When I was younger I felt I’d lived 1000 years. Maureen and I used to fly at night, escaping monsters that chased us. We would skim above grasping hands, barely out of reach. Looking down, I could see a face of evil, and it was so close, the dread made me sweat. Between steep, gravelly mountains, she and I would fly by sheer willpower, and I knew I had to have the strength to keep us in the air. Powered by fear and defiance, we soared over a dark forest, seeing a flowing body of river with an abandoned convenience store and empty factory buildings below. Alighting on a road, we stopped and looked around. I surveyed the scene. Along the river, there ran an abandoned railroad track with no train and a broken down bridge, suspended above dark water. I knew I had been there before, but how, I did not know. The sky was grey, in a perpetual twilight, oppressive. Maureen said nothing, and neither did I.
Telepathically, the thought passed between us that the monster was still coming, but when I went to lift us into the ground to fly again, my power was gone. Together, we ran until we found ourselves at an enormous mansion. The outside of the mansion was brick, and the same gray sky loomed overhead. Trees with no leaves dotted the grounds. Overhead, the sun shone, but the day was no lighter. I knew the evil was coming, and it could see us. Our only chance to get away was the mansion. I ran up the front steps, and slammed the great wooden doors open.
Inside, there was a foyer with black and white checkered floor. Display cabinets lit from within, held samples of scientific manuscripts, and small objects in jars. The feeling of evil permeated everywhere. Maureen and I ran to rooms connecting to rooms, and in one, we climbed into the car of a wooden roller coaster, which looked more like a mining car. As far as I looked, the tracks stretched into blackness within the house, no end in sight. The cart started forward, moving slowly, of its own accord. I hugged onto Maureen, but no sound escaped my lips. Fear weighed my heart, but I was powerless to do anything. We entered a room, and a metallic “Clang” signalled a sickly overhead light that showed blood on four walls. Instantly, I knew that the owners of the mansion were bad people, and they were murderers we had to escape. Besides ourselves, no one was visible in the house, but we could feel their black, shapeless presence.
The coaster chugged upward, then dove down into a series of rooms. Each room was a miniature tortuous scare-cell, with the strange wooden rollercoaster connecting everything. We rode the coaster into the different rooms, and I had to solve the mystery of why there was always the murdered body, that I knew the bad people had dispatched. I knew they were around us, and if the coaster stopped, they would be able to reach us from the sides of the track. It was terrifying, and the worst was keeping away from them. I felt a fierce anger, the anger of survival well up in me. I screamed, “C’mere, then!” My fist swung out at the blackness, and annimalistic rage gave me inhuman strength. My fear was gone, and with that, the coaster suddenly rolled into the foyer of the dark house.
I knew I had to go back and get the bad ones. I was the one in charge now, and like Jennifer Lopez in “The Cell”, it was “my world, my rules.” I told Maureen to wait in the foyer, and dove back into the cart.
No comments:
Post a Comment