Edge of End (8 page)

I smiled at the way she tried to avoid
the reality. Okay, that wasn’t quite the reality I had been used
to, I know, but it wasn’t a dream either.

Finally, I saw the entrance. My eyes
looked to the right seeking the house of the woman and her
daughter–Melisa. The garden full of dry leaves and grass stood
empty, the swing swaying in the breeze. I made my way to the house,
Elizabeth padding behind me in silence.

“
What is it?” she asked me
as I came to a halt on the path.

I ignored her question. My thoughts
drifted back to the little girl living in that house with gloomy,
dark and opaque windows. Not one soul could be seen through them.
But the emptiness of the house didn’t cause my distraction; my
attention had fallen upon the new house next door. I was fairly
certain I hadn’t seen it before. I observed it for a few moments;
my legs hauled my body closer to it involuntarily.

“
This house wasn’t here
when I first arrived.” I was standing in front of it dazed and
confused. “I’m sure I didn’t see it standing here. Did
you?”

“
I…” Elizabeth stammered.
“I’m not sure I was in this district at all. Have we come the right
way?” She looked lost in thought, surveying the houses around
us.

I saw she didn’t recognize
anything.

“
Look,” I pointed my
finger towards the entrance. At that moment, I think my jaw
dropped. I was about to say that the entrance was there, but my
hand froze in mid-air, my body remained fixed like a statue. There,
in the far distance, the horizon was lost in a yellow
phenomenon.

Elizabeth stepped forward and took a
better look. “What the hell is that?” she asked.

“
Storm,” came out of my
mouth. A big cloud had risen and was approaching the town like an
enormous tsunami–its intention, to come and wipe us
away.

“
Jonathan,” she said my
name in an undertone. “Do you see the same as what I
do?”

“
I guess so,” I attested.
I lowered my outstretched hand and walked slowly to the town’s
entrance.

“
Where are you going?”
Elizabeth asked worriedly.

“
Can you see that?” I said
without looking at her, my eyes stared ahead. “Over there, on the
road.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh my God! Who
is that?”

There was someone running towards us,
a chunky-looking man, hauling his legs heavily. I hadn’t seen him
when I had mentioned the storm. He had emerged suddenly as though
he had come out of nowhere and materialized from thin
air.

“
We can’t leave the town,
Jonathan. We’ll die out there,” Elizabeth hissed. I glanced at her,
spotting the hopelessness in her eyes.

“
Yeah,” I had to admit
that she was right. “It seems like some sort of supernatural power
wants to keep us in this hellish town.”

“
Like the old woman said,”
Elizabeth reminded me.

I smirked and shook my head in
puzzlement. “This is a nightmare, an awful nightmare.”

She eyed me; her expression read ‘I’m
real, not an imagination of yours, and not a part of your unreal
nightmare.' She quickly averted her eyes from me and looked back at
the houses.

“
We still have some time
until the storm reaches us,” I supposed, but Elizabeth didn’t
listen to me.

“
I still doubt,” she
muttered. “Maybe I came through another entrance. Do you think
that’s possible?”

I glanced back. The newly
emerged house was comparatively smaller than the one where I had
seen the woman and the girl. Judging from its exterior the new one
appeared abandoned just like all the other houses we had seen in
this
town
. Its
windows were dirty, and the ground was cracked like the arid desert
that had never seen a drop of water.

As I was examining it, a girl’s
snicker made me jerk my eyes back to the familiar house. I was
looking for Melissa. She was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear
her voice, her laugh.

“
Can you hear her?” I
asked Elizabeth, though I didn’t wait for her answer and ran to the
house.

“
What should I be
hearing?” she called after me.

I didn’t pay attention to her, and on
reaching the house, I stood still on its path. The door and the
windows were closed, but the girl’s voice continued to echo in my
ears as though she were standing right beside me.

“
Jonathan, what can you
hear?”

“
A young girl. I saw her
playing in this yard. Now I can hear her voice.”

“
I hear nothing,”
Elizabeth looked around in astonishment.

“
Wait here,” I ordered and
started towards the door.

With every step the girl’s voice
became louder and sounded happier. It wasn’t just an ordinary
voice, it carried an odd power which possessed my mind and pulled
me closer. Imagine you’ve been starving all day long and abruptly a
scent of a grill fills your nose, and you carry your heavy legs to
ask, no, to beg for a piece of steak or sausage. Or you’re a
smoker, and you haven’t smoked in two to three days, then a big
puff of cigarette smoke seizes your senses–that’s what it felt
like.

“
Jonathan,” Elizabeth
called me with quivery voice, but I didn’t stop, and with a great
sense of purpose I approached the house.

I arrived at the door and put my hand
on its handle cautiously. I could still hear the girl’s laugh as if
it was seducing me to step inside, but I lingered.

What was I doing? Why should I go
after that girl?

I didn’t even know who she was or what
she was. She wasn’t even real if Elizabeth couldn’t hear her. She
was only in my mind, which meant she was there only for
me.

I thought about it again letting the
knob go slowly and looking back to Elizabeth. With sorrowful eyes
she was watching me. We had just met, but I felt I meant more to
her than just a mere stranger.

I was the person who had
saved her life from a ravaging monster. No, she didn’t want to lose
me, not because the
town
seemed almost abandoned, and I was the only human
beside her; there was more to the expression in her eyes. Even
though there was a distance between us, I delved into her
expression seeking the reason. I can’t say I wasn’t attracted to
her, but I just hadn’t given it too much thought, mainly because of
the unbelievable things that were happening to us in this
town
.

