It is midnight. You are in the streets with your friend Darren. You are going to the abandoned park for a bit of adventure.

When you reach the gate, it groans open unwillingly sending a chill down your spine. The play area is totally destroyed and wait! Where's Darren? He just vanished from your side! A sinister wind blew and the swings and roundabout start moving. A voice starts singing but you can not see anyone there. You see a shadow reaching toward you so you run. You slam the hut door shut and scream.

Come with me...

I did reach the window sill, and beyond -stood up, albeit aloof, searching for a million reasons why Darren was here so early -to save me, or to tell me to save myself.

"Charlotte!..Charl..." on and on went the clamour to help me. A shout that only ordered me to save myself from...I don't know from what. I resume my window sill viewing point and the loudest of the calls of my name had gone quiet. Suddenly. So suddenly that I imagined it was now my turn to freak out and shout back to send help the other way mine was coming from, "Darren", I took a turn, "are you good...are you coming in here?" There was no rejoinder, so I call quieter with a tinge or worry and a splash of sorrow, "Are you alive, Darren?"

The wind and the rain were louder than the yelps my throat was trying hard to give. "Darren..", I go again but his sound is now dead but I don't stop. "Wait right there, help is coming." I reassured but with a load-full of doubt that I'd actually even foolishly attempt to leave my safe haven and freely show myself up into the embrace of Darren's bothersome pursuer. He would die and so would I. But if I stayed here, in my room, I'll surely live to tell the story. If we both died, there'll be no sound to narrate what became of us because they'll be, simply, dead.

I gather up my thoughts and marshal my boots onto my feet. I command my adrenaline to take charge of my mind and lips and legs and head. It's going to be a run, a series of cry-outs, throwing with hands and hurling from an already fatigued lips and tongue. I was as ready, as an enemy besieged deer, to scamper as fast as my little adrenaline-filled legs could carry me. I gear up, picking this and leaving that, so many times that thirty seconds later, I hadn't even approached the front door. I needed to be faster than that. No the back door. The enemy will more than likely be at the front and exiting at the back is tactical. Tick. Clever that.

All the while, i don't stop reminding Darren that I was still alive, "Almost, Darren, hang in there, huh, I am more than ready now, mate. You know we both play damn good together and we win all the time, together." I don't hear back and I decide not to tell him a story about us, in case he is long gone with the wind, or the rain or an enemy I didn't know. I'm all set to frog-leap into the world of unknown, heeding to Darren's call that hasn't called again for a quarter of an hour that felt like a quarter of a decade.

"Yeah, did you say something?"

I hear a peculiar tone prick sharply through the white mist of the severe weather and that makes me cringe. Gosh! I had been saying so many 'somethings' in the last century of minutes and then I get asked if I had said something. Oh! Could I have just been so loud shouting into my heart? I felt messier and busier: busy worrying myself with messy options, shuffling through a legion of options, for out there seemed like a million quagmires gasping for attention, yet Darren wasn't helping either.