The Locket

Spring has finally come to my small town and is already starting to wash away the hardships of the past season. The snow that has covered the town for the past 4 months is already starting to melt away. This has inspired many people to start going back to their regular secludes including me. The first step back to normal I take is going on my morning jogs in the park. While jogging I see that many people have already started taking their dogs back to the dog park and also doing their daily runs. The warm breeze going through the park gets me excited for the new season coming. On my final lap around the park I noticed something shining out of a melting snowbank. I take a closer look and see that it is a locket. I put it in my pocket and decide to take a closer look when I get home. When I arrive at my apartment I start getting a shower ready and toss my jacket onto my kitchen chair. The clink of metal hitting metal reminds me of the locket in my jacket. I put off looking at the piece of jewelry once again and head to my shower. After I finish with the shower I put on my favorite olive green turtleneck sweater and a pair of legging. I then gather my things together to start working and head to the living room when I see my jacket hanging off of the chair. I reach for the jacket and my fingers burn once they make contact with it. I get my pair of running gloves and slip them on. I once again reach for the jacket and start looking for the locket, by the time I find it my fingers are numb with cold. I get my winter gloves and continue to inspect the locket. It is on an old silver chain, the locket itself is also silver and oval shaped. There are circles chained together spiraling towards the center. In the center there are five gemstones, four are a pale blue and the other is white. Interested by the cover I am very eager to see what is inside so I try and open the locket but find I'm unable to open it myself. I then grab a knife and try to pry it open, after around ten minutes it finally pops open. Inside is a photo of a couple, both wearing old timey cloths. The women has her blonde hair pulled straight back into a bun with a small hat that is decorated with many fancy feathers and flowers. She also is wearing a brown jacket and a plain black dress. In her hands is a bouquet of black roses and her hands are covered with pure white gloves that almost match her pale complexion. Her face is in an interesting expression, it is hard to read and makes her look in pain. The man next to her looks like her complete opposite. His brown hair is messy and his shirt is untucked. She looked like she was preparing for a winter storm while he was ready for a trip to the beach. He had short sleeves and a ball tucked under his arm. He wore a smile and had his arm playfully draped over the women's shoulders. When looking closer I discovered that the women was wearing the same locket I was holding, the only difference being the gems on her locket were all white. Suddenly there was a shock of cold causing me to drop the locket because of my freezing fingers. It landed upwards with the women staring up at me. Being an adult means I shouldn't be so afraid of an inanimate object, but something about that picture put me on edge. I bent over to get the strange piece of jewelry that I had dropped under my kitchen table when a loud bang erupts from the apartment causing me to jerk my head and knock it on the kitchen table. I remember that my air-conditioning was turning back on today which was the cause of the banging noise. I then snatched up the locket and put it on the kitchen counter. I collect my work things and headed to my room, where I spent the rest of my day and end up falling asleep against my open laptop. I wake up the next morning freezing even though I rapped myself up in 3 blankets. I find the whole apartment is cold, at first I think maybe I had the air-conditioning at a freezing temperature. However when I go to the thermostat I realize the last temperature it was on was 70. Another realization I had was that the closer I got to kitchen, the colder it was. I went back to my room to get one of my winter jackets, zipped it up and pulled the hood over my messy black hair. The jacket barely helped in my frigid kitchen. I felt as if I was battling through a wind storm just to get to my kitchen counter. when I arrived I found the locket closed and that now two of the five center gemstones were white. This obviously caused me to panic, however I had the sudden need to be close to the locket. I don't know why but something about it put me into a trance. I picked up the locket, unclasped the backing and put in on. It made me feel somewhat complete and also very hot. I went the rest of my day wearing the jewelry that I now found so beautiful and also turning down the AC. At first at 70 degrees I felt like I was in a volcano so I turned it down to 60 degrees. Then I at 60 degrees I got the same feeling of unbearable heat and so on and so on until my apartment was a frozen tundra. Once my