A Dark Destiny

Chapter 2

I finally remember.

My eyes quickly flew open as a sudden sense of familiarity came over me. I was at the school clinic and as I sat up on the bed, I realised that the ward was empty. The white coloured walls greeted me with warmth as the sun rays reflecting through the windows gave the room a wonderful glow. As I took in the warmth, everything came back to me. I had fainted in the orchard. That wasn’t the only thing that I remembered. There was a whole lot to it than I had realised.

“I now remember,” I said aloud to the empty ward.

Everything came back to me in flash like it had in the orchard when I saw the mysterious stranger who was standing behind Amanda. When I had looked at the stranger, I finally remembered what had happened to me when those images came running into my mind. I now remember what had happened to me before I woke up this morning. I hated to say this to myself, but Christine was right. Something was wrong with me and it had started all the way from the time I had failed to wake up this morning until now. As I tried to go through what I could recall from the images that had run into my head earlier, I felt I was hit in the face with a reality check.

I had died in my sleep.

“You didn’t even budge at all. It was like you were dead or something.”

“I was there when Christine tried to wake you up. You didn’t even move an inch. You just laid there. And you looked, I don’t know, dead.”

I recalled what Christine and Amanda had told me earlier. They were right and what I could remember proved it all. I had died in my sleep and as far as I could remember, only one person knew why. The stranger who came to the orchard was the same person in my dreams. And surprisingly, the same stranger was the one who took my life.

I closed my eyes and everything became clear as I remembered what had happened to me in my dreams. Everything around me was empty and dark. I couldn’t even tell if I was floating in the air in the deep void of nothingness or if I had my feet planted to the floor. There was no sign of life, light or any object I could feel or grab onto. I was nowhere, in a place where things never existed.

Then, out of nowhere, something had appeared right before my eyes, a few feet away from me. For a moment I couldn’t tell what it was because it was too dark and the same object that had appeared before seemed to be covered in a black cloth that swirled around as if there was the presence of wind when it actually wasn’t there. I adjusted my eyes a little more to see more clearly. The object was kind of tall and before I could have realised it sooner, the object that stood before me was a human being in a black long cloak. And whoever it was was facing my direction looking at me. I couldn’t see eyes or even a face underneath the hood; it was dark, dark as the environment around us. For a moment, it seemed like we were just staring at each other until I got a feeling in me that this person in front of me was creeping me out. The air around us started to get cold and each second that passed became colder and colder. At some point I breathed out air and an icy cold mist escaped from my nostrils. It was definitely getting cold and it felt like I was stuck in a freezer. I started to shiver so violently and when I looked at my hands, they were icy blue. My hands soon felt numb from the cold, so did my face and legs too. In a matter of minutes, my body had turned cold and blue. My body had become numb with cold and at that moment, my legs gave way and I fell to the cold floor which had suddenly turned into a hard cold layer of ice. I tried to move, but I was so still. The nerves in my body seemed to have frozen up too but it was a wonder how my brain was still functioning because I was completely aware of what was going on and I could see the stranger in the dark cloak just staring back at me not doing anything to help.

I tried moving my icy blue lips, but it was no use. I couldn’t even feel them. My lungs had stung with pain inside me and I was scared that they were going to stop functioning right there and then. What kept my hopes up was the beating of my heart; though I could hear every heart beat grow faint as the coldness in me took over. I continued to stare at the stranger in front of me, praying that he could do something to help me.