CHAPTER FOUR: CONTACT
I have read a very many tales of the supernatural throughout the course of my life. I scoffed at all of them – until I had a paranormal encounter of my own. This experience, which occurred on the eve of Elsa's first death anniversary, made an instant believer of me. It also got me thinking twice about how Elsa met her end, and kick-started my journey down a hitherto well-concealed path fraught with horrific surprises and deadly danger.
The night I mention saw me tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep. I left my quarters for a stroll, endeavoring to find a place where I could properly view the moon in all its radiance. A short walk led me to the room that had the best view of all the rooms in the Agency – Elsa's.
Moonbeams shining through the windows and reflecting off the floor, walls and white-draped furniture of Elsa's room lent it a ghostly beauty. There was an aura of sad serenity about the place, which eventually got to me as I stood observing the heavens. I found myself thinking about Elsa, and whispered to the stars that I hoped she had found peace, wherever she might be now.
It was at this point that I realized I was not alone. The sound of somebody else's labored breathing reached my ears. The noise was coming from the tarpaulin-covered bed.
In little more than a second, I had drawn my Sig Sauer P230 SL and assumed a 'combat crouch' stance, taking a solid aim at the bed. "Come out of that, whoever you are," I ordered, my voice sounding like a thunderclap in the silence of the room.
"Get cracking before I color that wall behind you in a nice shade called 'hint of brain'," I snarled. But there was no answer save the breathing, which went on at an erratic pace.
I cautiously approached the bed and flung the cover off. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight that met my eyes – the sight of Elsa's haggard and drawn shade lying supine before me, nothing but a gore-stained hospital sheet offering her unclothed body any decency. She weakly turned to look at me, her face deathly pale and fixed in an expression of great anguish. All that remained of her right eye and much of the area around its socket was a frightful mess of blood and bone, and her left eye, which brimmed with tears, regarded me with a kind of pleading.
For the first time in my life I felt like shrieking my lungs out, but no cry exited my mouth and I hyperventilated instead. I stood rooted to the spot in stark terror as Elsa pointed slowly and painfully to one of the windows. I glanced out this portal to see that it overlooked Liesel's apartment. When I turned to look at the bed once more, it was empty. Elsa's whispered voice echoed around the room: the single word 'murder'. Then my nerve broke, and I did not stop running until I was back in my quarters.
Needless to say, seeing a ghost did nothing to help my insomnia, and I remained wide-awake until dawn. After a time, however, the intense fear permeating my mind faded away to be replaced by utter befuddlement. It was understandable that Elsa would choose to make an appearance close to her death anniversary, and equally comprehensible that she would choose to appear to me – the only person who ever looked out for her. But what did she mean by the word 'murder'? And how did Liesel, whose room Elsa had indicated, fit into the picture?
Somehow, I felt that the answers to my questions lay with Liesel. My hunch grew stronger upon recalling something that I had scarcely paid any attention to previously – ever since Elsa's death, a change had come over Liesel. She had always been a pensive little dreamer, but she acted more detached than ever of late, and her face, ghostly as it normally was, now seemed a whiter shade of pale, often wearing a haunted look – the infamous 'bulkhead stare' that betrayed great emotional stress.
There was one thing that I absolutely had to do – question my friend as to what she knew about this matter. However, I had utterly no idea what to say to Liesel, and I must admit that I probably would have bungled everything had I initiated the conversation. It was, indeed, immensely fortunate that she ended up being the one who got the ball rolling.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR
