much that her enemy had prevented—
“Amelia.”
Louder
now. It seemed like a kind voice, tender, if a little timid. The voice had a
playful, halfway mocking quality, as if it were only speaking as part of some
wonderful game it was putting on for her benefit, a game it dearly hoped she
would enjoy. A note of suppressed pain lingered in its timbre, as though the
voice contained centuries, centuries of waning hope and ever-diminishing
chances of Light. Centuries that had at last turned it within itself, and now
it strove to escape the involuted prison it had inherited…
No.
There was no voice. It must have been the wind, she repeated to herself as she
tossed about, hunting hopelessly for sleep, the blissful self-forgetfulness
that hid in the bed.
“Amelia.”
She
started, and her heart stopped icy cold. A chill ran down the length of her
spine as she realized the voice was coming from inside, was it from the kitchen? Lightly, carefully, she crept to
the door, silently unlocked and opened it.
On
tiptoe, she made her way to the kitchen. No, she should go back to her room,
ignore this voice, go sleep the night away. Surely the voice wasn't really
there, surely it was all her imagination grasping at phantoms and shadows. And
if it wasn't? If it was real?
All the
more reason to ignore its calling. But still she approached the kitchen.
She
arrived, peeked around the corner at the table, her arms and neck tingling, her
body shivering from the night’s chill, and perhaps something else as well.
There
was no one in the room. Holding her breath, she walked into the kitchen,
checked everywhere, even dared to turn on the lights. Still nothing.
Slightly
disappointed, she methodically searched the rest of the apartment, the living
room, the bathroom, every closet, and under all the furniture. With the whole
place alight, she made certain that she was the only inhabitant.
With a
sigh she walked through the apartment turning off the lights, and returned to
her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She climbed once more into her bed
and wrapped herself in sheets.
“Amelia?”
came the voice, close by her ear.
She
turned, saw nothing. What was this insistent voice, this phantom that disturbed
her rest but would not reveal itself to her?
In a
flash, as of a light coming on, she knew.
Amelia
took a deep breath, sat up and answered, “Yes? It’s me, Amelia. Who are you?
What do you want?”
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