Hearts Of Time: Joker

Chapter Two

Elliot could feel herself falling through the blackness; how long had she been falling? How long will it be before she splattered on the ground? How was she even falling? The last thing she remembered was walking home from soccer practice and there wasn’t a fall this long anywhere around there, or in Parkes for that matter. Elliot closed her eyes against the darkness, the back of her eyelids a more comfortable night. She was alone in this darkness, she realized. Elliot squashed the fear that rose in her throat and screwed hey eyes shut even tighter.

She continued to fall down, down, down for what seemed like forever until she heard something rushing up to meet her; the ground, maybe or it could have been a big long spike waiting to impale her. Elliot hit the ground with about as much force as tripping over would’ve generated and the wind rushed out of her. She opened her eyes to a dull indigo sky and lay there for a few moments to get her breath back.

Elliot sat up slowly and was greeted by an immense, old school building. She could see the way time had eroded the cement and caused the support beams - whether wooden or steel she didn’t know – to twist and bend out of shape. The glass in most of the windows had blown out and littered the pavements in front of the building. The pavements stopped only a few meters away from the building, their progress halted by dark red soil.

Elliot could feel the cold from the soil bleeding through her sports pants. The soil was damp, but it didn’t seep into her pants and the consistency was something other than mud. It was possibly rich with nutrients that the many trees and patches of grass couldn’t, or refused, to take in, leaving them brown and knobbly, the branches reaching out like the wrinkled fingers of a dying witch.

She stood up and walked over to the building, watching the trees around it with suspicion, as if they might suddenly spring alive and do a little jig before proceeding to kill her. She reached the door without experiencing any sort of horrible tree death and after tugging and pushing, realized that it was locked. She sighed and peered back up to the indigo sky.

It didn’t look like it had rained in a while, the cement was dry and so were the trees and yet the soil was as damp as if it had just rained. Though, Elliot reasoned, through a lack of an unidentifiable heat source, it could have been there from eons ago. She sighed again and leaned her head on the blue, rusted door and turned away from the old school building, away from the old trees and away from the old, dead grass. Her feet started moving and she gazed out over the vast wilderness she had been plunged into.

She stopped dead.

Her face grew pale and her breaths shallow.

A graveyard. There was a graveyard in this wilderness. It was right in front of her, behind the dent in the ground where she had landed. The fear she had suppressed earlier came rushing back, making her heart flutter. It wasn’t as if she was scared of graveyards in general, she was just scared of the thoughts they bring. She had only ever seen one person die in her entire seventeen years; her grandmother who was suffering from lung cancer. They were visiting, just a routine visit when she was six and during that visit, she had watched the light from her eyes fade out of existence. Grandmother wasn’t exactly on the way out either, the doctors had said she would get another good 5 years, but it was like her body had just given out.

It wasn’t until much later when she actually understood death that she had started to question it. Was that what it was like to die? Just fading away and all that is left is blackness? Elliot didn’t like the idea of dying, it terrified her like any normal person but she also didn’t like the idea that one day she would be there and the next day she would be gone. Poof, gone. She would be forgotten in time, her family would follow her and her existence extinguished just like her thoughts. There would be no reminders that she had ever lived, no record of the struggles she had gone through or anything of the sort. That’s how she envisioned death, an eternity of darkness for her and an eternity of unknowing for those who remained and that thought simply terrified her.