Translucent (7 page)

Karena lay awake, as usual. The day had been terrifying, and Shawn would be gone
forever in this life,
and maybe even in her next life,
but she had information about the Sandman. Only the per
son who is a victim can see him, even if another person has seen him in the past.
He cannot interact with objects exc
ept when viewed by the victim.
To a viewer, it is impossible to detect his presence unless you are the victim.

But what did all this mean? Did it even mean anything?
How was she ever supposed to get out of this? She could find out all she could about him, but there was no guarantee that that would get her anywhere. There was no guarantee about anything really. That was why all she could do was do the best she could.

Shawn was gone.
She would have no one to talk to, no one to
confide in
, no one she could really trust. The other people would continue on with their lives normally, but not her. She was destined to see the Sandman. That was her fate, for
as long as he decided it was.

She had
no idea if she would see Shawn in her next life. All she could do was hope.

2 years later…

Karena had an appointment with the Sandman. It had been Shawn’s turn two years before, and now it was her turn.

The last two years s
hould have gone by slowly, after all,
her living at the orphanage and w
ith her desperately wanting out
should have made it seem longer, especially with her anxiety building up the whole time.
But the years went by as if they were in the snap of a finger, and now the day had arrived.

She was with her friends, like last time. She didn’t know why she was with them. She hardly knew them. She was an outsider, and they probably found her a nuisance, tagging along. But they were friendly
, though oftentimes annoyingly friendly,
and let her come along. They even asked her where she wanted to go for lunch. She said anywhere but Quencher’s. They had wanted to go there, though they didn’t say that. Karena could tell, but they hid their annoyance. She wasn’t going back to that place. The deja-vu would be too strong. She would feel an even greater dread then she already was feeling if they walked through the front door of Quencher’s. So they went elsewhere, and sat down at a table, and ordered food.

Karena didn’t want to look at her watch, but it was involuntary. She had to look at it. She looked at it. They were earlier than last time. The Sandman wasn’t com
ing for 15 more minutes. She
broke into a
cold
sweat.

Her friends asked her if she was okay. She said yes. They ordered their food. The thought of eating made Karena want to throw up, but she ordered a piece of pizza anyway. The food came. Everyone ate, except for Karena. There was hardly any time left until he arrived.
Every few seconds she looked back at her watch, and every time it was a little sooner until he came.
Her friends were probably asking her something, but Karena was cut off from them, like
she was in a parallel universe, an alternate reality.
She completely ignored them.
Nothing that was around her actually existed, it was merely a fragment of her imagination. Nothing was real except for the Sandman, who was sitting at the table in front of her.

Karena stared. There he was, after all this time, sitting there just like he’d been at Quencher’s over 14 years ago. Exactly like he’d been last time. His hat was pulled far over his face so that she couldn’t see it. But she didn’t need to. The face haunted her nightmares all the time, and she knew it well.

Suddenly, Karena freaked out. Frantically, she stood up and threw her plate at him, but she missed and the plate crashed against the wall and splintered into pieces. Karena picked up a knife, hardly even aware of what she was doing, and charged at him,
raising the knife in the air, but a force held her back. She realized her friends had grabbed her, were trying to calm her down. She trashed wildly in their arms. She had to kill him. She had to kill the Sandman before he could start her torment all over again. She raised the knife and threatened to stab her friends, and they backed away. She charged at the Sandman, who continued to sit calmly
in the same exact positon
,
as if nothing was happening at all
. People were staring at her, terrified, but she paid them no
heed
. She only could see the man sitting in front of her.

And then he disappeared. He’
d been there a moment ago, and then he was gone. Karena whirled around, looking for him. There he was, standing outside the window on the opposite wall, with his hat still pulled over his face as if
he’d been there all along
. Breathless, heart beating furiously,
Karena charged once again, picking up a chair along the way.
She hurled it in front of her with as much force as she could muster, and t
he window smashed into millions of tiny pieces as the chair collided with it, causing he
r friends to back away. She must’ve seemed like
a madman, but she didn’t care. She had to kill him.

