He lay in his narrow bed, eyes closed, his face an alabaster mask in the moonlight. Occasionally a tremor would run the length of his body.
He clutched the bedsheets, pulling them tight under his chin. A dreadful heaviness inside weighed his body down, a feeling that his blood had turned into liquid lead: the burden was loss, and it had left him exhausted and weak.
The boy had rested there a long time – how many hours he had no way of knowing, for all of the last three days had been a timeless eternity – but his father had forbidden him to move from the bed again. So he lay there, enduring the loss, frightened by the new loneliness.
Until something caused him to open his red-rimmed eyes once more.
The figure stood near the end of the bed and she smiled at him. He felt her warmth, the momentary shedding of bereavement. But it was impossible. His father had told him it was impossible.
‘You . . . can’t . . . be . . .’ he said, his small voice a shivery intrusion on the night. ‘He . . . says . . . you can’t . . . you can’t . . . be . . .
The sense of loss was renewed, for now it was also within her.
And then the startled boy looked elsewhere in the room, gazing upwards into a far corner as if suddenly aware of yet another presence, of someone else watching him, someone he could not see. The moment vanished when footsteps were heard along the corridor and he looked away, for the first time real fear in his eyes. The woman was gone.
