by Reginald
Jarrold looked around himself. He was stunned. Then he saw her face, the fear of a passerby who, just as she approached the spot where he had been sitting at the park, saw the world around her plunge into darkness. From the shadows, trees had sprouted, grass took root and was overgrown in an instant. The ground beneath her feet, the entire world around her had morphed. Only Jarrold and his bench were unchanged, until a man, his dog, and voices emerged. The female passerby was stricken with fear and frozen by shock. As the sun returned to the sky, the bizarre vision was proven real. She watched as Jarrold seemed to reanimate as the fox-like figure licked his face. Jarrold mirrored the woman’s shock, but swiftly got to his feet. He fled to his car and the dog sat panting on the beach in the place he had been.
He drove the two miles to his home at a high speed that would have meant arrest and license revocation had he been spotted by law enforcement. He pulled into his driveway and a cloud of dust plumed as he threw the car into park. He moved swiftly from his car and it seemed that the car door slammed as he swung open the screen door to the house. Inside, he sealed himself in his room. Jarrold paced the floor as if he was testing the number of footsteps the freshly lain vinyl could withstand.
Jarrold had a limited number of ways of coping with his stress, all of which are methods that a trained psychologist wouldn’t approve of, but Jarrold could only do what he knew. After pacing and replaying the scene’s events, he sat at his laptop to search for answers to the questions in his head. He looked around for credible sources of information in the search results, but all he could find related to the strange phenomenon he had experienced at the park was comic books about superheroes who could manipulate matter. But he was in the real world, not the Marvel universe. How was it possible that the craziness at the park had been real?
Jarrold noticed that advertisements and references to a book by a man named Mike Murphy began to dominate his search results. He ignored the ad disclosure that was visible in the corner of one of the results, and clicked on the link.
“The Creation Frequency: Tune into the universe to manifest the life of your dreams…” Jarrold read on the site. Just as his mouse hovered over the ‘buy now’ button, his attention was abruptly interrupted by a knock at the door.
The knocking filled him with a sense of dread. He had no way of knowing who was there, but he wanted only to barricade his room and hide. The knocking triggered his feet and he found himself slow walking towards the sound. The hinges of the old door wailed against the intense knocking, but Jarrold’s body moved closer. Soon the door was open.
He saw her crouched by the tree in his front yard but there was no one at the door. He knew he had heard the knocking, but Sarabi was not close enough to have made the noise herself.
Jarrold forced himself to project an image of boldness. The dog was no longer an image of his imagination. She was definitely there. She truly existed.
Jarrold slowly approached her. She sat calmly as a sheet of paper flapped in the wind beneath her paw. Jarrold was uneasy. He couldn’t make out a message on the paper, but it’s placement was no accident. It seemed that Sarabi guarded the paper with a serene expression as Jarrold walked closer. When he was close enough to smell her fur, she lifted her paw. She exposed one word on the paper. The word was scrawled in a deep, crimson hue. ‘Why’ was written in a scraggly handwriting and sent chills through him.
PRL Serials 