Endurance

   The moment he reached the top, Finn sat down next to the yellow flag and removed his shoes. He knew that to be a stupid thing to do, because he had to go back down at some point, but his feet were hurting so much that he needed them to breathe for a while. However, he did grab the flagpole and removed it from the soil. He then opened up his backpack and put the flag there, leaving the pole outside in order to use it as a cane, in the case his feet hurt him even more as he climbed down.

 He then sat down still and enjoyed the beautiful view. The mountain was the tallest one in the vicinity and it overlooked a very deep valley filled with trees and a stream that could be heard from that summit. Birds and other animals could also be heard and seen. It was an idyllic place to be in and it wasn’t a surprise they had chosen it to be part of that year’s race. They always chose beautiful places and the flag was always in the most remote place of the area chosen for the contest. Good choices anyhow.

 Finn wiggled his toes to make blood flow through them. As he did that, he closed his eyes and raised his head at the sun. For some reason, the clouds that had been covering the area all morning had mostly dissipated and now the sun could shine and bring joy to everyone, including the race’s contestants. It was nice to feel warmth on the skin, just as it was nice to participate in such an event that made people use their physical skills but also their wit and intelligence to solve puzzles and riddles.

 The race consisted in every contestant receiving a backpack with various things. They chose the backpacks randomly and each one had different things inside. However, they all received some sort of clue in order to begin the event. It was fun to do it with friends or if you liked to compete with other people. Finn, however, loved to do it because he had fun by himself. He had no friends to invite to such a thing and he wasn’t the type to enjoy competitions. He actually thought they were only for brutes.

 But he did love to enjoy himself in the woods, by a stream or just walking up and down a mountain. The problem was that he had made too much of an effort this time and his feet were too sore to continue. The game did consist in people finding the flag but they had to come back to the area’s entrance in order to win whatever prize the organizers had. Sometimes it was some money, some other times it was something like a gift card or sunglasses or things like that. The point was that with his feet hurting so much, Finn wasn’t going to get anywhere near the entrance point. He would have to forfeit from the whole thing.

 He expected someone to at least solve the hints fast and come help him go back down from the mountain. He would give that person the flag and just say he had been just behind them. The pain was increasing slowly and he was also beginning to have these pinches on his legs. It felt as if a scorpion had walked into his pants or something. For a moment he did think that was the case but then he remembered he was in a cold climate and there were no scorpions around, for thousands of kilometers.

 The young man waited up there for an hour and then another hour. By the third one, and after finishing one of the power bars that were inside his backpack, he decided to go back down by himself. He would probably get to the entrance by night, but it was really necessary for him to just go back and rest properly or even ask if they had a nurse or a doctor in place. It wasn’t normal that his feet were hurting so much. He was used to doing these sorts of things and didn’t make any sense that he was feeling so awful.

 Putting his shoes back was not an option. He did try but it made no sense to do it, as his feet seemed to have swollen up as he waited seating down. So the trek had to be done barefoot. As the mountain was covered with small stones, it hurt like hell but he then realized there were small patches of grass on it, so he tried to walk only on top of those. There were still some stones there and his feet were making him cry and yell silently, but he continued. Finn knew very well it was always easier to go down than to go up.

 He had walked up the mountain in less than thirty minutes but it took him three times that to make it to the bottom, to the tree line. There, it was almost impossible to walk barefoot. There were too many things on the ground including leaves, branches, roots and rotten fruit that had fallen from the trees. After stepping on something that looked like blueberries, he decided it was time to be a little smarter about the whole thing. So he sat back down and looked for something to use in his backpack.

 Having found nothing that could work, he did think about ripping the flag in two and using a piece on each foot in order to walk easier or at least with much less pain. However, he decided against it because the organizers could see that as something else, as him not wanting for others to find the flag, for example. So he left it alone and decided to do what he was going to do with the flag but with his own t-shirt. He took it off, ripped it in two pieces and carefully wrapped each one around each foot, trying to make something similar to the early shoes used by cavemen.

 After this short stop, he decided to continue through the forest, walking by the river that he knew he had to cross at some point. The bad thing was he had to do it by walking on top of a gigantic tree trunk but he would only worry about it once he saw the crossing. His feet were still in deep pain but at least he wasn’t carrying any more dirt or little stones between his toes. He had to make many five second stops along the way. Not only he was in pain but he was also getting very tired of the whole day.

 He heard wolves and birds and even something that seemed to be a board in the distance. That’s what made him fall in love with the whole thing: he loved nature and how free one could feel in it. The forest always felt alive and thriving, it always seemed there were many possibilities for it to move on and keep being that awesome place were everything felt so far away and where everyone seemed to be on the same level. It was almost an utopic place to be in, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

 But, by the time Finn got to the tree trunk, the sun had almost completely disappeared from the sky. He tried to move faster, climbing the trunk as fast as he could in order to cross over the river. After all, the entrance was not that far from that place and he could easily push himself to the limit in order to get there and finish the whole thing for the day. He was even thinking that he might miss the next one, just to have a bit of a rest.

