Damnation

. As much as I try, I can’t control it. The darkness eats my body as my soul searches the light, the one that I can’t find again. I’m lost in my thoughts, torn between Leana, Niamh and this place. I hear something weird, it’s far away from me and I can’t tell what this sound represents. It should become closer as I walk further and get closer to this source of some strange life… but I can only hear it more and more imperceptible. It may come from the first spot of darkness, the one I avoided before. Shall I get back and have no fear? Shall I carry on my unending walk? This corridor seems… huge… endless… and it sure is unbearable.
. I decide to wait. The darkness is already in front of my eyes, I see nothing but my darken nose. It can’t get worst… I hope.
. As I sit on the floor, my back against one of these walls, my heart beats faster. I feel thirsty, for the first time today I desired a beer, and as I keep stepping this idea away from me, my breath gets uncontrollable. This must be the feeling of an asthmatic person: the rush of the heart, the fight of the lungs for some pure air, the strength of the mind trying to focus on something really important in order to survive. I have to survive; I have my own child coming; I have a mysterious letter from a solitaire girl to understand; I have a mystifying house to explore if I want to go away from it… I feel dizzy, but I know I’m not drunk this time.
. James…
. Wait. That sound is becoming clearer… James?! Someone is calling for me… a voice so intense and guttural as if I was in a dream. James… There it is again. I hope it is Leana calling for me to make me wake up from a screaming nightmare. I get up and try to find the source of the sound; it’s useless, I hear it from both my right and left side. It’s confusing…
. Suddenly, there it is. The light. The bright light I lost before, and it’s right in front of my eyes. I’m on a huge room, where a huge family, perhaps a royal one, could host a pretty fancy ball. The five windows I can see are replacing the walls, from the ceiling to the ground. Those wide pieces of glass show me the same forest I’ve seen before, maybe it surrounded the whole house as a cursed house lost in a damned forest… It would be a great horror story, but the idea is freaking me out. How did I come here, during my sleep?! My mind doesn’t want to think about that though, as my eyes catch a beautiful piano of a black wood, dark as a night without the moonlight. The keys are clean and bright as a piece of fire, I feel an amazing will of playing a little song, but I don’t dare to. It wouldn’t be enough to fulfil this all room with its sound, no matter how crazily I play it. It would never be enough to this spooky place… I don’t dare to touch this piano, but I’m having a really hard struggle deep within to hold myself.
. I try to focus on something else… There are the windows and the damn forest, there’s the high ceiling, and there’s the piano… Stop! There’s the black furniture, the creepy details on them, and there’s the piano… Oh no! There’s a suitcase, a lot of those books look so old, and there’s the piano… James… c’mon!
. I don’t care, I will play it. And so do I… More than ten minutes of a floating melody, the notes aren’t pretty sounding at some moments as I leave my fingerprints on these shinny keys. The sudden song that I play disappears from my mind as I come to an end, a simple scale of notes that dash through the room. This piano seems so magic, with so much power as it sings my imagination to an empty room that calls my name as it is invaded by my notes. I was afraid of playing and I don’t know why, because the magic of this sound is so thrilling and addictive, I could stay here and play for the rest of my life… I feel so free, as if no one can ever hurt me or insult me again. I want to stay in this world forever, where no shadows from the past and no questions about the future worry my mind. There’s just me and the piano… I know I’ve never felt this way, and maybe I’m getting drunk by the soft touch of this well-treated keyboard. I’d live like this for eternity…
. My mind has no more notes to play, but my hands are walking over the piano and its music makes the birds come closer to the windows as the black crows stop their yelling sounds… I’m so intimate to this music that I play instinctively, I think I will never stop. However, suddenly, this strange feeling haunts me… I think I’m being watched, but I look around and no one’s there. Every door is closed and not even the windows show me places where someone can be peeping on me… yet this feeling doesn’t do away. It’s growing, actually, as my fingers play a faster tune in the piano. The feeling is growing and it brings fear back to my mind… The music will stop soon, I can feel it as well, because the notes are coming to their higher elevation. It’s about to stop, probably just one or two more sequences, but there’s this breath I can feel in the back of my neck, so close to my skin, so frightening… My music suddenly stops before it ends and the room dies again into its emptiness. I run away from the piano, taking my hand to my neck, to the exact spot where I felt the breath so close to me. That area is fucking cold, as if a winter breeze has appeared from nowhere specifically. My mind is once more covered with confusion, as I keep walking backwards. Then my head bangs on something and I feel nothing more…