Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #22 January 2016 | Page 36

me, I didn’t recognise it at first. The symptoms were similar to what I’d seen, but it didn’t make me weak. It didn’t make me bedridden. Letters started pouring from under my quill when it was finally over. I realised what I had been spared. I knew if I died there and then, too much would be left unsaid. I wrote as I had never written before. I was afraid it would turn on me again. Turn on me it has. None too soon. Unlike the first time, it’s left me powerless, unable to lift my hand and jot down a line that comes to my mind. To exist has become a torment. To keep the knowledge inside and to be unable to share it is the cruellest torture known to me. Dust settles down on my pages, and I watch it swirl around, my eyelids so heavy I can barely keep them open. My mind keeps returning to the illness. Why haven’t I been spared? Why weren’t many before me? I draw in a shaky breath and feel that it is my last one. I listen to dust rustling against the pages of books… to it every single day. But then, two weeks after I met them, they suddenly started dying. Visible signs showed cancer or heart attack or other health problems but people don’t die of that unexpectedly, especially not if they are as young as the people I’m talking about were. Two weeks is an approximation, and yet after a while I started foreshadowing those deaths, waiting for them to happen. Nobody connected the natural causes to me, but I knew what was really going on. I just didn’t know what to do about it. Through day and night I went, pondering the reasons behind those deaths until I met a strange man. He lifted his hat to greet me, and I saw he has a hole in his skull. There was a small canary sitting in it. He told me to look at the stone statues standing in the yard. They had always stood there, but he told me to look closer. And as I stared at them, I realised they were never there. The man told me to walk with him and took me to the city garden. There were skulls sitting on the fence planks that had always been there. He told me to look closer, and as I did they were never there. The pages of books held the records of deaths I felt myself responsible for. The man told me to take those books and burn them and see what happened. True stories are always told by those who sound the craziest. When I close my eyes and look back I laugh at how I shuddered while experiencing all these events. Life is inexplicable sometimes and you have to puzzle it out and marvel at what you are offered to go through. You wonder if there isn’t some powerful being that sets the chessboard and makes you the pawn that is destined to become a queen or be killed trying. Turned out, everything that happened wasn’t in vain. I’d always liked meeting new people. It was a slow process of starting to read yet another book that wasn’t finished and new pages were being added As I prepared to go and get those books the man left. He said I had no need for him anymore. He said I was capable of finding my way. He disappeared, and I realised I was about to step into an abyss. Getting those books was no easy task. They held them in a place where no one was allowed to go. I needed to get there during the night and get past the guard into a highly secured room. “Burn them as soon as possible,” I kept telling myself as a mantra. “Burn them before somebody comes and stops you.” I took out the lighter and grabbed the first book. Those deaths were too surreal to be true. I wanted to know what really happened. I watched the fire lick at the pages and swallow them whole as if they had been meant to be destroyed... 36