"BORROWED TIME". (1.1)

BY: MAURICIO ESCOBAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.1

 

He looked down terrified. An instantaneous shot of adrenalin made his consciousness return momentarily and then he saw it. The flickering bursts of light made it hard to distinguish, but there was a man dressed in what he couldn’t recognize but a dark diver suit with some sort of helmet on his head, almost like an astronaut, right in front of him. Martin opened his eyes as plates and swallowed. The figure was just not standing there... It seemed to be floating! Was it real or a figment of his delusions? Martin rubbed his eyes.

The astronaut didn’t move and remained still for an instant, suspended in the air; but then the ghost seemed to revolve, almost as if the air was water, and grabbed Martin’s wrist. He shook and screamed. Initially, Martin thought the man was trying to hold onto something to avoid falling, but then he confirmed that the stranger’s feet weren’t either touching the floor neither was he supporting his own weight from falling. He was just floating, inexplicably levitating in front of
Martin’s eyes. The phantasmagoric vision became more vivid as the lightning reflected on his dark, brilliant suit. Then Martin could corroborate, barely giving credit to his eyes, that flying objects went through him as if the astronaut was ethereal and immaterial, not just ghostly but actually ghost-like.

The apparition then extended its black hand and grabbed Martin by the hand. Right before collapsing, Martin saw one thing: that the man in the spacesuit had put a shiny bracelet on Martin’s wrist; the bracelet had a red light that flickered and the stranger had an identical bracelet on his own wrist, with a tiny red bulb that started flickering in the same way…

And then, it all went quiet. The world around Martin McGregor had simply stopped to exist.

TO BE CONTINUED...