Page 93 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

Something is choking me and I can’t breathe. Red fog rises before my eyes and again I hear the deep voice: Step aside.

I’m knocked over and all the images are gone. For seconds, I see the boy walking along the sea, searching for the area that will be his home for years to come. Suddenly, I find myself back in my body even though I’m not really there.

“Bren,” I hear Lou whisper. “You are here, with me. Not somewhere else. Bren…it’s me…Lou.”

I’m still on the ground.

“Bren, I don’t know what happened to you in the past…but that’s over. You are no longer locked up, you are free. You just have to look properly to see it.”

I rock back and forth like I can take her voice into my nightmare. “Bren…everything is fine. You’re not trapped.”

Someone else takes my place. “Lies! Everything is black.” I run to Lou, but it’s not her anymore. She looks like my mom.

After that, something snaps inside me and flies away like a kite severed from its string.

When I come to, there’s that voice again. It resonates as if from a distant land and it is beautiful, although it sounds so sad. Like the last time, I let it carry me up to the place where everything could be fine.

“Bren…” it whispers. “It’s only me. Lou. Lou, the girl you kidnapped.”

Lou. Lou. Lou. Dark and light, the name echoes within me as she continues to speak to me. More and more words drip like sweet balm onto my wounds. Run away. Don’t hate you. I don’t understand all of them, but they make sense, like notes in a piece of music. A part of me…actually likes.

I’m clutching a birch branch with one foot on the trunk.

My eyes hurt and I blink a few times. I don’t want the voice to stop talking, I want it to lead me out. Again, sentence melodies get through to me. That part, the one that likes you…insane…completely insane…don’t get it myself. I flow with the voice…got into your RV and kissed…not to run away from it.

Something cold touches my face. Gusts of wind.

Suddenly, I see clearly again and discover Lou in front of me. “Louisa?” I ask, stunned because I don’t understand anything anymore. “What are you doing here?”

Tears stream down her cheeks. “I’m sitting in a tree and I’m scared,” she whispers through sobs. Her whole body is shaking.

I’m heartbroken. She spoke to me again during the blackout. Maybe she even brought me back.

“I was gone, wasn’t I?”

“Pretty much.” She nods weakly.

I want to say a thousand things, but I can’t put into words what’s going on inside me.

“It’s too dangerous.” Decidedly, I rise from the tree trunk and search for the bottle. It must have rolled out of my hands as I drifted away. I spot it in the grass and pick it up.

I look at Lou again. “Come down from there, please…” I say urgently.

The wind inflates her sweater like a balloon.

“I’m not drinking that!” she exclaims, clinging to the branch like a shipwrecked woman.

“The concoction works almost immediately. It took me a long time to get the mixture just right.” I walk backward into the woods to show Lou I’m keeping my distance. “Originally, it was meant for you, so it won’t act quite as strong on me since I weigh a bit more than you do.”

“On you?” she asks, confused.

I grip the bottle tighter and down the contents in one gulp. “I had no intention of taking it myself. But I guess you won’t climb down that goddamn tree otherwise,” I tell her. “I don’t know when I’ll have my next seizure. What if I try to get you down from there? Or you get startled by my behavior and lose your balance…”

It starts to roar in my ears. It sounds a bit like someone pumping air against my eardrums. My surroundings grow fuzzy, but this time it’s the drug. I stumble blindly through the forest, my foot getting tangled in a stack of deadwood and I fall to the ground. Sweat pours down my face and my pulse pounds in my throat.

Clenching my teeth, I crawl to a bare tree trunk and sit against it.

I planned on feeding this stuff to Lou! The thought makes me feel so sick, I want to die.

---