Kai opened his eyes. But he still couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.
He tried getting up but his head hit the ceiling. He was in a very cramped room. It only fit two or three of his own body stacked. He was lying down and he couldn’t get up.
“Now what is this? Is this hell for sure?”
He stopped to try and remember everything that happened. First the monster in the school, the other one in that weird dream.
Kai noticed he was panting. The air was rarefied.
‘I need fresh air.’ He thought.
Kai started knocking on the ceiling. It seemed to be made of hardwood.
“Damn it. It’s locked.”
Kai got a bit desperate and tried harder.
‘Wait, if my body is craving so much for air does this mean I’m still alive?’ He thought.
Kai tried using the awesome power his body had in the dream. He pictured his punch breaking through the wooden ceiling.
But this time his body didn’t respond very well. The punch was far weaker than he would expect and the impact made his hand hurt.
“Ouch!”
His vision began getting more accustomed to the environment. He noticed there were hinges on the corner of the ceiling.
“Maybe if I try opening from there…?”
Kai was out in no time.
It was a coffin.
He left the coffin and saw himself in a cemented room. The cement seemed to be still fresh.
“What is all this? Where am I? What’s going on?”
Kai realized he was dressed fancy. He was wearing formal clothes and a brand new pair of shoes. He spent the next five or ten minutes repeatedly kicking the cement until it all fell off.
“Thank goodness I was not barefoot” He muttered as he left the cemented room.
He realized he was in the downtown cemetery. He had been there a couple of times before. He looked back at the place he just came from. A grave on a wall. The cemetery had those instead of having people actually be buried underground. They put the casket inside a hole and cemented it.
“Kai P. Erickson. 2004-2020,” he read. “Sounds morbid.”
He stretched the body and got a full gulp of air.
“Did I really die? But then… Why am I here? What about those powers? Unbelievable! I’m not sure what’s real or not anymore!”
Kai extended his hand and tried releasing the energy again. Nothing happened. He tried again, and again.
‘Nothing, heh?’ He thought. ‘I guess that’s to be expected. It was just a dream after a…’
In the next attempt, he felt a gust of wind coming out of his body. The energy hit the wall in front of him. He heard a thump. But it didn‘t do any visual damage to the cement.
‘What is this? I still have some trace of power!?’ Kai stared at his hands in disbelief. ‘Anyway… I should go back home. It looks late…’
Kai had to walk as he seemed to not be carrying his wallet. It took him a long couple of hours to reach back. He was all worn out when he knocked on the front door.
His mother took a while but answered, with disheveled hair and horrible appearance, like he had a very bad day.
“Kai!? Kai!!”
She rushed from the window to the front door.
His mother could barely contain herself.
“Oh. You’re here! You are alive! You are really my son!”
‘Well, this is awkward…’ Kai thought as he withstood the big wave of hugs. Soon dad also came and he noticed he wouldn’t rest very early in that night.
“Kai!? How are you alive? What happened?”
“I…” He tried to come up with an answer but he was the one who understood the least.
“Please never jump like that again…” Her mother said to him.
“…Jumped?”
“You scared us real good, there. Jumping from the balcony at school. We couldn’t understand… But now you’re here, so…” His dad realized they were still at the front door. “Anyway, let’s come in.”
“Yeah…”
‘It seems I’m gonna have a lot of explaining to do…’ Kai observed.
It took him long, but Kai’s parents finally let him go to his room and lay in his comfy bed. However, he could still not sleep at all. The words of his mother still reverbed in his head.
‘Please never jump like that again… What the hell happened that day at school? I didn’t jump sh*t. It was some animal thing that did that. And I was nowhere close to the stairs even… What did that girl tell the people at school? She saw it too, right?’
Kai rolled for the thousandth time in his blanket.
‘Ah, screw this… Next time I go to school I’m going to find out what happened.’
