Lost Inside a Legend
by Elsa Graus
Copyright © August 2015 Elsa Graus
ISBN: 9781311080424
Cover Design by: morguefile.com/ranbud
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, places and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Lost Inside A Legend
What is the dividing line between myth and reality? Where is the frontier – if there is such a thing - between one and the other? I’ve always thought I had the correct answer to those questions. I always thought I knew where the limits were. After all, it is not that difficult. Being young and inexperienced I had the feeling I knew many things when the truth is I knew nothing at all. There were many things I had still to learn and some of them were – to my astonishment – not so easy to explain or to give credit for.
An early and eager interest in legends has kept my mind in alert mode searching and enthusiastically hunting for stories of every kind. But the ones I prefer are those which depict paranormal activities. It feels good from time to time getting some thrill in this, otherwise, boring life of mine.
I can barely remember when it all began. I don’t think it was gradually growing on me. And I don’t contemplate the possibility it appeared suddenly. The hypothesis ‘one day there was nothing and the next day it was’ does not satisfy a plausible explanation. But I’ve supported the idea that it was always there, deep inside of me. It was very clear to me the limit between fiction and real life.
At least until I was twenty-three.
From then on whatever preconception that was nested somewhere in my mind was wiped out in a twinkling of an eye.
It was my last year at college. My time as a student was about to end only to give birth to a new and indeterminate one. If I were to give an account of all I learnt the summary wouldn’t be more than half a page. And that was just in order to leave enough space to write my full name in capitalized letters big enough to make them fully legible. But in fact what I really – and I must put a strong emphasis on that ‘really’ – made… Well, I guess I would be able to find as many words as to fill the pages of my dissertation.
Amongst some mist and blur episodes – gaps I’ve unsuccessfully tried to fill with the only help of my own imagination – there are some others interspersed in between where alcohol runs free in all the parties of all the fraternities I went to, sometimes invited and some other times as an intruder. If there were some inconvenient questions the solution which best worked for me was to point to some chick or dude and told whoever the questioner might be how I came to be invited. But when some resources were limited there was always a plan B eager to be put into practice. And just when the time came and the tangle of the same old excuse of ‘I came here because a friend of a friend’ is about to be solved there is enough alcohol in the veins to impair the normal functions of the brain.
Surely I could have filled thousands and thousands of pages with a multiplicity of anecdotes only if I wasn’t so drunk that I forgot about them all.
Due to the huge amount of liters of alcohol running all over those places, passed from hand to hand, undecipherable mixtures of a selection of cheap concoctions easily found in every round-the-corner liquor store, my mind has some blanks which I began to doubt that perhaps knowing what truly happened was not the best thing for me.
With the perspective of the final exams in view – I still don’t know how I did pass them –, I had some time to kill. While others occupied themselves with more suitable endeavors – I couldn’t argue their purpose was more to the point of hitting the target of the right thing to do – mine was basking in the beach of uselessness. My motto, carpe diem, was that much different from theirs and not only in this respect.
However, one way or another, I happened to be at the exact place in the exact time. I don’t know who suggested it or where that idea came from, but the four of us congregated in that room agreed to it almost at once. There was no hesitation and there was less time to lose. It was the week before the Mardi Gras parade. We packed a few belongings and left campus dorms in the strike of a lightning. As it turned out later, this was going to be our last escapade as undergraduates but none of us thought about it at the time.
The trunk of the car was packed with our bags and lots of beer cans. Mostly – thought not all of them – alcohol free. The four of us were serious advocates of the ‘Don’t drink and drive’ spot. And with the only objective in mind of having as much fun as we could, we got in the car with the tank full of gas and the perspective of many miles ahead before we reached our destination. And off we went, John, Marc Luc and me.
By the way, my name’s Matthew but you can call me Matt. Everyone else does.
We had to cover a distance of a little bit more than 500 miles and the idea was to make it in just a couple of days. Since the decision of making this trip was so sudden and time was somehow running against us – one way or another – we chose to leave as soon as we could. That, in our own world, meant ‘immediately’. Easy said and sooner done.
We arrived at New Orleans safe and sound. And as soon as we found a suitable place to leave our things – there were not many options for us to consider as the city was bursting with all the excitement you could imagine – we stepped out into the streets to get lost amongst the throng. It took us all morning to find some decent rooms to stay the following couple of days which it was fairly quickly, if you consider it this way: due to the unpremeditated of our journey and considering the city was overcrowded with a fairly good amount of tourists coming from every single corner of the planet, it didn’t cost us much to find lodging.
The crowd enveloped us in a joyful frenzy of music, laughter and a multitude of voices coming from everywhere.
The weather was hot. Really hot. And the fact that there were so many people filling the streets was another reason to make the temperature rose even more.
Our little adventure together came to an end pretty soon for when we let ourselves be carried away by the human avalanche each of us followed our separate ways.
Needless to say that, in a city like New Orleans, always surrounded by a thick veil of mystery, there is not uncommon to meet the inevitable money seekers who use every means available to con tourists and non-tourists alike.
Ghosts, apparitions, dead people walking… I was more than tired of hearing the same old stories told and retold. All I was hoping when I agreed to this adventure was to hear something out of the usual. It was a long time since I was a kid and whatever stories I might have heard during childhood – stories that at that time made a good role frightening me – were not enough for me with at the age of twenty-three. I was looking for something else. Something out of the ordinary. Something that could really make my hair stood on end. That was the type of thrill I was hoping to find. That, and of course, to have fun. It was the main idea when we chose to come down here.
The big event we were all waiting for, the parade, was going to be in three hours. Until then there was nothing I could do but to explore the city as much as I could. However my explorations didn’t get me very far. I didn’t even have time to wonder what my friends could be doing because my wanderings over the most unusual places of New Orleans made me become acquainted with someone hard to forget.
Be that as it was, my steps took me to the less visited streets of the city; and perhaps where the true stories have their beginning. This was the old quarter of New Orleans. A God-forsaken and labyrinthine place not fit for the faint-hearted or the easily frightened. Dark corners, narrow passages and dead-end streets. I was soon caught myself in that gloomy atmosphere of now knowing wh
ether it was still daylight or night had covered the whole sky.
Few people were walking on by. And amongst those that did it, it was hard to know if they were human beings or rather shadowy figures. The acrid smell of burnt ashes permeated the air. But in spite of turning around and find myself a less unpleasant place to be, among the partygoers, I followed my instincts and got deeper through those paving stone streets full of buildings dating as far back on as in post-colonial times. Splintered wooden balconies sticking out of ancient glories, reminiscences of past times.
I had the feeling I was being followed. Surely much more than a pair of eyes was looking at me suspiciously. All I can tell about it is that if I had to choose some scenario to be having nightmares this place would be on top of my list of priorities.
I wondered at how easily I succeeded in getting lost and part of me was contemplating the idea if I was going to find my way to get out of there.
I stopped to listen for a few seconds and the lack of sound was piercing my ears. Far from the madding crowd, I was beginning to miss the cries and the laughter that first welcomed my friends and me that same morning. There was the possibility of this part of town being mostly inhabited although I didn’t think