Passage from Emergence

Emily Wright opened her eyes on darkness and lay utterly still, willing the terror spinning through her mind to fade.

After a few moments, she began to force herself to relax, one muscle at a time. Her shoulders ached, she discovered without surprise, and most of her back also seemed keen to make its discomfort known. Beside her she could hear Oliver’s regular deep breathing, sound asleep. He was fine, as always.

Emily stifled a wave of resentment. Of course he was fine. And so was she, really. She’d been through this same experience night after night for the best part of a month, so it was hardly unfamiliar.

So relax.

She gradually became aware that her hand was resting on her abdomen. That, too, was no surprise. Sometimes in these moments she could convince herself that she sensed a slight movement within her. Once, she’d even thought she felt a heartbeat, tiny and feeble. But there was nothing tonight, nothing at all.

She slowly let out the breath she realised she’d been holding, tried once again mentally to ease the tension in her shoulders, found that it was impossible, and gave up.

On the edges of her vision, parts of the darkened room were beginning to coalesce into shapes now. Near the foot of the bed she could make out the looming shadow of Oliver’s large grandfather clock, standing lifeless in the gloom. It didn’t tell the time any more, of course; it had finally given up the ghost, according to Oliver, in his father’s study when he was about ten years old. Still, it was a pre-Emergence design, so by her reckoning that meant it’d ticked along quite nicely for a good ninety years or so before finally succumbing to the inevitable. Not bad, all things considered.

About three years ago, Emily had asked him once why he’d kept it all this time. It had been a cold winter, fuel for the stove had been particularly hard to come by, and the thought of all that potential firewood standing solemnly and uselessly in the bedroom had been preying on her mind.

Judging by Oliver’s horrified reaction, she might as well have suggested that they burn his grandfather. The clock was an heirloom. It had been in the Wright family for five generations and it wasn’t going anywhere. One day, he’d said, when everything was back to how it used to be before the Emergence, there would be clocksmiths again, and whichever distant generation of Wrights were lucky enough to live to see that time would be able to have the clock repaired and restored to its former glory and it would keep time for them for at least another ninety years.

So there it still stood, a symbol of survival, awaiting better days.

Like the rest of us, really.

All right. Enough.

Emily rolled onto her side, away from Oliver, and sighed to herself. At least the terror had receded, and although her body still ached there was no harm in having another shot at a decent night’s sleep. She closed her eyes and tried, once more, to relax.

At the foot of the bed, the great clock watched her as it always had, dormant but not yet dead; and in her belly slept an innocent new life, the subject of the recurring nightmare that had visited her every night for the past three weeks.

 

Portfolio | Academic | Misc | Web design