Whispering winds through paper sheets and dreams of forgotten memories

It was now late and the night was dark as the moon and stars were covered by clouds. The streets of London kept their chilling emptiness. A wind swept through the parks and gardens, brushing against the branches of the trees, letting them whisper a name to the night, and the Londoners moved restlessly in their sleep.

Ned Warren had arrived at his home, a house in a small village a few miles outside of town, where his bed was cold and the sheets rustled as dry paper as he tossed and turned in the bed, staring up at a spot of light in the white ceiling, cast by a street lamp outside of the window, listening to the silence of an empty street.

Charlotte was falling down her rabbit hole, deep down into the world of her dreams, inhabited this night by demons, offering her parchments where the ink ran down the surface, making them impossible to read, and quills, which crumbled into dust by her touch. She was running through the park again, the branches reaching out for her, turning into long fingered hands, green cloths covering her face, fastening themselves to her mouth, making it difficult to breathe. She was suddenly on the tube, sitting next to a man in a dark suit, who leaned towards her and whispered:

"Sleep, Charlotte."

As she slept, her head leaning against his shoulder, she saw a man in leather cloathing, looking at her with grey eyes, surrounded by black hair, turning and walking away from her, towards the doors of the train, which opened as the train reached a station, and the man left the train, the doors closing behind him, and the seat next to her was suddenly empty.

She was standing at a book shelf at the library, picking up books from a small book wagon and putting them in their right places on the shelves. She was at the Mythology section, which was one of her favourites. She grabbed a book on Greek mythology and placed it in that section. The second one was about Norse mythology. The cover featured several of the gods and goddesses, including Thor, with his hammer raised to the sky, and the god of mischief, the giant, what was his name... She started looking through the index, searching for the name... But the pages faded and just as sudden, the dream changed again.

She was standing in her apartment and Molly, her roommate, was there and her ex was there, but he was still her boyfriend. She was crouching down, taking her sneakers off since they were covered in mud from a bike ride through the woods. When she stood up again, she saw that her knees were wrapped in bandages with some blood on them. She tried to remember what has happened, but it was just dark. Molly was talking on the phone and passed her in the hallway, smiling at her as a greeting. She walked into the living room, where her boyfriend was sitting in the sofa, and she started explaining that she must have fallen off her bike in the woods, but that she had no idea who had found her and put the bandages on her wounded knees, only to leave her again. She followed her boyfriend into the bathroom, where he helped her to change the bandages on her bloody knees. The feeling of unease wouldn't let her go.

Charlotte woke up from the dream, suddenly and swiftly, and was immediately wide awake. All she could remember from the night's dreams was the last one and, before she left her bed, she wrote it down in the dream journal she kept in a drawer next to the bed. When she was finished, she put the journal back in the drawer and went up from her bed and into the livingroom. A glass of wine from the day before was still standing on the coffee table, next to the shattered pieces of her mobile phone. She sighed and crouched down next to the table to inspect the damages again to determine if it could be fixed or not. It didn't look hopefull. At least, the SIM card and the memory card looked pretty okay. She went to the kitchen and grabbed a plastic bag which she put the pieces in. There was an empty wine bottle on the bench. She must have drunken more then she though she did. Or did she pour it out? She couldn't remember. Did she drink more after she came home from her walk? She tried to mentally retrace her steps. She took the tube and walked from Warren's Street to Regent's Park, beside the lake. She pictured it in her mind; the blank water, occasionally disturbed by a light, chilly breeze, distraughting the images reflected in the water. There was something, or someone there, reflected in the water, but it was difficult to focus. It was as if her mind was trying to push her attention away in another direction and she was starting to get a headache. Or maybe it was just the wine. That could explain why the rest of the evening was a bit blurry in her memory as well. She remembered sitting on the tube, going home. Had she fallen asleep? She also remembered lying down on the sofa, a pillow under her head, a blanket covering her body, and again her head started to hurt. She didn't usually drink so much. This wasn't good. Not at all.

Charlotte opened the fridge and took out the bottle of white wine from yesterday. She unscrewed the cork and poured the remaining wine out in the sink. She put the empty bottle in the recycling bin under the sink and opened the door to the cabinet where she kept her small storage of wine and took out the only remaining bottle. She opened the third drawer to pick up the corkscrew, but didn't find it in its usual place. 'That's odd', she thought to herself, but decided that she probably could refer this incident as well to her state of mind the previous night. She opened the second drawer, where she found the corkscrew, neatly placed next to the ladles and spatulas. She took it out, opened the bottle of red wine and poured out the contents of that one as well, placing it in the recycling bin next to the other one.

'There. No more wine for at least a month', she decided. Her head felt lighter now and she decided to walk of the disturbing thought of the empty wine bottle on the bench by going downtown after breakfast to look at getting a new mobile phone. Her old one was getting outdated, anyway, so it was about time, and it seemed like quite a good way to start of her Saturday off work. She prepared the coffeemaker and turned it on, watching the dark beverage dropping down into the can, making quite loud noises and puffing out hot steam. While she waited for the coffee to get ready, she walked into the living room, sorting out the blanket, which had been left in the middle of the sofa, and putting back the pillow so that it rested against the back of the sofa. On her way back to the kitchen, she picked up the chair which still stood there after she had used it to change a lightbulp a couple of days ago. When she lifted the chair, she saw something soar down onto the ground, which had probably been lying on the chair. She stopped, put the chair down again and bent down to pick up the item. It turned out to be a white business card, made from a thick, white paper. It had landed upside down, so she turned it around to read the writing on it. The card read, in dark red italics:

Crowley

King of Hell

666

Charlotte sank to the floor, her sight dizzy and out of focus, her legs not carrying her, and she dropped the card on the floor next to her, the red letters staring back at her, and now, suddenly, she remembered the dreams, with the parchments with the running letters, and the man on the tube, and running through Regent's Park, the green cloth over her mouth, and she clasped her hand over her mouth, keeping in a silent scream, and then the world went black again, as Charlotte fainted on the floor.