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Faced with returning to the solitude of my room, I joined the card game instead. If nothing else, the concentration required to switch between snap and poker depending on who entered the room provided a good distraction.
Chapter Five
Rowan
I woke in the middle of the night with the sick certainty that something was wrong.
There was no sound, no obvious reason for the feeling, yet it sat in my chest like a weight, squeezing the air from my lungs. My heart was already hammering, as though it had started racing before I even opened my eyes, while every instinct screamed at me not to move.
The room lay in darkness, broken only by the faint outline of the curtains, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone. Something else was there, hidden in the darkness. Watching me.
You had a dream, I told myself. Something you can’t remember, but that scared you. Nothing else. All you need to do is switch on the lamp, and you’ll see that you’re alone.
The switch was only a few inches away, yet reaching for it felt like dangling my arm into shark-infested water and inviting whatever was there to bite me.
My mouth had gone dry, and I was acutely aware of every thud of my heart. With each second that passed, the darkness seemed to press closer. Eventually, the fear of what might be concealed within it outweighed the risk of discovering it.
I dived for the switch, and the lamp flared to life.
For the briefest fraction of a second, I saw something darker than the darkness itself. Something huge.
Then it was gone.
It hadn’t retreated into the shadows or darted out of sight. One moment it had been there, and the next it had simply ceased to exist.
The room was empty. There was only the desk with my untouched sketchpad, the wardrobe, and the same bland furniture that had occupied it when I went to sleep.
I collapsed back against the pillows, adrenaline still coursing through my system, and unable to get Laura’s words about something watching her from the corner of her room out of my head. What if she hadn’t been imagining it? What if the thing had left her room and come to mine?
I left the lamp switched on for the rest of the night. Despite knowing how ridiculous I was being, I deliberately turned my back on the corner where I’d seen—or thought I’d seen—something standing.
The headache was worse the next morning, and the nausea was bad enough that I barely touched my breakfast. The problem with being in a place like this was that you couldn’t be slightly off-color without someone noticing. As a result, the nurse called me to her office and carried out all the poking and prodding again from the first night.
“It’s probably just a bug,” I said. “That happens when you’re not used to being in proximity to so many other people.”
She unwrapped the blood pressure cuff from my arm and gave me a long look. “Do you really think that?”
“What else would it be?”
“How did you sleep?”
“Not great,” I admitted.
She nodded. “Given the poor sleep, sweating, shaky hands, headache, and nausea, I’d say you’re suffering from alcohol withdrawal.”
“I’m not…” I stopped myself before automatically insisting that I wasn’t an alcoholic. Instead, I thought back over the last few weeks and calculated that yesterday had been the first day I’d gone without a drink for quite some time.
“Possibly,” I conceded.
“I’ll get the doctor to look at you, and if he agrees, he’ll likely put you on Librium. Just a mild dose. Enough to take the edge off until your body adjusts to being without alcohol.”
I gave a brief nod. I felt bad enough that if they had medication capable of taking the edge off the headache and stopping my hands from shaking, I wasn’t about to refuse it out of pride.
“And then this afternoon,” the nurse said with a smile, “you should go on the walk and get some fresh air.”
“The walk?”
“The nature walk around the forest.”
