by Frankie Rose
The smell woke me. The room was so dark I had to touch my face to make sure my eyes were open, but the darkness didn’t last for long. A small, flashing patch in the corner of my eye twinkled into existence. At first it was just a tiny glimmer of color in my vision, but it quickly developed into something much larger. Tendrils of green and blue and red swam across my eyes, undefined, like television static. My stomach dropped. It was an uncomfortable sensation when lying down, and I sat up to avoid being sick. It had happened before.
Lilies. There was no mistaking that smell. I swung my bare feet out of the bed and flinched when they made contact with the cold concrete, but I didn’t have time to locate the socks I’d inched off my feet in the night. I needed to find my bag and take my migraine pills. Maybe if I caught it in time I wouldn’t have a hallucination.
I fumbled my way towards the other side of the room and located the light switch, flipping it up. When nothing happened, I flipped it back the other way, and then up and down, wondering why the room was still unlit. A jangling, nervous feeling crept up on me. Had I switched off the light switch before I passed out last night? I couldn’t remember doing it.
My heart started doing that thing—that stuttering, pounding thing. Had I woken up blind? I found the door handle and yanked it open, hoping to see the faint glow of light at the end of the corridor, but there was nothing. Just emptiness. Surely I should have been able to sense the close proximity of the wall on the other side of the corridor. I couldn’t, though. A chilling breeze fluttered against my face, suggesting a vast, abyssal space instead. Anything could be out there.
The flashing lights were all I had to cling to now, except the tendrils of twisting color seemed to be evaporating like so much smoke. My throat tightened. Tears of panic were already working their way down my face by the time I found the courage to step out into the space ahead of me. I’d stupidly left my bag in the hangar. What if I couldn’t find my way back? It had only been two left turns last night, but who knew how many other corridors there were out there in the dark. A person could get lost down here and never find their way out again.
I walked for an inordinately long time without coming to a turning in the corridor; I must have gone the wrong way, only the same thing happened when I turned and walked back the way I had come. The open door to my bedroom would have been a reassurance that I was still in familiar territory, but my fingertips found nothing but smooth, unforgiving concrete.
Five minutes passed by before I eventually came to a bend, by which time my panic had developed into full-blown terror. The colored, shifting patterns in my eyes had disappeared, but the smell had intensified until I was gagging on the rotten sweetness of it.
Still no doors. Still no light. A frightened sob escaped my lips and bounced off the narrow walls surrounding me. No, I definitely wasn’t lost in a huge void. Now it felt as though I was trapped in a space too small, too tight, and the walls were closing in. My breathing grew shallower by the second. I was in a tomb; I was going to suffocate to death in the dark, all alone.
I sank to the floor, incapable of holding myself up any longer, and let out a low, pathetic cry. The nausea came on like a wave, and without warning I dropped to my hands and knees, my body bent double, retching. Nothing came up.
Scrape.
I froze, my stomach clenching, breath hitching in my throat.
Scrape.
The noise reverberated down the corridor. It came again, the sound of flint dragged across stone. Someone was out there. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“Hello?” My voice shook. There was no reply, only a break in the thick odor of decaying lilies as something else drew near: citrus, like soap. Something clean. I sank back onto my heels, the blackness weighing down on me, suddenly knowing who was out there. He didn’t say anything, but I felt him in front of me.
I hadn’t been expecting the touch of his fingertips against the skin of my cheek, though. The unexpected warmth made me flinch, and the contact was snatched back in an instant. I gasped. In that second, when the roughness of his fingertips had grazed the line of my cheekbone, I had felt reconnected with the world. Now, with his touch gone, I was cast back into shadow.
“Daniel?”
This time when he touched me, it was to pick me up and lift me from the floor. His arms, circled around me, were strong, safe. The panic of the blindness, the fear of being lost and alone melted away in seconds to be replaced by such a strong sensation of relief that I found myself inexplicably sobbing into his t-shirt. I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. Instead, I folded into him and wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging hold of him and the idea that I wasn’t completely alone. The tears kept coming. Daniel didn’t breathe a word.
Less than a minute later, I felt myself being lowered. He’d taken me back to my room. The mattress softly yielded beneath me as he set me down. He was so close I could feel his breath, hot and sweet against my neck. Then he was gone. The suddenness of his absence felt wrong, but somehow I knew he was still there, standing at the edge of my room.
It would have been stupid to ask him what was happening. How would he know? It made more sense to apologize, but the words wouldn’t come. I closed my eyes. There was no use keeping them open; I was still completely blind, without a glimmer of hope that my vision would return. Now there was nothing but the exhaustion. It sank its claws in, dragging me down into a sleep so dizzyingly deep that I suspected I might never wake up at all.