CHAPTER 5 – IT’S HIM!

"How am I supposed to find you when I can't even see the tip of my nose?" I muttered to myself. I was supposed to have a knife or a stick in one hand, but as if by some cruel twist of fate, my ghost-hunting weapons had been taken away from me. Was I stupid enough to venture into the pitch black?

"Am I stupid? Let someone else find you!"

"Find me urgently! Find me!"

Well well, look at him! He was even insisting. And I was just standing there, tripping over a non-existent entity. I thought.

"Time is running out! You must find me!"

As whole ghost exorcist, a ghost hunter, he was asking for my help for free.

"I'll find you, but we need to talk about the price!"

The voice fell silent. So, it seemed this guy had no sense of generosity. Ah, and I was the epitome of conscientiousness...

In the cold embrace of darkness, I advanced towards the source of the voice. With each step, the hardness of the ground echoed beneath my feet. The path was frustratingly flat, and the darkness seemed endless.

"Find me!" the voice whispered, each time more impatient, more furious. Time seemed to have stopped, each second feeling like an eternity. Finally, a hand clamped tightly around my wrist and began to pull me towards the heart of the darkness.

A faint light illuminated a barely discernible face. A mix of exhaustion, anger, despair, and hopelessness was etched on this face. He grabbed my other hand and began to shake me.

"Find me urgently! You must find me! Time is running out, FIND ME!" the voice roared.

It was exactly like a scene from a movie with a cheap scenario: I jolted awake from bed, drenched in sweat and screaming. As I came to my senses, I realized that the hazy face I saw in my dream was the brunette man.

I was furious. With one hand, I was gripping my hair at the roots, and with the other, I was trying to control my trembling limbs. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it was four in the morning. My anger turned into tears, my tears into sobs, and my teeth clenched together. Was there no way to calm down?

Who was this man? I felt like I was going crazy if I couldn't figure out this nonsense. I was scratching the deepest corners of my memory with my nails, hoping to find a tiny fragment of a memory. But no, I had never seen him - and not to brag, but I have a photographic memory. I never forget a face, a place, or a text I've seen. But I didn't have the slightest idea about this man.

I waved my stick back and forth to calm down a bit. But this time, I couldn't sleep. I took the pack and took refuge in the coolness of the balcony and smoked three cigarettes in a row. With the alertness of having woken up from a shocking dream at four in the morning, my senses were on high alert. I was ready to flinch if even a speck of dust flew in the air.

I carefully extinguished the cigarettes and went back to my bed and closed my eyes. I tried to fall asleep, but to no avail. I turn right, I turn left; sleep just won't come! It's like I'm fighting with the blanket and pillow. Okay, I admit, I'm going through more than the average person. Strange things keep finding me. But this is too much! I wondered what someone else would do if they had been dreaming of their own death for a week and being called by strangers. Could they endure as much as I did, or would they go crazy? I don't know.

"It's impossible they could have endured."

As I grappled with thoughts, questions, and a hint of pride, a faint ray of sunlight crept through the gap in the curtain, caressing my eyes. As if to say, "Hey, look, it's morning, get up!" I reluctantly sat up. My muscles were all stiff, probably from tensing up. An annoying pain like needle pricks was spreading through my body.

"I've aged a decade in a week."

I got up and went to the mirror. As usual, exhaustion had left dark circles under my eyes. In the dim light, they looked like two bottomless pits. As I was staring into this abyss, a voice with an unknown origin reached my ears.

"Find me!"

The pleas did not cease, on the contrary, they intensified. I wondered if I had sleepwalked and pinched my arm. It hurt, and I had my stick in my hand. So, I was awake.

The ice inside me began to crystallize, and a cold drop of sweat ran down my back from my neck. "Okay, calm down. I should ignore this. I need to go to work, I need to get ready," I told myself.

Exhausted, I took clothes out of the closet and started putting them on carelessly. There was only one unanswered question in my mind: "Who is this man, WHO?"

This question, like a mosquito buzzing, took over my brain throughout the day, making me forget how time passed. After work, I called Cemre.

"Cemre, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, please stop and come to me! This is getting worse. I can't see ahead," I said.

"Where do we meet?" Cemre asked without asking what was happening.

After deciding on a meeting place, I hung up the phone. I normally took a vehicle from work to where I was going, but for some reason this time I started walking towards the meeting place at a brisk pace. I was walking almost at a run, like a dervish1. I continued on my way, accompanied by that damn question scratching at my brain. I reached the meeting place in a time I would never have thought possible. Shortly after, Cemre arrived and we started walking, our destination uncertain, like mad bulls.

As I recounted my dream to Cemre in every detail, we kept walking as if there was not an inch of land in the city we hadn't set foot on. We were scrutinizing the incident, but we couldn't come to a conclusion.

Suddenly, I collided with a large, burly man. As if I had hit a giant pillow, I stumbled back a few steps. Just as I was about to blurt out, "Watch where you're going!" I locked eyes with the man. In that instant, the ice crystallizing inside me began to crackle even more, and with a loud bang it exploded, triggering a fierce snowstorm.

There he was! That big, brunette man... He looked quite different from how he appeared in my dreams. If it weren't for the dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn't slept in centuries, and the glimmer in his gaze, I wouldn't have recognized him.

Cemre, unaware of my collision with the giant man, had walked on. A moment later, I saw her faintly looking around, "Asya?" she called out. She had noticed that I was locked in a stare with a man of unknown identity. With cautious steps, she approached us and stood by our side. She looked at the man, then at me.

The man, still staring intently at me, remained silent. Cemre quickly looked at our faces again and again, as if to ask, "What's going on?"

With great difficulty, the words "Cemre, this is him!" tumbled out of my mouth. I had spoken so faintly that I could barely hear my own voice.

At that moment, in a voice deep enough to jolt both Cemre and me from our places, the man said,

"Yes, it's me..."