Chapter 468

The desert air held a dry chill as Jeyola stumbled through the scrub. She pulled her thin jacket tighter, the synthetic fabric offering little comfort against the encroaching cold. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs, each beat a drum in the silence.

She kept turning around, convinced that she had heard a twig snap right behind her. She wasn't supposed to be out here.

The rave had ended hours ago, its pulsating music fading into the expanse, but the world was a distorted painting, edges blurry and colors too vibrant. A stupid mixture of who knew what pills swirled inside her, a cocktail of chemical promises.

Jeyola wasn't even sure when the following had begun. Initially, the idea had been merely a nagging concern, but each form, each sound behind her only solidified the awful reality.

What had begun as curiosity began its turn toward sheer, palpable fear. The branches of the acacia trees seemed to reach for her like bony fingers, and shadows stretched out with distorted dimensions.

They made familiar bushes resemble crouching figures that were waiting to pounce. A rustle of leaves caused her to spin, adrenaline surging.

Nothing. Just the gnarled trees casting intricate shadows on the barren red soil.

"It's the drugs, Jeyola," she muttered, the sound a shaky puff into the cold, indifferent darkness. "That's it."

The moon was a distant disc, casting a pallid glow that made every crevice and dip seem a potential hiding place. Every rock was an alien thing to be looked at cautiously.

She kept trying to pinpoint where she was exactly in the night but just wasn't sure at all, that didn't help to curb the mounting panic. It all seemed new, the drugs had made her unfamiliar with the natural world.

She thought of her friends, back at camp, sleeping. They were safe and warm in their tents.

It was very far away now though, the thought. She considered going back but the distance felt like miles.

She didn't want them to know the state she was in anyway, it would've only resulted in laughter. The dry, crackling ground gave way beneath her boot, making her jump, and almost stumble to the dirt below her.

This was all too real now and no longer was something her head conjured, it was here. It was all around her.

There was no mistaking the sensation that her very own skin had grown sensitive and prickly all over. The very pores felt as though they could open at any moment, to give passage to whatever awful thing waited in the woods.

She pressed onward. It would be safe on the other side.

There was always more at a rave and in this isolated land, it might even be a secret one that no one knew of, full of people she could join up with. She walked in an uneven path and didn't focus at all on what was before her or her direction, the ground was difficult anyway, rocks and sand combined.

It was impossible to make an even pace. A low groan came from behind.

Jeyola broke into a run, her lungs burning as she gasped for air. The thorny shrubs whipped at her arms and legs, leaving red welts in their wake.

A horrible paranoia settled within her bones. She was surely close to dying or at least she was surely in trouble.

Maybe it was one of her "friends", looking for her. Perhaps it wasn't and she was doomed to whatever fate they planned.

It wasn't that, of course, there wasn't anyone at all, just shadows. She found a small alcove between a large rock and an embankment, crouching down in the darkness.

It wasn't enough to make her feel at ease and yet she still stayed, wanting desperately for the "entity" that pursued her to vanish at last. Every single sound now seemed amplified; the whisper of the wind, the crunch of pebbles underfoot, it was everywhere all at once.

Her mind was racing. Had she said something to someone?

Had she seen something she wasn't meant to? None of it made any sense though and no explanation could come that would satisfy this new, acute level of fear.

It felt ancient, as though it were being recalled from the core of her very being. Something dark and primal that she'd never been meant to come in contact with.

She told herself to relax. The drugs made one think funny, and the idea that it was truly just drugs calmed her to some degree.

Her body still trembled from the adrenaline and paranoia, of course, but it gave way, ever so slightly, to a moment of calmness and rationale. Maybe she would even be able to make it through.

There was a chance! Yes, that had to be the way it worked.

She wasn't just going to fall over now and cease. She'd make sure of that!

But that idea fell when the low growl sounded again, closer this time. It wasn't animal, she thought, because it held something distinctly more cunning, malevolent.

She scrambled back out and began to run again. It was impossible now not to scream or call for help.

The need for someone to aid her became overwhelming, tears falling in streaks down her cheeks. She shouted for them as loudly as her failing lungs would let her but only got hollow silence as her reward, and she knew there wouldn't be anyone.

