Awakening with a frenzied gasp, her eyes snapped open to behold a vast night sky, its darkness indifferent to her immediate panic. Feeling the hard tarmac beneath her head, a faint breeze helped her to discern that she was outside, though her limbs were slow to catch up with the rest of her senses, still being numb with shock. Scanning the twilight, she found the moon first, a distant but calming sensory lock that she used to regulate her breathing. Eventually, the craters on its surface came into view, her vision thereafter drifting towards the stars, each one appearing to discordantly dance around the larger celestial body. Once she was able to collect her thoughts enough to recognise some of the constellations sewn into this cosmos before her, she let out a timidly optimistic sigh, her voice carrying little more register than a whisper:

“At least I’m still on Earth.”

After a few more breaths, she was able to get her hands and feet moving. Her arms and legs soon followed as each intake of air granted her limbs more energy and feeling. Finally, she rolled on to her right side away from what sounded like gently lapping waves, using her hands to steady herself on the ground as she manoeuvred onto her knees. Once upright she surveyed the environment around her; a long stretch of road leading to seemingly nothing in both directions, a wooden fence blocking entry to a flat country field on one side and a sand bank on the other, sat between an endless sea and a steep ridge of long grass that led back up to the road. Other than that, there were no signs of life whatsoever, not even a streetlamp or distance marker to offer some semblance of civilisation or direction, the only brightness offered being that from the moon, its luminescence reflected by the sea and the wet shine on the road.

The air felt light, meaning that the dampness of her clothes was not so much of a problem, even if she could not be sure as to how they had become that way. Dragging herself on to her feet, she checked the pockets of her jeans and her jacket, finding nothing. She took the jacket off and ran her hands down from the top of her head to her ankles, checking for any injuries or tears in her clothes; again, nothing. Closing her eyes tightly as an overwhelming anxiety began to flow through her, she clenched her fists and brought them to her chin, breathing sharply through her nose to try and suppress her increasing nervousness, her head reeling with a vain hope that perhaps through enough sheer will, she could make this horrible scene go away. After a few moments, she held her breath and opened her eyes, only to behold the same desolate stretch of road coldly staring back at her.

“FUCK!”

Her scream rang out over the empty landscape, disturbing nothing before being subsumed by the sound of the tide. She leaned forward and clasped her hands above her knees, listening to the calming wash of the shore, which appeared to help each of her laboured gasps begin to regain some of her composure. After a few minutes, these breaths gradually became longer and fuller, and she was able to lift her head to allow her eyes to meet the long open road once again with a psyche less riven with panic than before. She turned her head towards the sea, a grateful smirk creeping across her face as she surveyed its moonlit waves rising and falling. Combined with the noise of their soft crashes onto the sand and the strong taste of salt in the air, this expanse was the only thing offering a semblance of comfort to her now, for which she almost thanked it out loud.

She walked to the edge of the tarmac, taking in another deep breath. Upon exhaling a nervous laugh escaped her, followed by a single tear that rolled down her face, its bitterness the only acknowledgement she could give to the surreal situation in which she found herself, still unable to recall any means as to how she had arrived at this disturbing scene. Her gaze lowered towards the waves in front of her, the tide low and tranquil as it lightly pawed at the shoreline leaving little disturbance in the sand each time it withdrew itself back into the sea. Prompted by the breeze, her eyes trailed eastwards along the waterline, however all she could see was an untouched beach bereft of any impression of human endeavour. No landmarks, no lighthouses, no pathways leading back up to the road or even footprints that betrayed some semblance of activity; just a stretch of sediment that continued alongside the grass until it disappeared into the horizon parallel to the road she was standing on. With her earlier panic now giving way to impatience and anger, she looked up at the moon again, the largest object within her line of vision upon which she could focus her ire.

“Any chance you can you show me where I am supposed to go, then?” she bitterly scoffed.

She held the satellite in her sights for a few moments more until her mounting resignation eventually wrestled them away and she began to laugh again, the absurdity of it all now making her feel as if she had arrived at the punchline of a cosmic joke made at her expense by powers unknown. After running her hands across her forehead to hold her hair out of her face, she closed her eyes as her laughter was interrupted by a loud grunt of agitation, stewing in the resentment bore from her inability to make sense out of anything that had befallen her. Then, her eyes snapped back open as a single name passed her lips weighted with an eerie resonance:

“…Joan…”

Alert with a new anxiety over this involuntary exclamation, she turned her eyes back on to the road via the same direction as when they had followed the shore. Narrowing them to look further ahead, she could see something that had up until now escaped her gaze, a small object that emitted a blue glow, faint but still discernible enough in this blanket of night to catch her sight. Though mystified as to how she could have missed it when she first awakened, her suspicions as to its sudden appearance quickly dissipated as she briskly advanced to its location.

It was not clear what the artefact was until she was standing right above it; a small ornament in the shape of a blue whale made from what appeared to be hard plastic resin that was coloured with a substance curiously luminous enough to reflect the moonlight, radiating with sweet phosphorescence as she picked it up from the road and held it in her hand. She ran her fingers along the ridges under its belly as she studied it. Nothing more than an admittedly cute little trinket, she thought.

