The Skullcap Chronicles

Chapter Two

 He looked straight out of a cartoon, only more, well, grim: smoky black cloak with a pointed hood pulled over a scowling skull, and billowy sleeves allowing his hands to poke out, long bony fingers wrapped around the shaft of his scythe.

 For a long moment, we stood in silence, staring each other down. I blinked several times in that moment, and he never cleared away. I couldn't tell if my heart was thrumming too fast or had stopped beating altogether, but either way, fear had turned my chest to a seizing block of ice.

 In a flourishing gesture with his free hand, the grim reaper disappeared in a haze of smoke, leaving in his wake the strangest of relics: dice. Black with white dots, shiny and polished, they rested on the hardwood floor reflecting lamplight. Slowly, I stepped into the room enough to close the door. My pulse was still racing as I approached the dice, which were left showing snake-eyes.

 I still hadn't fully grasped what I'd just seen. The grim reaper was standing at the foot of my bed- am I schizophrenic? Possessed? Sleep-deprived? Way more stressed than I realized? Did Kim sneak some hallucinogens into that curry?

 I took a deep breath and knelt down. Can you feel hallucinations? But if it's not a hallucination, then...

 Reeling in confusion, I touched the pad of my finger to the dice. Cold radiated it off of it, my chest clenched, and as I touched it the room seemed to grow darker, shadows stretching, yawning, yearning-

 With a herculean effort of will, I pulled my finger off the dice. The shadows shot back to their normal positions, and I could breathe easily again. I rose to my feet and crept downstairs. Kim and Marty remained absorbed in the latest Redbox movie as I stole tongs from the kitchen drawer and returned upstairs. Carefully, I lifted the dice one at a time and placed them in a cardboard box. The first gentle tapped to the bottom of the box, remaining on one. The second, despite my caution, rolled to a four.

 Something shifted in the atmosphere, a foreboding that gathered in the shadowy corners of the room, and for a moment I stared around with wide eyes, unable to breathe.

 The feeling didn't pass, but I shook myself from its hold. The nagging discomfort of being watched settled into the back of my mind, and I knew that whatever I had just done, it wasn't good.

 Dreams that night were hectic.

 I varied from sleeplessness to nightmares involving searching through foggy darkness, without any idea what I was searching for. At some point in the dream, I'd stumble into a hole, whisper-scream in the way only dreamers do, and then wake up, cold and unnerved in the dark, always with that feeling of being watched.

 By morning, I was exhausted.

 I had finally begun to actually sleep when the voice of the devil- er, my alarm- began its awful beeping. Grumbling and groaning about how it was across the room, I stumbled over, turned off the alarm, turned on the light, and began getting ready for school. I drank my coffee, half-heartedly attempted to tame the mess my hair had become overnight, and managed to get on pants, a bra, a henley, and a peacoat. I had just pulled on my converse when my second alarm told me it was time to head out for that hellish contraption modern society labeled as a "bus."

 I had just left the front door when my phone rang. I looked down- Heather.

 "Yes?" I answered, starting down the drive.

 "Get a ride from Kai."

 My pace slowed to a shuffle. "Why?"

 "Your bus crashed yesterday."

 "How do you know?"

 "You and Alexis ride the same bus. You told Lacey your bus number, and she told Alexis, and yesterday the bus crashed. Alexis was at a dentist appointment, thank gods, but she heard about it from a friend."