 Climbing the trunk wasn’t easy and it took him various attempts to finally make it on top. Once there, he tried to modulate his breathing in order to cross in one go, not stopping at all. One, then two deep breaths and then he went. He was more than halfway through when one of his feet got a cramp and he lost his stability. In moments, Finn slipped from the tree trunk and fell straight into the water. The backpack’s weight pulled Finn down, who was in shock for the first few moments of the incident.

 However, he then tried to pull himself out but the only thing he was doing was fight a force he wasn’t able to submit. His feet were useless so his legs couldn’t propel him properly to the top. He started panicking, knowing he could not hold a long time underwater. He had never been good at that.

 Then, he felt something pull him out. He was dragged off the water and then over the grass on the other side. The sensation went away but he couldn’t see anything, as he felt he could not properly move. Then, the face of a young man such as himself appeared in front of him, all drenched in water. He smiled.

The Donner mansion

   For the last hundred years, people had stated that the Donner mansion was haunted. People claimed ghost lived there and that’s why people never went there anymore. Professor Marcus Stevens and his assistant Vanessa arrived in town just to check out the mansion, in order to put to rest the legend of the so-called ghosts. Professor Stevens was not a believer of the supernatural and was decided, in his spare time; to debunk any silly beliefs people might still have around the globe. He had chosen the Donner mansion because it was a very well known place, not only in the region but nationwide. People talked about how real the experiences there were and the professor wanted to end all of that.

 To be honest, he had personal reasons. Silly beliefs had left his grandfather helpless. When he was younger, his grandpa was suffering from a strange disease. He asked his mother and practically everyone in the family to take him to the hospital but they wouldn’t, saying it was the will of God and that if He intended grandpa to be cured, it would be done that way.  Even as a child, Marcus was restless, even trying to sneak into the house a doctor he had picked up from the phone book. But to no avail, as his parents forbid it and his grandpa died days later.

 When he grew up, he decided to study science and prove everything, make the world a more realistic place, getting rid of all the magical creatures, the folk tales and the silly beliefs that took lives like his grandfather’s every single day around the world. Since he was eighteen, he had left home and didn’t talk to any family member but he soon made lots of friends in the scientific circles, so there was no sadness or longing for the past. He hated his pasts, his family’s beliefs and all that had to do with that. He decided he could live very well without his parents or anyone else from his family close to him.

 The first thing they did was travelling to the town of Rensal, where the mansion was locate, and talk to many people there. The idea was to make something like a survey, in order to better understand the phenomenon that people claimed happened often in and around the mansion. They set up their headquarters in a small hotel room and they would interview people in the lobby. It was an old town in the mountains and now it was a ski paradise in the winter but it was not yet that season so there were not many people around.

 Many told them that the mansion got “more active” during the summer, when less people were visiting. This was odd as, in many other towns, the occurrences happened always in the months when tourists were in larger numbers. Anyway, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a hoax, it just meant people in this town were probably not manipulating the events occurring in the house, or at least not in a large scale. In one week, they had already interviewed more than one hundred people and that was more than enough to make a survey that showed which were the most frequent activities inside.

 Apparently, people saw lights inside the house despite the manor being disconnected from the power grid, many people also testified seen people there wearing old clothes and ignoring them and the small group of people that had entered the house told him that the walls were covered in some strange goo, yellow in color and with a terrible smell. Besides that there was the usual: voices, lights that went in and out, strange sounds, the feeling of being touched… Marcus and Vanessa knew them all from their other experiences and were ready to debunk the tales of Donner mansion.

 The following week was used to enter the house. The plan was to go into the mansion every afternoon, three whole hours. They would carry special equipment to detect metals, radioactivity and other events that may seem strange but were very normal in a old house. They had done it a million times. The first day, on Monday, they entered the house with care as the front porch seemed to be damped and the wood that formed it seemed to be in the verge of breaking into several pieces. They went along with Xavier, an old friend of Marcus who loved the whole hunted house experience. He wasn’t a scientist but gladly helped as he thought it was a very cool thing to do.

 The first thing they felt was cold. Despite very warm temperatures on the outside, the house remained as cold as in the winter. They measured the temperature, noted it down, and proceeded to another room, crossing a large hall with care. The place was not dark as the afternoon light entered the house through the high windows all around the hall but it was very strange as the glass was not transparent but had various colors. It was like walking around a circus fair ride.

