Page 45 of Solivagant

I’ve never been here before.

Wrong.

The house I’d woken up in was the only one still standing. Whatever else had once existed here was nothing but rubble now. Chunks of stone were covered in vines and moss. Rust slowly ate at the metal of shovels and pitchforks.

I kept walking, seeking things that were familiar and finding them in ways unexpected.

The more I walked, though, the more my chest tightened. The more my heart raced, until I found a large slab of stone, with strange engravings.

No.

Each step I took toward it my heart rate escalated. My palms were cold and clammy. My head ached. A stinging sensation pulled at my neck like an invisible wire. Another step and it traveled from my sternum to my belly.

Get away!

I turned around, rushing through the ruins, unsure if this was even the correct direction to go in, but it didn’t matter, because all I needed was to get away from that stone structure as if my life depended on it.

Go. Faster.

I pushed through branches, uncaring of the small cuts they caused.

Run.

A stench filled the air. Decay. Death. I didn’t have to look for long to discover its source.

As I broke through the tree line I noticed two things.

The first was Jim’s body, or what was left of it. His stomach and rib cage busted open for some creature’s feast.

The second, and somehow more alarming discovery, was the wall. I’d walked along that wall for hours. I’d woken up here on multiple occasions, so I knew by the way it curved toward me instead of away, that this wasn’t like those times. Because this time I was already inside.

22

JOSIAH

Damp wood. Dust. Darkness.

I was in that old decrepit house again. I could tell even without any light to see my surroundings. Something inside me could just feel it.

How the fuck did I keep getting back here?

It had taken multiple attempts and a lot of fucking effort to climb that wall to leave yesterday. Once again, when I attempted it, the weird cutting sensation sliced over my forearms and dampened my sleeve with phantom blood. I’d had to push through it, and the pain hadn’t faded until I retreated away from the wall. If not the climb itself, then that alone should have been enough to wake me.

But it hadn’t.

And I was back again.

It couldn’t have been normal, not that any of what had happened to me recently was normal, but I had to consider the fact that it weren’t just regular sleepwalking leading me here. I’d moved like a thing possessed. Absolutely determined to make it back here and with the apparent awareness to remove any obstacles that prevented that, as well as any way I could be tracked.

It frightened me. More than the vulnerability of being asleep as I traveled all this way. Because if I were capable of all this, then what else was I capable of doing without any memory of it at all?

Wind rattled loose wooden panels. The old house creaked and groaned, each sound amplified by the darkness. The floorboards creaked as I attempted to feel my way around to locate the door.

I stopped when I heard something shuffling around on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t be sure if it were outside, or just in another room, inside the house with me. I didn’t know if there were anything sturdy keeping it separated from me, or what it even was.

It didn’t sound like the mimic again. Chuffs and snorts led me to believe it were some kind of animal, sniffing around, but until I knew exactly what kind, I wasn’t going to announce my presence.

They continued, drifting further away, only to come back again. More of them. Wood creaked under weight in several directions.