Imprint (3 page)

“Well, little brother, we’ve always known you were sick. Why bring it up now?”

Sean had to force back a
fierce glare at the reference
to…
that
, due to more pressing
matters. “I’ve been
having
dreams,” he admitted.

“Like most other human beings, apparently.”

“Just shut up and let me explain
first
, would you?
I’ve been
having the same dream for months now. It’s always about a door, and there’s someone knocking on it. But whenever I m
anage to open it all I see is this
hazy figure before I wake up.”

There was a small frown on Hayden’s
face and his brow was creased with thoughts that Sean would never be able to fathom. They were so
alike and yet so far apart, he
mused
. Their rooms were almost identical
ly messy
.
They were bot
h creative. But
while Sean preferred art, Hayden’s passion was poetry
. And this…this was the perfect gothic setting for a writer.

“It’s probably nothing.” After all of that though
t, Hayden’s dismissive reply
made Sean scowl.

“You think I would have c
ome knocking on your door at four
in the morning if it was ‘just nothing’?” he growled, indignant. “It’s not
‘nothing’
it’s…it’s…” he rubbed at his weary eyes as the fatigue began to wear on his frayed nerves.

“What, then? What is it?”

“It’s scaring me, Hayden.”

It was a long while before the other boy spoke again. There was a more urgent, concerned expression on his face now and Sean was glad that the gravity of the situation had finally gotten through to him. “You say you’ve had the exact same dream, right?” Sean nodded. “And when did they start?”

“A few months ago, but they’ve been getting a lot worse in the past few days.”

“
Maybe they’re trying to tell you something,” he
suggested. “In Victorian times
there was an Austrian psychologist
, Freud,
who studied the interpretation of dreams. He wrote a book all about it. He claimed that our unconscious selves and therefore our dreams are the secret desires and thoughts that we normally suppress due to the influence of society. In other words it’s still our minds, just uncensored.”

“So,” Sean clarified.
“According to you, my ‘unconscious self’ has a burning obsession with doors.”

His brother let out a low
chuckle. “In literature
t
here is not a single door that is opened without a particular meaning behind it.”

“And what does this have to do with me?”

“Doors
can mean lots of things.
Opening doors can mean opening one’s mind to a new way of thinking, or a new lifestyle. Closing one can mean the opposite – shutting oneself away, or the end of a story.”

“So then what about locked doors?”

“They generally symbolise withheld
information.
But in your c
ase, it sounds more like something
trying to open your door, open the door into your mind.
Something, or someone.
”

Sean paused for a moment, letting this new revelation sink in. He had no idea how his brother had come to this conclusion – open the door into his mind? There was no such thing. “That’s rea
lly creepy,” he muttered
.
“What do you mean, ‘open the door into my mind’?”

“Exactly what it sou
nds like.
It could be a memory, some form of your true primitive nature, anything really.”There was
still a deadly serious expression on
his face which Sean
did not like.
In the strange, prancing shadows cast by the flickers of moonlight it looked desolately grim.

“But that’s just assumption,” Sean stated, more to convince himself. “Stop comparing my life to ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ okay? I don’t have a hidden ‘primitive nature’. I’m just
Sean. No evil alter-egos.”

“If you don’t want to believe me, then fine. You never know, it might be your memories coming back.”

“It’s not that,” he
shook his head. “It’s
more than that. In fact, it’s not just the dreams. I keep getting this feeling that someone’s watching me, but there’s never anyone there. And, just now, I think I had a hallucination.”

“Of what?”

“There was something in my room, I know there was. But when I turned around, it was gone
.”

Hayden managed to hide his worry well, but
Sean could still see it.
When it came to the paranormal, ps
ychology and the solar system
his brother
was undoubtedly a walking encyclopaedia. He had w
atched documentaries
, read the accounts, even gone to so
me of the ‘haunted’ sights. He
found
the idea of something beyond the real
m of reality to be fascinating, and had often talked in the past about wanting to one day witness a real haunting. Sean couldn’t help but wonder grimly if his brother would get his wish.

“You don’t believe in t
he paranormal, do you
?” Hayden suddenly
asked
.

“Of course not,”
Sean gave the expected reply, one he’d used many times.
“
Ghosts don’t exist. I’m just delusional, that’s all.”

“You know that may not be true…”

“
I k
now what you want to believe
, b
ut I’m not like you. Ghosts don’t exist. I’m just delusional.”

Hayden let out a frustrated sigh.  “
Fine. Whatever. It’s your life.
Just don’t do a
nything stupid.”

“I won’t.”

Hayden leaned over to a drawer beside his bed and pulled out a piece of blank note paper and a pen. He handed them to Sean. “Here,” he said. “Whether this is real or not, I want you to draw that figure that you see in your dreams. Draw
whatever you think was in your room
. Anything really, just whatever comes to your mind.”

