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My eyes fell shut again and the emptiness that I imagined was death began to take over. Just as it did so, there was a muffled sound, maybe from the surface, then the smooth, peaceful water lurched with a disturbance. Something hard wrapped around my arm, like a claw, jerking me off the bottom. My arm was released and something hit my back. Faintly, I could feel water rushing past me, but I was barely there.
A vague sense of cold hit my face and a choking cough echoed in my ears, painfully loud after the silence of the water. Then everything fell away to total and complete blackness.
----
I pursed my lips, looking curiously around the chilly white fog. It seemed to drift like a mist but at the same time inconceivably billow like clouds. The floor didn’t look solid, but it felt like concrete. Coldness seeped quickly through my jeans and cami, even more quickly through my exposed skin to my core, and I felt ice grip my heart. “You know, Edgar, you could consider decorating. This place is a bit bleak. A fireplace would be a good start because it’s so damn cold, but I’d settle for a nice shag rug.”
Edgar materialized out of the mist with a grim and firmly disapproving look on his face. “What in Heaven or Hell, whichever suits your purposes, were you thinking?”
Looking around, I frowned. “A couch would be good, too. I’m tired.”
“You ought to be. You just drowned.”
My frown deepened and I met the stern look on his face. “You’re joking! You have to be joking. I did not die! I wouldn’t be here if I was dead, would I? It’s a conference room, you said, not a waiting room.”
Edgar shrugged, his eyes the grey of a gravestone and far more somber. “It is disappointing, really, that you broke the surface of the water and then died. You had your life right there in your hands, but you didn’t take it. You didn’t take that last chance, that last breath. I had expected better, certainly after everything you’ve been through and moved past. Surely after what you have survived and after your past failed attempts you ought to have given up on suicide.”
“I didn’t commit suicide!” I shouted in the emptiness, a similar panic to that which had consumed me in the pool flooding my veins. “That’s not possible! I’m just unconscious, I’ll be fine!”
He shut his eyes sadly and shook his head. “Do you know that that is exactly what I heard from your friend Frost? That’s not what I am hearing anymore, though.”
I swallowed, ignoring the way it seemed to do no good, like it didn’t matter if I swallowed. I wondered if it mattered if I breathed. “What are you hearing now?” I asked, my eyes burning with rising tears. He had to be joking. He was trying to trick me, to make a point.
Edgar met my gaze levelly with a look of pure and completely untainted, uninterrupted pity. “Just two words in quick repetition.Not again.” The words echoed around me, crashing against my ears like waves of the fatal water. My eyes tightened shut with pain and horror and I bowed my head with the weight of the shame. What had I done? “I take it you understand the meaning of these words?”
I nodded my head. I didn’t know what it was he had lost in his past, but I knew how much pain it had caused him and that he couldn’t survive it again. “Oh God, Edgar, what have I done? I swear I didn’t mean to, I never meant to…not Frost. If anyone else…” I shook my head slowly. “If anyone else had saved me, or tried to…did I die in his arms?”
I met those knowing, dark eyes and a tear fell over my cheek. I barely even felt it, my senses were so dull, so numbed by grief. “I did, didn’t I?”
Edgar sighed sadly. “I had hoped for so much better, Poe. Promise me you’ll try? The answer to this curse is not suicide. That will not solve anything and it certainly won’t protect your loved ones.”
“I...what?”
He gave me a pointed look, then the mist enveloped him and everything fell into blackness again.
----
Throbbing pain pulsed against my back and my insides burned. I felt cold hardness on my aching back, pounding on my chest. Then heat against my mouth. I counted the repeated pressure against my chest and recognized CPR. Warmth pressed against my lips again and this time a kind of electric charge passed into them.
Another pound against my chest and I gasped, coughing, choking. I was going to give Edgar a piece of my mind the next time he called me. Death did not hurt this bad. I was definitely not dead.
“Thank God. Poe? Can you hear me? Poe?”
I coughed again and nodded slightly, then continued coughing. Frost seemed to understand and held me upright, patting my sore back as I spewed pool water everywhere. “You are such an idiot! Do you know that?”
I nodded again and Frost made an irritated sound. “What the hell were you thinking, then? Were you thinking at all? Because I’m starting to seriously doubt your sense of logic.”
My eyes slid open, still burning from the chlorine. I was bent double, sitting on the side of the pool with Frost holding me up. I coughed one more time, then said in a scratchy, weak voice that made me want to scream it hurt my throat so badly, “Thank you. For saving me.”
“Really? You sure? Because it seemed like you were pretty happy down there,” he snapped.
I tightened my eyes and coughed again. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I rasped.
Frost snorted harshly. “Then what were you trying to do? If you were attempting virtually anything else, you were doing a really shitty job.”
I winced at the sharp-edged words. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “Please, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t trying to…. It was an accident.”
He laughed grimly. “Let me guess. You fell? Kind of like you fell on a razor blade?”
