The Legend of the Firewalker, Book #1

Chapter 9.1 (Premonition)

Author Note:

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Chapter 9.1

Nathan opened up his eyes slowly as they adjusted to the darkness. He had a view of what appeared to be the night sky. His head was cloudy and he was a little confused. He continued to blink while his mind tried to focus. He could clearly see what looked like the stars and the moon, but they were a lot more vivid than usual. They appeared almost animated. The stars and the moon appeared to flicker playfully with one another.

"Am I dreaming?" he asked himself.

His thoughts were coming together now, and he was becoming aware of his body. He could tell that he was lying on his back but on an unfamiliar surface. There were little prickles of something underneath him. He stretched out both his hands to sit up and immediately noticed something bendable and soft pass through his fingers. It almost felt like plastic.

Nathan looked down to examine what was between his fingers and paused before looking all around him. "Where the heck am I?" he wondered. "This can't be grass." He was sitting in an open field that was surrounded by small and large trees. There was a stone road to the left of him that ran alongside a series of small hills. 

Nathan blinked his eyes several times and held his hand to his head. "I might need to be on medication, or something. Or maybe I already am on drugs. Because everything is gray. There is no color."

He looked down at his hands again and then at his clothes. Whew, he thought. I can see the color in my skin and in my clothes. For a second I thought I was going colorblind.

He hoped one of the campers hadn't put something in his drink. "This is not funny. It'd better not be Jonas," he said to himself.

Nathan turned his attention again to the gray-looking grass that was all around him. It's like — frozen, he thought. And it feels weird — like plastic.

He stood up and continued to look around him. The trees were motionless, and the air was humid and stagnant — no breeze, no sign of animals or people, and no sound.

He quickly clapped his hands together to test his theory and was relieved to hear the sound they made as it echoed back at him. He was caught off guard when a small branch beneath his foot snapped with no sound.

Cautiously, he picked up the branch and examined it. Next, he picked up a rock from the stone road and tossed it, but again there was no sound. "This is definitely strange," he murmured. He was relieved that he could hear himself. "Everything but me seems frozen, lifeless, muted." 

Nathan glanced up at what he thought was the night sky and was amazed at how brilliantly the stars and the moon shone, considering that his entire view, apart from himself, seemed shrouded in gray.   

He crossed over the stone pathway and climbed up one of the larger-sized hills. Almost at the top, he froze. A cold shiver ran down his back. The silence that gripped the entire area was abruptly broken. The sound was all too familiar to him — everything was, the sky and the lifeless trees.

He heard the sound again; this time it lingered amongst the trees. "Somehow I know I've been here before," he mumbled to himself. "And that was definitely a scream, and I am pretty sure it was Leah's."  

Everything flooded Nathan's mind at once: his dreams about Leah, her face as she fought in desperation against an unknown attacker, the speckles of blood on her pale skin, and the scratches on her arms and legs. 

Nathan's heart pounded against his chest. He was definitely frightened for Leah as he had always been, but this time it was different. This time, he actually felt like he was there. He wasn't a spectator watching everything unfold; and this time, dream or not, he planned to do something about it.

In a matter of seconds, Nathan was down the hill. Frantically, he headed in the direction of Leah's screams. If it weren't for the sudden tingling in his hands, he probably would have kept running recklessly towards the screams. 

"Okay Nathan, calm down and think. If this is like all the other dreams, then Leah is in trouble and she is being attacked."

His hands felt warm, like they had at Lafonda's birthday party. He looked down and saw that they were red. He clenched them into fists. "I don't have time to think about my hands right now!"

Cautiously, he continued down the stone pathway. I need a plan, he thought. I need to find something to fight with. He thought about stopping to look for something, but every time he did so, his stomach twisted in knots. He couldn't bear the thought of wasting time to look for something when Leah's life was in danger. 

He considered going back and picking up a tree branch he saw along the way, but he came across a large oak tree at the end of the pathway. "I've seen this tree before," he said to himself.

His eyes quickly caught the first line of the all-too-familiar words carved at the base of the tree. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," said Nathan. "Speak no ill of the dead."

Just about everyone in town knew the saying because it was carved in the large tree that stood right outside Grimm Cemetery. "I must've awoken in Lynn Field. But how in the world did I get there?"

He rubbed his head and stared again at the familiar words, trying to make out the second line, but he couldn't because someone had scratched through them. No one in town could make out the second line either, and no one knew who had scratched it.

Nathan looked up and then back at the big oak tree. He caught a glimpse of the glaring moon before it disappeared behind a wisp of gray clouds. "How could this be? Besides my funky gray vision and the psychedelic sky, everything seems so real." He glanced up at the gray branches and leaves of the big oak tree and shook his head. "This has to be a dream."

He froze. A cold shiver ran down his back again and another scream filled the air. Yeah, he thought, and Leah is supposed to be in a mental hospital right now. And yet, here I am, running towards her outside of Grimm Cemetery.

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