Flat 8 saved Cheryl’s life

April 16, 2008 at 1:31 pm · Filed under 1 and tagged: science fiction

Flat 8 saved Cheryl’s life. A successful lawyer after struggling for many years with assorted ailments she found herself at age forty divorced for the third time with three estranged children, no money, and no life.

So she sees me as a potential abuser of newborn children and she relayed that information to my professional body. It has been hard for me to stay in employment when I have to fight for my professional credentials at every trial. It all stemmed from my involvement with her husband. She suspected that we were having an affair. I was never smitten with him. After that night we spent out fishing together and the breathless way we arrived home in the early morning. Remember when we slaughtered that trout? The children’s delight and she standing in the background. Fuming. That it should have been her.

She also stole my professional work. I had been working on a very important case to free a young man from a sexual abuse case. It was ground breaking stuff and would later surface as a watershed case in the countries history. Recovered memory would never be the same. The mental health professionals were made to look like fools as they backtracked on their professional position of a decade.  She made me out to be a mental case and harped back to the time I spent as a teenager in s psychiatric hospital. She even searched back and had a colleague seek out my records, which had become defaced and abused.

She made a lesbian advance to me you know? Twenty years ago she tried to seduce me and I, repelled by her effrontery, told her in no uncertain terms where to go. She has had it in for me ever since. Surrounded herself by lesbian lackeys who hang on every word. I have stood in the curtains long enough. I have started proceedings to recover the two million she owes me through pilfering my professional knowledge and profiting from my ideas.

I should make amends through mediation but the ill will I feel towards her and her family makes my anger boil to the surface. I want revenge. But I should leave her children and husband out of this. Although she showed no hesitation forgetting mine.

She went on a relaxing, albeit brief vacation to a tropical island. This is where she hatched her sinister but mad plot. She would fight the bitch the way she had attempted to destroy her. Turn the tables. She drafted letters to the governing bodies and to her employers. Demanded an immediate investigation. Showed she had the support of important minority groups who could not be ignored. Evoked the Privacy and the State Security and the Official Information Acts. Changed her name and address three times to evade detection. Hired a fancy lawyer and took a case to the highest court in the land.

But she failed. She even failed to turn up to the hearing, involved in another pressing matter. The judge looked at her evidence and shrugged.

“This women is wasting the courts time. Should she ever bring a case like this again I will be turning this evidence over to the police but advising them to prosecute her for malicious mischief.” Cheryl was devastated. So the abuse had risen to this level. Even the highest judge in the land was now in the pocket of this women. This women who had now completely and devastatingly destroyed her life. For what? For sexual revenge and jealousy? She couldn’t believe that this was all that was involved. She consulted her runes and called upon ancient Gods to provide her with answers. On this, they were silent.

Then she found Flat 8.  She had been walking down the street on a bright summer’s day. Traffic whizzed by. Tuis flittered in and out of the tress and occasionally swooped on insects grazing on freshly mown grass. Cheryl’s attention was suddenly drawn to a window of a house adjoining the road. A notice was propped on a table that was almost in dark back from the roadside window. She squinted in the bright sunlight willing her eyes to adjust to the contrast in the light. She could make out the words salvation and help is at hand, but little else. She knocked softly on the door. The heavy knocker and the number 8 were prominent in her field of vision. The door opened.

“You have finally come to us Cheryl.” She lurched backwards. How did they know? Was this another part of her plan. To draw the last bowstring before she was catapulted into the void?

“How d-d-d-d-o you know my name?”

“We have been waiting twenty years for you to come Cheryl. Haven’t you seen our sign?”

Cheryl peered closely at the women in front of her. She was ancient, her skin like thin parchment. Her eyes were incredible. They were so bright. Her hair had once been black but was now flecked with grey and white. Her arms, shrouded in a gossamer material seemed to stretch forever. Her long fingers were clutching a small blue notebook.

“Here. Take this. Read it until you can recite it from memory. Return to us when you have done so. Be tranquil.”

Cheryl stumbled from the front steps and she barely remembered clicking the latch on the gate, or the Tuis, or the noisy traffic. She was effused with such a sense of well-being, of completeness, of bliss. She barely heard the screech of the airbrakes as she stepped into the afternoon traffic and was completely flattened by a fourteen ton logging truck as the driver frantically downshifted and applied brakes to stop killing this wild looking women who suddenly threw herself into the heavy traffic.

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