 The first room they entered after that happened to be the kitchen. It smelled awful, as if someone had left food to rot there. But that didn’t make sense as no one had lived there for the last hundred years. Vanessa put on some gloves and took out the food that was rotting in the fridge. There was a moldy cheese, meat and a chicken breast, all covered in green and smelling awful. However, Vanessa was able to recover a plastic covering from behind the food and put that in one of their own plastic bags.

 Vanessa had been with Marcus for a long time. She started as a student of his in a physics class back in the university but they had formed a nice friendship that had consolidated just after she had graduated. In the blink of an eye, Marcus had hired her to be his assistant in the university and proposed her to be his assistant in these trips too. Vanessa did not hesitate, as she thought it was a very cool thing to do and she confessed that she had always been bored out of her mind when friends started talking about the possibilities of life after death, ghosts and all that supernatural crap. She even had proven to them how the Ouija board was all about conditioned thinking, a fake in simple terms.

 After finding the rotten food, Xavier stepped on a weak part of the kitchen and the floor broke beneath his feet. He twisted his ankle and both Marcus and Vanessa had to help him out of the mansion and to the medical center down in town. It was good that Marcus had asked a local to be there with a car in case they needed help, so he took Xavier away and they had to cancel the rest of the exploration for that day. They spent the night in the hospital waiting for the doctor to tell them about their friend. He was ok but he was going to have a cast and crutches. So there was no way for him to join them anymore.

 The rest of the week, Marcus and Vanessa would go into the mansion and test every single apparatus they had inside. They used the electromagnetic device to prove that the house was actually not fully disconnected from the power grid and just walking around they found thousands of small gaps and holes, which were used by the wind to enter and make strange noises. All very natural.  The cold feeling inside the hosue was explained because of the location of the house, just in the way a small air current that went down the mountain, covered in snow all year, towards the valley were the town was located.

 The only thing that hadn’t been able to prove wrong was the presence of unknown people inside the house; even some wearing old robes, from the times when the mansion was built. They decided to plant several cameras all around the house and stay one more week. Marcus wanted to go away as soon as possible because, although he found it all to be very interesting and even funny, he also wanted to properly rest this summer before the classes began again. He didn’t have much time to spare and this time he wanted to think more about himself than about work or others.

 However, the cameras didn’t show anything. She stayed in front of the monitors for hours, even falling asleep in front of them but they had not picked up anything, not a real person, not a floating person, nothing. On the last day, the moment they were packing, something happened. One of the cameras picked up kind of a shade crossing the front side of the house, apparently entering the mansion. Back in his home, Marcus checked the video various times. He could explain the shadow; it was probably the sun and the surrounding trees. But there was a moment when a face seemed to appear and the door opened a bit, and it was a heavy wooden door.

 For the first time ever, Marcus decided he didn’t care. He didn’t believe he was a ghost and he knew there was an explanation to everything that happened in that place and in places like that all over the world. But the truth was he was tired, growing fed up with filling his life with meaningless things. He had to admit he still resented their family but that, however, he was in need of someone to hug and that feeling appeared to him, like a ghost, every single morning.

 There was nothing supernatural in Donner mansion but there was something missing, something rather natural, from Marcus’s life and he didn’t know exactly what it was or how to get it.

Flights

   The flight had not been awful but my body was just sore from being seated for so many hours. Somehow, those airplane exercises did not do the trick for me. Besides getting in the way of some people, they didn’t accomplish anything. When we finally landed, I felt my legs weakened by the journey. And to think I still had six more hours to go. But at least I had twenty hours to refresh and relax before hopping into another aircraft.

 I went through customs quite fast, and then headed straight for the airport hotel. I had my only bag with me and was certainly happy to be able to sleep in a proper bed for at least a few hours.

 The lady at the counter of the hotel seemed a bit distracted by something and kept looking towards a TV located in a small meeting area besides her post. I asked her if there was something wrong and she said something about a hurricane that was battering some islands in the south. It was feared that the storm could come this way. But, at the moment, her words seemed not all that important to me. As a matter of fact, the moment she gave me my bedroom keys, I had only the bed on my mind.

 The walk from the front desk to my room felt short and, seconds after I closed the door, I had stripped to my underwear and was making my way into the cozy queen sized bed. I fell asleep fast didn’t even remember to put an alarm in case I slept longer than I expected.

 I had a dreamless sleep, very nice and cozy. When I woke up, I saw the sun through the curtain, which could only mean that the day was coming to an end. I grabbed my cellphone and realized I had slept seven hours straight, which was perfect for a guy that had to make another six-hour flight the following morning.

 I stayed in bed a few minutes until I realized I could have a nice hot shower and change my clothes, which I did. I even sang through my entire time in the bathroom. For some reason, a hotel made me feel special, more so when my company was the one that had to pay and not me. After changing clothes to a less constricting combo of shirt and jeans, I decided to head down to the restaurant.

