The Forest of Adventures (#1 of The Knight Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

good times and made him still feel young at heart
if not in body so in a way the clown secret hadn’t been a lie.
    It wasn’t our family style to
show great physical affection but as I walked by, he grabbed my
hand and held it for just a moment, giving it a gentle squeeze. It
was all he needed to do to show me how much he loved me and how he
truly expected things to turn out. He poured us both a glass of
wine and topped up his own. We sat down without talking. The
television was on in the corner and it gave us an excuse to pretend
we were watching it. In truth we were all lost in our own thoughts.
When the credits came up, I made my excuse and left for bed. I
could hear Mum and Josef’s muted conversation through the
floorboards of my room. It was clear that Mum, like the doctor,
didn’t expect Sam to make it through the night.
    Impossibly, the smell of
hyacinths still lingered in my room and I shuddered as I recalled
how hyacinths were the symbol of a youthful death. It’s wasn’t the
sort of thing that Sam would’ve known when he brought them.
    Gagging, I dashed to the
bathroom making it just in time to throw up into the toilet. Ever
since being a small child, being sick had caused me to go into a
full panic-attack so with the feeling of being drowned in boiling
waters, I threw my head under the shower, the setting on cold,
hoping to bring myself back into my own body. It worked, the
sickness faded.
    I slipped my naked, shivering
body between the cold white sheets of my bed. The thought of Sam
seeing me leave the school with Blake refused to stop worming its
way through my head and I knew that somehow it was all connected;
as if his broken body was perverse reflection of the damage I’d
done to our relationship. I’d stood by Sam’s bed at the hospital
willing him to wake up so that I could explain myself, so that I
could tell him that Blake was no threat to us. And as much as I
wanted him to believe it, I wanted to believe it myself. But Sam
was unlikely to wake up soon, if at all and I knew that I’d have to
carry a level of responsibility for whatever the outcome was.
    No matter how many times I
tried to reason that the accident was a fluke result of the
weather, I knew there was something more to it. Sam was always such
a careful driver and although it had been snowing, the road was
gritted and clear. Something must have caused him to spin out of
control and all I could hope for was that it wasn’t me.
    In the end, exhaustion dragged
me under but it wasn’t the sleep of the peaceful, it was the sleep
of the fevered, the sleep of the diseased; image after image
speeding through the mind like a film reel out of control.
    *
    From under the water, Sunlight
dances on the surface of the lake throwing out handfuls of
diamonds. She’s mesmerising, hypnotic, but the light flares in a
blinding flash, as if it’s hit polished metal and the whiteness
hurts my eyes. It hurts so much that I have to look away into the
direction of the Other Place.
    The Other Place is a barren
land, an unending landscape in which the only things that move are
the strings of wind-ravaged black flags and a huddled figure,
squatted low, dressed in a ragged cloak which he pulls to him in a
desperate search for warmth. The Other Place is a dead place, a
place of utter despair. It is a wasteland in which the devil of
treachery stalks the betrayed amongst the monumental tombs of all
those who’ve had their hearts torn out by the ones they loved the
most.
    The sorrow that comes out from
the wretched figure is too much to bear. I wake up choking on the
knowledge that the figure trapped in the wasteland is Sam.

7. DAMAGE
     
    Sam survived the first night
and he continued to fight his internal battle with Death night
after night. I spent the next several days sitting by his bedside
watching and waiting, willing him back. In the hospital, time took
on an eerie almost supernatural quality and I found the only way to
measure the passing of it was by