Once we had walked deep into the darkness, me trailing a hand along the brick to make sure we didn't wander away, our eyes gradually adjusted. Aside from fires, lightning bugs, or electrified light bulbs, there was little to rely on sight-wise during the day. Nighttime, a real temporary night when the moon appears along with thousands of stars, had become the ironic reprieve from near-constant emptiness overhead. While some people, systems, and societies, still insisted on following humanity's old habits of wakefulness and rest, such as the education system in this part of the country, large segments of mankind, I heard, adopted a live-by-night routine. I wanted to follow in those peoples' footsteps if I could. How else would I ever get to live in the light?
"Do you hear that?"
Liza's voice pulled me from my thoughts. We stopped in our tracks, and I listened carefully for whatever it could be that she was hearing. As soon as a high-pitched ringing hit my ears, the ground began to quake. "What's happening?" I gasped.
Something hit us. A sudden, blanketing force shoved us onto the sidewalk. My skin burned; the wind was sucked out from my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut, heart pounding in my ears, louder, louder ... then I lost all sensation.
A flash of light.
I sat up involuntarily, letting out a scream as unfamiliar whiteness pierced my eyes. My every nerve went off for a split second, and I threw up in my mouth, barely managing to swallow the bile.
My fingers trembled and I couldn't take in a proper breath. I was on fire, burning, cast through a doorway into hell where the black disappeared and left me ablaze, scorched by solar winds and molten red white yellow plasma. I shut my eyes and saw white. I tasted mortality on my tongue.
Save me, I screamed in my mind. My skin suddenly went from hot to cold. And the agony didn't last forever ...
Slowly, the light dissipated, my senses evened out, and I felt Liza's tender hand grip mine, which no longer quivered uselessly. Soon, her heavy breathing entered my ears, and I succeeded in pulling my eyes off the ground, which no longer resembled a concrete sidewalk: we were seated on a gray-blue wood-paneled floor, not outside but inside, not at Greene County High School, but somewhere I had never been before.
Looking at Liza, my breath caught in my throat. She turned her pale face toward me, her frightened gaze searching mine for answers that neither of us possessed.
"What happened?" she asked, voice hoarse.
I gulped and shook my head. "I wish I knew ... Do you recognize this place?"
"No, not at all." Her thick blonde eyebrows scrunched in thought. I couldn't help but stare at her. She didn't look the same … It took me a moment to process the sight before me, then I realized my jacket had been torn clean off of her, clinging in tatters to her right shoulder. Red marks covered her left arm from her shoulder down to her wrist, as if someone had dug their fingernails into her skin, and these markings joined together to form a bizarre constellation of eyeballs, each staring outward. I could have sworn, for just a moment those agitated pupils fell on me.
"Your leg," Liza said, gesturing a limp hand down at my legs.
"Huh?" My eyes fell where she had pointed, and again I found myself unable to breathe, my brain wracked with confusion.
On the right side only, my blue jeans were shredded from the thigh down. There used to be black hair on that leg, but now it looked smooth, the only sight that stood out to me being the similar constellation of eyeballs like those on Liza's left arm, all red and raw, freshly engraved into my flesh.
More bile rose up in my throat. I had to look away from our bodies. When my eyes flickered forward, I saw the rest of the room we were in: one staircase stood at the opposite end of the room, winding to an upper level that I couldn't make out from where I sat. There were a few lights shining along with the navy blue walls to our right and left … It took a moment longer of me squinting at those yellow spots, to realize these were oil lamps stuck into the otherwise plain walls.
But not all the walls were plain. A few tapestries were hung from the same wall that the staircase curved into, depicting what appeared to be a grotesque battle between titans. I thought they looked like those from Greek myth, gigantic, wielding lightning or boulders or gigantic blades, but nothing about the images provided any real proof that they were at all Greek, or that me and Liza had been sucked into the mansion of some classics professor who liked to decorate his place in scenes from mythology.
A rustling sound came from the side. I glanced over and watched Liza get onto her feet. Her tight brown leggings looked darker around the knees. Blood? Probably from when we crashed down on the sidewalk.
"Let's get out of here," she said, dusting herself off. My lips twisted when I made the connection between the markings on her arm and that same arm's weaker movement. As soon as I tried to stand with her, also eager to leave, the weakness in my right leg became apparent to us both. Liza had to help me to stand straight since my knee threatened to buckle whenever I put any weight on it. "Come on, Kev. I'm scared."
Turning away from the staircase, we saw the wall behind us, and we found ourselves facing a black iron gate, locked by a fat padlock. We couldn't make out whatever existed beyond the gate … The light from the oil lamps didn't reach that far … But I gathered from glancing at the floor below the iron that the wood we were standing on split off into slick, obsidian stones.
"Is there another …?" My voice trailed off. Even if my senses seemed normal again, the sheer insanity of the situation made everything about it almost impossible to process. Just attempting to do so gave me a stabbing migraine.
"Maybe the staircase?" Liza murmured, hesitantly turning from the gate.
"Doesn't look like it goes down," I observed, joining her in eyeing the stairs. "Unless the only exit is a fire escape, I doubt we need to go up to get out."
"I don't know. There aren't any windows. Maybe we're in a, um, a basement?"
"You might be right, Liza."
She took a step toward the staircase, then stopped herself before her other foot left the ground. Her lips parted slightly and her forehead wrinkled. "I … Wait …" The words squeezed out from her throat, every vowel shrunken with fear. "I don't … I don't think we … should go upstairs."
"Why not?"
At that moment, the force from earlier, which had shoved us onto the sidewalk and knocked us unconscious, now sucked us back against the freezing iron gate. Instead of an overwhelming sensation of rising heat, heat, heat … we shriveled into ourselves, bitten by relentless frost, bruised by metal … Our very souls may have been sucked violently between the bars of the gate, since our senses dulled to nothingness, and we succumbed again to something beyond us, forced into a restless sleep.
We woke up in the rehab room, together on a red cot, met by white lights and the worried faces of young researchers.
"They came to," I heard one say, though his voice sounded like a mumble to me.
Another said, "Tell their parents to come in …"
Disoriented, I tilted my head toward Liza. Her left hand gripped my right hand weakly as her eyelids fluttered open and her lips tugged into a pained grimace.
"I feel it too," I croaked out, my voice wavering.
She didn't say anything. I couldn't blame her for the lack of response. It's not like I felt very motivated to speak.
What we experienced felt unreal, but the markings remained: the eyes on her left arm; the eyes on my right leg. The researchers provided no answers. No explanations. And we couldn't draw any conclusions in the weeks that followed, nor did my dad or her mom believe either of us when we attempted to describe what had happened.
Weeks turned to months. Liza and I …
We stopped talking when talking hurt too much. Time passed, yet the markings on our limbs showed no sign of fading. After a few anxiety-inducing meetings, we concluded that we must have suffered a strange psychological episode from the Cloud. Even so, we feared the possibility of experiencing whatever the hell that was a second time, and seeing as we now always shared the same dreams, and we were never apart when those nightmares played out in our minds, it made sense to avoid each other in person. That way, we hoped, we would never get spirited away.
But … those hopes really were just hopes.