Coma Somnolentum

‘Zoe, c’mon!’

The voice was quieter now. More personal, feminine, and tinged with an anxious concern. Much like the hand on her shoulder, it had followed her out of the dream and into the waking world, morphing as it did so into something far less threatening.

‘I’m awake…’ she mumbled, pinching her eyes shut against the surface of her school desk and forcing herself to commit what she’d just seen to memory. Drey Island. Kit’s tower. The spiralling descent into a sinister darkness… Dreams could be so easy to forget, after all. Especially in the presence of such insistent distractions.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the voice insisted, the now far smaller and gentler hand jostling her shoulder as she refused to budge. ‘It’s almost the end of lunch! What if a teacher comes in? You’ll get in trouble.’

‘Then I’ll get in trouble,’ Zoe sighed, pushing herself up off her desk and blearily glancing around the empty classroom. The muffled chattering of students in the hallway outside played gently against her ears like the wash of waves against shale.

Once she’d both fully woken up and committed the events of the dream to memory, she finally glanced up to the girl stood at her side. Long, maple brown hair and wide, hazel eyes, Eirene’s face was fixed in that well-practised, panicky expression of hers that said “you’re doing something wrong, and you’re going to get caught”.

It wasn’t that Zoe had any particular issue with authority figures, it was more that she just took whatever they said on its own merits and made her decisions from there. Eirene, on the other hand, would have insisted the sky was green if anyone sufficiently imposing had told her so.

‘I did it,’ Zoe said, slowly getting to her feet, wary of the likely response but feeling the need to share with Eirene all the same. The two of them had been friends for almost as long as she could remember, after all.

‘Did what?’

‘The tower,’ she explained, nodding slowly as she let her mind’s eye drift back over the dream. ‘I found it. On Drey Island… The old lighthouse…’

Eirene’s expression shifted into one of awkward sympathy. The kind of look one gives a dying man as he shares his plans for the years to come.

‘Zoe…’ she started, but Zoe cut her off with a shake of her head.

‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. ‘Brain chemistry. Seeing what I expect to see.’ She leant down to pick up her schoolbag off the floor. ‘But it… wasn’t what I was expecting. It felt different. Like it didn’t come from me…’

Slinging her back over her shoulder, she caught her friend’s expression and let her justification trail off with a quiet huff.

‘You doing anything this evening?’ Eirene asked, her smile a mixture of kind and sorry. ‘We could head down to the Mariner’s after school? Grab a coffee?’

Zoe paused for a moment, more than a little tempted to accept. Some time away from the inside of her own head, chatting about unimportant things like school, boys, and university applications… She had to admit, it was an attractive offer.

‘Sorry,’ she replied, finding herself shaking her head even before she’d consciously decided to decline, ‘I… think I’m going to head on over to Sacks. Dad’s working late tonight, so…’ She gave her friend an appreciative smile. ‘Maybe sometime this weekend, though.’

‘Oh,’ Eirene nodded, frowning to herself in what was probably concern, ‘okay. Well, would you like some company, or…?’

The jarring ring of the school bell jolted Eirene straight back into that panicked expression that she wore so naturally, and Zoe couldn’t help but smile.

‘I’m alright,’ she replied, ‘thanks, Eirene.’ She stepped past her friend and gave her a playful frown on her way to the door.

‘C’mon,’ she teased, ‘you’ll get in trouble if a teacher comes in!’

***

The country road leading out of Holmstowe carved its way through rolling waves of springtime green. Leaves budding from the branches of trees rose and fell in the breeze like sea water, residual droplets of the morning’s rain catching the amber sunlight as they reached their peak, sparkling like an ocean spray.

The clouds had parted, releasing the landscape from their veil of moody grey, and bathing it in a heavenly beauty that Zoe couldn’t help but resent.

She pushed her bicycle just a little bit harder in the hopes of shortening her journey by a few seconds, swinging into the long driveway on her left with as much speed as she dared. It wasn’t exactly a busy road, but, even despite her mood, she didn’t want to cause her dad any extra trouble by rolling herself over the windshield of an oncoming car. He already had more than enough to worry about as it was.

Sacks Cottage Hospital had once been a minor country house on the very outskirts of Holmstowe. After a localised outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1970’s, it had been repurposed for non-emergency medical usage as a way for families to be able to visit their sick loved ones without travelling all the way out to Carlisle or Whitehaven.

These days, Sacks served much the same function, albeit now more focused on frontline and convalescent care. If anything, Zoe’s brother’s situation was something of a throwback, as far as the hospital’s modern patients went.

Securing her bike and removing her helmet, Zoe took a deep breath and headed through the open double doors. Sharing an artificial smile with a passing nurse as she removed the hair tie that had been keeping her lengthy auburn hair out of the way as she’d cycled, she ignored the sparse crowd of other visitors in the waiting area and made a beeline for the reception desk.

