The Truth

Aurora lay nestled on the left side of her neatly dressed bed. She breathed so gently as if not to disturb a single soul around her. Her chest barely rising and barely falling in slumber-some succession. It was almost as if her own soul had left her body altogether, leaving but an empty shell behind. 

In the near distance, an old-fashioned brass alarm clock ticked on faster than Aurora’s measured heartbeat. Its soft creamy face displaying that it was three minutes past midnight. It was when this clock turned to 12:04 when the dream began to materialize inside the depths of her mind and it was then that her breathing picked up, if not doubled, in pace.

“Where am I?” Aurora contemplated as she found her red converse-clad feet planted on the dark grey stone steps of a very old-looking church. She spun on her heel slowly and whilst doing so gradually drank in the vast abandoned building, which exerted a looming sort of presence that made her head spin. The building grumbled and Aurora’s heart thudded faster, it was almost as if it was speaking to her. 

Aurora spun on her heel again, this time peering into the view which faced the church steps. Two rows of trees, fir, she identified, ran parallel to each other for what looked like at least three miles. Aurora noticed that all this spinning was making her queasy, almost as if it was harder to move in this place. “Like walking through jelly”, she considered, “Or more logically water”, she corrected. Feeling the acid in her stomach gargle, as a result, she decided it was a good idea to sit down and so leaned back to take a seat on the steps. Moss stuck to her palm as she gripped the edge of the stone slab for balance. 

“I’m obviously dreaming but I know I’m dreaming?” she pondered. “Is this normal?” she thought, for she had never been conscious of dreaming in her dreams before, not that she remembered anyway. 

“Whatever this is..” she spoke aloud to herself now, half-muttering, “it sure is some weird meta wacky shit, like what am I supposed to do?”

Aurora turned to look over her shoulder at the church entrance. “If I was in a movie, I’d totally be walking through there.” she almost confessed to herself having watched a surprising number of horror movies in her sixteen or so years of being alive. However, just as she was beginning to come to a decision about whether or not to venture in, Aurora’s attention was sharply snapped up by a high-pitched sizzling sound rising from what seemed to be above her.

Aurora’s grey eyes fluttered to the sky, which she noticed now was slowly but quickly turning a deep cherry and alarming shade of red. By the time Aurora scrambled to her feet, the sky had turned as red as her long wavy hair. Aurora felt her heart stop as she saw it. “It’s just a dream” she started chanting as her throat began to dry and her lungs began protesting. “It’s just a dream” she repeated now slowly backing up the stairs towards the church, inches away from tripping and falling…

And that is when she saw him. A boy of about her age, maybe one or two years older, with dark messy looking hair and a tall, thin but lean frame. 

He had materialized just a step behind her and now grasped her hand to brace her from fall. Aurora looked up at him as he gently held her wrist whilst feeling all but too familiar even though Aurora was sure she’d never met this man in her life. 

“Come with me,” he spoke softly and Aurora felt she didn’t need another look towards the sky in order to go along with his instruction. 

Again, there was something about this boy's watercolour green eyes that told her she could trust him and since this was all a dream Aurora thought, “Why not?”

So the pair of them found themselves running into the sanctuary of the old church and Aurora tried to ignore her logical mind telling her that it was probably a bad idea to enter a building during a mass flaming meteor shower. “It’s just a dream,” she told herself for yet a third time. 

The boy's hand had naturally slid down her wrist and cradled her hand now and it perturbed Aurora a great deal how comfortable and nostalgic the gesture felt. She was not a touchy person. She couldn’t remember the last time she had let anyone hold her hand and here she was finding herself not wanting to let go. 

“Yuck.” she thought but the low and growing rumble beneath their feet forced her disgust out of her mind. 

As they reached the center of the church which lay beneath a misplaced-looking, large, aqua-blue translucent roof, Aurora and her new, or as she thought “god-knows-what”, acquaintance found themselves standing on either side of a tall ornate baptismal font. As both parties looked in, each peered at the reflection of each other in the still clear water within. 

“How is it so still?” questioned Aurora but was interrupted by the soothing voice of her companion. 

“Drink,” he spoke gently. “You must remember to drink,” he stressed each word whilst looking piercingly into her eyes.

“But why..?” Aurora began but it was too late and everything went to black. 

And then there was light. 

“Aurora!” a voice called loudly from downstairs subsequently waking Aurora who jolted up startled in her bed. 

“Up!” She recognised her mother's voice immediately, its shrill and rising pitch traveling from the kitchen and sparking her memory of the shrilling sizzling rocks hurling down from a red sky from her dream. 

“Now that was one weird-ass dream” Aurora grumbled into her pillow, mentally arguing with the time displayed on her alarm clock before stumbling out of her bed. 08:04 am. 

“The coach will be here any minute!” her mother's voice echoed again and Aurora groaned more irritatedly. 

She opened her pastel green bedroom door and called out from the landing. 

“I know MOTHER!” and was soon gifted with a cheery reply about pancakes. 

“Tame the beast, check” Aurora muttered jokingly gesturing a tick in mid-air as she wandered back to her room. 