thermostat wouldn't lower anymore I still got the strange heat strokes, I was forced to remove all of my clothes just to stop the burning and when that didn't work I started an ice both which helped for a while. However my heat free time was short-lived when the burning sensation returned. At this point I didn't know what to do. While leaving the tub I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and instant horror filled my body and seemed to knock me out of my heat hating trance. My skin was pale, looking as if I was deathly sick and my lips and the tips of my fingers are pale blue. My naturally black hair was frozen still and sticking out in many different directions and worst of all in it there were strikes of white sprouting out of my routs. As I started in the mirror I was unable to recognize the person who was starting back at me. It was then that I looked at the locket again, four of the five center stones had turned white with only the last out one still the original pale blue. I didn't understand why this was happening or what was causing it to happen. The only thing I could see at blame was the cold, and the only solution to cold was heat. I started running around my apartment trying to find things to warm my self up, however even the slightest heat made everything hurt. It felt as is my skin was boiling and someone was trying to light my insides on fire. In tears of my last attempt of warmth I fell against my bedroom wall and cried. After what felt like years of crying, which was only around 30 minutes, I got this strange need to leave the apartment. I put on a flowery sundress that I didn't even know that I owned and a pair of black ankle boots, for some reason I felt like I was heading to a special occasion. As I head to my door I hesitate to grab my keys from there place on the wall next to the door, something tells me I won't need them, I do however take my phone. I walked down the stairs and as I walk out of the lobby the air around me feels like a warm summers breeze, out of instinct I check the temperature and find that it is 60 degrees. I only react with a shrug and continue on. At this point I don't have a real idea where I am going, being lead only by instinct. When I get the same snowbank from two day, though it felt like 2 weeks ago. At the snowbank I just stare, I feel like I am waiting for someone. I am hit by the feeling of freezing metal right on my sternum, where the locket is resting. I take it off but the cold is still there. I seem to snap out of the trance that the locker had put me in. I open the unjammed locket and see that the photo of the man and women is not fully locked into the lockets grasps so I take it out. Behind it I find a picture of another women, she looks about my age however not from the same time as me, maybe from the 1850s. This women also is very pale and has white strips in her brown hair. She is wearing a white dress. She has a horrified look on her face as if she wasn't ready for the picture to be taken. This makes me start to panic. She is holding the locket in her right hand. The next picture I pull out is another girl, she looks a little younger then I am maybe around 19 years old. She looks like she could have been a girl I went to college with wearing her blonde hair in pigtails. She once again has extremely pale skin that almost blends in the white crop top. When I look a little closer I can see there is red writing on her shirt that says Spring Break. She also looks as if she wasn't ready for the picture. I chill runs down my spine. I can see she is wearing the locket and its open. I put all the pictures back into the locket and close it. I run my thumb over the cover of the locket and find that the fifth stone on the locket has turned white. I then hear running footsteps in bushes and turn. There is a sudden flash. When my eyes readjust I am face to face with the pale blonde women from the original photograph. She looks me up and down and smiles, I follow her gaze and find that the pale blue from my fingers have spread up my arms and down my legs. I am now hit by the freezing weather and the coldness of my own skin. I try to yell for help but I can't, my vocal codes have been frozen. She put a single finger over her lip in a shushing motion and put her other hand out for me to take. I take a step back and knock into something. I turn to find the brown haired man standing behind me but something is wrong. His once dark brown eyes have turned white and he seems to be stuck in a trance. When I look behind him I see the other two women and they are in the same state as him, white eyes and a trance-like trance. I turn back to the blond haired women and stare at her. After a minute or two for a final time instinct guides me to take her outstretched hand, I wince at how cold her skin is. She pulls me with her but I don't know where we are going, I do know the other three are following. As I feel myself slipping out of consciousness I whisper "Why?". She gives me a sly smile and says "I have never been very fond of spring"