Dreams of Absolution

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JACK

I thought my day couldn't get any worse.

To begin it, I woke up in a cold sweat around five thirty. The dream I had had was still lingering in the back of my mind...so vivid as though it really had happened to me.

I was in the woods. The ones back behind my house. I don't go there in the wintertime, but my dreams don't stop from taking me there. I went through the wall of trees to a small clearing, where I sometimes did my homework in the early fall and late spring. But instead of the normal tree stump I sat on, there was a rock. A rock covered in something dark coloured. Something that had to be blood.

I ran a hand through my short brown hair and dismissed the dream. After all, it was exactly that: a dream. They don't mean anything.

I couldn't shake the horror after that. I lost a precious hour of sleep just staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to think of anything else. My green-brown eyes just stared blankly at me, offering nothing to take my mind away.

I was distracted the rest of the day; nearly missing my bus, failing a geometry test and forgetting my chemistry notes were just a few of my blunders. Perhaps my uneasyness wore off towards my friend. On the bus home she sat behind me and sort of drilled holes in the back of my head with her eyes, which was her way of using some demonic psychic power to see into my soul. Seriously, this girl was good at reading emotions.

"Ay, Jack. You all right? You seem sort of distracted." she said in her odd, personalized accent.

I just shook my head. "Nothing, Holly."

Holly was odd, even by teenager standards. She never wore anything low cut... I personally didn't know if she even owned anything low cut...and just mostly wore T-shirts with video game characters on them. She always had her hair back in a ponytail, a black and red pen forming an X in the scrunchie. She wore huge, '90's black rimmed glasses and had a rather noticeable overbite. She had been my friend since the first day of freshman year. The crazy thing was we lived on the same street, five houses away from each other, and we didn't know the other existed until we sort of exchanged awkward glances at each other on the bus. Thus, our equally awkward friendship began.

"But you're never this way. Why start now? You've had a bad day. I can tell. Don't worry, they happen to me too." she flashed me her overbite grin and pushed her thick, black rimmed glasses on her nose. "So what happened? Fail a test?"

"Part of it." I sighed.

"Ey? What else?"

"Just minor things. But they added up quickly." I said.

"Like what?"

"Well, I had a dream."

"I have dreams too." she said.

"You know that clearing I do homework in? Instead of a tree stump, there was a rock. It was covered in blood. It greatly disturbed me. The end." I said curtly.

"Ah," she nodded.

"Know what it means?" I asked.

"Not really, no." she shook her head.

We got off the bus at our stop and walked the short distance towards our houses. Holly was the one seeming a bit distant now...perhaps remembering dreams of her own.

Or perhaps it was because of the manor I spoke to her in. Her parents always yelled. She had taken to locking herself in her room every waking moment when she wasn't at school. Well, either that or visiting me. I can't even begin to count the many Mario Kart races we played in silence. She had two brothers that were treated like kings...maybe her parents wanted a third son instead of a daughter. But I don't know. I wouldn't ever ask her either.

"D'you ever dream of...uh...the end of the world?" Holly asked suddenly.

"Like how it's going to end? Sometimes. I've always pictured water and earthquakes demolishing the place." I said.

"That's not how it's gunna happen." Holly said. "It'll be burned. Fires sweeping across the continents and wiping out everything. There will be no more water. No more anything."

The way she spoke of this was almost as if she knew what was coming. "How do you know?"

"I just know." she said, stopping in the middle of the street and pulling her coat around her. She shivered violently from the cold. "The same way I knew about my church too."

With that, she turned and headed towards her dreary, two story house; leaving me to head to mine. I always suspected that Holly was some sort of a psychic. When she was five, she dreamed her church had caught fire. Five years later, her dream came true although some things had changed. In the dream it had burned to the ground and started in the electrical wiring. In reality it was saved and started by some still-burning incense. There were other bizarre dreams she had...

She once saw a bird as blue as the clear sky. Three days later it showed up, dead, on her front doorstep. She dreamed of horrors like car accidents and avoided the roads as much as she could. I remember her telling me about one that left six people killed. Not three hours later did it come true. Six dead...one wounded. But what really worried me was the possible fact she was seeing the end of the world. Would it come soon? And was she right about the fires?

