Solitary

CHAPTER 5

  Amanda was alone in an empty and unknown street. She didn't know how she had gotten there, or why.

  The darkness pressed around her as if it was trying to clench her, suffocate her. Obviously it was just darkness, there was no way it could harm her, still it seemed alive... evil.

  Apart from the ground under her feet, she could see nothing else, just darkness all around, in which the street itself disappeared after a few feet.

  She tried to turn and look behind, but there was only more darkness to be found.

  A sense of anguish pervaded her, then she thought she saw a glimmer in the dark.

  Two small lights, intensely green, were in front of her, at the edge of what she could see of the road. There seemed to be nothing holding them, still there they were, motionless, like the only real things in an imaginary universe.

  She took a step in their direction, then another. The distance between them didn't seem to change. Something else, though, had changed, but she couldn't say what it was.

  She took another step, then another. The lights weren't any nearer, but the darkness seemed less ominous, more distant.

  She kept walking, one step after another. The more she moved towards the two bright objects, the more the world around her seems to shed its dark shroud. Black became less black, then grey, and finally melted into a nondescript color halfway between white and azure.

  Amanda looked around to try and understand where she was, now that she could see, but saw only and endless desert of dark and flat rock.

  When she looked again in front of her, the lights which had lead her so far were no more, if they had ever been there in the first place. In their place she saw something peeling out from the rock.

  She tried to get closer and check, and was almost surprised when her steps really carried her forward and near the mysterious thing.

  It was small, black and pyramid-shaped. It seemed to be lying on the ground, but when she bent and tried to pick it up she found that it was stuck, just as if part of it had been under the layer of rock which paved the whole surroundings.

  She had just straightened when the ground under her seemed to vibrate, almost making her lose balance. She had to struggle not to fall. Once she was standing still again, and she could look at the small pyramid again, she saw it was growing.

  Actually, she realized, it would have been more correct to say it was rising, as if something was pushing it up from below, and the rock around was making way to allow its passage.

  Instinctively she took some steps backwards, afraid of what was going to happen.

  The pyramid kept getting larger, until its base was some meters wide. Then it kept rising but stopped growing, and it became clear that it was not a pyramid at all, but an obelisk.

  She backed some more, slowly and carefully, always keeping her eyes on the thing that kept coming up, becoming taller and taller. It seems to her that it was touching the sky when it finally stopped, towering over her in all of its magnificence.

  It was a black, smooth obelisk, with regular and unmarked walls. Only at the base, right in front of her, there was something that could have been a door, or even just the representation of a door, engraved into the material the thing was made of, whatever it was. She was tempted to approach it and try to enter, fighting with the desire to see what was in there and the fear of knowing it.

  Her inner struggle didn't last long. Something else took the decision for her.

  Something dense and black started flowing in the square she had acknowledged as a passage, as if the obelisk had started bleeding. Then she heard a chilling noise, like huge nails scratching a gigantic blackboard, and a crack started forming onto the smooth black wall, starting from the alleged door and darting upwards like a branched lightning bolt going from the ground up instead of coming down from the sky.

  Moving by instinct more than anything else, Amanda turned and started running, so she couldn't see the crack reaching the top of the obelisk, which exploded silently in a myriad of shards, some as large as a grown man, others small as specks of dust, all bursting upwards like the squirt of a fountain. But she saw them fall all around her; none, miraculously, hitting her.

  A huge slab, large and thin, penetrated the ground right in front of her, blocking her way. She stood, seeing her reflection in the polished surface. She was about to walk around it and restart her desperate run when the reflection of something else stopped her.

  She turned, unsure, almost inadvertently leaning her shoulders on the shard which had stopped her, that didn't even shiver under her weight.

  The scene she had seen in the impromptu black mirror she was now leaning against was now happening in front of her eyes, and could no longer be ascribed to a weird trick of the light.

  Wherever the shards of the obelisk touched the ground, they seemed to penetrate the rock as if it were liquid, and immediately, from that same spot, a gray slab of stone rose, something it was difficult not to see for what it was... from a rain of shards, a field of tombstones was being born.

  Trembling, Amanda left her temporary support and advanced toward one of the stones, forgetting the dangerous fragments still raining around her – which anyway seemed to avoid her on purpose, if something like that was even possible. She knelt to see whether the stone bore a name and she found it. It was hers.

  Under it, two dates were clearly sculpted.

  The first was her birth date. The second was the 26th of Trianar of 2009. According to that tombstone, the date of her death was two days from now.

  A chilled shiver ran down her spine as she moved to examine another stone. She was almost sure she would find her name on that one too, but she was wrong. The name was different, she wasn't even sure she had ever heard it, and so was the birth date. The date of death wasn't, it was exactly the same.

  She examined one stone after another, reading names and dates. Many of the names were new to her, others weren't: she saw that of Kate, the seer she was friend with, that of Shim, those of many of her colleagues and acquaintances, people she knew were alive.

  And each of them had the same date of death.

  Exhausted, she fell sitting against one of the tombstones, panting.

  And panting she jumped to a sitting position in her bed.

  Sweat was running in flows down her forehead and cheeks, her hair was glued to her head and a cold feeling clenched her back as if she had slept on ice.

  The blankets where lying in a crumpled heap, half at the foot of the bed, half on the floor, looking like some thick fluid slowly leaking from the former to the latter.

  She had goose bumps and all of the hairs on her body were standing up and shivering, as if electrically charged.

  She was able to slow down her breathing to a more regular pace, and very slowly she climbed down the bed, almost afraid her legs wouldn't be able to sustain her. She took some unsure steps to reach the kitchen, where she filled a glass of water and drank it in little sips, fighting against the urge to gulp it all at once because she thought she would choke if she tried.

  She was slowly starting to get together and calm down, still the scenes of the dream were clear in her mind, too vivid for it to have been a simple dream. She could almost still feel the rough stone of the tombstones under her fingertips, her ears still ringed with the noise the obelisk had made before starting to self-destruct, and she was still shivering.

  And there was something else, an indefinable sensation, like the awareness of being observed.

  She turned, almost believing there really was someone behind her, in her own house. The room was empty, but that wasn't enough to set her free of the feeling of that stranger gaze she felt upon her. She almost thought she perceived it physically, like a magnetic force slightly pushing against her, and attracting her at the same time.

  Letting instinct lead her steps, she slowly moved to the window and pulled the curtains apart, looking into the darkness outside. For a split second, the anguish she had experienced at the beginning o
f the dream was upon her again, but it soon dissipated. The darkness was just darkness, the normal dark of the night, unable to do any harm.

  At first she didn't see anything out of place, then she lowered her gaze to the road and found herself looking into two bright green dots which seemed to be pointing at her somehow. It took some time before she could focus what was around them and realize they were the eyes of a black cat.

  In that precise moment, the cat turned and disappeared into the night.