Just in the nick of time the final part of May’s Project is published. Original idea was a short story in around about ten parts, so I consider the project to be a success. As for the quality, that’s another story altogether. May I present the concluding part of ‘Unencountered’…..

Part 9

It was difficult coming to terms with what had happened over those turbulent few months, but time is a good healer and a year down the line I was beginning to understand. The endless police interviews, the physical tests and the psychological consultations had all played their part. Steve had just left. Steve was the coroner that had very nearly killed me, and over this past year we had become good friends. We had discussed that day in the autopsy suite many times and had reached a conclusion. A conclusion that, even now, seems impossible. That unencountered presence was a warning.

For Steve it started about five years earlier. A seemingly dead body that he had to conduct an autopsy on. Only the man, like me, was not dead. And again, like me, as Steve was about to begin he felt a presence that delayed him long enough for the man to ‘wake up’ from what doctors later described as some sort of extreme sleep paralysis.

Once I heard Steve explain this story I began to piece together my own dealings with this unencountered presence. Those weird notes I was writing myself during sleep were not notes aimed at me, they were warnings for Steve. A man I had never met, but soon would. They were warnings of what could happen. And my old friend John, the incident in the pub. The incident that seemed so real at the time, was, as I found out later, a warning. The very next night John was involved in brutal attack from a drunk, that left him needing stitches for a six inch wound to the face. The incident in the alley that ultimately left me on the autopsy table, the deafening hum that I heard, merely the hum of the fluorescent lights at the morgue.

We hadn’t told anyone about our theory, it seemed so far fetched, and actually I’m not sure if we believed it ourselves. But over the past year neither or use had felt the unencountered presence and, for that, we were truly thankful.

The End