Knock Three Times

10. Marked for Death

                 ASHLEY RHOADS HAD GIVEN up on a decent night's sleep the night prior, knowing there was little hope of solid slumber. Every time she closed her eyes there was yet another horrific scene burning itself into the back of her eyelids, the women mounted on their inverted crosses, screaming while the fire took them from head to toe. The dream was significant, she was positive, but her adolescent eyes were fragile and innocent, her psyche too delicate to handle such a cruel and heinous scene. She hadn't noticed any of them at first, but one in particular seemed to stand out the more their flesh melted; the bloody and burned woman depicted in her drawing. She had been standing just outside the principal's office, and Ashley was nowhere to be found, which she found rather odd. Who were the mysterious five who were sentenced to such a horrific execution, and who was the dark figure standing in the middle of the circle, laughing madly at their torment? There were others there, watching and crying in despair, but where she travelled in dreams she could not say.

    The child had managed to keep alert during breakfast that morning, walking to school and even during recess, but when she found herself sitting at her desk, the lack of proper slumber began to take its toll. It was around ten o'clock in the morning when she began nodding off in class. Giving her head a shake, Ashley jolted her posture straight, focusing with great difficulty on her teacher's words as the history lesson carried on.

    Each sentence blended in to an alternative reality as though her dreams and the world around her were somehow merging into one. Confused, the struggling youth was genuinely unsure if the strange euphoric sensation was caused by the lack of sleep or something else entirely.

    Ms. Hanover turned toward the chalkboard and began listing specific page numbers to read in their history books, but as Ashley attempted to write down the details of the assignment her eyelids grew heavier still. It was as though there were tiny weights relentlessly pulling each lids toward the floor no matter how much she forced them open. The eraser end of her pencil gradually lowered as the muscles in her arm went slack for a brief second, but she jolted herself alert yet again. The pencil lifted, gripped tight between her fingers. She had managed to jog down half a sentence before her writing turned to scribbles and her hand went limp, brow lowered yet again.

    It was no use fighting it, as though sleep itself was an unconquerable enemy.

    A few of her classmates turned to her with looks of general dislike, the memory of her last unusual episode still fresh in their young minds. The adolescent girl was deemed amongst her peers a plague of sorts to be avoided at all cost—a social castaway to be scoffed at, ridiculed, and exiled from normality in her own classroom.

    Her only friends lived in her own head. They spoke to her as a grownup would, spouting far more interesting topics than her schoolmates could possibly manage. Suddenly, Ashley found little interest in video games or popular trends, all mundane and terribly boring in contrast to a never-ending stream of fantastical visions that would flash into her memory whenever she felt drowsy or fatigued. The night was filled with terrors, but daydreams were reserved for the breathtakingly wondrous. Each vision felt real—much more so than her own memories, as though she were there to witness. The strangers seemed to come from all walks of life and knew things the living could not even imagine—strange things and forgotten lore, and events that had occurred in distant places long before she was born. Some visions seemed sporadically erratic and completely random, while others seemed relevant to whatever topic of discussion that happened to come up in the moment.

    When Ms. Hanover spoke of the Second World War, she had lost herself in a haze of fog and gun smoke. She could hear the cries of the soldiers dying in the trenches, the odour of open wounds, human sweat and feces all around her as the ground shook, the countless explosions rocking the very earth beneath her tiny feet and high above her head. The whistling of distant bombs dropping accompanied the loud roar of aircrafts from on high, though the thick black clouds revealed little.