A Demon's Tale

Chapter Fourteen

- The Dark Room -
- Part II -

I was standing in the center of the dark room staring blankly ahead. I found myself, trying to find myself, trying to find my mind, trying to figure out why I was here. It seemed my mind would constantly slip away, and once it returned; I had no recollection of where it had been. I was once again just standing there, barely able to remember the chain of events that had led me here.

I looked around. I was surrounded by four walls, an almost pitch-black ceiling, and a dirty floor full of litter. There was something on the floor just beneath me, something that looked like a rectangular catalog. It seemed to have been open to one specific page for so long that it had stuck to it. I picked it up from the floor as I looked at the open page. It was dark and hard to distinguish the picture. Suddenly, the page flashed up with a blinding white light...

I blinked a couple of times by reflex reacting to the flash. I looked around. My classmates were standing next to me all dressed up in unusually nice clothes and fancy haircuts. Colin had gone all-in with his outfit, wearing a white shirt with a red bow tie. I had decided to wear more regular clothes, still, the best-looking ones I had and very fashionable of course, but not too different from what I usually wore.

"Okay, great! We're going to try another one. Try not to blink. Everyone, say 'cheese'" The photographer said.

"Cheese!" I heard multiple kids say in chorus except for one saying:

"Mozzarella!" Of course, it was Colin.

The lights flashed up by the umbrella-like things. This time I was the one to blink. 'Damn it!' I thought to myself.

"Colin! Urhh! Why can't you ever just be serious!" Emma yelled out of frustration from having to do the same pose for so long, afraid she wouldn't be able to keep it long enough to look good on this, 'to her' extremely important photo.

"What? She said, 'say a cheese?'" Colin responded playing dumb.

"Not 'a' cheese you goof. Just cheese!" Emma said with an irritated tone.

The photographer looked like she also had had enough and was dying to be done with it, as she had probably been doing this for hours and still had many more classes to photograph.

"Okay, one more time. Smile!" She said quickly.

Emma looked back with a worried expression trying to find her pose again. I turned my face to the camera. Another flash temporarily blinded me as I focused hard on resisting the natural instinct to blink. The second after the intense white light somehow made everything pitch black...

Slowly my vision returned, but there was not much to return to. Everything was still dark. I held the catalog still in my hands, still unable to see the picture clearly. It was just dark and blurry shapes of faceless people. I let go of the catalog as it fell back down to the floor.

I was standing in the middle of the room. The headache wouldn't go away, but there seemed to be nothing I could do about it, and there was no better place to go. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on resisting the pain. But the more I tried to resist it, the harder it became, to the point of making me dizzy, finding it hard to stand upright. I felt a cold chill through my body and the sensation that I was about to fall forward and so I moved my leg to try and prevent myself from falling. The floor was filled with litter and so my foot hit something in the motion, -kicking it away...

A thick shard of ice skidded across the walkway. The sky was icy blue and the ground and trees around were covered with a crystallized sheet of white snow. Colin was walking next to me as he himself kicked away another block of ice as it skidded onward ahead of us.