I woke up to my friend trying to shake me up.
He said, “I got a new lead on where my father could be”. “What on Earth was he up to now?”, I thought. The sleep still had me in a haze. I stood up, rubbing my eyes. I stooped down to the floor and hovered my hand blankly in the space under the bed to find my jogging shoes. He stood there eagerly with an overflowing backpack, its contents waiting to burst through. I chuckled, “We are going on a dragon hunt or what,” to which he smiled and flicked me off.
He led me through various nooks and corners. One street after another. The streets looked vaguely familiar yet strange. “This cinema hall has been demolished for 10 years now, hasn’t it? How is it still here?”, I asked Andy. Andy, short for Andrew, was my childhood friend – my partner in crime. We were always up to a shenanigan or another.
However, he has been living in denial ever since his father went missing, which was a couple of years ago. So these trek hunts were completely normal for the two of us, but something did feel a little off today. The surroundings looked like something straight out of a black and white movie. I kept trotting on the pavement as thousands of thoughts rushed in and out of my mind.
I happened to notice a silhouette out of the corner of my eye. The pacing came to a halt when I saw a girl watching us from a distance. She held up a poster that said, “Push him”. Who was I supposed to push? Andy? I hadn’t realized I had slowed down until he doubled back to where I was and gave me a shove. I shoved him back and that’s when I noticed how his facial features weren’t recognizable. His build looked exactly like Andrew’s, but I couldn’t see his face clearly!
My anxiety was starting to kick in. “What date was it today?”, I reached into my pockets and a feeling of dread took upon me; I didn’t have my phone. That was practically impossible. I carry my phone everywhere with me, even when I’m pooping. It was as though I wasn’t in control of anything. Was I stuck in a movie?
All these thoughts came to a halt when Andy started upon our destination. It seemed like an abandoned meat storage facility. The girly voice in my head whispered again, “Push him, push him!” ” Who was I supposed to push?”, I wondered, as I drearily followed him into the building. Hooks hung from the roof, and the stench of rotten flesh wafted all over the place. Dried up blood covered the floor like the canvas of a sadist.
I taunted, “You seriously think your father will be sitting here, sipping tea at a place like this!” I could see his eyes, dejected, clutching on the last strands of hope. His voice broke when he said “This is the lead I’ve found after hitting a dead-end for weeks. I had to check it out.”
e noticed a shadow lurking at the end of the wall, and ran off behind it, leaving me there all alone. My mind took a couple of minutes to process this before I realized that we should stick together. I proceeded to follow him into the next room. Old newspapers were scattered all r the floor and news articles were pinned to the wall. The room had a balcony, outside which I was unable to see anything.
Bright white light filled the open space and it was blinding. I turned my back towards the light and peeled off one of the articles from the wall. It seemed like an article from a Russian newspaper. How did I know it was Russian? More importantly, how was I able to understand it? “Bodies of a 7-year-old dancer -redacted- from Chechnya, Russia, and her five-year-old son -redacted- found in a cold freezer”, the article stated.
The giggle of a child caught my attention. He was playing with his ball while her mother sat beside her on the chair. She gestured to me to come to join her. I declined. So she stood up and slapped me so hard that it shuddered the soul out of my body. So obliging with her request, I took a chair and sat facing her. Her face seemed sunken yet I could make out a smirk from her chapped lips. She told how her husband used to come home drunk and hit her and her child. So what she had to do was justified. To escape the brutality of his ex-con drunkard husband, she took both of their lives.
After her narration ended, the child took my hand and tugged at it. I followed him through a series of rooms with his little hand clasped around my finger. He opened a door and smiled. Freezing cold winds hit my face as I peeked inside. Andrew’s body was lying there. His body colour was as blue as the sky itself. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I ran back.
Surprisingly, I reached back to the room where the lady sat. No matter in which direction I ran, I kept on ending up in the same room. This time the voice in my head became clearer. If I was to escape this hellhole, I have to oblige with it. I held her child with both hands and picked him up. She screamed and asked me to keep him down. In a fraction of a second, I took to turn my face towards her; the child stabbed me in the shoulder with a wooden shiv. Growling in pain, I pushed him outside the balcony into the bright abyss. She howled a gnarly scream and jumped at me. In my defence, I backed off and my foot tripped over by the edge. As I was falling into the bottomless abyss, all I could see was her agony filled face and the room she stood in, surrounded by bright white light.
I woke up in bed, covered in sweats. “Thank goodness, it was all a dream”, I reassured myself. I tried to get myself out of the bed when a sharp pain shot up in my shoulder. I looked down to see my tee-shirt soaked in blood. Huh? Blood was continuously oozing out of the wound caused by that shiv. I stammered, “But that was a dream right? It wasn’t real!” Grabbed my phone from over the sideboard. Hit 7 on the speed dial.
‘Calling Andy’ spread over the screen. He didn’t answer. So I covered up thend with a gauge and put on a fresh set of clothes. I biked over to his house. Threw the bike in the driveway and frantically knocked on the door. Her mother opened the door. “Hey, Dawn. Come in”, she said with a smile. I rushed to his room. And he was still in his bed. “Thank God. Wake up, Andy. We gotta talk”-I shook his body. My heart sank the moment I touched him. His body didn’t have a pulse and it was as cold as ice. My head was spinning. How was this happening? It was just a dream. I couldn’t explain to her mother what happened to her precious little baby. My best friend was dead. The post mortem claimed the cause of death to be a heart attack. But I knew what happened.
I was walking down the road with a roller coaster of emotions hitting my mind. I was trying to make sense of what was happening. We were the only ones who knew about this. Should I have told his mom? I was lost in my thoughts when I didn’t see a car pull up beside me. A girl was driving a red Chevy 2007. She looked at me. It was the same girl from the dream who held up the poster for me.
She said “Get in. We need to talk. Otherwise, we’re next.”
The author is a 23-years-old from Panchkula, Haryana and loves to write fiction stories.