This part was for her and her alone, they didn't matter at this stage. The world seemed to tilt.

The vibrant colors morphed into strange, nightmarish shapes. The sky became a swirling mass, the moon a gaping eye.

She tried to reach out, tried to grab on to anything, any sort of reprieve from this bizarre hallucination but the ground was slippery with her own wetness now and was only making it worse. The growling followed, never faltering and always remaining nearby.

Her foot struck something, sending her sprawling. She landed hard on the coarse ground, a sharp pain shooting up her leg.

Tears blurred her vision, and the growing chill became her constant focus now. Her hands found only the hard rock she had hit her leg against, and then suddenly they could feel dirt, too.

It came on now in an instant, a great crushing wave. Not of grief but rather one of acceptance and it was no longer about the thing stalking her through the woods but about herself now.

It began in the legs, numbness starting its march towards the middle and then all she could do was breathe, which in its own right, had become something truly difficult to keep up with. Her own shallow breath became painful to try and produce.

Jeyola tried to move, to stand and push onward once more, but it felt as though weights had been tied to each limb. Each push brought an even sharper sting and for what?

It wouldn't even matter. There wasn't anywhere else for her to run anyway, nowhere at all that would even attempt to fix what had already begun, it was always ending right there, in that moment she was simply experiencing.

The fear had subsided to make room for some form of horrible understanding. Her breaths grew more labored, the chill settling into her bones.

Her head felt so light it was almost as though she was no longer attached to it and her ears were constantly buzzing with white noise and strange droning sounds from nothing at all. There was the sound of heavy breathing but that too began to simply add itself to the general mishmash of random droning notes.

The growling had at last moved past being right behind her and had begun a journey toward far in the distance. It didn't want to hurt her anymore, it had taken something far better.

She reached out again, the dirt staining her nails as she tried to feel the familiar dryness of this environment. But even the dirt felt strange and unnatural, it made her feel ill and like she should avoid it with her bare hands but that wasn't possible now as it began to soak up more and more of the warm, crimson red that had appeared on her hands and knees, the place where the skin was now exposed.

The blood felt strangely alien to her, the metallic tinge and the strange stickiness a horror she hadn't noticed earlier. It mixed so easily with the natural substance, an almost grotesque symbiosis that both confused and horrified her, all in an instant.

She had an idea but it was far too slow in execution. It didn't make any sort of difference in this particular moment and only resulted in even further pain for such a pathetic reward.

Her fingers grasped for any object that would prove its validity; dirt was fine, just something she could grip to the reality around her. It did not, of course, result in a fix and in fact had almost a negative effect now, everything felt farther and stranger, her reality was turning against her and everything had its own form of logic.

There was no turning back now. It was almost funny, had she had the ability.

Jeyola's eyes began to lose focus. The moon started to melt in her vision.

Everything turned to muted greys and washed out pastels. A terrible and almost comical thought bubbled up from deep in the recesses of her mind: she couldn't help but recall her own first introduction into the usage of hallucinogens, something she did only because her peers had at the time, it was never because she wanted to and then she'd simply carried on.

Now it had all come back in an almost hilarious cruel twist of fate. How silly it all had been!

The world had just played another cruel and almost perfectly well planned trick and she hadn't been ready at all. She still hadn't figured out where the supposed person was.

The fear of someone or something hunting her now fell out from priority to some deeper understanding. This place.

She was a part of it. Just as they said they'd been.

This was forever. A final, rattling sigh escaped her lips, the air whistling through the gaps in her chapped and broken lips.

Her body, stiff and cold, settled onto the unforgiving soil, a small lump in the vast and indifferent expanse. The low drone seemed to be right above her now, closer than it had been before.

As she ceased to see or breathe or feel or understand anything at all she almost felt pleased and thought that surely, the noise had become her own little special greeting in death. Her hair covered her cold cheek and settled her onto her cheek to where no sound or sign could show and she'd at last truly blended with everything.

The landscape accepted her, another insignificant life reclaimed. And as the stars came out, glittering like distant, icy points of judgement above, the real truth began to settle; there had never been anything at all, besides herself, from the start to the very end, it had only ever been that.