TJ Maurice Journal

Important notes,

Entry Day 1

The Stranger

This morning began like any other.

I arose in good spirit and set about my daily routine, one of which was a short walk to fetch the news paper, the air was crisp with a quiet chill of winter, the streets still not awake properly. The world looked ordinary enough, pavements damp, shopfronts dark.

And then it happened.

A stranger passed me.

Nothing dramatic. No shout. No collision. Just the simplest crossing of paths, except the moment he drew level, something in the air seemed to pause.

Time didn’t stop, not really, more like it hesitated.

He glanced at me.

I glanced back.

And in that brief exchange, less than a second, I felt it. A strange pressure, like my chest tightened. An awareness that was not mine, brushing against me as he went by.

It was a sensation of dread.

I kept walking, a few steps.

But in that moment my instincts were already turning over, reading the energy the way you read the sky before a storm.

I swung round to look at him again.

But he was gone.

There was no crowd, no corner or doorway, to dissapear into. He had simply disappeared from where he should have been.

And what I felt from him did not leave with him.

It lingered.

A feeling that comes with the realisation that something bad has noticed you.

Evil
 

That is the only honest word for it.

And worse than that, more unsettling than the disappearance, was the certainty that I knew him. I knew I had met him before.

I stood there staring down the street, and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

Realisation being…..

Something is happeningI

And whatever it is, I do not think it is finished with me.

Night presence

The best part of the night passed uninterrupted.

But around five in the morning I awoke to the strangest atmosphere. Not a sound that woke me, not a dream, not even discomfort. It was simply that feeling of the room being slightly different from the one I fell asleep in, as if the air itself had been disturbed and had not yet settled back into place.

I sat up in bed, drawing a slow breath, getting my senses in order. For a moment I just listened. The house held its silence, but it was not a comforting silence. It felt watchful.

The stranger from morning was still fresh in my thoughts, and now, in that half dark hour before this next dawn, I felt something of the same thing again. That sickening undertow. That sense of wrongness that does not announce itself loudly, but presses in all the same.

So I did what I always do when the world feels like it is leaning too close.

I entered meditation.

I let my breathing steady, let my mind sink beneath the surface chatter, and I called the memory of the passing stranger forward. Not the details of his face, not his clothing, not the ordinary pieces that the mind likes to cling to, but the energy. The imprint. The signature of whatever it was that brushed against me.

I knew him. Or at least, I knew that feeling. I could not deny it.

And yet when I reached for the thread of it, expecting to be drawn backwards into some forgotten moment, something inside me shifted. The deeper I went, the clearer it became that this was not a memory pulling me into the past.

It was pulling me forward.

That was the moment the realisation landed with full weight.

I will be meeting this stranger.

Not as a chance passing in the street. Not as a flicker at the edge of a normal day. But properly. Intentionally. As though the first encounter had only been the knock at the door, and what comes next is the opening of it.

When I finally finished my meditation, I did not feel relief. I felt the kind of calm that arrives when a truth is accepted, even if it is unwelcome.

I decided to get up.

I went to my elfstones and did a reading.

The symbols came through with a clarity that made my stomach tighten. I could see a number of things, but two stood out above the rest.

One was a journey.

And another was danger.

I sat with the stones for a long while after that, staring at them as if the meaning might shift if I willed it hard enough. But it did not. The message remained as steady as the chill in the air.

A journey is coming.

And so is something that does not wish me well.

I ‘m sure of that.