I am (on hold)

Chapter 4 - The Dream

Chapter Four – The dream

Three years later

I am sitting, bolt upright in my bed. Images of the accident swirl around in my head. My hands are clammy and cold and my eyes are cloudy with tears. As my vision clears, I see Jimmy, Amelia and Penelope Clearwater, the town doctor, sitting at my bedside, all with worried looks on their faces. Someone asks if I am alright, but I block it out of my head. I wonder why everyone is sitting around looking at me. Then I remember the dream.

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The dim light made it hard to see the photos and drawings. I shifted the pile and reached for another exquisite artwork to examine. I held it closer to my eyes, and found it showed three people, dressed in some formally lovely clothing that had been ripped, torn and dirtied. Their faces were smudged, whether from the ink or dirt I couldn’t tell. They had shackles around their wrists and ankles. I turned the picture over, and on the back it said, ‘not everything is what it appears to be.’ Just as I was about to look at the picture again, when there was a knocking that sounded like it was coming from behind me. I turned, and sure enough, there was a door. I got up, walked to the door and opened it hesitantly. Jimmy was standing there with a box of chocolates in his hand. He was wearing a suit and tie.

“Are you ready?” He smiled up at me.

“Am I ready for what?” I asked back. I really wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He had the weirdest look in his eyes. They were hurt, saddened and angry all at once. He started to tell me what I was supposed to be ready for, when we both heard footsteps on the gravel driveway. Jimmy turned around to see who was coming, but the footsteps stopped. Jimmy drew in a sharp breath of air then turned back to me and told me to run. I could tell he was scared.

I looked over his shoulder and saw, to my horror, a man, standing there with Spas 12 in his hands. No sooner were the words out of his lips than the muted shot of the shotgun was heard. It obviously had a silencer on it. Jimmy's face exploded in front of my eyes .I turned to shield myself of any debris that would follow the shot. Jimmy’s body landed with a tell-tale ‘thud’ on the harsh wooden floor, and his blood was splattered on my shirt. I looked down at the blood on my arms and legs, and felt the atmosphere changing around me.

“No,” I whispered. Jimmy couldn’t be dead. I felt the all too familiar pricking sensation at the back of my eyes. I stepped back into the dark room and shut the door, as a barricade against any more bullets the person would shoot at us. I sank to the wooden floor boards as I realised, with dread, there was no more ‘us’. There was just me. My body was racked in sobs as I mourned for him. Many thoughts were running through my head. Most of them were including Jimmy and the person who shot him, but there was one question that was trying to make its way to the front of my mind. ‘Where was I?’

I looked up through my damp hands and found myself in another dim lit room. There was a table and a chair about two meters from where I was crouched.

This time, on the table was a bottle of tomato sauce, turned on its side. If anyone was to look in the window, if there was one, they would just think I had spilled the tomato sauce on me, instead of being drenched in my best friend’s blood. I reached to tip the bottle the right way up, when I realised the label on the bottle has been worn out in some parts. I wiped the tomato sauce off the remainder of the label. I started to read the letters that were still there.

I didn’t expect there to be any secrets to be hidden in the letters, but I added the letters together anyway. It took me a while, as I couldn’t see out of my flooded eyes for a while, but I finally got it. The message in the sauce bottle was; ‘Watch your step.’ I looked down at my feet. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I looked down anyway. I was expecting to see my sky blue runners and white socks, but instead, my feet were shackled and bare.