Heart of Darkness

Chapter - 1

I ran through the disinfectant smelling hallways of the one place I did not like, frantic and anxious and hoping to hell that the news I had got on the phone was just another one of her stupid pranks. I stopped, finally, at the sight of the man that was leaning against the pale walls of the place, shaking with his hand partly covering his face, the board just above his head reading in bold, taunting, cold words the one word I had not wanted to read.

Morgue.

My steps turned unhurried as I approached the man, my hands shaking and turning into fists as my breaths came out in shudders, the man's face clearing up more and more as I stepped closer, my heart dropping as he looked to my side for a brief second when I was a few feet away, the familiar face enough to break me.

My steps rushed and I slammed the doors of the morgue open, too erratic in my head to care about the startled looks. "Where is she?" The woman that was staring at me with shocked eyes looked at the door behind me for a second before she nodded, moving to the side of the drawers that held the dead bodies, pulling one open and uncovering the sheet.

The sight was enough to make me gag.

The body before me lay burnt to the very bones, so much so that parts of the limb bones were falling apart already, the tag on the side of the metal tray reading the name of the one person who I loved the most. 'Mrs. Eleanor Weston.'

The smell of burnt flesh was somehow prominent even after all this while and I gagged again, a gasp of pain wheezing itself out of me as I shut my eyes and gripped the table a little to my right with every inch of strength to keep myself upright.

"Are we sure it's her?" I asked desperately, my eyes wide and hopeful as the doctor looked at me with pitiful eyes.

"We cannot be sure. The body is too burnt to know for sure, but from the description we have of her, it matches up. I'm sorry for your loss." I smiled weakly in distaste at the sentence, wondering however in hell she would ever know what I had just lost.

I whirled around, suddenly remembering the man that should've been with her, my gaze accusatory as I spat out, "How the fuck did this happen!?"

The large man appeared to have shrunken since the last I saw him and he looked at me without a hint of an expression on his face, his eyes dark and red and puffed from mourning over the loss of his wife, my best of friends. I stared blankly at the sight of Blaine Weston with anger coursing itself through my veins and tears blinding my eyes.

"She went out for a drive, we had an argument and she needed to clear her head." He rasped out in that low, moaning voice of his that I had always found peculiar and I clutched onto my head as it pounded, turning back to stare at the body of my now dead best friend. "It was an accident, the car rolled over the countryside hill she was driving by, a wire dislodged and opened up, the fuel tank exploded, I'm sorry Hailey."

"Don't you dare say that." I shouted, despair filling my bones as I watched the body slid back under the sheets and then the sliding metal slip back into the freezer where Eleanor now laid, at least for the time-being.

I sobbed as the handle clicked shut, the silent tears that were running down my face gaining speed and voice as I cried my distress and pain, screams threatening to break the eerie, cold, ruthless silence that always descended in the kingdom of the dead.

I stayed hunched over the table for lord knows how long, crying over the loss of the woman I had known since the start of my time, flashes of hurtful memories whizzing past my head, reminding of the fact that those will be all I will ever have to remember her by, taunting me about how I will never be able to make new ones.