A Short Trip

   The night when Charlotte was going to come back home from her business trip eventually came. In this area, late autumn saw extremely frequent rain and wind that made it even colder than other parts of the country. That’s why she had no desire to delay. She was already two hours on her way, sitting in a car in the middle of the road, when a GPS locator showed how congested one of those roads that she had decided to choose, was. So she was compelled to turn off the road on to another one and continued her way. Scattered woodlands and dry grass residues were seen near the lakeside along which the road went.   

   Unexpectedly, the car hit a water-filled pothole and the tyre pressure slowly went down. Charlotte was completely sure this time she didn’t have a spare tyre with her. This tyre damage seemed a complete disaster, considering that the city was still far away.
When she went out of the car, frosty wind met her outside. Stepping into a clearing not far from the place where she left the car, she saw a tiny path, at the far end of that, was a small dim light clearly seen through the trees. Her tired, foggy brain was so exhausted from the long car trip, that she wanted to find help as fast as possible. In this way, she happened upon the house that was oddly detached from the main road. “At least I knew where to go,” Charlotte reminded herself hesitantly. Stepping closer she saw that it was built in a interesting Victorian style. She was looking at her dusty reflection in the windowpanes, when a woman in a long grey dress was walking to the same house from the other side. “Oh, excuse me,” Charlotte started excusing and explaining her situation, raising her hand as if in a weak attempt to attract more attention to her presence. At that time, the woman reached the house on the side where the wall was woven by ivy and hid in it without letting out a single word. Charlotte at a loss followed her, but when she came closer, she realized that she couldn’t see where the entrance was. Ivy wove on the wall of the house in a such dense way that at first the entrance couldn’t be seen. In the darkness, Charlotte started to move her hand along the ivy wall trying to detect the entrance. Fear slowly fettered her body when she understood that this was the whole wall. Only wall. No doors. Nothing else. One big wall. She went along this wall and peeking through the old window inside the house. Furniture in dustsheets, a floor covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt showed that this house had been unlived-in for a long time. The woman in a long grey dress, whom Charlotte saw outside the house, moved to the wall, where the fireplace was situated, and losing her concrete form, she slowly dissolved into the wall. Charlotte froze for just a moment then turned around hastening to run, stumbled and fell and everything went blank.

   The first thing that she noticed, when she little by little started to regain consciousness was that her entire body was shivering all over with cold. Something hard was under her body… She forced herself to open her eyes, but she felt so tired and sleepy, that she didn’t want to spoil this tiny moment of rest. It seemed that she was lying like this for a long time, because when she tried to move her hand, it was like a long stony piece of something uncontrollable. A strange tingling was in her fingers and in the whole extremity, probably because the whole it was numb. A nasty headache that she had, didn’t give her any peace, so after all, she finally decided to open her eyes. She was lying and looking up at the white fleecy clouds that were moving slowly across the morning endless sky. Suddenly she remembered what had happened at night. She sat up and glanced around her. Charlotte was sitting on the grass alone not far from the house. No one was around her, when her phone rang in her pocket, so she pulled it out.


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