Requiem

A Story by Deco

Seeing flashes of the past is only the beginning.

It was the stroke of midnight when Brahe Noah turned in bed and shifted on her side. She'd been wide awake, fighting the visions that served as the catalyst of her sojourn in the foreign land. She was seeing it now. Again. She felt a twinge in her hand at the onset, when she'd shifted. Then a surge. As a tourniquet released, sending her blood to an icy chill.

She gasped in succession, startled, breaths of air rushing her lungs as if it had been her first; as a newborn at the genesis of life, drawing first breath in the world. But the sensation felt more like drowning. She knew that feeling. The lungs getting more of another and less of what it needs to maintain its host. Her heart gaped in intervals; it's beating an un-rhythmic yet melodic vignette, pacing steadily, rising as would the early-morning sun. The sensation was real enough now as it was when she was six years old being dragged to the bottom of a bridged creek by a bicycle whose chain had come entwined with her shoelace. She fought to rid himself of the image. There was enough of those as it was. She grabbed her anatomy, the part where she supposed her heart would be as if to ease the tension therein, nothing. She inadvertently arose.

Unaware, she stood hunched over the side of the bed with her hand gripping her left cleavage.

"Damn! D****t!" she wailed in subdued whispers as if there were another to heed her complaint.

There was no one. Just an eerie chill at the depths of her being, but...they, the visions, were the same, flickering behind the curtains of her eyes, the flashes. Growing more intense the tighter she shut her eyes. The tighter she squeezed attempting to erase them.

Then she felt it.

Cold.

Freezing.

It moved.

Swiftly.

Its aura was ominous.

Eerie.

Ghastly.

Then she heard it.

A voice. Noah had heard it before.