I. Never-Ending Breathing
It struck at night. Quiet and simple, slithering and standing around the corner. I flicked off the lamp on the bedside table and that’s when I felt it, the presence just beyond the open doorway of my room. I knew it was there, and no matter how much I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t real, I didn’t sleep that night. Were those footsteps I heard? Was that the shifting of a body, a hushed and lengthy whisper? Was that the sound of breathing – only out, and without an end?
It haunted me for four days. Or was it five? Sometimes I struggle to remember. Every night. I kept the light on. I didn’t close the door. I knew it was there and yet I also knew it couldn’t be. Logically, there was nothing there at all, and yet I could sense it as surely as I could feel that there was oxygen in the air.
If you wake up in the middle of the night, terrified and shaking and staring at the darkness because it’s going to kill you, who do you call out for?
Because I breathed, it was breathing.
II. Safety
“What on earth are you reading?”
Harrow almost dropped the book in shock at the sound of Gideon’s voice, and tried to gulp down her heart as it jumped up her throat.
“You look like a little goblin, crouched over that thing,” Gideon said. “Is it something you would prefer to keep a secret?”
The book made a sharp slapping sound as Harrow closed it quickly. She laughed offhandedly but she also wasn’t very good at laughing, so it mostly sounded like gasping for air. “No, no. Just getting into the atmosphere of it, I suppose. It’s intense.”
A loud, high-pitched beeping sounded over the speakers, and they instinctively looked up. A routine weather update was robotically verbalized, and they relaxed again. Gideon glanced around the dusty, metal-walled room filled with bookshelves and open boxes of folders. The large window between two shelves allowed orange sunlight to pool in through thick glass.
“I wonder what really happened to this place,” she commented absently. With the tip of her foot, she pushed at an empty box next to her. “There are some extensive records. Someone abandoned this entire planet and in a hurry. What’s that you have there?”
“A diary,” said Harrow, looking down at it. It lay unassuming in its tattered, loose binding.
“Whose diary?” asked Gideon. She walked over to stand next to Harrow and tried to read the cover. “Did it belong to one of the patients?”
The words on the front of the book were smudged and written by a hand so shaky it was illegible. There might have been an s, possibly a p, and either an H or two letters melded together.
Harrow shrugged. “I don’t know whose it is. But whoever it was, they had problems.”
The beeping came again, and they listened to the next announcement, an update of the time. Before it even finished, they drowned out the rest with the rustling of moving feet and papers. When the area was slightly tidier, they made their way to the door.
Just as Harrow was about to leave, there was a loud thud and she spun around, her body tight with terror as a flash of darkness seemed to haunt the edge of her vision for a moment.
The book she had been reading was now on the floor, fallen from its shelf. She took a breath to calm herself, glanced around just in case, and went to pick it up.
“Hey, where are you going? We don’t want to be late for dinner.”
Harrow paused and called over her shoulder, “I’ll be right there! A book fell.”
Gideon made a noise of acknowledgement and her steps sounded over the metal girder of the corridor outside, in time with Harrow’s boots tapping over concrete as she went towards the book.
She picked up the book carefully, feeling like it should be treated with kindness after the hard life it led, and she rested it on the shelf again.
This time, it let her leave. She didn’t see the ripped sheet of paper that lay in the darkness beneath the bookcase, and so she didn’t get to see the harshly etched plea.
Save me
III. Irregularities
Harrow kept her eyes trained on Gideon as they ate. They were surrounded by the other students who were part of their group for this excursion, but Harrow only ever cared about Gideon. She didn’t even realise what her sandwich tasted like until she was almost finished with it. The dull pounding sound of people walking over the thin metal floor and the noise of their chatter was nothing compared to Gideon’s laugh, and the others surely had nothing to offer that could be better than Gideon’s shy glances.
They had only gone on one date so far. Just one, and Harrow was trying not to seem too eager but she really wanted Gideon to know how much she wanted another one. Dating Gideon was glorious; something she could already tell would be a pure indulgence of the guiltiest kind. But they were young, and inexperienced, and shy. Harrow didn’t want to scare Gideon with her eagerness and bevy of flaws, and Gideon probably didn’t want to make some embarrassing mistake. Neither of them knew exactly why the other was interested in them but neither wanted to spend too much time questioning it.
Together on this excursion with other students, Harrow really wanted to hold Gideon’s hand but she knew she couldn’t. Were they even at that stage yet? They’d held hands, but that was before the date, and holding hands now would be about dating more than friendship… right?
Right.
Was that a whisper? Harrow frowned at herself, then erased the frown and replaced it with a smile, looking at Gideon who was laughing about some silly thing. She loved silly things. She thought silly things were great, and easy to laugh about. The easier the laughs were, the more she wished she could keep them.
Harrow shook her head, though she wasn’t sure if it was in response to her own thoughts, or in reaction to Gideon’s joke. She kept the smile, anyway.
On the way back to the library, she deliberately brushed against Gideon. “How about we have dinner again tonight?”
In other words, let’s go on another date. Why not just say it? Is this what they call being ‘coy’?
But Gideon’s expression was far too serious for anything but an unhappy ending. “I don’t know, Harrow.” She looked away, bit her bottom lip, and brushed against Harrow as if in commiseration. “You know I’m not sure it’s a good idea for us to be doing that.”
