Excerpt: Underpass

Amelia opened her eyes and found that she was in bed. There was a kind of weak light trying to sneak through the curtains, and she tried to figure out if it was dawn or dusk. She groped around for her mobile phone which she always left near her bed as she used it as an alarm clock, but it wasn’t there. She tried to sit up, but found she had a blinding headache that felt like hot knives were being forced into her eyes from behind. Deciding to lay back down for a while, Amelia fell into a deep sleep peppered with strange and confused dreams, full of dark shapes that she could not identify. When she awoke she tried to remember what they were, but they were slipping out of her memory faster than she could hold on to them. It left her with a strange, frustrated feeling inside that she just couldn’t seem to shake no matter how hard she tried. She heard voices downstairs and thought she heard her name mentioned, and as she was feeling less sore in the head now she went to investigate. Looking at the aged grandfather clock in the hallway as she passed, she learned that it was 7:15am. Funny, I can’t remember coming home from work, she thought to herself. She shook her head as if to shake away all of the confusing thoughts going through her brain, but stopped as soon as she found it hurt quite a lot.