Forgotten: a truly gripping psychological thriller Read Online Free Page A

knowing the final result wouldn’t really reflect what I could see.
    I’m now sitting on my bed after a quick pizza in the Pizza Hut clone across the street. I know what I said about local food but I think I was being hopelessly optimistic. I ordered only pizza and this seemed to cause some amusement among the other diners. I think I must have offended some law of etiquette which states that, in a restaurant, a person has to order more than one type of food per course. I looked around to confirm my suspicions and every table seemed to contain plates of pizza, salads, pasta and ice-cream. It still seems a bit harsh to be smirked at by people who order and eat dessert before the main course and struggle with a knife and fork. Still haven’t aired my skills with chopsticks – that should cause a few real laughs.
    I need to stop thinking of my room as some sort of safety net, I can’t measure my days by how far I’ve managed to venture from the hotel. If I carry on thinking like that I might as well never have left the hospital. My room is just somewhere to sleep and there’s a huge country out there waiting to be explored.
    I’m going to be really adventurous tomorrow and get some jobs done. It’s important for me to work out for myself how to do things, no more being told how to behave and what to do. I need to find a post office and I must book a train ticket to my next stop. I think I’ll go to Xi’an the long way, via Datong and the mountains.
     

III
     
    It made no sense. Why was she writing about the hospital? How could she have known about the hospital before she ended up here? Who the hell was she, some sort of psychic? Kai tried to steady her breathing, taking deep even breaths and sighing ‘shit!’ on every exhalation. What the hell was going on here? She had hoped that the journal would answer some of her questions but it just made things worse, and it was bloody spooky.
    Unless.
    Unless the hospital she referred to was in the past. This might not be the first time she’d ended up in hospital. It might just be some wild coincidence. That would make sense, in a way, but was such a coincidence likely?
    She wanted to read on, to try to solve the mystery not only of her own identity but of the confusion about the hospital. Kai squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her temples. The incipient headache was a welcome excuse to back away from the rising panic she felt from having lost so much of her life and from the bewilderment the journal had sparked. Coincidence was the only plausible explanation. There was nothing supernatural about the diary, but there was so much detail locked inside: places she should know, a friend who she should be able to turn to now, when she really needed help. Instead she had the security of a room in a hospital in a strange country, a concerned doctor and an account of a journey that she could remember nothing about.
    And she knew self-pity was pointless. She had to focus on getting well, moving forward and finding herself. If only she had a better idea of who she really was.
    Kai. It was a pleasant sounding name. She said it aloud a few times, trying it on for size. It felt okay. It was not her name but it would do for now.
    ‘Okay, Kai it is,’ she breathed. ‘Just wish I knew who the fuck Kai is.’
    She glanced at the clock somebody had placed thoughtfully on her bedside table. It was mid-morning. Another day stretched ahead of her like the blank pages at the back of the journal. She scanned the room looking for something to focus her thoughts, to give her a point of contact with the present but there was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to cling to. It could have been a room in any hospital in any city in the world. The expanse of grey walls was only broken by the two doors, one to the bathroom and one to the great unknown – the corridor. The single window was partially covered by a plain white roller blind which, she’d discovered two days ago, hid a view of very