Sincerely, S.H

Chapter 9

I think that my cheeks remained red for hours after he left. It’s a good thing I stayed in my room so Stephanie couldn’t see me; she’d probably try to disinfect me. But maybe if she could disinfect my soul, I should let her. The rest of the night is blissfully uneventful, which I’m glad for. I turn in a little late, which is nothing out of the ordinary, and perhaps is the only piece of my normal existence that I participated in all afternoon.

Sleep doesn’t come to me as easily as last night, but it does come. It comes tumultuously, actually. At least I hope I’m asleep. That would make more sense than me being surrounded by dancing tree shadows in my waking hours. If at all possible, the shadows seem to be approaching, like they are coming off of whatever wall they were being projected onto. In fact, I don’t think there are walls anymore. Were there walls? I watch in awe as the dancing shadow trees approach and slow their dance. At first, I felt like maybe I was moving with the trees, but as they decelerate to stops, I realize that I have always been stationary. Soon, the trees movement cease entirely, and they are no longer shadows. They are tangible. They may not be trees, but they have form. I reach out and touch the black surface of one of the organic shaped posts to find it cold and metallic.

Curious, I hit it with my fist, not hard, but strong enough to test the sound blunt force would make. Instead of a reverberating low ding, I hear a crash as the tree shatters like glass. When it’s shards hit the floor, the floor itself begins to tear like a stretching plastic bag beneath the weight of the forest and the weight of myself. Like an improperly disposed of broken glass in a garbage bag, I fall through along with the shards from the tree; even the ones that aren’t stuck in my arm. There is another world beneath the pitch black industrial forest above. This one is also a forest, but the trees seem to be wood, and the sky is orange with the setting or rising of the sun. I notice these things as I fall for what seems like a while, especially since it seemed I was only a hundred yards above the tree line when I began my descent. Odder still, I don’t feel my stomach almost disconnecting from me as I fall like it did when I braved risking my life by riding a roller-coaster.

Immediately after I inwardly acknowledge the faults in my falling, they seem to correct themselves and I suddenly feel properly uncomfortable, and I reach the trees in under a second. Immediately as I feel the first branches graze my arm, I wish they hadn’t. I feel them poke into me, but I only sink farther into thicker and angrier branches. If only it were summer time; the leaves could cushion my fall, and would provide me some protection from not only their own branches, but the pine branches as well. As I fall deeper and deeper, the pain caused by the unwelcoming branches becomes more and more real. There is a very small and insignificant voice buried in a back corner of my mind that is telling me that this is all a dream, but I don’t believe it. Everything is too real. My body hits the ground, and I cry out in pain before I feel nothing at all in my legs, and pain from ripped flesh everywhere else.

Panting heavily, I muster the will, energy, and coordination to lift my head up with my mangled neck and examine my body. The task proves more difficult than ever imaginable because I can hardly distinguish my body, or rather its parts from the broken glass pieces that land beside my head. Gruesome as it feels, it looks like nothing more than the accident of a child; a broken china doll. My limbs and abdomen are not only no longer human, but they are also no longer flesh and bones at all. Just glass. “Do you see what you’ve done?” says a bellowing voice from all around me; the air, the trees, even the ground. I know that voice.

I awake with a start. Not at my body being destroyed and turned to glass, not at the ominous voice that came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. I jumped at the idea of who, rather what, the voice was. It’s back. It was not in my waking hours, but as Drake said, it came back. And I wasn’t prepared. I shake in my bed, though I am fully covered under my blankets and the room is almost a tolerable temperature. Drake was right. His voices stopped and came back, and now he’s… I don’t know what he is, but I am almost certain that it isn’t sane.