Welcome to Gaia! ::

Clari walked absentmindedly towards the door. The class had left only moments ago, but already the room looked as if it had been empty all summer.

They had each helped to stack the desks against the wall yesterday. Gum of all colors decorated all of the undersides, and Clari had to look away before the sight made her vomit. She sighed and walked into the hallway, flicking off the lights like the teacher had asked.

The hall was virtually empty; accept for a few of the senior students who were saying good-bye to their favorite teachers, it was a ghost town. A fire alarm droned on annoyingly in her ears, some sad attempt at a last minute senior prank. The noise waned and waxed, depending on if she was near the alarms or not.

She headed into one of the hallways where the teachers had already left and the lights had been turned off. The only light source was the windows, and as the girl looked out she saw it was the perfect sort of day. The sun was bright and boisterous, the only clouds in the seeming distance. Yet, in that impossible way it had, the rain was falling in light sheets. She smiled, a thing against her quiet nature.

The room she was heading for was past this hallway and down another one on her right. This one was well lit, and by this time, the fire alarm had ceased its droning sound. She headed to the third class on the left. This was her Aunt Sarah’s room, where Clari had come to help teach the mentally handicapped students for OJT during first period.

She smiled as she looked at the classroom. She had spent the summer after her tenth grade year studying to take the test that would register her as a Certified Teaching Assistant. After passing, her Aunt had arranged the job with the High school. All of the kids she had spent her year with were now gone, and she smiled as she remember baking cookies with them on Friday mornings. This had been her one if her favorite things to do, third only to Lacrosse and Model UN.

Her aunt, a tall thin brunette woman in her late thirties, came out from the teacher’s office attached to the classroom and smiled at the sight of her niece. In her hand was a Styrofoam coffee cup, steaming and letting off an enticing smell. She nodded to the smaller room. “There’s more in there if you want some.” She said, in that loud but calm voice she had. It in no way matched her personality, which was very loud, but in no way calm. After all, a single woman stuck raising her niece after both of said niece’s parents had died in a plane accident two years ago had to be unpredictable to survive.

Clari smiled, keeping to her silent streak, and headed into the teachers office. She stuck her foot in the closing door, and opened it back up by pushing at it with her ankle.

The room was rather neatly ordered. There were 10 groups of six baskets, all of them in alphabetical order. There was one for each of her aunt’s students. She had six classes with mentally challenged students, one planning period, and a 45-minute lunch period.
The baskets were now devoid of paper, but yesterday, they had each been stuffed to potential. Clari sighed and went over to the coffee maker and poured a 1/2 cup of the steaming java. The other half was vanilla creamer, which she stirred in slowly.

Her mind was working at a million miles an hour, going over the last year, causing the pain of spring break to rise up as if it were yesterday.

He had disappeared on her. Gone forever, never to be found. One step into the dark of the German hotel room, and when she had flipped on the lights, he had simply been gone. There were the footprints, four large indentations in the plush carpet, the last print only half formed. There had been no scream, and the window had been closed. It was a mystery that had left the world baffled, and her heart broken.

Clari sighed, shaking her head and grabbing her lacrosse stick in her free hand. She took a sip of her coffee, and turned to leave. She looked in the mirror like surface of the door.

Her hair, so long before the incident, had been chopped off. It was now a short flare of a haircut. He had always loved it long, and it always reminded her of him, so she simply had gotten rid of. She had also taken to dying it as the whim fit. Her aunt had objected at first, but soon realized Clari would only get rid of her sorrow by doing things her way. Right now it was shocking violet that offset her yellow dress and headband, but perfectly matched her eyes and the vest she was wearing.

She closed those same eyes, taking a moment to see her originally long copper hair in her minds eye, so beautifully paired with the white turtleneck she had worn that day. Next to her was him. Greek god handsome, she had loved him from the start, and she liked to believe he had, too. That short brunette hair, the cute dimpled smile… basically the guy that had never been her type until he had saved her life those two years ago. It had gone from there; it was the friendship that some not so great romantic would have compared with wine. The longer it lasted, the better it got.

A single tear fell down her cheek and she wiped it off with the back of her hand before forcing the door open. She held up her lacrosse stick with her left hand, to signify that she was going to practice, and left the classroom.

The dark hallway she had passed through earlier was all the darker now that the window blinds had been closed. The light was gray and musty, and Clari turned to open one of the blinds so she could make her way down the hall with out falling. She saw something in the reflection before she was able to turn the blinds, and turned back around to see if she had missed someone else in the hallway.

There was no one, so she turned back to her previous mission. She started to turn them again when she saw the movement once more in the surface of the window. Figuring it was the light playing behind the blinds, she continued to turn the little knob. As they opened she saw the sky had become quickly overcast, so there was no way it had been light on the blinds.

Slowly she turned around, and saw the misty shape rising from the denser shadow. She was hypnotized, unable to make a noise, but full of fear and anger. The bright red eyes, the pale stone like skin. Behind her the shapes of more, ready to converge if this monster should fail.

Snakes for hair…. And another with no head for hair to rest on. A pointy hat, a grinning wolf. The world of nightmares seemed to converge on this spot.

On May 13th, 2020, Clari had one last conscious thought.

‘Is there really any thing to fear in the Dark?’