The fear in me

Jason

When I wake up next morning from a deep dreamless sleep I'm at first totally disoriented. Where the hell am I? Then it all comes back to me. Oh yes! I'm far away from my personal angel – Nay! My heart belongs to her! Forever! I can be glad I didn't kill her by mistake. I should have known it was too beautiful to be true. It would only have been a matter of time before my monstrous ability destroyed her. And so it's good that I'm no longer there. Now she's safe!

I quake at the thought of seeing her cast in resin in Dr. Death's trophy collection. He must not know that Nay exists. Never!

I get up out of bed and look over to the computer with yearning. I'd so much like to tell her why it's best that I've disappeared from her life. But she doesn't know what she is, and it's better that way.

Has she got another father too? Doesn't matter! She's safe, and that's the only thing that counts. Tim will take care of her. He loves her, and some day she'll forget me. That thought gives me a pang. I must not be jealous. She has deserved to be happy, and in any case I'm not going to live much longer ... if things go well!

I sigh and go into the bathroom to freshen up. I'm scared of the other angels of death. Are they just as eerie as Dr. Death? I hope not!

Twenty minutes later I set off for the dining room. On the stairway I can already hear a hubbub of voices that is clearly coming from below. Probably the others have arrived. Just great!

Slowly I stroll down the steps past the resin pictures that look so innocent and yet veil a cruel background. If the Devil had a house it would look like this, I'm sure of that, and he would embed his collection of bodies together with their souls in a resin picture and hang up everywhere in the house. And each of the artworks would be burning internally. Yes!

But the screams of the souls would not reach the outside, no, they'd bounce back to the bodies like an echo. Each would have its own soundproof hell! Yes! The Devil would be sure that they were suffering. There's nothing worse than having to bear your suffering alone, again and again ... Wow! What on earth am I thinking now?

"That's an amusing scenario," somebody calls to me, and I look down the stairway. There a man is standing. Before I can permit myself a judgment of the man's appearance he says: "Artificial resin wouldn't necessarily be a good choice because it melts, but there are certainly other possibilities ... hahahaha ... Solitary confinement does at least sound cruel. Imagine how terrible it would be if you were suffering and nobody knew about it. Even worse, nobody was interested."

Damn it, how does he know what I was thinking? And then it dawns on me and I'm shocked. "Can you read thoughts?"

I don't want him to read me!

"That's only one of my abilities!" I hear him say while I'm imagining a wall in my head. "I see that was probably a unique experience, you're blocking me ... not very nice." He looks disappointed.

"I don't like it when someone is rummaging around in my thoughts," I tell him brusquely.

"Rummaging about is not what I'd call it, let's say rather that your thoughts have manifested themselves to me like a film on a gigantic cinema screen ... an achievement worthy of an Oscar nomination," he says dryly.

"Who are you?" I ask. He doesn't look like Dr. Death. But he too is an angel of death, the iris ring of his eyes show that unmistakably, it's black ... like a framework. Like my eyes and those of Dr. Death.

However, Dr. Death always reminds me of a fresh product of plastic surgery, and the man here looks genuinely young ... I mean quite young. Not older than twenty, and he's dressed in a modern and youthful style, even his blonde hair has a cool new cut. Dr. Death's long grey hair looks like something out of a horror film, a horror film in which monsters have been to a plastic surgeon.