The Eleventh Hour

Chapter 57

I didn’t know when I fell out of the empty nothingness.

One minute, all I saw was black, and I don’t know how, but I knew I could see it, I could feel it.

There was no physical pain, but as I had regained the ability to mentally feel, I was suddenly struck with several emotions.

Panic.

Where was Roxy? Was she safe? All I could think of was her being in grave danger, but my mind couldn’t process the last memory I had of her, or any memory at all – it was just darkness. Where was I? What was happening?

My thoughts – or whatever they were – shifted to Nate out of their own free will. The sound of his voice came back to me clear as day; the way he said my name, the sound of his laugh, and then a different sound. I had never heard it before, but I was certain it was him. He was shouting, but not out of anger, out of pure agony. Dread overwhelmed me, but not in the way I was used to. It didn’t drop my stomach and tighten my chest the way I was familiar – I couldn’t feel anything physical. The more I thought about it, the more I realised I couldn’t feel anything except emotion.

I tried to move my hands, expecting to feel them comply somewhere at my sides, but nothing happened. It was the same when I tried to move my toes and then my legs. Nothing. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t find my voice.

What was happening? Was I dead?

New noises sounded, but they were different. They didn’t seem like they were coming from my mind, or whatever this was, but from the outside. It sounded as though I was underwater again when the sound of someone speaking entered this black pit I was in, though it was unintelligible.

There was a jolt. I don’t know where it came from or what part of me felt it, but the blackness seemed to waver. It bounced and radiated for a second, before snapping back into place.

“Clear!”

Clear? What –?

There was a second jolt, this one so much stronger than the first. This time, the darkness remained, but it was no longer a smooth shade of pitch black vacuum-less onyx all around me. It’s as if the shade of black changed, with miniscule grains of white lightening up the darkness, as if I’d floated to some invisible surface.

As soon as I’d attained this sudden change, the whirling sounds became louder, clearer, no longer in the distance. A long, high pitched drawn out sound changed into a methodical beeping.

“We’ve got a pulse!”

More voices, but they began to sound distant again.

“We’re not losing you again, Lola Rose! Stay with us!”

The sound of an unfamiliar male voice loudly entered my ears and tipped me back up to the surface, where the persistence beeping sounded again.

The only sense I had was hearing, and even that was failing me. Although I could hear, it was a strange sensation. It was different – wrong.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move one inch of my body. I couldn’t open my eyes.

My hearing started to fail, and the strange, garbled sounds started to dim.

I was pulled in by an overwhelming amount of exhaustion, and I drifted.

~

I was running through the familiar scene in my dreams, before hurtling through the air.

I landed on the floor with a thump and although I didn’t feel the impact, I started to feel the biting coldness of the water on the hard ground as it seeped through my clothes and onto my skin.