In truth, Aurora had completely forgotten about this school excursion given she had only just started at this school about a week ago and was still struggling to catch onto the basics. She knew it was for some sort of local history project but hadn’t bothered to research or look into the itinerary list. 

“I guess I’ll find out,” she thought to herself nonchalantly and proceeded to use what little motivation she had in the mornings to get herself ready. Once she had pulled on her red converse shoes and double-laced them tight she finally made her way down to the breakfast table. 

At the table, or barely, Aurora scoffed down as many pancakes as she could before the school coach beeped from the other side of the road. 

On cue, her mother planted a kiss on the cheek like she did every morning and then Aurora set forth outside. 

The coach was chaotic as expected, filled with some chatty, some angsty, and nearly all smelly teenagers, luckily to Aurora, all of whom ignored her almost entirely. 

Aurora finally found an empty seat and slid in before leaning her head against the window with her earphones in to drown out the sound. She closed her eyes and succumbed to the slow rumble of the coach wheels on tarmac mixed in with her current favourite song -‘Apocalypse’ by Cigarettes After Sex. 

The singer’s soft crooning voice chimed on a loop until about half an hour before Aurora naturally felt the vehicle come to a jolty stand-still and was returned to the present. She tugged out her earphones and blinked repeatedly. Her eyes felt tired from being persistently being shut for that long and it didn’t help that she was wearing contacts. Little did Aurora know, however, that the next three seconds would do more than just make her feel more awake.

As Aurora turned to look out of her coach window she felt her gut plummet and her memories synchronize. It felt as if someone had smacked her in the face. Except it wasn't someone who was smacking her at this moment, it was a building. And not just any old building but the very one from her dream. 

The church in front of her was identical to that which she had visited in her dream, other than it looked slightly less old, worn, and creepy looking. In fact, every inch it looked more homely and inviting now bathed in an orange juice shade of sunlight. “At least the sky isn’t fucking red.” Aurora thought to herself but that brand of cynicism wasn’t doing much to help her make sense of this situation. 

She was certain she had never seen this building before other than in her dream. 

Certain. 

Aurora only then realised that amidst her harrowing thought process she was the only one left on the bus, and she could see from the reflection in a central mirror that the driver was half-glaring at her for taking so long to alight. 

She scuttled out of her seat and down the steps and the bus doors swung shut behind her. 

Their teacher had already begun voicing what sounded like a pre-downloaded tour guide for the place and while Aurora felt it logically would be a good idea to learn about this building, which all so eerily had seemed to have been magically plucked from her mind and placed into the middle of reality, she was finding it very difficult to listen. 

Specifically, because a ringing had begun in her ears. 

Aurora tapped the side of her head and winced but the sound only grew louder forcing her to try and locate the source of the sound and switch it off but as far as Aurora got was the sky. Aurora craned her neck to look straight above her and noticed with horror that the sky was no longer a friendly shade of blue. 

It was red. 

And getting redder. 

“It’s just a dream,” Aurora told herself as panic mixed in with the nauseous deja vu that had arrived not long before. Dred added itself to the pile-on and began to swell in the cavern of her slowly tightening chest. 

“It’s just a dream,” she told herself again but the alarmed face of her teacher shepherding screaming, hysterical, teenagers surrounding her from all angles forced her to acknowledge that what she was so desperately telling herself was a lie.  

Aurora’s heart found itself hanging in the lurch like a ripe tomato on a barely-there vine. 

And that is when she remembered. 

“I need to go inside the church,” she thought more decidedly than she had ever thought about anything in her life and made for the stone steps. For a second she found her teacher's hand grasping the collar of her dark leather jacket but she had begun running with such a force that his fingers soon tore away and grew occupied by another distressed member of the party. 

Aurora ran straight up the steps upon which she had sat in her dream and into the church, almost crashing into the baptismal font she had seen in her dream. She found it both ridiculous and remarkable that it was even there, be it that her conscious mind had never laid eyes on it before. 

It wasn’t until Aurora stilled herself that she realised she was not alone. 

A dark-haired green-eyed teenager met her gaze with the exact same expression as her. 

“It’s you.” they both said in unison. 

“You told me to drink..” They both continued this unintentional mimicry. 

The boy's lips pursed stoically and he swallowed as if to hide his nerves…

“On three” he proposed assertively with the cock of his head and Aurora nodded pushing aside all that was telling her that this was crazy. 

The pair began counting together.

“One…”

“Two..”

“Three”

Then both plunged their palms into the water and drank deeply.

The ringing stopped.

They both looked above themselves through the translucent glass roof and saw that the sky was gradually returning to their preferred shade of friendly blue. 

They looked at each other once again. 

“What just happened?” Aurora asked her accomplice and grew startled when it was not he who answered. 

A woman dressed in a long white cloak was floating towards them surrounded by a cloud-like soothing presence. 

To Aurora, she smelled of strawberries, apples, and cinnamon.

To the boy, she smelled of freshly mown grass, mint ice cream, and christmas trees.

“Now now children…” she spoke tenderly. 

“It’s time someone told you the truth.”