Chapter 23 Damon
Damon
Oh fuck. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Laura isn’t here for me, she is here for herself. And I’m helpless to make it stop.
Now she is holding her phone out in front of her and she touches the screen. I think she’s recording my death.
‘Don’t fight it, and it will be a lot easier and so much quicker,’ she says, over the sounds of my coughs and gasps. ‘Trust me.’
But I don’t. Instead, I try to free myself, however, she has done far too good a job of securing my hands and the knot around the noose. It won’t budge.
Now she has commenced slowly crawling towards me with the stealth of a cat approaching its prey, her phone trained upon me.
I can smell her hunger as she draws closer.
She takes deep breaths as if ingesting my panic.
Oh, no. No no no no. I try begging her for help, to tell her I’ve changed my mind, but I can’t get a word out.
The rope is crushing my airway. And now the dead boy is standing next to her, reaching his hand out towards me, as if wanting to save me.
There’s a change. He opens his useless black mouth wide and his rasps mimic mine.
And then his expression alters. There’s no mistaking it: he is silently laughing at me. He wants me dead. They both do.
Panic suddenly steps aside when my body floods itself with a naturally occurring chemical reminiscent of a sedative, numbing both my pain and my fear – my brain once again kicking in to protect me, pave the transition from this life to the next.
An overwhelming sense of calmness washes over me.
If there is a God, He has truly thought of everything.
And it’s in that moment that another familiar sensation begins, one I have only felt once before, two months ago, beneath the waves.
It’s like the reverse of a Polaroid picture, as if a clear image of everything around me is slowly fading to black and is being replaced by a carousel of moving images that represent my life.
But then, in the remaining seconds before my exit from this world, the bedroom door bursts open.