The Fool - Part II

A shadow passed over me. A very distant and dim light twinkled once before it vanished. The darkness squeezed around me and then released the grip. A pain seared and a few glowing holes appeared in the dark canvas overhead. They slowly widened to let some more light while the pain throbbed in the back. A question lurks in the backwater. Where am I?

Through a narrow slit of my own eyelids, world crept in like a wounded animal. Smell of corpses swept past like a morbid wind. Pain on the back of my head is by no means gone. This place stinks of death - most of them untimely and swift. My ribs are etching like hell and a dead hand is brushing my cuff. Whatever this place is, I need to get up and get out quick.

It's still the dead of the night. Memory flies back to me. That accursed shadow and that silhouette. Then a sudden drop of darkness. How far is this place from the town? Who was the creeping beast?

I see ahead a filthy river flowing through a filthy suburb of sparse tainted lights. The horizon lies far shrouded in a dampness worthy of myths. I don't know why but something tells me that I need to get to that side before it's too late. I see a bridge upstream with its dark structure melting in the overhauling gray. It was my only way back. I ran for it.

Some more memory comes back. I remember the face of Jennifer. The task she has entrusted me. Have I already put my hand in the burner too deep and too long? Does that mean, like a complete fool, I have unwittingly stepped on something big? The questions kept haunting me as I panted once I crossed the bridge. I was wrong about this side of the river. It was not my town at all.

Someone's played a big joke on me.