Ray of Light

Chapter 7- Confessions

Finally, we had some comfort. We were seated in Anita's living room whilst Anita was standing, casually playing with her knife. 'So I guess we should introduce ourselves properly then, shouldn't we?' Jason said. Dahlia smiled sweetly. Her green eyes shone bright, and she swayed her airy brown hair around to face the centre of the room.

'I guess I'll go first,' she began, 'I'm Dahlia. I'm 22 and I'm studying at Heartstone College to become a vet. Just a few days ago, a blue haired man approached me and gave me the note. Now, I'm probably crazy to have gone. I could have been... stolen, killed, who knows what. But the man seemed so weak, so lost. I gave in.'

'How many have you dated?' Jason broke her speech. Creep! What kind of question was that?!

'Oh. Haha... Seventeen.' Silence. '..Times zero.'

'R-really?' He seemed genuinely shocked. So was I, actually. Except I wasn't a creep, so I kept it to myself.

'That's right. So your turn now, Jason.' Dahlia passed along the centre of attention to Jason. It was his time to shine. 

'Well, I'm Jason. 24. I work as a forensic scientist with this dude,' he gestured in my direction, 'And I'm probably not meant to be in this. It's just that I tagged along. Actually, I forced myself along with Leon. Because, you know, I'm cool like that.'

'And what about you? How many?' Dahlia challenged him with a sly grin.

'I lose count. But for the time being, I'm single,' he leant closer to Dahlia, '...and ready to mingle.'

Wow. I felt ambivalent towards this rather quickly-escalating confessions session. Jason was really stretching the limit. We were in a room with two people we barely knew, and we were already talking about some icky stuff. I felt like I needed to set the record straight, so I made sure to keep my intro simple and clean.

'I'm Leon, and I'm 23. You all know who I work with. It's rather unfortunate.' I couldn't resist. 'Yeah, that same blue haired guy approached me at work the other day and handed me his message. I guess it was simply to get us to meet eachother. It didn't seem like there was anything else happening, apart from that drunk crowd.' I nodded at Anita, letting her know I was done.

'And, I'm Anita.' Her blood-red hair looked even crazier under the light. 'I'm 19. I'm doing psychology in uni. That same blue-haired man approached me, too. He seemed very genuine, and if he was some sort of scammer, he slipped passed my bullshit detector pretty easily.' She glanced at me for a long time, for effect. 'I guess now we need to work out why we've all been given this message. We need to find the common denominator.'

I replayed the messages in my head. The first part was the same for everyone; it gave us the details on where we needed to go. But the last three words was what seemed to matter. Ours was "Into the light". Anita's was "You must go". And then Dahlia's was "Of Scath Street". I decicded to raise this issue. 'Perhaps we need to rearrange the messages we've been given? They don't make sense on their own, so maybe we need to combine them together'

Dahlia's face lit up. 'Ah! That would make sense. So...' her skin wrinkled a little as she went into thinking-mode. 'You must go, into the light, of Scath Street. That makes sense, doesn't it?'

Sure, it made sense, but it just seemed so... simple. Why would that man go into so much trouble of all this, if it was just to decipher a very simple message? It was child's play. Perhaps it was to ensure that we cooperated. After some brief discussion, we decided there were three options now. Each that would take us to a very different road. To make our decision though, we needed some answers to some basic questions.

Where were we going?
Why were we going there?
Who was the blue-haired man, and what business of his was it to set up this 'game'?
Why did he choose us?

We knew nothing.