Melaine

Chapter 28

The girl had been sleeping in her bed snuggled underneath the comforter against the cold that suddenly chilled the room after midnight. She pulled her legs up, curling into a ball as she shivered but didn't bring herself out of the bed to turn on the gas heater. The cold had jostled her out of her sleep, and she moaned rubbing her feet together to seek some heat for comfort. She, at first, thought of turning on the heater but decided against this urge and stayed in her bed. Because, if she had made any sound padding around the bedroom, he would have known that she's awake and she couldn't have born the terrific consequences in the middle of night. After some restlessness, she was finally able to heat her numbed feet from friction and got herself comfortable in the bed to sleep. She was about to touch the realm of dream when she heard the gasps and pants of someone inside the room. Her eyes fluttered eyes open in confusion, blinking few times when her ears met with a muffled sob as if someone had been crying. The girl immediately closed her eyes, shuddering in fear and tugged the comforter above her head brushing off the paranoid thoughts that sprang up from being alone in the room. She heard another whimper and sat up in her bed, clenching her thudding breast and looked around the room to find its source. She suddenly froze in horror when she realized that the sound had been coming from under her bed. The girl gulped and reasoned not to look under her bed to confirm her theory. But a sob after sob, made her to muster up her courage against her will. She covered her mouth with hand and bent to look underneath the bed. She barely held back her scream when a thing sprang out of the bed and pressed itself against the wall.

"A-Alan?"

The girl stared at the pale bluish form of her brother horrified who's standing like a dead corpse. The hollows of his eye sockets that were almost black in the dimmed room gave him appearance of a ghost. The boy's lips were blue poisoned from the sting of cold, and he wet his night pyjamas right in front of her sister trembling in fear. The girl immediately leapt out of the bed rushing to help her brother who stood barefoot in the pool of his urine.

"Alan, are you alright?" She asked shaking her brother by shoulder who craned his head towards her and blinked up at her as if he had been having a hard time registering his surroundings. The rational part of her wanted to wake Darren up, but it's the rationality that stopped her from telling him about Alan. The girl rushed inside the bathroom, filling in the bathtub with hot water and checked the temperature for him. She steered her ice-cold brother into the bathroom and helped him out of his ruined pyjamas leading him inside the bathtub, an act that wasn't foreign to her to bathe her brother since she had taken the role of mother after their parent's death. The boy pulled his knees up to his chest out of modesty and shyness in front of opposite sex wrapping skinny arms around his legs. The girl knelt beside the tub and touched his arm tenderly.

"Can you clean yourself?" The boy gave a blink in answer and sank his head against his chest.

"I'll be right back, Alan." She told him awaiting answer from her painfully muted brother who refused to utter a single word to her about the cause of his condition.

"Okay?" This time the boy nodded his head staring in the distant and she left the bathroom to retrieve his clean clothes and sweaters. She learned from their maid that Darren had been out of the station in some business meeting, to her relief, else he would've been awake before the siblings could have known. She pulled fresh pyjamas and socks from Alan's closet, fretting for her brother's condition and went back to the bathroom. She found him curled up in the bathtub just like she had left him and grabbed the towel wrapping around his shoulders.

"The water is getting cold now." The boy remained in the fatal position and didn't complied to her worried sister.

"Alan, at least tell me what happened?" She hadn't been his sister, sole friend but his mother and father too since it was ultimate responsibility on her shoulders to look after her brother. But seeing him near dead made her tear up despite the fact that she should have been stronger for him. It's then that the girl noticed the forming purplish bruises on his entire body.