On a String

Chapter 15

Which reminded Cole... where were they going?

"Kai," he turned to look at his friend in the faint desert light. "Where are we going? What's the plan?"

Kai, who had been watching his boots scuffle through the darkening sand, looked up. "To visit... a house..." he seemed more distant than usual and unwilling to explain further.

"Who's house?" Cole pressed.

Kai shrugged, his gaze fixated on the glow of lights several hundred meters away which signified the outskirts of Ninjago City. He drew a stiff breath and Cole watched as he let it out slowly, back and shoulders tense.

Cole thought it was odd that his eyes reflected much more of the city light than normal. "Kai?"

Kai blinked, causing the colourful reflections in his shiny eyes to flash. "Clarissa's."

He was silent for the rest of the journey into the City.

The solitude of a headstone is the loneliness of death, for underneath such a stone lurks the fact that one more life has faded from this world; never to return.

It's so final, really.

So grim.

And graveyards are made of many, many gravestones. Rows upon rows of death and death and death and-

But a graveyard is not the only place which can be infected with death.

Death cannot be restrained or controlled. Death does not play by rules- for it has none. It will not be contained. It is limited by nothing; like a dark shadow, it can flit and ooze and infect wherever and whatever it likes.

And once it settles somewhere, it is very hard to remove it. For no matter what you do, some traces of the dark, unsettling feeling will always linger like smoke from a fatal crash.

Kai's eyes glimmered grimly.

They had arrived.

A small, cosy, smiley sort of home located near the City's central park.

But it's not a home. That implies a small, cosy, smiley place. It's a house- and as he looks at it, Kai faintly wonders if the building can even be called that.

There's nothing wrong with it on the outside. A pleasant outer coating of white paint covers the plaster which, in turn, surrounds large, clean windows that overlook a cute wooden porch and a wrought iron gate...

But it's what's on the inside that counts. Just as people can be dead inside... so can buildings such as this smiley(?) home.

-No. Empty house.

No one lives here anymore, so how can it be a home if it's empty?

(Dead inside?)

Kai shuddered.

(The chilly darkness of death had settled here... it was practically a graveyard in its own right)

Light shone, not from the house, but rather from the streetlights surrounding the park in front of it. Kai knows that this is wrong. Light should also be dancing inside the house; filtering lazily through drawn curtains and thereby indicating the presence of a person inside.

It should glow with warmth from within like a person's body; warmed from the heart. (As if the home is the body, with its owner as the heart).

But this house is like a corpse under a lamp at the morgue- and he is the one performing the post mortem. The only light around it is the street light pining it down- there is no light (no life) inside it.