‘Zoe Lucas,’ she told the receptionist. ‘Here to visit Ki— Christopher Lucas.’ That never felt right. No one had ever called him “Christopher”.

The woman on the other side of the desk nodded and quickly checked through her records.

‘If you could just sign in here,’ the receptionist replied, tapping at a clipboard to Zoe’s side with her lengthy, French tip nails. ‘Follow the corridor on your left to the end, then head right, and he’s the third room along.’

Zoe ignored the woman’s superfluous directions, filling in the sign-in sheet as she’d done what felt like hundreds of times before.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered, more out of reflex than anything else, placing the pen down and setting off on the all-too-familiar walk into the miniature hospital’s depths.

Old, worn remnants of what had at one time been beautiful wooden façades decorated the hallway walls as she passed. Herringbone floor slats that had once been carefully maintained by dutiful servants now lay scuffed and faded underfoot, long since saturated with neglect and the decades-old stench of antiseptic spray.

Finding her brother’s room, Zoe hesitated for a moment before turning the cold brass knob and letting herself inside. This never seemed to get much easier, and, even as she closed the door behind her, she found herself keeping her eyes fixed anywhere but on the bed at the other end of the room.

Pulling up a battered old armchair to the side of her brother’s hospital bed and taking a seat, Zoe finally mustered up the strength to let her gaze focus on the room’s sole other occupant.

‘Hey, Kit…’ she said, giving her brother a sadder, but altogether more genuine smile than she had the passing nurse. ‘How’ve you been, huh? Scout’s been missing you. Keeps finding ways to get into your room, heh. It’s driving Dad nuts…’

The golden-haired boy in the bed didn’t respond, the only motion coming from the soft, unhurried breaths cycling through his chest, and the occasional flicker of his eyes as they rolled back and forth behind his eyelids.

Had it not been for the feeding tube snaking its way up into one of his nostrils, and the rhythmic bleeping of the heart rate monitor, Kit may just as well have been sleeping.

In fact, as far as the doctors could tell, he was sleeping. The only reason he was in a hospital bed and not his own was that the last time he had woken up had been almost a month ago this coming weekend.

The boy’s chart described his condition as “atypical encephalitis lethargica”. What had started as a mild fever and abnormal difficulty in waking up had evolved over the course of about a week into what his doctors described as something between a coma and the state of akinetic mutism expected in more normal cases of encephalitis lethargica.

He was neither so fully unconscious as a coma patient, nor so immovably alert as a traditional sufferer of the vanishingly rare disease with which he had been diagnosed. If anything, with the fever now long since passed, he appeared by all accounts to simply be asleep. Brainwave monitoring had even gone so far as to suggest that he was dreaming.

Although his primary doctor had suggested the old term “coma somnolentum” to better describe Kit’s situation, his ultimate diagnosis had remained as an atypical form of the more clinically accepted disease.

Sacks Hospital’s past cases of similar patients in the 70’s had not escaped anyone’s notice, but, with Kit seemingly an isolated incident, there was little to be done with that information other than to search for environmental causes around Holmstowe. A true needle-in-a-haystack exercise, if ever there was one.

‘I found it, you know,’ Zoe told her brother, reaching a hand out and placing it over the bedsheets covering his own. ‘The tower in the moonlight? Would have helped if you’d said it was a lighthouse, heh…’ She chuckled softly to herself, wondering just how much, if any, of what she was saying was even getting through.

‘I know it’s a long shot,’ she sighed, stroking a thumb over the side of Kit’s covered hand, ‘and Eirene’s probably right that I’m just seeing what I want to see, but… I’m not a doctor. I can’t do anything to help with… this…’ She gestured weakly to the tendril-like cables of the heart monitor that reached up and under the bedsheets to clutch possessively at her brother’s motionless body.

‘I just… It can’t be a coincidence that you started seeing it right when the fever hit, right…?’ She gave her brother’s hand a squeeze, more so for her own conviction than for his potential reassurance. ‘And every night after…?’ She shook her head.

‘If that’s where you… went…’ she gritted her teeth, hating how desperate she sounded, ‘if that’s where… “you” still are…?’

Zoe exhaled, glancing up for a moment at the amber sunlight trickling in through the window, then to the heart rate monitor, and then finally back down to her brother’s smooth, sleeping face. Determination swelled within her, and she found herself setting her jaw, giving the boy’s hand another much firmer squeeze.

‘I’m coming to find you, Kit,’ she told him, feeling the beginnings of tears starting to sting at the corners of her eyes. ‘I’m coming. So hold on, all right? Just… hold on.’

She dipped her head, feeling the distinct urge to hide her face in case her brother somehow saw her cry.

‘I’ll be there soon. I promise.’