 When I got there, I noticed there was no self-service but one could order anything from one of the waiters, which I did: a big cheeseburger with fries and onion rings. Yeah, I was starving after my sleep. The television screens were still broadcasting images from the storm in the tropics and warned people in the city were I was that they should be mindful of the storm for the next few days.

 When my burger came I ate it so fast, I surprised myself, and the waiter, who kindly asked if I needed something else. I told him to bring me lemonade and to put it all on my tab, as I had no money to pay and even If had had any money I wouldn’t. After a week of hard work, I had earned all the nice treatment.

 There were only a couple more tables occupied and some people on the bar. I looked at those people, the kind that have their first drink of the day at four o’clock. It was nice to be that careless with one’s decisions, although maybe they had interesting jobs or just lives that required that extra kick. As I drank my beverage, I saw them all one by one and realized I knew one of those men: he had worked with me years ago but he had left, probably fired but I did not know for a fact.

 He noticed I was looking at him and stared back and, clearly, he realized who I was. He waved, a whisky glass in one hand, and came walking towards my table, smiling like an idiot. I had just remembered I did not like him very much when he took a seat just besides me.

 He acted all surprised and shocked and happy to see me but somehow I know it was all a lie. I normally knew when people were being deceitful to me and guy just didn’t seem quite honest to me. He smiled a lot and I had always mistrusted that and he had stopped drinking, which was clearly a bad sign.

 The man started talking about his new job, where he traveled a lot and met many famous people. He was something like and insurance guy for the wealthy or something like that. To be honest, I did not pay much attention to anything he said and, from time to time, I would look towards the screens still showing what was happening in another part of the world.

 He obviously noticed me doing do because he started giving me he’s opinion of the matter, as if an opinion was able to change the path of an incoming storm. Yeah, I clearly remember I hated that guy. He was always trying to be visible, attracting everyone to his stupid life and just trying to be funny and just coming out pathetic. He was the kind of person that was desperate for attention and I had never cared for any of that.

 Without any warning, I told him I had some affairs to attend in my room and shook hands with him. As I walked away he told me to email him some time and I nodded but I clearly had no intention to do so. I decided to get around the airport, which was huge, and walk around until my flight became available on the screens all around the place.

 The airport had three terminals and each one was simply huge and well connected, so walking was just a pleasure, looking at people come and go, the pilots and flight attendants and all the colors their uniforms sported. Besides, I had always liked airplanes so my favorite thing to do was buying some candy and then seating by a large window and stare and the planes moving all over the tarmac. It was like watching ants work on giants or something. Maybe that’s what was attractive to me…

 After getting bored and running out of candy, I decided to shop for some souvenirs. They weren’t for me but for my friends and family, all of whom loved to receive t-shirts and fridge magnets after I had traveled around the world. My mother had a collection of those and I had already bought her some in my earlier destination. I found a store that sold several of those, shaped as animals and fruits so I bought a whole bag.

 My sister’s gift was a bit trickier as she loved clothing but I always seemed to forget what size she wore and which colors she was into right now. They changed quite often and it was hard to keep up with it. So I just bought her a black sweater with a funny image on it thinking it went with everything and even if I got the wrong sixe I could tell her I thought she could use at nights or something.

 For my friends I bought boxes and boxes of chocolate and candy. That was what they liked, besides booze, which I couldn’t buy because I had always been scared a bottle would break and then of my underwear would smell of vodka or something. Some of the candy I bought were filled with rum and gin so that would cover me with them.

 I went back to my room, realizing my flight was only three hours away. I got everything I had bought into my suitcase but I couldn’t make the chocolate boxes fit in so I took that on their bad and hoped for security officers not to annoy me about it. I took all my things; check the room twice for things I may have left around and then left the room. In the front desk, the receptionist was busy on the phone, speaking occasionally. She hung up and attended me quickly to go away rather hastily.

 Not thinking twice about it, I walked straight to customs again, then to my gate were I sat down to wait for the boarding procedure. As I checked my emails on my phone, an airline worker dressed in light blue and with jet black hair walked to the counter and spoke on the microphone.

-       Ladies and gentlemen, Air Jet has to announce the cancellation of this flight due to a serious event that has taken place. We will take care of accommodations and will help you get into a later flight to get to your destinations.

 People started to quarrel with her and, not talking to a microphone, visibly tired and fed up by passenger’s attitude, she said:

-       A man committed suicide. He, somehow, got to the building above this gate and  jumped. He landed… he landed on the plane.

 Everyone was now silent and the some of them where walking towards the window. Although far to have a good look, I was sure I had seen correctly. The man that killed himself had been talking to me some hours earlier