She leaped through the broken window, getting her legs scratched as they scraped against jagged shards of glass still stuck in the frame. She landed with a crunch on more glass, and
, without slowing down,
sprinted towards the Sandman, brandishing the knife all this time. She hurled herself at him, knife extended in front of her in a position where she could stab him.

But once again, he was gone. It was like he’d never been there, and Karena found herself careening towards the ground, caught terribly off balance from having expecting hersel
f to be crashing into someone. He
r arm got cut with
the knife
when she landed
, and it began to bleed tremendously. Not caring, Karena got up again and spun around, looking for him.

He was s
tanding not thirty
meters away, in the exact same position as the previous two times. Unmoving. Karena began to feel hopeless. It was impossible to catch him. There was no way he would just let her catch him and slay him. He was invincible
.

Nonetheless, she pushed on, with a vigor she hadn’t anticipated.
She suddenly found herself sprinting even faster than she had before, an aggressive look in her eyes, but also a determined one. It would end now. She wouldn’t let this continue the way he intended it to. She had to kill him.

He
was standing in the middle of an intersection
; there were no cars. Karena went off the sidewalk and sprinted towards him. She knew it was foolish, this whole pursuit, but she wouldn’t give up. She ran in
the middle of the street, focused on him and him alone. In seconds she was running out into the intersection, and would be at him in just another second. She knew he would disappear, but she had to…

A car flew out of nowhere, brakes squ
ealing, and it careened
into her body, throwing her to the side and
causing her to go sailing through the air. She slammed into the pavement, and immediately felt a physical pain like nothing she’d ever experienced before. It was impossible for her to describe it. Her vision was red, and she
could
vaguely see bl
ood dripping onto the street
around her. She could vaguely see the Sandman standing there, in the same position in the middle of the street.

People came out of the car to tend to her, but she ignored them. They didn’t matter. They would be gone in moments, anyway. It didn’t matter what happened to her now, if she was taken to a hospital or if she just died. She was going to start over again no matter what happened.

And then, the Sandman reached into his pocket and pulled out the hourglass. Karena could scarcely see him, but she could see his face. It was the same face as before, but it was older now, maybe 20 years older than the last real time she’d seen him
when she’d first woken up as a baby.
But nonetheless it was easy to tell that it was the same man, the same expression, the same everything.

The sand was at the bottom of the hourglass. Karena saw the Sandman raise his finger through her blood-stained eyes. And then, all sound disappeared except for one noise.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

“You win,” she muttered through her swollen mouth. “This time, you win.
But not next time.
”

And everything disappeared.

The pain left Karena’s body, or at least the physi
cal pain, not the
other pain
.
And the other pain was much stronger.
She knew what was going to happen now. Everything was black, and she felt the bedding form under her body as the world came into existence. Her new body was unblemished, free of all bruises and cuts, but she did not want it. She wanted her old body, the one that was 15 years old. Not the one she’d just been in, but the one before that. The original one, where she hadn’t had any worries, or at least any real worries. The body where
she could freely live without the surveillance of the Sandman, where she could grow up properly like an ordinary
human being. The body where there was no Sandman, where she had actual friends, where there wasn’t a care in the world. That was what she wanted.

But it was useless to wish for such things, and she knew it.
She was here, lying in her crib, as
baby, and there was nothing she could do about it.

The light turned on, which was strange, because she hadn’t been crying and so her parents wouldn’t have known to come in to check on her. And then she looked up and saw who’d turned on the light.

It was the Sandman.

She’d forgotten that he’d be here too. He looked like he was
at least
80 years old now, but in every other way he looked exactly the same as before.
Karena stared, wide-eyed, helpless, as he lifted the hourglass out of his pocket. The sand was all at the top now, just starting to fall down. Karena knew exactly
what sound she be hearing next
, and she closed her eyes.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

When she opened then he was gone
and the light was off, as it had really been the whole time
, but she still felt like
his presence was still around her, watching everything she did.
She would feel that way for a very long time.

