I stuffed my hands into my pocket, feeling nostalgic about my day at my mysterious aunt’s eerie house as I strolled along the grey pavement. I was enclosed in a thick blanket of fog, only that this was an extremely cold blanket which made the world seem gloomy and frosty. There was no wind, just cold, uncomfortable, stifling, claustrophobic fog. It was extremely quiet and unnerving. Moreover, the loss of sight of the path made me feel like I was walking through endless fogs and I felt disorientated. Anyway, my thoughts kept me occupied.

‘Ghosts, do they exist? Witches? Dementors? Evil spirits? What about God?’ I thought

‘Who knows?’ replied the other side of my brain, ‘They might exist, and they may not’.

I strolled on thinking and thinking, racking my brain for rational answers.  Suddenly, I didn’t feel lonely anymore. I felt an eerie presence; something startling, cold and disrupting. Something cold and foreboding. I could feel a chill running down my spine as I slowly turned around, expecting to see a delinquent thief. An odd thing it was, when I turned around to see nothing. Nothing at all. Just dense fog but it was slowly moving, like it is parting for someone to come through. My heart slammed against my ribcage as I turned back slowly when a black shadow swooshed passed me. My heart stopped. My brain stopped working. My legs didn’t move. My mouth couldn’t move. The only movement made was the prickling sweat on my forehead. I felt like was frozen in time. Again, that strange, menacing, macabre creature swooshed before me. I jumped back, the hairs standing on my back, so stricken with fear that I couldn’t make a sound. I continued forward again, slowly this time, clawing the air for ‘creatures’.

Suddenly, a hooded figure loomed from the now-grey fog. It didn’t have legs and seemed smoky like a dream. It wore a grey hood that covered the face, but I could sense the fear it was radiating, the gruesome death it would bring when met. It drifted in the air with its head slightly bent in such a way that I could see its mouth which was set in a line, grim but satisfied. The air suddenly turned unbearably chilly, like it was being refrigerated even more.

I was stupefied. Suddenly, my freeze-in-time reversed and now my body functions went on a fast-forward. Adrenaline rushed through my body rapidly, more sweat trickled down my back and forehead and my head was filled with macabre thoughts. I was still completely blank as too many thoughts filled my head about what this creature might be. I finally realized feeling dreadful that it was the most deadly creature of all time. A ghoul which can suck all happiness and life and FEEDS on happy thoughts. A creature which can suck the SOUL out of someone. A dementor. A deadly dementor. That was what it was. I knew, from the strange stories that passed around the town, that this was DEATH.

I desperately tried to throw out all the happy thoughts in my brain but in vain as the other side of my brain kept sending them in. Dementors were supposed to move by sensing happy thoughts and feelings and now, too bad I have more happy thoughts pouring in, much against my will. Suddenly it gave a blood-curdling scream. A high-pitch wail that can turn anyone’s eardrums to liquid and leak out of one’s ears. I imagined my tombstone and how I would like it engraved when I felt piercing pain in my chest. I dropped to my knees, holding my throbbing temples.

Suddenly, it disappeared. Not disappear exactly but dissolved in the fog. I didn’t understand what was going on. It was supposed to suck out my life. What happened? Something finally lit up in my brain after much thought: there was something strange about that dementor. It had been smoky and had DISSOLVED into the air. I mean, dementors had smoky feet and all but they were still solid, good, hard solid. Solid can’t disssolve. So this was not a dementor but it certainly had its features. After much thought, I concluded that this might not have been a dementor – if it was a dementor, I would probably be in heaven drinking grape juice with Dionysus or getting cooked up in hell – this was a dementor’s cadaver, in other words, Death’s soul. But how can Death DIE? I finally ended up right where I started: thinking.