Lucidity

Chapter 10 - Night Terrors

Grace lay on a bed in a deserted call room. The plastic-coated mattress rustled with every breath she took. After the girls’ warning, she’d decided she was too tired to investigate the ECU tonight, had returned to the Annex instead. Now she lay in the musty, abandoned call room, staring into the dark, trying to will herself to sleep and failing. Maybe it was the room—brought back old memories. Her body tensed as if she were still a resident, waiting for her pager to go off, primed to jump into action at a moment’s notice.

Fool. She didn’t have a pager and she wasn’t a doctor, not anymore. Not for a long time.

She sighed and flopped over onto her stomach, face buried in the thin pillow, inhaling the scorched scent of hospital linens. She hadn’t told the girls the entire story, about that day when she met Jimmy. Now she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Her senses scanned the dark room, hoping for some sign he was here with her, but she was alone.

That first night in the beehive hut she had woken to find Jimmy crouched at the fire, adding more peat to the blaze. His chest and feet were bare. The fire cast strange shadows on the rough stone walls of the hut, bizarre shapes of mythic beasts: griffin, dragon, unicorn. As he rose to his full height, silhouetted by the crackling fire, Jimmy appeared to be the master of them all.

The wind tore through the airshafts with the mournful cry of a lover lost. Jimmy looked over at her, brushing soot from his hands, and their eyes met. He returned to the sleeping bag, sliding in behind her without a word.

Of course, she told herself, trying to force her body to relax, there was only one sleeping bag—his. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting company. She kept her eyes on the fire and realized the shadows weren’t creatures but her own clothing rescued from the sodden pile she’d abandoned it in, hung by the fire to dry.

Jimmy’s body stretched out behind hers. She was no longer cold, but she still shivered. He circled his arm over hers, drawing her into his chest. His body was warm, solid, safe.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I believe you Yanks call it spooning,” he said, his breath rustling the hair on the crown of her head. “Tsk, tsk,” he crooned as her body remained tense, trembling like a child woken from a nightmare. “Go back to sleep.”

“I’m not a baby—” she protested, her words blurred with exhaustion.

“Of course not, shh.”

“I’m twenty-eight, you know.”

His chuckle resonated through his chest and into her. “Then you are a baby—compared to me.”

Silence. Grace closed her eyes, hypnotized by his steady breathing. Still, she could not lose herself in sleep.

“I wouldn’t have died,” she whispered, too low to wake him but loud enough for the words to take on solidity. Jimmy sighed deeply and wrapped his leg over hers, snugging her closer to him. His protectiveness irritated her.

“The water would have risen and I would have been able to swim to the tunnel, climb out by myself,” she continued. He was silent, but she felt his breath catch and knew there was a flaw in her logic.

She squeezed her eyes shut, imaging her plight in the burial tomb as a simple physics problem. The cavern was an empty wine bottle, upside down with its corked neck in a shallow pan of water. Pull the cork and water flowed into the bottle, seeking its own level. Then it stopped.

Just as it had in the cavern—far short of the ledge. She would have lasted maybe a few hours, trapped with escape in sight but out of reach, until hypothermia and exhaustion took her under for the last time.