Moonchild

CHAPTER EIGHT

Come on, Lucas, you know the drill. It happened many times, and with such practise, you should have been a pro by now.

Close your eyes.

I closed them.

One deep breath.

I breathed in, and out.

Count to three, slowly.

I counted.

One. Two. Three.

One more breath.

I breathed in again, and out.

Count to two, slowly.

One. Two.

Was that a light?

Focus, Lucas. One more breath.

I breathed in a slow breath...

Spell the word "one", slowly.

Oh. En. E.

I exhaled and opened my eyes, hoping the nightmare would end, just like the other times when I drowned into the peach-black void, but the feeling I got drilled deep in my own core of sanity came true:

The nightmare never ended.

At least it's better than the other nightmares, I thought, when I got dizzy with all the blurry shapes moving fast in front of me.

Alright, I'll pretend I know where to go, and I'll find my way out.

I started to walk but realised that my feet were glued to the ground, like there was a ground under my feet. I, then, tried to move the rest of my body, but nothing happened.

This is new.

I considered the situation for a second, and started panicking at the thought that the possibility to move was turned down. I tried once or twice but nothing happened. I just stood there, observing my surroundings. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. The void was an endless black hollow.

I tried to speak. But as I said the words, their sound was not detectable in my ears. Silence was concurring my voice. I felt as if the words were swallowed up from the void, as soon as they escaped my mouth.

The image of monsters and demons popped into my head, tormenting the little courage I still had in me, and I tried to move again in order to escape. If I put a good amount of effort, and if I had the slightest thought that my body was really moving, it moved slightly as in slow motion.

I got the feeling that I was drowning. Drowning in a bottomless ocean of black water. The only way of sight was a bullet-like spot of white light, rushing over the surface of this doom. The bullet-like spot remained where it was, but I felt the light of me reaching my skin softly, and in a split second, the blackness drowned me again.

There were no bubbles around me even in those slow movements that I managed to do. I didn't know why I thought I was in a black sea, but the way the sounds were in the background of my hearing, almost absent around me, it made me feel drowned. It made me remember the time when I went swimming at Lady's Mile beach with nana when I still had my friends around.

The thought of them made me open my mouth. I tried to scream. No sound escaped. No bubbles leaving my mouth either.

The bottomless ocean was my own space, a starless galaxy, as if I was the only planet there.

And then I felt it. The sensation of the water around my body disappeared, out of existence, and I was floating now in nothing more than a dead space, in a distant galaxy of my mind's prison.