Down

**This is just a scene that never turned into an actual story. Hope you enjoy reading it anyways!**

That screaming. Every other night Alex would wake up to it, and this night was no different. He clenched his teeth and covered his head with his pillow. Why did she have to scream so loud? He put her in the room furthest from his own and he could still hear it clear as if she was in the room adjacent to him. What was it that tormented her; that plagued her dreams and terrorized the inner-most sanctuary of her mind?

He lay in bed for hours after that but could not fall asleep. The scream always left a disturbed feeling that pained his heart. It was still a few hours before dawn and the brilliant white moon was piercing his curtains when he decided to get up. He paced around his room a few times, poking the dying embers in the fireplace and listening for anymore cries from the girl. There was an unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach; his whole body tingled as if it was anticipating something that his own mind couldn’t see coming. Finally, he went to the window and pulled back the curtains.

The dark blue sky was a sea of stars; the moon bigger and brighter than he had seen in years. The entire garden below was a stark contrast of shadow and light.

Someone was standing on the bridge over the pond; a white figure dressed in a flowing white gown, brown hair falling in long waves down her back, being lifted slightly by the weak breeze. Whoever it was had to be freezing, and Alex wondered why that was his first thought as opposed to Why there was someone standing on the bridge. But that was because he knew who it was; the answer was there in his mind, as if it had always been known to him. Her back was to him so he didn’t know what she was doing, be he sensed she was looking into the water, deep into its depths, as if searching her own soul. He knew this because he, too, had done it many times before. As he had told her when she first arrived, the manor was practically built for people suffering from past transgressions.

The woman moved suddenly and he realized that she was climbing onto the wall of the bridge. She stood there for a moment, suspended in space and time; everything suspended in space and time.

“No,” whispered Alex.

She fell. It was the most graceful fall anyone could make, with her arms outstretched and gown fluttering. It wasn’t a dive or a jump or a faint. It was an intentional fall, right into the deep, freezing pond.

As if a switch had been pulled to start up time again, everything began to move very fast. Alex took off running, not even bothering to grab his robe or slippers. Down the long hall with his ancestors glaring down on him, down the grand staircase that had been his mother’s death, down to the garden overcast with the light of the moon, and down into the cold, murky pond.

Down, down, down. Down into the seaweed and slime and sludge of a pond long left to its own will. Down into the bleak, the dismal, the darkness of the unknown. Where was the moon now to give its light? Even it could not reach these depths; even light was forbidden in a place so harsh and unforgiving.

But Alex kept going. Alex was not light, and so he was not afraid of the darkness. He gripped cloth and pulled until he had her wrapped in his arms. Then up he swam out of the deathly depth of the dark and towards the light of the moon; towards life.

He burst through the surface gasping for air, shivering at his cold welcome. At the shore he pulled her up and checked her pale, blue face for life.

“Come on,” he whispered, maybe even praying. “Come on!” He pounded her chest a few times with his fists.

A gasp of air followed by coughing and sputtering. He rolled her onto her side and finally took a moment for himself to breathe normally, too.

She started crying, sobbing, her whole body shaking and heaving as she gasped for air. “No, no, no!” She lay crumbled in a ball on the ground, crying these words.

“No? No?! Listen, lady, you came to me, to my house, for help, to be saved, remember? Now you’re trying to kill yourself at my house? No. I will NOT let you die.”

She said no more so he carried her inside and called a maid to help her get changed. He then stood guard outside her door all night to make sure she wouldn’t attempt anything else while the maid slept in the chair beside her bed.