Afraid

Written from the other side of the ghost story.

I am cold.
I do not open my eyes- my eyes are too cold to open. Rather, I drift into awareness. It is dark. My cellmates have gone. The blood splattering the ground has long since dried and turned brown. How long have I been asleep?
Or have I been asleep? I feel no warmth, no movement, no breath. Could I be... Dead? And if so, where am I? For I know that this place, this cold, empty room, could not be Heaven. So, is this Hell? Or some twisted form of purgatory?
No. In my core, in the part of my consciousness that linger still, I know where I am. I am in my cell, the room of the final days of my life. Or was it weeks? Months? I had lost track- in the dark little room, time had no meaning. But before, before I... fell asleep, there were others. Others, screaming, snarling, fighting, sobbing, or sometimes just sitting in silence, waiting for inevitable death. But, dangerous and abysmal though they were, they were humans, they were people, they were warmth. Why have they left me?
A thought occurs to me: are they dead, too? Do they wander this room with me, cold and confused? Suddenly, I feel something resembling a chill, though I am so cold already that it is more a memory of a chill than an actual change in temperature. The room, so still moments before, suddenly seems to crawl with demons, with the terrible unknown, waiting to draw me into its clutches and torture me endlessly.
But, no. The room is empty.
I am alone.
And I am afraid.

Author's Note

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