It's Never Over

Chapter 3

Over the next few days it was all I thought of. The raw fear I had felt at that moment never quite faded away and I had even resorted to sleeping with a knife on my bedside; to help defend myself from a night time attack. My movements were almost robotic; I would get breakfast, watch TV, have lunch...

I found myself peering over my shoulder whenever it was dark, fearing seeing something out of the ordinary. There was a tremendous storm the second day after the incident and my flat was hit hard. Mould covered the windows and the floor near the walls became damp. On the third day I had almost gone stir crazy so I decided to go out briefly to gather supplies. I picked up a newspaper since the TV had become boring to me. I paid quickly and left. A part of me enjoyed walking down the Camden roads but then I remembered what had happened. The scrawled 'soon' written on the wall stared at me when I entered my flat. I called the landlord and told him what had happened, choosing to say it was some youths who had done it, since that was common in this area. He told me it would be dealt with but would cost me. I could only care about it being taken off the wall so I agreed to his price.

Once in my flat I decided to pass the time by reading the newspaper. The front page was:

'Murder in Camden flat

The disfigured remains of a local woman have been found in her flat floating in her bath tub full of blood. Police discovered her body at 19:37 yesterday after complaints from another resident of a strange red liquid leaking through the ceiling. Reports claim that she was repeatably stabbed until she had become entirely unrecognisable. Police are currently looking for the assailant...'

I stopped reading and ripped away the first page of the paper, then scrunched it up and put it into the bin. My breathing became strained and the pace of my heart rate quickened. I needed to distract myself from my current thoughts so I read the sports page. My football team was Inverness CT but this was a London paper so it wouldn't have much on Scottish teams apart from scores. I scoured the page and found what I wanted. Or rather what I didn't want to see; Celtic 4-0 Inverness. So I couldn't rely on that to lighten my terrified mood.

It was when I was looking at an article on the Premier league title race when I heard a shrill scream coming from next door; my neighbour was in . I froze, but it kept going so I rushed out my door and since my neighbour was still screaming, I decided to knock her door down. I had a small run up and then kicked the door. It felt flimsy under foot but it didn't come down. Another two kicks however and it finally did break. She was in the middle of the floor in a pool of blood, her throat cut and a knife nearby. She was choking on her blood and a gurgling sound was all that escaped her mouth, apart from blood. I panicked but had enough composure to find a towel in her bathroom which I could use to stop the bleeding. But when I returned to her, she was no longer there. Instead by the door was an extremely unkempt, colossal being with a long black coat which flowed down from his thick shoulders. He had no other features other than his eyes were bloodshot and projected an appearance of pure insanity. A streak of blood covered the floor, I guessed from when he dragged her body outside. I stood absolutely frozen to the spot. We stood out staring eachother for what seemed like an hour before he began to rapidly move towards me. The gap between us closed extremely quickly and I lost consciousness.

* * *

I woke up bleary eyed with my head aching badly. I smelled of vodka, which I had apparently been sleeping in. An almost empty bottle of the clear liquid lay on its side next to me. The dream was still vivid in my mind, having somehow stayed locked in my head despite the awful hangover I was experiencing. I looked over to a clock on the wall and it read '10:22'. A phantasmagoria of horrifying figures passed my line of sight and time seemed to slow to the pace of a doomed snail on a hot summers path. The wallpaper around me peeled off revealing what appeared to be a hospital room, and subsequently a doctor traversed the painfully bright room.