Unexpected encounter

~Chapter 4~

The night was still dark and gloomy. No trace of the moonlight, which was blocked by the thick clouds covering the sky. Naito had stopped moving and was trying to make sure if his eyes were seeing correctly. Between a bench and the park fence, in the middle of the well-trimmed bushes, a girl was trying to get away like a scared rabbit fighting back when caught by a fox. A man was on top of her, with his legs between hers, pushing her arms to the ground with one of his hands, while keeping her mouth shut with the other.

Naito stayed in his position for some seconds, thinking if it was worth it to even get involved in this situation. He could simply leave and keep running - it wasn’t his own problem after all, and he never owed anything to a useless girl like her. What if that perverted guy was dangerous? Why should he, of all people, put himself in danger for the sake of an ungrateful person who never cleans after leaving work and doesn’t have the dignity to finish some simple chores?

She was squealing like a scared kitten, putting all her might to push the man away, but there was no possibility she could ever find the strength to do something like that.

Damn.

His mind wasn’t working properly - somehow similar to when he was dreaming… He was feeling an adrenaline rush because of running; Naito was in a high-power mode. He started walking towards the bench. After two steps, he stops. He looks at his hands. 5 fingers, normal hands. He checks his smartphone. 21.32.

It’s not a dream.

He curses inside his head and starts moving fast towards the man, who hasn’t even noticed him in his disgusting lustful state. Naito creaks his teeth, tightens his grips, puts all his strength to his right leg and kicks the man’s sides as hard as he can. The man falls onto the ground with his breath cut violently off, being the one who’s squealing like a pig this time.

Airi looks at Naito with eyes wide open. No sign of tears or fright. Just… embarrassment.

What’s wrong with this girl?

The man seems like he’s gaining his breath back. Naito turns at him with an emotionless look in his eyes and kicks him again on the stomach. He turns to face Airi.

She’s already up and tries to move silently, until she realises that Naito is looking at her. She starts running.

“Hey!” - Naito shouts at her, but she doesn’t seem to care to answer. She keeps running and turns to a corner, vanishing from his sight.

An ungrateful piece of rubbish even in a situation like this.

He takes one last look at the man on the ground, to be sure that he will not be getting up for some time and continues his run. He just wanted to empty his mind, and he ended up with more troublesome thoughts than in the beginning. What a hustle.

The way back to his house took him less time than expected. He ran as fast as he could to remove these unnecessary thoughts from his head.

~

Five days have passed, and he still hasn’t seen her at work. Although she was usually doing afternoons before him, their shifts seemed to not be successive to one another lately. The manager had made changes to the timetable, and it seemed like everything was set, so that two specific shifts could never collide. It’s been quite some time since he even had to do morning and afternoon shifts.

Is this happening on purpose?

She definitely has something to do with it. But oh well. Works better for me, since the others before me leave everything cleaned and tidy, unlike her.

Naito’s sleep schedule was all over the place because of these unexpected changes, and his dreams were very unstable and illogical.

He started realising patterns in his brain behaviour - his mind would bring specific elements back in his dreams if he repeatedly read the description he keeps in his dream journal and then think of them before sleeping. For some reason, there seemed to be a very weird river in almost every dream he had lately. A long, narrow river filled with thick, yellowish water of low depth. He wasn’t exactly sure that this was water, but he could somehow feel it by seeing its motion and interaction with the rocks and dirt inside the river.

In one of these dreams where the river had a very intense presence, he could even feel the temperature from the water: a cold and refreshing breeze was coming from the direction of the river, following its flow. He was on top of a bridge which was connecting a maple tree and a very tall bookshelf, and underneath him there was a field full of poppies. And while he felt very calm and relaxed, with this relieving breeze embracing his neck gently, he noticed that inside the serene water, there was something that created a very uneasy emotion, interrupting the flow and producing a very disturbing sound, like a very deep and hellish voice from the underworld. When he managed to control his subconscious to look at its direction to observe it better, he came to realise that what was creating the turbulence was…

A bucket.

A bucket full of .. cut human parts.

Human arms that looked like broken toys, and legs hanging outside of the bucket like flowers inside a vase. He didn’t want to see more of this horrific scenery, but he had reached a state where he could not control his actions, and his eyes were devouring everything, remaining wide open and imprinting all these gruesome details deep in his mind. One of the things he wished he would have never seen, while in that state, was one specific part of this human soup. A face. A horrified, desperate face that looked disturbingly familiar. Because..

it was his own.

This river appeared very often, sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent and violent. The color of the water would change even during the same dream. Naito was wondering why something like this would have such a strong impact on his subconscious, so he tried looking it up on the web. After filtering out all the garbage that dream tellers were posting on their blogs and weird websites - and they were A LOT - he discovered a study publication from a university in Austria, with an expertise on the psychological impact to brain functionalities.

The researchers had noticed that when their test subjects had dreams about moving objects or unstable states of materials (like running water) their brain would present an intense electromagnetic activity in specific areas. The subjects were interviewed after each experiment, being asked to reply to irrelative questions about their lives, habits and current state. 95% of the test subjects who had dreams about waterfalls, waves or turbulent seas, were going through transitional phases in their personal or professional life, and were profoundly upset or uneasy about their situation.

Naito rubbed his eyes and remained sceptical for a few seconds, trying to comprehend the information.

It doesn't sound so illogical - many conditions are proven psychosomatic after all. I wonder what they have to say about a bucket full of human remains.