A Demon's Tale

Chapter Nineteen

- A Strange Light -

The bed was uncomfortable. Laying down with my clothes on, wrapped within the quilt, there was only me in the apartment as usual, all alone. Dad had gone off to work, and mum had still not come back as it seemed like she had left us, for what now seemed like, -for good.

I opened my eyes. I could see the clothes on the floor and a school photo catalog beneath me next to the bed. There was a dead houseplant in a small pot in the windowpane. The blinds were up, so there was at least some light in the room, but it was a cloudy day and foggy outside making the room only dimly lit.

How long had it been? How many hours? How many days? How many weeks? How many months? What season was it? How much time had passed since Colin had disappeared?

I couldn't tell, but there hadn't been a single day that I had not stopped thinking about it, about that day, about that incident. What had gone wrong? What had even happened? Why had it happened? How could it have happened? And why had they never found the body? I had been pondering every single second since the day he had been declared dead. Nobody really knew or could give a satisfying explanation. There had been many speculations, but none of it made sense to me... Nothing made sense.

As soon as the rescuers had arrived, they had first swum out to pull me out from the lake as I had fainted from exhaustion, and so I didn't really know what happened after that. I had woken up in an ambulance surrounded by paramedics. I was too dizzy to really communicate or be communicated with. All I remember was looking around in disorientation hoping to see Colin there as well, but he wasn't. I had been told everything was going to be okay. But they had lied...

I had later found out in more detail what had happened. The rescuers had never managed to find him, and given the amount of time that had passed, they had eventually concluded that it was too late and it was no longer a matter of trying to rescue him, but just retrieving the dead body. Instead, a team of divers had been called in to search for it. The search had been going on for hours, even well into the night. But they couldn't find it.

Eventually, they had had to call it off and continue searching the next day first thing in the morning with a new crew. The search continued not for hours, but for days. They were stumped as to why they couldn't find it. They speculated that the body had sunken down to the bottom of the lake and had to have been buried deep into the mud, but were certain that they would eventually be able to find it as within two to three days, as they had said that the body would eventually float up to the surface. Colin's family had still bought a casket just waiting for the body to be recovered, but yet, it never was...

The days passed, and no body was found. Weeks passed, but the body was never recovered. There was a lot of controversy as to how this was possible and everyone was puzzled and unsatisfied, criticizing the legitimacy of the rescuers and diving team, demanding a logical explanation. But they were just as perplexed and unsatisfied as it didn't make sense to them either. They said that they had no good explanation, and so, a lot of speculations and theories developed.

Some believed that the body was still there down at the bottom of the lake, insisting that they would continue searching, very uncomfortable with the idea that there was still a dead body lying at the bottom of a lake that was also a very popular bathing location. The most reasonable explanation being that the body could have in fact floated up to the surface during the night, drifted up on land, and been dragged away and eaten up by some animal. But that also seemed far-fetched to some people.

To me, all of it seemed wrong. None of the explanations were satisfying to me. None of it was right... It wasn't right. It couldn't be true. It couldn't be real. It didn't make sense. And after that incident, it seemed, nothing in this world did anymore...