Souls of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

careful look around at the other students there. Nobody was looking straight at me, and none of the students appeared to have looked away hastily, embarrassed that they had been caught staring. Therefore, it seemed, nobody had noticed my ‘insanity’.
    Though very shocked by this unexpected occurrence, I calmed down again after a couple of minutes. I was sadly already getting used to the strange reactions my body threw at me of late, and was more and more determined to get to the bottom of them.
    I was beginning to see a pattern. Whatever any of it meant, it had something to do with that name. I definitely reacted every time I laid eyes on it. Maybe I was destined to go to the professor’s class. Perhaps he could explain what was happening to me!
    Taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the ‘Paranormal Phenomena in Today’s Society’-class an hour later, entered, and quietly took a seat near the entrance in the row farthest back from the professor’s desk that was situated in the middle of the fairly small auditorium.
    Due, no doubt, to the rather unusual nature of its content, the class had apparently been surmised to be of little importance to the bulk of the student body, so that a small auditorium had been deemed sufficient. One to two hundred seats sloped downward, divided by stairs, which ran down the middle toward the professor’s desk at the bottom of the room.
    The professor wasn’t there yet as it wasn’t quite time for the lesson to start. In groups of twos or threes, with the occasional loner in between, students began filing into the room, taking seats and talking to each other in excited voices that carried through the room.
    I busied myself with taking my paper pad and pencil case out of my bag and placing them on the small table in front of me, getting ready to jot down any information that could bring light into my increasingly dark world. I glanced at the watch on my wrist. I was way too early.
    Fifteen minutes, I groaned inwardly, feeling stupider by the minute, sitting there waiting, with nothing to do but stare holes in the walls while nearly everybody else was immersed in conversation. Bored in the extreme, the minutes going by like hours, I took a pen out of my pencil case and started doodling on my pad.
    Footsteps echoed off the walls in the hallway outside the open door of the auditorium, their sound a rhythmic “thump”, “thump”, “thump”. The doodle on my page began to blur around the edges as my eyes lost their focus. A ringing sound filled my ears, and everything around me slowed down as if being viewed in slow motion.
    I could hear my heart beat slower and slower, until … it stopped.
    Suddenly, as everything rushed back to normal, my heart started up a frantic beat, my pulse racing desperately through my body. Fire consumed me, slowly and agonizingly eating away at my flesh.
    For the second time in two days, I was in the grip of something so violent, that all I could do was dig my fingers into the seat in front of me, refusing to give in to this sudden urging sensation, my knuckles white with the strain of holding on. The footsteps continued to echo across the hall, “thump”, “thump”, “thump”, in time with my heartbeat. They came closer every second, at length reaching the door.
     
    Darkness took me.
     
    Slowly I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings. I felt drained, as though I had run a marathon or two. The last couple of days had been so full of terrifying sensations that I was utterly exhausted.
    As my eyesight slowly returned and objects began to come into focus again, I gingerly raised my head off my arms, where it had rested during my spell of unconsciousness, and took in the room.
    I hadn’t been out of it for long. Barely two minutes had passed, it seemed. The other students had all sat down in their seats, and most of them had quieted down. There were, however, still occasional whispers to be heard, indicating that the professor had not yet