As any regular student who died and came back from the dead, Kai took a couple of days before he started frequenting school again. He only got back to the studies in the next week. He arrived late to the first class and had to go straight to his spot.
In the way, he glanced at the front row and saw her again. Aimee.
Among all the students who were clearly staring at the ‘guy who jumped and came back’ during that silent moment of his arrival that interrupted the English class, Aimee herself seemed to be the most shocked of them.
‘You…’ He thought. ‘You are still alive, too. I need to know what happened on that day. I am going to make you spill it all to me in the interval.’
Kai was forced to just sit in his spot and act like nothing was wrong through the next hours. The eyes of his classmates followed his every action uncomfortably.
Minutes after the teacher resumed class, he asked for the short colleague who would always sit next to him.
“Hey…” he whispered. “Can you lend me… The… Textb…” He noticed the colleague he always forgot the name was facing up front, pretending he didn’t hear him.
‘Great, now I’m the weird guy.’ Kai thought. ‘Thanks a lot, Aimee.’
In the middle of the second class, he began hearing rattling coming from the ceiling. Something seemed to be running around. A person? No… It was an animal. Those were definitely the sound of paws.
It was like a very energetic pet was knocking the thing over and the noises were really loud.
‘C’mon I cannot concentrate like this… I can barely hear the teacher.’ Kai thought about asking the teacher to at least talk louder but as he was about to raise his hand, he noticed everybody was acting like they weren’t hearing anything.
‘What’s going on…?’
Aimee, in the second row, raised her hand and said she was going to the bathroom.
‘This girl… She knows something. I bet she is also hearing all of that.’ Kai thought.
Kai also raised his hand.
“Sir, can I go to the bathroom?”
“The rule is one student in the bathroom at a time, Kai.”
“Yeah. But I’m not going to the lady’s one, sir.”
Kai managed to get permission and went straight to the upper floor, where the noise seemed to be coming from. He was expecting to corner Aimee and ask her what the hell was all of that about.
‘On a normal day, I would have gotten at least a giggle from the class with that one… People are still weirded out…’ He thought. ‘Oh, well. I’m going to find Aimee now and make her clarify the things.’
The room on the upper floor was like a deposit. They kept all the things which were used by the staff personnel. Cleaning tools. Boxes of things to be used in remarkable dates. Boxes of who knows what. When he was younger that was a great spot to play with the fellow kids in the interval.
Kai opened the deposit door.
“Aimee…?”
As expected, the boxes had all been thrown around.
Kai felt like someone was in the back of the room, behind the shelf, so he walked amidst all the things, trying to reach it.
“Aimee?” He asked more firmly.
But as he reached the back of the shelf, he didn’t find the girl. Instead, he found another familiar figure: the same monster with the spiky fur of the other day.
Kai was paralyzed for a moment.
‘That thing killed me last time, right? But that was when I didn’t have my powers yet. But wait… I still don’t have the powers! I mean, I managed to somehow use it in the grave that day, but…’
The thing was staring at his eyes with the same never-changing expression. This time it didn’t give the chance. Noticing it was cornered in the room, it jumped right at Kai.
But Kai swung his body to the side with all the speed he had and dodged it by a hair’s breadth.
“Woah!” Kai didn’t know whether he was more surprised due to the thing’s sudden charge of the fact that he actually managed to dodge.
‘This isn’t normal. I wouldn’t have dodged that. It turns out I still have some of those powers, after all. Even if the scale is far inferior.’ He thought. ‘In this case…’
Kai’s eyebrows curved in a serious expression. He extended the palm of his right hand at the creature while it was turning around to try and attack Kai once more.
As soon as it saw Kai’s serious face, it froze down. It lost the desire to attack.
Is it scared of his eyes? Or maybe it felt something else…
Either way, the thing, and Kai stared at each other for a brief second, and then the monster decided to run away, as it had swapped places with Kai after the first charge-in. Now Kai was the one behind the shelf and the monster was closer to the door.
It ran to the corridor with all its speed.
