Pretty Faces and Dark Places (6 page)

I just had no idea how to get to her. How to prove all of the people around me wrong and show them that they’d given up too soon. I had no idea how to get my friend back. Or from where, for that matter.

I remember once opening her chat box on Facebook, only because I wanted to be near her somehow. I wanted to write to her what I couldn’t tell anyone. I wanted her to listen to me as if she was really there and would somehow receive it. Her last message to me was two days before Halloween:
‘I love you, crazy bitch. xox,’
she’d typed. It made me choke up, sob, and weep until I couldn’t cry anymore. Still, I opened it a few more times, and one time I could swear I saw
‘Sophia is typing …’
at the end of the chat box. And as crazy as it sounds, I did wait for the message to come up. It never did.

On top of everything else, I was actually ashamed of myself. Ashamed that I was thinking of
him
almost as much as I was thinking of her. It was unfair.
I
was being unfair. I’d known him for an hour, and I’d known her my entire life. I shouldn’t think about him that much. Heck, I shouldn’t really think of him at all. But I did. I just couldn’t help it.

Halloween 2014

A whole year had passed without her. It didn’t feel like a year – more like ten or twenty. Losing Sophie was really painful. It gutted me. Gutted. Me. It hurt so bad, so bad that I could physically feel it deep inside of me and everywhere that could ever hurt, all at once.

With every passing day I missed her more and more, still. There was nothing in the whole world I wanted to do more than curl into a ball and just cry. But it was like I wasn’t even
allowed
to do that anymore. People used to look at me with pity in their eyes, but now they were judging. It was like they were telling me – yelling at me – with their eyes and those looks they’d give me to just snap out of it already. As if that was something I could do. As if there was a button I could press and everything would be okay. I even wished there
was
something like that.

I just wanted my friend back. Or an answer.

Around eight in the morning, I went downstairs and walked into the kitchen. It felt like only yesterday that Sophie had joined me there at the kitchen table, scolding me for trying to remind my granny that she didn’t like pancakes.

I wiped a lonely tear away from my cheek and reached for the cereal in the kitchen cabinet, then for the milk from the fridge – another silly attempt like so many other silly things I did just to feel closer to Sophie, now by eating the food she liked to have for breakfast.

As I was eating my breakfast, which I couldn’t even taste, something on the milk carton grabbed my attention and I had to stop mid-chew. It wasn’t Sophie’s photo this time – hers had been removed long ago when her family decided that enough time had passed searching for her and that there was no hope. This one was a photo of a face I knew so well. I
knew
him. I’d talked to him. I’d shaken his hand and felt its coldness. I
knew
him. And I also knew that I’d seen this very photo long before last year’s Halloween.

Matthew Harrison.

A loud gasp left my mouth when my doubt was confirmed by the first name underneath the photo.

“You look oddly familiar.”

“I hear that a lot,” he said. “Actually, my eyes are not my own; I borrowed them and I need to give them back before sunlight.”

I covered my mouth with my hands – how could it be? How could it be him? What did it even mean? He’d asked me if it was my first time at that party. He’d told me it was his third time there. Did that mean that …
God! Oh, God!

The thoughts in my head were enough to make my head dizzy. Matthew has been missing for longer than a year, but he’d seemed okay when I saw him. Meaning, he hadn’t been kidnapped or anything like that, so why wasn’t he home? He couldn’t be just a runaway boy; he was
still
in town, and if he was, why would he stay here? Why did his family have his photo put on milk cartons all the time? If they loved him so much, why couldn’t he love them back? Because if he loved them just as much, he would’ve at least told them he was alive … Or maybe he wasn’t? 

I was going insane!

Without a second thought, I grabbed the keys that were on the small table in the foyer and hopped into my grandmother’s car, going to where I’d always wanted to go but never had the heart to. I drove myself to the woods.

Hours passed without finding the right way; it was as if the police officers were right, that the road I was talking about simply
didn’t
exist. Still, I kept searching, driving all around the forest, wherever the car would fit, leaving with empty hands each time I circled it.

I felt as if there were eyes on me, watching me closely, my every move, even while still in the car. It was creepy and I got that tingling feeling in my fingertips and my toes which I hated with everything in me.

I shrugged those thoughts away. They were not helping, only holding me back and scaring me, and it was something I seriously didn’t want today. I wanted answers, and I was determined that I’d get them.

After a long, powerful fight with myself, I hopped out of the car and decided to walk, hoping that my legs would have a better memory than my mind and would lead me to the right path on their own.

It was still daylight, and I could see clearly, but the quietness was enough to send chills all over my body and cause my stomach to turn and twist into knots. I walked, walked, walked. Came up with nothing. Everything looked the same; everywhere I looked there were trees, leaves, and dried grass. Nothing looked familiar enough. Nothing gave me a clue of where to go to even find the cottage. Nothing.