“How did you end up out here then, eh?”

Placing it between her left index finger and thumb, she held it closer to her face to appreciate the finer detailing in the figurine’s eyes, minute but expressive, capturing a beatific serenity that offered a disarming contrast to the abject uncertainty that surrounded her. Between them, the tiny barnacles dotted around its body and the various shades of blue mellifluously flowing into each other like liquid across its surface, it seemed to carry an air of regal preciousness, possessed of too much work and care in its rendering not to have been made by and for someone truly special. She gave the trinket a small smile and slipped it into her left front pocket of her jeans, a new semblance of resolve tentatively beginning to build as she walked back down the road to collect her discarded jacket. After threading her arms through its sleeves, she straightened the collar to stiffen it upright around her neck, one last paltry armament to fortify herself with before turning back towards the spot where she had discovered the charm and advancing further down the dark swathe of tarmac that struck through the landscape ahead. Someone had to have laid what was underneath her feet before she had gotten there, she reasoned, so she marched onwards in earnest, hoping that at the end of this path there would be something that could offer her some solace, a reprieve from the darkness that now threatened to envelope her mind, the continued lack of recollection still ceasing to reveal how as to how she had arrived at this desolate place. Nothing except for one name that hung heavy in her thoughts with an unquantifiable portent.

“…Joan…”

Unsure as to how a mere name could splinter her mood so fractiously, she continued to walk towards her unknown destination, her travel revealing nothing but more featureless landscape. Soon she noticed that a gradual decline in the road was starting to affect her balance, its gradient becoming steeper every few metres as her journey wore on. Thereafter, a deathly chill began to infiltrate the air, followed by a thick fog that threatened to obscure her vision so much that that she could no longer see the path, as if it had removed the ground from beneath her feet. She zipped her coat up to her neck and continued to stalk through the mist as best she could, determined to chart this route to its end. As the road became steeper, she tried to look back to ascertain what progress she had made since her start, but could now only see this infernal mist, clouding the air so voluminously that it was making her dizzy from the lack of spatial awareness as well as the silence that pervaded, even the water that had calmed her previously succumbing to the vacuum. Suddenly, the ground gave way as she misplaced her foot away from the tarmac of the road and fell through the tall grass, rolling onto the sand of the adjacent shore.

Lying face down, she began to cry and pounded the beach with her fists, screaming into it with rage and confusion. She rolled onto her back and continued to weep at the futility of her actions as an acute despair coursed through her body. When she finally opened her eyes though, she could see the night sky above her again, those same stars and moon that had revealed themselves to her earlier returning to saliently shine back down at her. Raising herself back onto her feet, she looked up towards the top of the ridge from where she had fallen and saw that the fog that had surrounded her seemed to be isolating itself along the road, and that the coast appeared to be untouched by its influence. The concentration of mist carried itself further along, leading to something she would not have been able to discover through such deep thickness. From what seemed like a few hundred metres away, a warm yellow light was emanating from inside the fog, its imposing size suggesting some sort of a large structure.

Renewed with enervated relief, she ran towards the source as fast as she could, her mind spinning with the promise of imminent salvation from this torment. Moving closer, she could see that the ridge on which the fog sat was ascending further away from the shoreline, until such a point where the light beckoned from atop a white cliff face high above where she stood on the beach. Upon further inspection she could identify that this structure was much larger than she had first presumed and appeared to be branching out into the sea itself, supported by an intensively regimented framework of tall wooden plinths.

“A pier!”

Arriving underneath the structure, her heart began to race as she marvelled at the long wooden implements that suspended the boardwalk above her. Following the wooden panels back towards the coast, she could see a small stairway that seemed to lead all the way up to the front entrance to the pier. As soon as she noticed this, the waves from the sea began to surge past her feet, and as she looked back out towards the water, she found that the tide had become more violent than it had been earlier and started to attack the shore more viciously. Wading her way through the surf as fast as she could for the staircase, she began her ascent with the waves crashing around her, the first step on the stonework prompting her to slip and hit her knee on the hard rock, nearly falling back into the water as a result. Wincing through the pain, she used her hands to drag herself upwards, the raging sea seeming to give chase and matching her progress with each ascent she made.

Finally, she attained a large stone slab wide enough to flatten the tide’s wild orations near the top of the staircase and dragged herself onto it. She looked back at the sea from which she had escaped, curiously finding that just as quickly as it had seemingly tried to steal her into its depths, it had now reverted to the tranquillity of before with no evidence left of the violent assault it had just exacted upon her.

Not that it mattered now. She brought herself back to her feet and made her way around the winding corner at the very top of the staircase and finally beheld the light that had beckoned her earlier in its full glory. In a grandly resplendent display, hundreds of lightbulbs burned brightly together, spelling out in their blinding virtuosity…

::-W-E-L-C-O-M-E-B-A-C-K-::

…

to be continued

…