Mary was surrounded by the Three Whores from the East.
It was a real test for her on her first day at our class. The three bitches would act friendly and welcoming, but their words would be sprinkled with a thin layer of sarcasm and snide remarks, snake tongues flickering between the lines, ready to unleash a venomous bite at the first sign of weakness.
I needed to talk to her.
I knew in an instant that she was the one who came to me as I stood by the death's door - and brought me through it.
Had I died back then?
Was it a dream?
If it was - was it a premonition?
I didn't believe in such things. I never did.
But the scene of my 'death' was so vividly engraved in my mind that I could not possibly forget it, although I wasn't even sure if what happened was last night or last month or even years ago. As far as I could see, it might as well have been a memory from another life - or even a memory that never existed.
Her magnetic effect on me was too strong for me to resist though. I couldn't wait until she was alone to go and talk to her. I rose from my seat and walked toward her like a moth to the flame - a pale flame that burned blond from the depth of the ocean.
"Hi. Have we met before?" I asked.
"Lame! Haha!" Vicky snorted.
"Woo, Jonas is making a move already?" Mel added.
"Couldn't you come up with a better pick-up line?" Jacie teased.
I couldn't give less of a fuck.
Mary raised her head - her gaze pierced right through me like a Polaroid picture of the most treasured memory in my life.
"Haven't we all?" she grinned, and the girls around her giggled.
I thought they are going to like her. Not a bad thing.
"My name is Jonas Vale," I offered my hand. The girls wooed.
She took my hand. No hesitation. There was a faint warmth in her palm underneath the skin that felt cool and dry.
"And I think you know my name already," her eyes spoke.
I saw no reflection of myself in her pupils. Instead, I saw they seemed to enlarge, growing like a quiet doomsday explosion, and I got sucked in through her retina that opened its gate for me.
But I didn't feel that I was transported. It was as if I stood on the ground where I always belonged. The ash firmly compressed below my feet under my weight told me this was real. The sting of cold wind on my cheeks, the oasis of warmth that beamed down on me from the pale sun - it felt tactile. It was real.
And in front of me stood Mary Noel, strains of her hair gently swaying in wind. If her skin was any fairer, it would have looked like marble.
"Where is this place?" I asked her.
"It is your home," she answered.
"How… is this even possible? Is this real?"
"Reality is but a perception, and to perceive is to be deceived."
Her words were as cryptic as they were clear.
"Who are you exactly?"
"Who do you want me to be?" she tilted her head to the left. She hadn't blinked even once. Her voice came through her parted lips, but I didn't see her tongue move.
"What have you done to me?"
Her eyes finally closed for a moment as she giggled.
"You ask too much," she spoke through the clenched fist before her mouth.
Giving up, for now, I looked around.
It was a city I couldn't recognize.
The destroyed buildings, as if they had been blown apart, were modern, yet the ruins felt ancient - except that there were scattered flames around the grim urbanscape still burning on nothing, as if an invisible war was still ongoing. Towering beasts that mankind had built were slain. Concrete walls were broken like given-up dreams of vanity projects. Corroded steel, melted glass, broken hymen of an unloved virgin, discarded umbilical cord of a stillborn baby.
"Is this… apocalypse?"
"Perhaps. But an incomplete one, if it is." Her voice was melodic, her pauses deliberate.
"What happened to 'our' world?"
"Shh… just close your eyes and listen," she was gentle but commanding. I did as I was told.
I heard nothing. It was an absolute silence.
Whales had long ceased to sing. Crows had no corpses to feed on. The wind that I could feel on my cheeks felt harsh, but it carried no mourning for the dead. The great divide between the sky and the ocean ceased to matter. Clouds wept for no one. The earth stopped giving. There were no lies, no truth.
"I don't hear anything."
"And that is sad, isn't it?"
And it was, indeed, when she put it like that.
It was as if there was no more life in this world. Eons of human history washed away like tears in rain, all the memories of joy and suffering forgotten - and we were rotten, rotten to the core. We were the sickness expelled from the stomach, the burst appendage surgically removed with a rusty blade to the guts. Unwanted, unloved, non-existent.
And it was painful.
"I want you to, Jonas-" Mary whispered into my ear, "fill this place up for me,"
Her breath was cold, but my ear felt hot as she brought her lips closer, almost touching.
"With lives."
Those two words resonated inside my skull and my eyes flared open; when they did, I was looking at Mary again, sitting on her seat, in the classroom, surrounded by the Three Whores from the East.
In her eyes, now I saw my reflection.
There was a thread around my neck. A very thin, fine thread, like a leash for my soul - if I had one.
With nothing more to say, I turned, walked away, and collapsed before I could go back to my seat.