Tears started to stream down my face and I started dry heaving when I noticed that the darkness had started to take over. I was in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t even know how to get back to my car; I’d never kept track of where I was walking. I was just searching, looking for something, anything to get me an answer as to where Sophie was or what had happened to her. I also wanted to find
him
. I
couldn’t
help the need to find him. I didn’t have my cellphone or anything to tell anyone where I was or even to find my way through the darkness.

I hugged my arms to myself and kept turning in circles, not knowing what to do. I felt numbness in my legs and a heaviness in my body that made it so hard to walk, it was almost impossible. My legs were simply glued to the ground beneath me.

Minutes or hours passed, I don’t even know how long I stayed there in that state – breathing hard, scared, cold and plain terrified. It could’ve been only seconds, until I felt a small earthquake that was strong enough to make me drop to my knees, but thankfully didn’t cause any trees to fall.

Suddenly, and out of thin air, once the earthquake passed, I saw light. A familiar campfire, far, far away from where I was kneeling. It gave me the power to get up and the undeniable need to run.

My legs were still too heavy; they felt as if they weren’t my own. I struggled with every step. I hadn’t gone very far when I tripped and fell, cursing, with more tears escaping my eyes. I searched with my eyes around me to see what I’d tripped on, and when I looked closely at it, all of the blood left my face, and all of my breaths caught in my throat.

A headstone.

I stood up, frightened and terrified, gasping when I found myself in a graveyard, with headstones all over the dark place, filling the ground. I had no idea that there was anything like that out here. I’d never heard about it, and I didn’t know why no one had ever mentioned it before.

The fact that I was standing in a graveyard in the darkness creeped me out to no end. I was breathing really hard and unevenly; heck, I was truly surprised that I was breathing at all. I wanted to walk away from them, but my legs just wouldn’t obey. An eerie fog started covering the ground, scaring me even more. It grew bigger and heavier with every passing moment until it was so thick that I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. For the second time in just a short while, my legs felt so heavy, even heavier than before, that I couldn’t move them at all this time, no matter how hard I tried. All I could do was look around like a crazy person and free more tears than I’d known could ever be shed, gasping scared breaths and sobbing frightened cries.

A loud scream escaped my lips when my eyes found a headstone that read
‘Andrew Damon.’
Beside it there was another headstone that read
‘William Damon.’
and next to them was
‘Kathrin Damon.’

It couldn’t be!

God! God! God!

My eyes widened as I saw headstones that stated years and years of death dates, knowing that those very people were ones that I’d talked to just last year.
Dear God!
One of them I’d slept with, not just talked to! How could he be dead for over twenty-five years, then?

Another scream flew from my mouth when I heard, “Welcome back, Soulmate!” by the voice that had haunted me for the last year. Awake and asleep I was hearing it. I’d loved and hated it all the same. Loved the feel it gave me whenever I heard it, and hated the sensation that consumed me when it spoke my name or referred to me with those nice words of his.

It was only a second after Andrew made his presence known that I heard another voice, the one I’d longed to hear the most, “May!”

My mind couldn’t take it anymore, it simply shut down. I couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear it. Too confused. Too scared and just utterly and completely lost.

Everything turned to black right then and there.

The sounds of screams surrounded me; they were seriously loud and spoke of agony. It took me a few moments to realize that those screams were coming out of my own mouth.

Agony was such a small word to explain what I was feeling, because what I was feeling was beyond that – it was indescribable.

I felt as if I was being pulled down, as if something or
someone
was pulling me by my feet. I felt as if I was sinking, drowning. But there wasn’t a drop of water around me. Every time I managed to force my eyelids to open I would see dirt and rocks. All around me was dark, and I could only smell that rich smell of mud and overly wet grass.

I didn’t like the smell in the slightest, but it was my tiniest concern. The feeling I had all over my skin made it too difficult for me to be able to think of anything
but
that horrible sensation. It felt like I was being rubbed with sandpaper; no spot on my skin went untouched. Every piece of my body was being scratched as I was being pulled down. And my screams only grew louder as the pain grew greater.

If that was how it felt to be swallowed by the ground, then I didn’t really want to know.

After what felt like ages, I felt as if my legs, starting with my feet, were being freed from all of the sandpaper-grinding. Soon I felt the same thing on my waist, then my stomach and chest, ending with my head. And once I was completely freed, I found myself falling from a high spot toward the ground, my hands in front of me doing nothing to ease the fall. I was pretty sure I’d broken some bones, and the bloodcurdling scream that I let out once the side of my head hit the ground was enough to make anyone around me realize how painful it really was.

I don’t think it was more than a minute later when I felt hands – many hands – carrying me and then placing my feet on the ground to put me in a standing position. My body was very weak and my eyelids were almost too heavy to open. Everything I could see was nothing but blurs of people, arms and legs and ... feathers?

I felt the hands tying my own to what I realized to be a cross, and at the same time I felt other hands tying my feet together and then tying them to the south part of the cross.

“No, no!” I screamed. “Please, no! Let go, let me go!”

My screams and begs for whoever was there to hear me didn’t do anything to help me. It was only when I felt the heavy and cold chains being tied and secured over my stomach that I realized I was completely naked.