“Doing what?” Harrow asked, hovering between playing dumb and being sardonic. “We haven’t even really done anything.” Bitter, in the end, was what she went for.
Gideon nodded to acknowledge that as a fact. “Even so, I’m not sure it would be a good idea. We should probably just focus on our studies, and you know back home things are –”
Harrow rolled her eyes. “I know all about how things are, thank you Gideon. Don’t bother, then. If you’re going to turn me down just be frank about it.”
Gideon stopped; there weren’t many students behind them, but they were forced to manoeuvre around the two. She frowned, deeply.
“What’s up with you? You know I don’t mean it like that, Harrow. Come on, you need to be reasonable –”
“Sure, I do,” Harrow said. “I always do.” She didn’t bother looking at Gideon anymore; she didn’t want to accept that she was even talking to Gideon – her Gideon – about this. “Come on, Gideon,” she whipped, “let’s just be honest. You’re scared, aren’t you? Scared of those ‘things back home’, scared of me, I don’t know, but scared as hell.”
Gideon looked briefly affronted, but Harrow could see the shadow of shame beneath it. Jackpot: she was right.
“Well, I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything, least of all the consequences, least of all you. You’re my person, Gideon. I want you. However much it will hurt me, I will always want you. If you’re saying you don’t want me as much as you want other people to control our lives, well, then, I guess that’s it, isn’t it?”
Harrow, meanwhile, had no idea where this was all coming from. True, it was what she was feeling, but the fact that it was all just pouring out of her like this was unprecedented and not a controlled action. She decided to accept it as a timely outburst; she really wanted to make this clear to Gideon.
“It’s not like that,” Gideon said, glancing around, eyes distracted. “It’s not like that at all. Well, it is, somewhat, but not entirely. I mean, yes, I do have those convictions, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get past that. Or… something along that line.”
Gideon was rattled. Gloriously, deliciously rattled. Harrow wasn’t sure why this was what she wanted, but it was certainly what she wanted.
Her mouth pulled into a sly grin grimace, and she edged closer. “Prove it to me. Kiss me right here in this hallway.”
Gideon jumped immediately. She looked around; the cool corridor was empty aside from them, and their presence alone was practically insignificant in the metal silence that surrounded them. But, still, she stayed where she was, and she shoved her hands in her pockets for what seemed to be emphasis.
Harrow didn’t say a word. She simply raised a single eyebrow, which Gideon avoided looking at.
She turned on her heel and set off down the corridor again. Words weren’t needed for an exit like that.
But Gideon wanted it to be different. “Harrow, wait! I’m sorry; I really am.”
Sorry, sorry, sorry. The words had a slant in the whispered edges of Harrow’s mind, each more mocking than the first.
It made her stop. And then it made her turn around. It even made her – “Okay, then. If you can’t make up your mind; find me in the library later and tell me yes or no. If you can’t find me, then you’ll see it as a sign, won’t you? A sign that we’re not meant to be and that I don’t want you. That should appease your guilt. Isn’t that right?”
It wasn’t true understanding that she saw in Gideon’s eyes at those words. It was some grudging kind of acceptance. An acknowledgement that her words were true and undisputed. It was this or nothing.
It made her smile, laced with resentment again. And she turned away one more time, leaving Gideon behind.
Far behind, something whispered in her mind.
She closed her eyes.
IV. Overcome
My body is heavy. I can’t move. I will myself, I say move please move please I beg you just fucking do it already just do it, just get up do things move move move but my body is dead, I can’t move, nothing happens, I see the immobile weak frozen flaccid state of my being and I despair, this is what makes me cry, the very emptiness of my heart, it hurts me. It keeps hurting me but I don’t feel so I just keep going like a total fool,
look at that idiot still living without life.
Harrow looked up from the words. Was it a sound she heard? There was nothing there. Far, far away she could hear the other students, exploring and learning like she should be doing.
But she was back with the weird, freaky diary and its dark, deep contents. She felt like she could fall into this, the world, or the abyss that it created, the endless sadness it emitted.
And, of course, still there was no Gideon.
What she had been thinking when she handed out that challenge, Harrow had no idea. It seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps, or maybe she was telling herself that now as a comfort at a time when it seemed like a terrible idea. Why would Gideon go for something like that? Why would she risk losing her most important person like that?
So, Harrow was still alone with the book.
She stroked the edge of its binding because she didn’t have Gideon’s jaw there to do the same. She traced the outlines of the handwritten words because she didn’t have Gideon’s palm do to the same.
She let it draw her in because she couldn’t kiss Gideon. And she let it hold her once tight and then tighter because Gideon wasn’t there, and Gideon wasn’t coming.
And just like that, Gideon became her everything and was immediately presented as an absence, eternally missing, ripping her apart.
She dug back into the diary, savouring every word, wrapping the tendrils of its pain and longing around herself without any exertion from the darkness within. It covered her, smothered her, and consumed her.
Harrow hoped, in some small way, that when Gideon arrived later, that she really would accept that Harrow just wasn’t there anymore after all, and that maybe the darkness could be a comfort to her. A truer comfort than she ever could have been in life.