She didn’t cry out. Her parents would find out
that their 11-month year old daughter could speak
in the morning. She decided that she’d at least take advantage of her new, sleepy body and get some rest for the
very
first time in a very long time.

When Karena woke up in the morning, Harold and
Christi still had no idea what had happened to
her. To them she was still merely a normal baby, and they acted like she was when they came in to greet her late in the morning, when the sun was already high in the sky.
They came in quietly, so as not
to wake her if she were still to
be sleeping, when in fact she’d been awake for quite some time now.

Before her parents could start talking to her and treating her like a baby, Karena spoke. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

As she’d expec
ted them to, her parents gasped and reeled back as if struck.

“And I just did,” Karena said. “Since I’m sure y
ou find it strange that your 11—
month old daughter is talking to you like an adult, and believe me I would too.
As a matter of fact, I am an adult, of 30 years of age, and this is the third time I’ve been in this body, and the second time it’s happened with me having been a grown-up. Please don’t freak out right now, even though you probably will, but I can explain everything, even though you probably won’t believe me. Then again, I am a baby who couldn’t speak English just a few hours before, at least in your world, and now I can, so what could possibly be more outrageous than that? Perhaps you’d believe any story I told you, though I won’t test it out. I’ll only tell you the true story, and hopefully you’ll believe that. If you don’t then please don’t send me to a mental hospital, because
that would be
awful and…”

Karena was practically out of breath from all this rambling. She hardly even knew what she was talking about, and was mainly talking simply for the sake of proving that she could talk, even though her speech was impeded upon b
y a thick layer of baby slobber and a high-pitched voice.

Harold a
nd Christi merely stared at her, jaws hanging open. I’m not sure anyone would know how to react in a situation such as this
, or at least any normal human being who’d never been through anything like this before.

Karena knew that by speaking she was going to freak her parents out even more, but she did it anyway. “Please don’t just stand there staring at me,” she said.
“It’s freaking me out just as much as I’m freaking you out, well, maybe not quite as much but I’m sure you understand what I mean.
The point is, you’ll get used to this eventually, so why be surprised now? Ok, that doesn’t make any sense. Look, just please, please don’t send me to a mental hospital, or any kind of hospital for that matter, because I assure you I’m perfectly okay and don’t need any sort of medical treatment.”

Karena’s parents were stunned. Finally, Christi was abl
e to gain enough control of her flabbergasted
jaw to utter the phrase: “What?”

Karena sighed. “Look, I can explain everything,” she said. “I just need you not to freak out and not to panic or anything like that.”

Harold’s eyes grew wide. “Okay, then,” he said
in a trembling voice
, sitting down. Karena didn’t know if he thought he was in a dream or what, but he would soon snap out of his trance; both of them would.

And so Karena, not quite sure if her parents were really listening to the words she was saying or if they were
still
merely mesmerized by the fact that she could talk, explained the whole situation to them, only leaving out, like last time, t
he aspect of the Sandman, which now actually seemed like a pretty major part of the story.
There
was no need to tell them about that. Then they
would think that she really was
crazy. Besides, talking about him now wouldn’t be good for her. For the past few minutes she’d forgotten about him when she’d been rambling on to her parents, and she wanted to continue having forgotten about him.
S
he wanted to keep it that
way for as long as she was able, which she knew wouldn’t be very long.

After she was done explaining the situation to her parents, they were still stunned. “How,” Christi gasped, seemingly out of breath. “How is this even possible?”

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Karena said.

“I don’t understand,” Harold whispered.

“Neither do I,” Karena replied. “But I accepted it a long time ago, and that’
s what you should do now too, like you did eventually in my past life.”

“We were there in your past life?” Harold asked.

Karena hesitated. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “My past life was identical to this one. This all happened to me before.”

“Were we there when you disappeared?” Christi asked.

Again, Karena hesitated. Then, making a decision in that moment, she said: “No, but this time you will be.”