𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐎𝐟 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐞

𝟏𝟗. 𝐑𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐲 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐬

Lying on the floor next to the spare tires was a human form, unmoving. It was a woman. She had long hair that were tied up, I gently touched her arm, it was soft but cold. My hand run up to her chest.

She was dead.

Fear clenched like a tight fist around my chest. Cold sweat trickled down my sides. I was with a dead body, I was trapped with him and a dead body.

His face is what I was taught to despise, hate and loath. I feared knowing what he might do. I am afraid of death. I don't know what I will face when I meet death. Death in these black days was neither kind nor quick. I would be murdered by the man I love.

Death is a body or shadow that lurks in the dark, it crawls under little children's beds and it is always there, following you and the closer he gets the sooner it will claim you as its own.

He is coming."

I was shocked, I had drunk three glasses of whiskey and my head was still messed up, aunt Grace was going to turn him in but Elias had caught her. He had kidnapped her.

My aunt had been through so much and yet she was still trying to fight. She always feared death and I knew that because of the stories she had told us when we were younger. She always avoided talking about death. I remembered, one day I told her about our mum and I was asking all kind of questions. Where did she go, if she was ever turning back, but she just told me to stop talking about death.

What I couldn't really explain was the fact that Elias had caught her, he kidnapped her but for what reason. Did he know that she was going to turn him to the police? And if indeed he did know then how. How did he found out about it.

All these things that I read made my heart ache in pain for aunt Grace. I wouldn't survive all of this, I wouldn't be able to bare it deep in my heart and yet she did. She carried this incident through the years until she took her last breath. Now I could truly understand why she wanted us to uncover the truth, she wanted us to do what she wasn't able to. We had to give justice to all the people that were dead inside, all the people that were suddenly alone in that cold world.

It wasn't easy and I knew this because, how could it be? She had found out that Elias, the man she fell in love with, the person that brought light to all people in Snowshill was now a strange human being that she had never noticed before. If we can call him human.

It felt as if the dark veil was lifted from my eyes as soon as aunt's Grace was lifted as well. I could see it clearly. The question still remained in my head, twisting and turning. In her letter it was as if she knew she was going to die, maybe after all it wasn't her time. They had murdered her too.

I knew that death had ripped away a part of her that was most loved. Her brightness, her happiness. I remembered her face sunken and haunted, her mind cold and empty. I never noticed it until I got older. The more the years went on, the more her town seemed to become like her. The world had gone cold.

Who was the betrayer? Who was the killer in the crowd? The one who creeped in corridors and didn't make a sound. It was him all along. I softly turned the pack of worn out pages to continue reading.

" January 13/ 1957

I don't know how many days have passed since I got here but I still haven't spoken to him. He just throws me some empty pages as I begged him to and then leaves.

Today he moved the body, the body of that poor woman he had killed. The corpse was almost devoid of skin and pitted by burrowing insects. When he came I turned away, as my stomach heaved, my nostrils filled with the smell of rotting meat.

The corpse, the milky blue eyes without eyelids, stared into the frozen ceiling while the lipless mouth hanged open. The woman on the floor was lifeless. Lifeless. Her brunette hair was scattered in multiple places, stained with dried blood, crimson. The smell was the most disturbing thing I had ever sniffed.

My heart pounded as one question continued to race through my mind. Why. I saw him when he came to bring me my pages and some bread. My eyes fell on his figure, my heart immediately drenched by fear. Everything was fading into the abyss. His eyes on me made chills run down my spine. Paralyzed in fear, I felt my breath being taken in that exact moment.

The only way to describe him is like a monster with no light. It isn't just blackness, it's nothingness. He cast no shadow, make no noise. If I stayed more with him he would kill me bit by bit until he would really murder me. That's what he did to me and he claimed he loved me. Why? I may never know. I felt like a little fragile doll in his hands and I was trapped inside his doll house. I was trapped and no one was coming to save me.

These last days I feel shuttered into a million pieces. I can't talk, eat or sleep anymore. I don't feel safe, I don't feel good. I am always nauseous and dizzy. He is destroying me, my health. I am being destroyed and eaten from inside out.

You know when your time is nearing its end because you can feel the chill of its icy breath as it tickles the hairs on the back of your neck. I could feel that I was dying either way. He would kill me.

I am already another soul added to his long list of killings. I am just a nobody to him. I am a soul floating between life and death and my rope is going to break at some poiny. I am feeling so heavy, my soul is slowly leaving me, my mind is slowly dying in here.

I am a fade light in a black world and I am not getting out of here until all this dark consumes me. Until I am one with the dark. Until I am moving like a shadow that has no purpose in life".

Should I give up or try for my..."

Her last words shocked me deeply and profoundly. She felt helpless in the hands of a killer, she had no one.