Willow | The Wayfarer Series

Chapter 3

I could only hear my own breathing for a little while. After that more things came in. I felt wind hitting my exposed skin and making my hair fly and fall in front of my face. I heard the soft sound of waves hitting the sand. I smelled the familiar salt of the sea. 

I opened my eyes.

I was laying on the grass. Wet grass to be exact. Above me, seagulls were battling the strong winds. The sky was grey instead of the blue I left it as. I could feel some rain dropping on my face. After I sat up, I saw that I was only a few meters away from the water, my feet were touching the sand.

It took me some time to comprehend what had happened. I had been shoved in front of a train by a stranger, I was told my life useless and now I am... Where? 

When I closed my eyes I could convince myself it was all a dream. But when I opened them I was faced with the reality of the situation. I had absolutely no idea where I was and I certainly had not been here before. 

I got up to my feet, and let my hand run over my face. I was still the same. My brains weren't painting the tracks of my beloved train stop. I was still wearing the same clothes too, a pastel pink jumper and jeans. They didn't have any blood on them either. 

My bag did not seem to have travelled with me. I was in the middle of nowhere, with the winds quickly picking up. Eventually, I came to the realisation that there was nothing for me to do but to walk. I chose a direction, which was keeping the ocean on my left hand but slowly moving away from it, and started walking. 

I felt like I had been walking for ages when I came to a house. The way it was build made me remember the words of Life. 'A different place, a different time.' I needed to know what time that was. 

The house looked rather poorly constructed. It had a straw roof and so many holes in the walls I doubted they could actually keep out the cold. When I came closer I realised that no one had lived here in a while. One of the walls had completely fallen down into the house. 

Still, I entered. I was never much of a history nerd, but if I knew one thing it was that people were not as accepting of strange people as they currently are. Even if I woke up fifty years ago my jumper and jeans would be considered odd. 

The inside of the house smelled horrible. Mould had started to grow on anything that was made out of fabric, but the real source of the foul smell I found in the kitchen. It was the rotting corpse of a man, who seemed to have died while eating lunch. 

I had never seen a dead person before. Movies and series really did not capture the gruesomeness of a rotting corpse, probably to save viewers from the inevitable nightmares that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The man had maggots crawling through his skin to the inside of his nose and out of his ear. I could see part of his bones poking out, while some were still covered in snow white skin. 

I forced myself to look away. Though before I did I had noticed his clothes. I wasn't a subject matter expert, but I am guessing I went back more than just fifty years. I entered what was once the man's bedroom and opened his dresser. The mould did not seem to have penetrated the wooden cabinet yet, so I was in luck. 

Luck, I huffed as I went through the dead man's clothes. I died today. I have no idea where or when I am and I am. I was not in luck, not even when I found out that the man once had a wife. 

I found a long, pastel red gown made out of wool and a sleeveless tunic that was folded neatly with it. Alarm bells were ringing inside my head when I pulled it on. The fabric was too new. It wasn't worn down or restored as I had seen in the museums. I must have gone back at least three hundred years. 

I broke my brain thinking back to my history classes. The seventeen hundreds. What happened in the seventeen-hundreds? I think there may have been a war or two, but then again, England was always at war with someone. 

The woman had been taller than me, so the gown was dragging over the floor. I switched out my sneakers for the leather boots that were near the door and even found a cloak that definitely did not look cruelty-free. 

If It was so long ago, I definitely fit in now.

I wouldn't even be mad if this was all an elaborate prank of some sort, I'd probably just be glad. Maybe I did hit my head at some point, I felt like I couldn't really string a proper thought together anymore.

I left the house behind me. There was no food to be found there that hadn't started to rot seemingly years ago, and the thought of spending the night with a rotting corpse was not particularity alluring either. 

I thought back to my brief spell with the girl scouts. They had taught me a fair few things about survival in the wilderness, but not really anything about telling time. If I had to guess, I would say it was somewhere around noon, or maybe a bit later. 

But noon turned to night, the winds grew colder and colder until I felt stupid to leave the comfort of the broken house behind me. I had been walking for ages, my feet were full of blisters and I had not encountered a single soul.