I shook these thoughts from my head and walked around my house back to my stump. It was covered in snow, but I brushed it off and sat, opening my backpack and grabbing my history book. But my thoughts weren't exactly on the Roman and Ottoman empires at the moment. In fact, I suspected I was being watched.

"Holly?" I turned, expecting to find her there. Instead, just a lone tree stood. I turned back to my book, feigning interest. But the feeling wouldn't shake. I eventually stood and walked in the general direction of where I thought my follower was. No footprints were visible until I rounded a tree. It hadn't snowed for days, so these tracks could be who knows how old. They were small too, like a child's. With a very odd sole pattern to them, I observed. They were smeared, like whoever it was had been in a rush.

And that...was that berry juice of some kind...?

I followed the tracks a bit more, coming to a part of the forest I rarely visited. Rocks lined the outer clearing, but one in particular caught my attention.

The memory of my dream came back full force. The blood on the rock...it looked almost as it had in my head. The only exception was that it spread to some of the neighboring rocks slightly. The footprints were still continuing on. They were even more smeared and uncoordinated, and in one place it looked as though a small person put their hand out in front of them to stop their fall into the cold snow. I quickened my pace. Even though I didn't know what lay ahead, I kept going.

The tracks finally stopped at the base of an old, dead oak tree. It was one of the largest I have seen; one of the broadest. In the base of its trunk was a large hole, probably enough to shelter a large cat or dog. It was occupied by something completely not of this Earth.

Patches of the white fur that fluffed up against the cold were matted down with dried blood. The white spines that trailed from the creature's back and head were lying flat as its ears, a look of fear in its golden eyes. Its legs and arms were drawn up to its chest to try to conserve heat, but that didn't stop it from shivering violently. A torn cloth was wrapped around its arm; the source of the blood flow. I knew who this creature was. And yet I couldn't believe it.

Holly had recently told me about another dream, this one involving the last person I would have expected. She had been addicted to the Sonic the Hedgehog games for a good four years, and only just had a clear, frightening dream. She had dreamed that Silver was ripped from his homeworld and flung across the galaxy. He had landed in a restricted research lab's property, and they wasted no time in capturing him and beginning experimentation. She had come to me in tears the next morning, describing what she had seen.

Well, at least I could tell her that Silver somehow escaped. If Holly could somehow control the future by dreaming, then I was going to make her an insomniac. But until I actually get a chance to show her all the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, she had better not have a dream about me.

Silver and I had a mini staredown. He eventually shied away from my look of astonishment and curled tighter into a ball, shaking so hard the dead tree branches were trembling.

"Silver...? I'm not going to hurt you..." I started a bit awkwardly. Silver's head snapped up from where he was curled, a look of astonishment on his face.

"H...how do you know my name? Who are you?"

"I'm Jack. And it's a long story. But there's someone I want you to meet." I said. "Can you walk?"

Silver shook his head, not taking his eyes off of me. I noticed the blue markings on the backs and fronts of his hands were dulled.

"I was lucky to make it this far." he admitted, still shaking violently.

"Here..." I unzipped my rather loose fitting coat and took a couple of steps towards him, taking it off as I went. The cold air stung, but I ignored it.

"No! Don't come near me!" Silver shouted. "I have power you can't imagine!"

"But you can't use it, can you?" I asked, still making my way towards him, my coat held out to the shivering form. "You're too weak. Please, you've got to trust me."

Once again, Silver fixed me with a shocked look. "Wha...you're one of them, aren't you?!"

"I'm with no one." I held the coat out to him, but he knocked it away and tried to run.

His leg gave out three steps from the tree and he landed in a patch of iced over snow, trying to bite back his shout. I only sat and watched his futile efforts, pity coursing through me. If I could just get him inside somewhere, I could try to address the damage the scientists had done to him...

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Whoo, another story!

This is actually a really lame prologue to what I hope to be a really great story. It starts off slow, but believe me, it's going to get better as I go along. Reviews help too, though. Jack and Holly are my two new OCs, and if their story works out well I might do something else with them. Don't worry, I'll keep writing my other two stories too!

Seriously, though, epic story on the way.

Hasta la Vista, Readers!

Lordoftheghostking28