Page 254 - The Midnight Library
P. 254
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Awakening
At one minute and twenty-seven seconds aer midnight, Nora Seed marked
her emergence back into life by vomiting all over her duvet .
Alive, but hardly.
Choking, exhausted, dehydrated, struggling, trembling, heavy, delirious,
pain in her chest, even more pain in her head, this was the worst life could
feel, and yet it was life, and life was precisely what she wanted.
It was hard, near impossible, to pull herself off the bed but she knew she
had to get vertical.
She managed it, somehow, and grabbed her phone but it seemed too
heavy and slippy to keep a grasp of and it fell onto the floor beyond view.
‘Help,’ she croaked, staggering out of the room.
Her hallway seemed to be tilting like it was a ship in a storm. But she
reached the door without passing out, then dragged the chain lock off the
latch and managed, aer great effort, to open it.
‘Please help me.’
She barely realised it was still raining as she stepped outside in her vomit-
stained pyjamas, passing the step where Ash had stood a little over a day
before to announce the news of her dead cat.
ere was no one around.
No one that she could see. So she staggered towards Mr Banerjee’s house
in a series of dizzy stumbles and lurches, eventually managing to ring the
doorbell.
A sudden square of light sprung out from the front window.
e door opened.
