Is It Worth It?

Chapter 2

It had been three months since the incident. It was mid winter and the cold was unbearable. More and more people were getting sick with some unknown sickness. Doctors from all over England couldn't find out what was happening. All they knew was that people got sick and eventually died from it. Closing time finally came and I put all the candles out in the small bank. The bank was elegant. Paul wanted the bank to be a very welcoming place so people would come in and hopefully invest more money. It had worked. People used to come in all the time with money, but now that people were dieing, less and less people came every week. But the bank had survived through tough times before and would so again. I put my black coat on and walked towards the door. I opened the door and felt the bitter cold bite my neck. "I hate the cold" I thought. It was around midnight when I left. Walking home I saw something. It was a man who was staggering around in the street. It wasn't uncommon to see a drunk this late at night. The man walked towards me. As he walked I could see that he was sweating and that he was constantly scratching his arms. Then, I saw the charred like skin on his neck and arms. He was mumbling to himself, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. As he was standing in front of me he started coughing quite hard. Disgusted by his sickness I told him to leave. He looked at me with a threatening gaze and stumbled off. As he walked I could here him still mumbling under his breath followed by coughing and wheezing.

I finally arrived home without anymore trouble. It was a nicer home compared to most. The outside of the house was a pale white with dark timbers made of rich oak. The chimney was made of smooth river stone. I walked on the ice covered steps and walked in the door. The inside of the house was pleasant, a little dark, but pleasant. The fire that I had started earlier that day was mostly embers. I went down to the cellar where I kept my firewood and grabbed three particularly large pieces of wood. I walked back upstairs to the fire and put the wood on the embers. It soon caught fire and was shortly a good sized fire. Knowing that I wouldn't go to sleep cold I went to my bedroom upstairs. I got undressed in front of my bed and looked at the mirror. I was a regular sized man, a little more round on my stomach than I wanted. I was looking at my face when something caught my eye, a little grey hair. I had my thirty- second birthday last week and it seems age was getting to me. I got in bed and tried to keep warm. After a few minutes I could feel sleep's embrace teasing me. And I finally gave into sleep and had a dream of terror. In my dream I was walking down a road I haven't seen in a long time. The air was rich with smells of spring and I could hear laughter in the distance. I was suddenly running towards the laughter and when I found its source I was terrified. I saw a small crowd looking at the ground chuckling. I walked closer to investigate. As I got close to the crowd I saw what they were laughing at. The man from the incident was laying on his back with blackened eyes and had the same blackened skin on his arms and hands and pockets of swelled flesh on his armpits with blood running from the corner of his mouth. Soon the laughing stopped and the sky turned black. As I looked around in the crowd I saw familiar faces but there was something terribly wrong...they all had the same symptoms of the man on the ground. I saw Paul,Aveline,and the man I saw on my way home. All had blackened eyes with black skin upon their arms. They all started shuffling towards me. Before I knew it they were upon me with gruesome smiles upon their faces as though they were beckoning me to join them. And with that I awoke screaming and drenched in sweat.