post-mentalist

We are Lost. We are supposedly following road signs but they aren’t right. We are driving down a foreign road that leaves the city. There’s no street lights anymore. The road is ominously and dangersouly – warningly – dark.

We’re still climbing the hill. Labouring in third gear automatic. Coming round a corner. I don’t feel good about this. I feel a physical fright in my body. A surge of energy creeping up into the centre of my ribs. It asphixiates my back muscles, they grip my body forward into itself. Shoulders shielding. Lock the doors, lock the doors.

I’m doing a U-turn in the worst place possible. This U-turn is deadly. There’s something sickening in this place. There sharp shards of energy in the air pricking the edges of us. It’s dangerously out of kilter. The unevenness throws me off; I don’t even check I just swing the car around. Catch the gears. Fly blindly forward onto the road. Get out, get out, go. Am I thinking that or is it being told to me? I think it is being commanded of me.

I have been affected. I have been slaughtered by some warped presence that I stumbled into by accident. It found me, like it almost hunted me out. Still the tightness in my sternum.

I think I must be in a horror movie. I shift my eyes franticly over the rear view mirror, searching out a large engraved sign. It reads: Ashburton Clinic. We are all over the place.