“Hey, wait!” Kai shouted and proceeded to chase it down.
‘Why do I feel some kind of déjà vu?’ He asked himself while he followed it around.
He spotted the thing running down the stairs, even passing right beside one of the inspectors. The inspector didn’t do anything. He didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he even said in a loud voice:
“Hey, no running in the corridors!”
Kai didn’t bother, he ran past him and kept chasing the thing.
“Hey, come back here!” The inspector shouted.
Soon the inspector had been left behind by Kai’s recently obtained high speed. He chased the thing all the way to the courtyard, trying to fire another one of the waves at it. The pressure was very weak but it managed to cause some impact on the monster, which caused it to start bleeding lightly.
The monster then climbed the walls and jumped to the outside of the school. Kai was locked in, so he couldn’t follow it.
“What are you doing!? You’re making it run away!” A voice behind him said.
“Aimee?” He recognized the voice before he turned back.
She was staring at him, carrying the same metal shapeless idol-like object from the other day in the hands.
‘Finally… She is here. Where do I start…?’ Kai thought.
“What’s going on Aimee? What is this thing?”
“They are called ‘presences’.“
“Presences…?”
“Ghosts. Spirits. Whatever. You name it. Most people can’t see or feel them.”
“So that’s why no one was hearing all that fuzz on the ceiling? And how do…”
“Look…” Aimee held his forearm menacingly “Most people shouldn’t see them. You included. What happened to you was an accident. But I tell you: you are not ready for this. I’m going to take care of this one. Please go back to the class and pretend nothing of this ever happened.”
With some difficulty, Kai managed to get his arm off of Aimee’s grip.
“What do you mean, act like nothing happened? Who are you? What happened to me on that day? Why do I suddenly have all these powers? What did you say to my parents? How am I supposed to ignore all this? If you haven’t noticed everybody is staring at me like I was… Like I was a ghost.”
Aimee just ignored all of Kai’s rant and began walking back to the class.
“I’m counting on you.” She said firmly.
‘Aimee…?’
She went back and Kai was left alone in the courtyard. The wind swept at his face like a cold shower, reminding he was in the middle of nowhere without anyone around during the class time.
‘And now people looking at the window are going to think I’m even more the weird guy. Great.’ He thought.
Kai followed Aimee’s steps back to the class.
‘Guh! Act like nothing happened! Like hell I’m going to ignore all that! Screw ghosts and living objects and such things. That damned thing killed me once and I got the chance to get my revenge. I’m chasing down the thing and if Aimee is not clarifying the things for me, I’m going to clarify them myself!’ Kai muttered to himself in his head as he walked up the stairs.
The rest of the class went by pretty fast. The students would always whisper at his back and stare at him strangely, but he just ignored. At least he did the best to.
On that day, Kai was allowed to leave the gates at lunchtime, since there was no mandatory class after. He thought of finding Aimee and walking with her back home.
‘She is going to act like an ass, but she’ll open in no time if I insist.’ He planned.
But even if he planned doing so; Aimee was too fast in packing her things and leaving the school. If there was really a race of the students against the bell during the last period, Aimee was probably McLaren or Ferrari.
As he crossed the guardhouse at the gate, he went to the other side of the wall where the creature had climbed earlier to confirm a thing.
“There it is.” Kai spotted a blood drip on the floor of the sidewalk.
“I’ve seen movies where people can work after analyzing a drop of blood like that. People can see that, right? I wonder what’s going to happen if I catch a sample and send it to analysis…? Huh? What is this…?”
Kai noticed the shape of the grass near the sidewalk looked funny.
‘”Did the creature do this…? No. It looks like a human. Footprints…? Oh…”
Kai realized that earlier Aimee probably had the same idea he had.
“So she is also chasing down the thing. What is she? Some kind of ghostbuster?” Kai considered his options, then abandoned the idea of the blood sample.
“Anyway… If I find Aimee, it means I’m probably going to find the creature.”
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