Chapter 116.

I felt a bit bad that things turned out this way, but I was thankful that Val was by my side right now.

“Hello?”

“Yes. Oh? You already heard? Great. Then send it over. Bye.”

“... so fast?”

“I’m not actually doing any grunt work, of course. I just called up an acquaintance who’s really on top of events like this.”

Swish.

“Oh? That was quick.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like my acquaintance really was already looking into it before I even called them.”

“How is that even possible?” Just what sort of person did she call?

“Well, we’ll know when we open it, won’t we?”

I anxiously got up from the bench on the side of the corridor and looked over her shoulder at the phone in her hand.

She leaned back against me, but I was of no mind to pay any attention to it. My eyes were glued to the video she was sent. Depicted on the screen was a low-resolution recorded video that had been uploaded to YouTube. At the corner of the footage was a running timer and date. It was the exact time when I was out on the balcony. It was very difficult to see myself, but I was located at the bottom left-hand corner of the video, almost out of frame. 

Though that was all it showed. Only me. Even when I fell backward, there was no sign that anyone was in the balcony beside me in the direction I faced. It appeared I’d just fallen backward without any sort of stimulus.

“Mr. Genovese, you said she fell from the balcony beside you, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Val, could the footage be doctored?”

“Well, that’s for the cops to figure out, but it’s looking like any sort of conclusive verdict to what really happened to her will be difficult without getting an account from the victim herself.”

“This is absurd.”

“It definitely is, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still going on that business trip. The police already questioned you about it while you were still out of it. You just autonomously answered everything, but you were clearly not all there. The police didn’t want to give you a hard time with how much stress you’ve been put through lately, considering how you were just discharged from the hospital.”

“I did all that?” Again? Another lapse in my memories? I guess I was just that shocked by it.

“You don’t remember anything about it?”

“No, I don’t. Not a single thing.”

“Val, do you think I have dementia? People in their 30s can potentially show signs of it, right? Or maybe even schizophrenia?”

“According to the doctors you don’t have it.”

“What if they misdiagnosed me? I was in a coma for two weeks after all, right?”

“Who knows? It could just be a side effect, after all, you only just recently regained consciousness. It may get better after a while.”

I sat back down on the bench and glued my eyes to the ground. I couldn’t stop my foot from constantly tapping against the ground or hide how nervous I was. I was an unstable wreck right now, but when I thought things over again, I realized that I had worked for thirty-two hours straight on that presentation. If all of this was the result of a severe lack of sleep, it wouldn’t be impossible for my brain to confuse everything and for me to grow despondent the way I had. 

When I looked back up at Val the world looked strange. It was only an instant, but Val’s exposed skin appeared transparent while the hallway had strange vibrant green characters that floated down vertically. Soon after they appeared, they disappeared. What the hell was wrong with my head? This wasn’t the bloody matrix. I shook my head to the sides to snap out of it. It was the lack of sleep, definitely.

“Val, was I just hallucinating just now?”

“Yeah, you were.”

“Can we leave?” I felt disgusted with myself when I said that, but I wanted to escape.

“I’m surprised you’d want to leave. I thought for sure you’d be adamant about staying by her side.”

“A large part of me wants to stay, but the other side of me wants to get the hell out of here and run as far away as possible. A business trip might be exactly what I need. I feel terrible for leaving heartlessly like this, but my sanity won’t hold out at this rate. I need something to take my mind off of everything.”

“Good. Let’s go then.”

When I got up, we proceeded to the exit. Before we exited the emergency room area, I took one last look back in the direction of the doors at the end of the passageway. At the end of the passage on the opposite end, I saw someone standing there. I was certain it was a woman. She had straight white hair draped over the front of her face, while her head was tilted down eerily toward the ground. She stood there silently without uttering a single word. I blinked once and she was gone.

Chills continually ran down my back after we exited the building, it felt like I was being followed and watched. When outside, we caught a cab and immediately departed from the hospital. On the way back, I occasionally looked behind us, but there was never anyone there. However... it always felt like someone was directly behind me. 

Watching.

Observing.

Judging.

As one might expect, the cab driver seemingly caught onto my abnormal behavior and asked, “Hey pal, you okay? You aren’t looking too well.”

When my gaze was drawn to the front of the cab, my eyes immediately landed on the rearview mirror and I felt like I was about to have a heart attack at that very moment. A hand clutched onto the trunk as a body creepily climbed on top slowly. Her long white hair, still covered her face as she crawled closer to the window. She only paused when her hair came into contact with the window. She sat there as still as the night and appeared to only be watching me. Quietly. She observed me. She never averted her gaze for a second. Was I truly being judged? Or was this a manifestation of my guilty conscience? I had no way to ascertain either.

When I finally worked up the courage, I turned my head; she was gone again.

I checked the rearview mirror one more time, she was still there.

“Dio, what are you seeing right now?”

“Adele. She’s behind us.”

“Where?”

“Nevermind. If you can’t see her it’s probably all in my head; a result of guilt.”

We continued in silence all the way back to my apartment. For the duration of the ride, I couldn’t pry my unblinking eyes away from the rearview mirror. Before I knew it, the cab driver called out, “We’re here. That will be $15.30.”

I didn’t have my wallet on me so Val paid the fare before we exited the cab. In the side-view mirror, when I stepped out the door, I noticed Adele who’d wrapped her arms around me from behind. I looked down, but there were no arms there.

This wasn’t the first time something like this happened, but different to last time, I didn’t seem to be in a hallucination like with my previous visit to the mental asylum she was supposedly locked away inside.

I took in a deep breath and calmed my on edge nerves.

“Are you flirting with a ghost in front of me or something?”

“I’m... definitely not.”

She’s not a ghost after all. She’s still alive, this was just a figment of my imagination; a real-world materialization of my guilty conscience. Everything I saw was all inside my head and seemingly only appeared on reflective surfaces. A mirror was a reflection of one’s self, the truth so to speak. In this case, my real thoughts.