Sean deliberated, before nodding
in defeat and silently obliging. He took the paper and cra
dled the pen for a moment, staring
out of the window into the
night as a thin layer of cloud-like white mist veiled a new moon. And then he started to draw. His mind was blank as the
pen scratched lightly
and scribbled intricate cobwebbed lines across stark white paper.
He could see that figure again, dominating his vision, stamped onto the forefront of his memory.

W
hen he was finished, he looked down to admire his work. The picture was a simple yet clear sketch, each stroke
of the pen
standin
g out clearly.
It was
a boy;
short,
dressed in a long trench coat with large buttons and
a high collar
that hid a lot of his face. Stra
y wisps of hair escaped
to
frame
the c
hin while the rest was hidden
,
except
for
the eyes.
Even
through a simple sketch, the eyes were piercing and intense.

Hayden took one look at the sketch. In that moment, Sean no longer needed the extra emphasis of the silvery
moonlight to see that his
face had gone from sickly pale to stark, deathly white.

People compare life to lots of things. They compare it to blank canvases just waiting to be shaped and made into something beautiful, or merry-go-rounds and full circles. They say life ends exactly where it started. Except, no one knows where that is. So to fill that black, gaping hole they make up theories. ‘Somewhere up there’ they say, ‘that’s where we go when we die
.’ Some p
eople like to believe in heaven and hell because it’s something to
cling onto; they like to believe in another w
orld so much better than this one
above the clouds.
But that’s not reality – that’s myth.

Sean La
ne was not one of these people,
unlike his brother who still had an odd
fascination with stuff like that
. Sean would never understand it, and he would never try. He was logical and down to earth
in every possible way
. He did not
believe in heaven, hell or spirits
. He believed in the evolution
theory
, he believed that the ‘big bang’ was simply a coincidence involving reactive gas and substances meeting and exploding to form the sun.
Maybe he was disillusioned or cynical, or just reliant on facts to give his life some order. He could never remember where his opinions on these issues had formed. However he was quite accepting of other’s beliefs. It was probably years of living with Hayden that had made him
so
accommodating. He did not agree with hi
m
, but he would tolerate him.

However by the next morning Sean
found himself still wide awake
and Hayden’s words refusing to leave him in peace. Did the idiot have to jump to conclusions so quickly? He almost regretted telling him now. He had not gotten any answers after all, just a few vague theories that were nothing more than his brother’s own personal fantasies. Sean knew well what his brother hoped for. He wanted to experience a real ‘haunting’ so that he could ‘study’ it and make some sort of scientific breakthrough and force his silly beliefs on others. Well, it wasn’t going to happen. It would never happen. The dreams, the hallucination
s
, the feeling of being watched – it was all just sleep deprivation induced madness that he was slowly but surely sinking into.

With that troublesome thought, he forced himself out of bed.
It was another half an hour before Sean was decently dressed and the large porcupine-like spike in his hair had been wrestled dow
n by what he hoped was gel
. Usually he would never have bothered, but he knew
Ali
would nag otherwise.
He
made his way into the kitchen and dug around for cereal. Mother was still asleep
and probably would be until
afternoon.
Hayden still refused to leave his room. He had been like that ever since Sean had shown him the picture of the b
oy and had been promptly thrown
out only to have the door slammed in his face.

The bus ride to sch
ool was the epitome of ordinary, but for once he was glad for the normality.
He met Ali
, got on with her and found
a
pair of grubby, chewing-gum smothered seats near the back. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good,” was her first remark as a group of boisterous students clambered onto the bus and took the back row.

“
Just didn’t get much sleep,” he muttered.

“Something bothering you?” She asked, as the bus lurched and began to rumble along the road. “You’ve been acting a bit off lately.”

Sean shrugged. “It’s…it’s nothing. I just had a weird dream last night.”

“What about?”

“I’m not sure. But I know I’ve been having t
hat same dream for a while now. I
-
” he stopped, unsure how to continue.

“What?”

“
I get the feeling that it means
something important,
”
he admitted uneasily.

“Can’t you remember anything from it?
”
s
he questioned, concern clear in her eyes.
“
Maybe if you told me I could help.”

Sean shook his head. “Look, Ali, th
anks for the offer but I don’t think you can
. It would be best if I had a little space for the time being.”

She looked hu
rt, and when she spoke her voice was thick with it. “Are you saying you want me to stay away from you?
Y
ou don’t have to
make up some crazy story to get rid of me. Just say so.
”

“It’s not a story.
I’m being serious.”

She still did no
t look convinced. “Whatever.
I’ll keep away from you, if that’s what you want.”

“Ali,” Sean ran a hand through his
hair, feeling extremely awkward and a little guilty.
“Stop over-reacting, would
you? You’re getting like Hayden, turning this into some huge deal.
I wouldn’t lie to you, not about this.
”
He tried to put as much sincerity in it as he could. She deliberated for a moment with narrowed eyes. Then her expression softened.