“
Hey! Please, help me.”
Both Elizabeth and I looked at the entrance absently. The chunky
man was at the new house, panting, one of his hands outstretched
begging for help. “What is this town? Where am I?”

“
We’re strangers here,”
Elizabeth said.

“
Morsfinis,” I announced.
Two curious gazes fell on me. “The name of the town,” I
shrugged.

For a moment, three of us stood in
silence.

“
Unfamiliar name,” the man
muttered. “Is this in the United States?”

“
No idea. Who are you?
Where have you come from?” I asked having a strange sensation that
this man wouldn’t remember his past, just like Elizabeth and
I.

“
I was alone in the
desert,” the man began explaining quickly. “I don’t know how I got
there; I only saw this town nearby. Could you help me,
please?”

“
Help you?” I said. “What
do you want? How can I help you?”

The man rolled his eyes, looked down
at the ground and muttered something under his breath.

“
What is your name,
mister?” that was Elizabeth asking.

“
I… I can’t remember,” the
man said shocked. He raised his head, his expression blank and
carried no memories, just like me. He rubbed his eyes and brushed
his curly hair back with his hand. “I don’t remember who I am. I
woke up in the desert without any memory. My head was empty,
absolutely empty.” He mumbled fixing his eyes on Elizabeth. “What’s
going on? Where am I? Am I dead?”

“
Who knows,” I shrugged
trying to take his attention away from Elizabeth. “Haven’t you had
any flashbacks from your past? Was there anyone who seemed
familiar, but you can’t remember who it is?”

“
No,” the man said
thoughtfully. “I woke up and I looked around. There was a storm
coming in my direction. I saw this town and I didn’t have much time
to consider my memory loss.”

“
Everything’s almost the
same except for the storm,” I said to myself casting my eyes
downwards deep in thought.

All of us appeared in the very same
desert, alone, without any memory, and the only place we could
reach was this town.

What was lying there? What
kind of secrets did the
town
hold?

“
What’s the same?”
Elizabeth had to ask twice to gain my attention.

“
He came into the town
with the house’s appearance,” I continued thinking aloud. “New
resident, new house. Yes, of course, that’s it!”

“
What is it
Jonathan?”

“
That man, who saved us
from the monster, that one with rag on his face,” I
began.

“
What about
him?”

“
He was surprised when I
said I didn’t have a house in this town,” I peered back over my
shoulder at the front door. The girl’s snigger heckled
me.

‘
Come to me
Jonathan
,' a haunting sound mixed with the
girl’s laugh, a familiar voice. It was the one I had heard in my
unconsciousness. The woman, the mother of the girl. “Look, you went
into that house because you saw a man and a girl inviting you in.
You can’t hear the voice of a woman who is trying to lure me in
now.”

“
A woman’s voice?”
Elizabeth repeated. “What voice?”

“
You see? Something here
wants me to enter this house,” I pointed to the door behind me.
“It’s not easy to say, but it seems every house in this town is
meant for someone. That one, the one you were in, was meant for
you, and I believe this one is mine. I avoided it at first, but the
evidence has led me back here. Yes, the old woman said that I was
going the wrong way. I think she meant for me to turn around and
get away from my house.” I put my hand on my forehead. “Why do you
think the doglike animals don’t attack us? They only
follow.”

“
I don’t know. Probably
they got scared of the man who saved us,” Elizabeth
suggested.

“
He’s not here. No, I
think it’s because I was on the way back here,” I tilted my head
and thought for a second. “I think they want me in this house, but
I don’t know why yet.”

“
I don’t get it Jonathan.
Why would they want that?”

“
I’m pretty sure now, that
every house in the town, even the ones that appear abandoned, has
someone inside, stuck in the four walls like you were until I came
and freed you. You said every time you wanted to get out some sort
of force pushed you away from the door, remember?”

“
Yes,” she said with
uncertainty in her voice. “You’re going to say that the houses are
prisons, aren’t you? If you enter the one meant for you, you won’t
ever get out?” That was it! Yes, that was what I had implied. I
didn’t know for sure, but that was my guess.

“
The town itself,”
Elizabeth announced.

“
What?”

“
That woman,” she said.
“When you told her you intended to leave the town, she told the
town itself wouldn’t let you. I daresay, she meant your unreal
theory.”

“
From the outside it looks
unreal, but being sucked into it…,” I pressed my lips together
dropping my eyes onto my palms again. If there was a power in them,
then I could come upon any abnormal theory, couldn’t I?

“
Hey! Boy! Come here.
Hey!”

While Elizabeth and I had been
talking, the man had totally slipped my mind. I looked at the place
where I had last seen him. He was now at the foot of the new house
calling out to a boy who neither Elizabeth nor I could see.
Although I knew it was a mirage only for that man, I was too late
to stop him from entering the house.

“
Hey, stop! Don’t go into
that damn house,” I cried after him as loud as possible, but he
appeared not to hear me. His imagination controlled him, and those
invisible tentacles were wrapped around his mind, luring him into
the house.

“
Mister!” Elizabeth
shouted and darted after him. I broke into a run, and, as I did, a
thought entered my mind. If every house was meant for someone, for
a single living soul, it didn’t let anyone else in anymore. Why? I
had been attacked by guard dogs at Elizabeth’s house, remember? I
was sure that the new house would be guarded furtively by those
hellish animals too. My aim wasn’t to stop the man crossing the
threshold, fuck him; but I wasn’t going to lose Elizabeth. She was
soft, looked defenseless and definitely had no idea about the
guards.

“
Elizabeth, stop! Don’t
enter the yard,” I was yelling and running, my heart hammering
again. “Elizabeth!”

She glanced at me but didn’t stop.
“He’s going to go in Jonathan.”