Godslayer: Chapter 3

Pressing Questions
"Do you believe in god, Marco?"

I opened my eyes and immediately slammed them shut. They still burned from the cold water and the exposure to the cold air shortly after. I felt sheets under my arms and a warm wind swirling around me. What prevented me from falling asleep was the voice at my bedside.

I lazily rolledmy head toward the source, still not opening my eyes, trying to maintain my breathing. I noticed that my soaked clothes had been replaced with softer ones, the thick and damp windbreaker now a warm nightshirt.

"Wha's......tha' suppos'a mean?" I replied, my mouth feeling unusually cottony. I heard the voice chuckle and the clink of a glass on a table.

"It's just a question. Do you believe in any sort of God, Marc?"

"How d'y.....you know my name?" I replied back. The voice was eerily familiar but impossible, and if I wasn't confused and tired and incredibly cold I might've been more forceful or skeptical.

Instead of an answer, I felt a warm mug at my lips and a hand at the back of my head, bracing me up. The atmosphere around me was surreal, all the warmth and comfort despite the fact that I was scared out of my wits. A thick, syrupy liquid poured down my throat with the strange taste of Grandpa's homemade stromboli.

....Did he just blend cheese and salami with bread and feed it to me?

I choked on the drink and tried not to imagine what the blend looked like as I reswallowed it. My head began to clear shortly after and I could recall everything I had done this morning at Aunt Clara's. The pain in my chest was subsiding and the acute numbness in my fingers subsided. My headache began to disappate and with that I opened my eyes with a bit less pain.

Setting the beige, flower-painted mug down was my father.

He looked exactly as he had at home. The short, somewhat curly yet manageable brown hair on top of his head, friendly green eyes. The scar on his lip from when he'd been shaving and I, as a child, ran into him on my way to the bathroom. He was wearing a simple grey t-shirt and jeans, the exact style he would at home.

When he was alive.

I blinked a few times and recalled my last moments of consciousness before waking up here. I had just been dragged out of the Keebles Fountain, and Mr. Keebles the statue was holding my leg....

Am I dead?

"No, you're not dead." My father responded from my bedside, hands clasped on his lap. I couldn't ever remember him sitting like that, it was awfully dainty for such a burly looking man.

"How did you know I was-"

"Intuition." He smiled at me. The same smile he gave when I won the baseball tournament as a Little Leaguer, the same one he gave me at my middle school graduation. The same one he gave me as he ran into the airport to catch his flight.

"So....are you-?"

"Yes." My heart sank. So Mr. Keebles hadn't just been a dream then. I was still very much alive, and my father was still very dead. But yet here I was, looking him dead in the face for the first time since May of last year. I felt tears pricking at my eyes and blinked them away quickly, and I noticed that although my father saw them he didn't move to comfort me. I always complained he was too fussy in life, and now....

"I missed you." I said weakly, looking up at the ceiling. I heard his chair creak as he stood up, and the sound of trainers against a wood floor greeted my ears. It was the same sound I would hear in my old house, the one before I lived with Aunt Clara.

I took his silence and my inability to move my legs and arms as a chance to look around the room. A low, slanted ceiling directly above me with simple semicircular divets. I was laying in a large, fluffy bed with red and gold sheets and black trim, and upon further inspection I noticed I had at least three layers of blankets atop me.

The room was painted a dark red or cherry with a brown dresser in the corner. An open door in the corner led to a bathroom with equally dark fixtures. A single light hung from the ceiling and lit the entire room in an orange glow.

My pajamas were - you guessed it,black - with a simple 'K' embroidered on the chest in gray thread. Nothing else was really notable about the room, aside from a lack of windows and the fact that my dead father was pacing the room nervously. I didn't see my Father nervous at all before.

"You didn't answer my question, son." He said finally, stopping at the corner of the room and watching me. "Do you believe in any God?"

"...Maybe?"

"Which one?"

"The one that let me see you again." My father smiled at my weary excitement for his presence and he nodded understandably.

"She'd love to meet you in person, sport."

"Sport?" I ignored his comment about a god wanting to meet me. This was definitely a dream. Father never called me sport, it was always 'Bud' or 'Marc' and sometimes 'Mac' if he was so inclined. It was never "Sport".

"...Sorry, Marc." He frowned. "Being dead has.....been deteriorating. That's all."

"It's okay." I jumped swiftly to his aid - er, in spirit. Sitting up now took all the strength I could muster and now, looking at my hands, I noticed a faint blue hue outlining a ghastly white.

My family was born and raised under the sun, and with a long purely Italian heritage, I had no right to be looking like Jack Frost. It sent a chill down my spine, had I really been that close to dying?

"I should be more concerned about this." I stated out loud. My father nodded in the corner, arms crossed.

"Understandable. It's part of the reason I gave you some of the nectar actually. So you wouldn't go ballistic and end up hurting yourself again."

"Again?" My father was silent again and shook his head.

"That's not important. You're here now, you're calm, safe, and look - even those clothes fit you." He gestured to my pajamas and I self-consciously ruffled them. My father's gaze had a tendency to make me nervous, sure, but this was even stranger. I almost felt like he was judging me.

Being dead for seven months must've had that effect on him.

"Speaking of the clothes, what does the 'K' stand fo-"

"...Anyway, now that you're up, feel free to take a bath and dress yourself. If you feel like you can, that is! Like I said before, she'd really like to meet you and the sooner you recover the better."

"Who wants to meet me?"

"A friend." He replied quickly, entering the bathroom and closing the door. I didn't even have time to say 'I love you', and when I opened the door I was disturbed to find that he was no longer there.