I approached ‘Blink,’ the beating heart of tension. The streets, once familiar and safe, now seemed terribly alien under the cloak of a twilight that seemed to have no end. As I entered the traffic circle leading to the main road, a van suddenly emerged from the shadows, like a monster born of the night. It hit my car on the side with a metallic smash and the car whirled around. My head buzzed; I felt dizzy, almost disconnected from reality, as if floating in a dark, slimy dream.

In the confusion of those moments, through my blurred vision, I could make out a figure wrapped in a diving suit. It looked like a ghost, an apparition moving with determination and urgency. He vigorously opened the car door and dragged me out. His hands were firm but gentle, as if he knew the delicate balance between saving a life and not causing further harm. He gently laid me down on a dolly, and then everything went dark, deep and total darkness.

I awoke lying on a bed, my head bandaged and a slight throbbing pain running through my skull like a continuous moan. The figure in the diving suit stood there, motionless and attentive, and addressed me, the tone was concerned but familiar: “How are you doing? How are you alive?”

I recognized that voice immediately, despite the distortion caused by the diving suit. “‘Clare! It’s you! You don’t know how much I wished you were here…,” I confided to her, feeling a knot in my throat and having the feeling that she already knew every detail of my adventure. But as the words came out of my mouth, a thin layer of disquiet crept into my mind. Something was off, like a misplaced detail in an otherwise perfect painting.

Clare slipped off her diving suit, her eyes fixed and intensely interested in my awakening. “Yes, but how did you wake up? No one ever has, not alive, at least. How are you alive?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “maybe it was my epilepsy. By the way, how did you survive it?”

In that moment, despite the chaos around us, there was an undeniable comfort in his presence, a bubble of normalcy in a world gone mad. But that very normality, in such an aberrant context, made me falter. It was as if I were living in two realities simultaneously, one familiar and the other completely foreign.

I looked at Clare, searching her eyes for confirmation of the reality I was experiencing. Her words were exact, her voice was the right one, but the energy she exuded was subtly different, almost like a dystonic melody.

Clare stared at the floor for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “I was working just inside this white room when, through the glass window, I saw the people outside collapsing one by one, as if they had been swept away by an invisible force. Still balancing on those same legs that many had lost, I sensed that the air outside had been contaminated. Without hesitation, I picked up and put on this suit, designed for emergencies with gas leaks. The fact that you are here suggests that you had a similar intuition about the situation. I saw and chased all those people in a trance and then … the rest I think you figured out.”

As he spoke, a thin veil of unreality seemed to envelop everything. The atmosphere in the room became heavier, as if gravity had suddenly increased its grip. The familiarity of his presence contrasted with the alienation of the outside world, creating a vortex of mixed feelings.

“Yes, I think I understand,” I said, casting a fleeting glance at the watch on my wrist, and then a second, more attentive one.

“Why are you looking at your watch so intently, Valter?”

I sat down and, looking at my hands, a sense of wonderful awareness enveloped me, “Unbelievable…,” I murmured. Then I looked up at Clare. “When you check the time twice at successive times, and the time does not match, you are in a dream. This is not real.”

Clare tilted her head and a brief twinkle of her eyes announced a slight tension that rippled across her face. She approached with a firm step. “Yes it is, the experience in dreams is no different from the real one, you know that. ” Her lips began to tremble.
“Now it’s important for you to concentrate because you’re about to have a epileptic seizure, but you can stop it. I…” he hesitated for a moment, closed his eyes searching for words, “I can offer you something. We can live in a right balance. You can have the Clare you’ve always wanted. Your dreams, your aspirations, everything you want. The rush of electricity you will have is incompatible with my existence. You can stop it. Don’t burn me, and I will make you live your dreams. I can give you everything, tastes, smells, experiences that no man will ever make, I will not die, You will not die. You just need to concentrate.”

His gaze was pleading, and for a moment, doubt crossed my mind. Was a balance between us possible? A symbiosis where we would both have what we desired?

The temptation to accept the offer, to have what I wanted most in the world, was powerful. But the memory of those people, of the souls consumed above and below the trees, resonated in my mind. I had witnessed the horror, the annihilation of whole lives under the silent rule of the parasite. How could I justify compromising with such evil?

The image of Clare in front of me was real, but behind those eyes I felt a foreign presence. Her hands sought mine, her gaze was pleading, but even though every fiber of my being longed to surrender, a part of me knew it was a sheer illusion.

She looked at me and understood, and I saw Clare’s figure contort and transform. Her once familiar eyes became black and empty, and the skin of her face began to crumble, revealing the true monstrous form behind it.

With one last glance at the hideous entity in front of me, I felt the darkness envelop me, sweeping away that distorted reality.

…continued.