After getting discharged from hospital, I returned to my hotel and thought about the incidents of the past days. I was on train in Maramures when I was chased by those grotesque creatures, and I met Dylan for the first time. The second time it happened, I was in Peleș Castle in Sinaia, and those  bloodthirsty monsters attacked me, and I narrowly escaped from death. But the question remained: who was Dylan and what happened to him? Was he even alive or not, or had it been a dream all along?

I looked for my diary in the luggage, and got a pen from the nightstand’s drawer to connect the timeline of events.

First, either it was a dream or a delusion, but the scratch on my arm and the injured hand didn't seem to say so. It meant that an injury or a wound received in that place would appear in the real world too. Then, the next question was : what was that place? Was it netherworld-but I was still alive- or did I enter another dimension? Could it have been transmigration where I had accidentally entered another timeline or a world different from ours? I worried my lower lip in a thought, and scribbled on the paper what could have led me there. The passengers on the train disappeared after it passed through the tunnel. Later, coming in and out of the Peleș Castle's entrance had transfused both worlds. The tunnel and the entrance had acted as a passageway to another world.

However, the core of the mystery still remained. Who was he? He wasn't one of those undead, but he definitely wasn't human either. What was he then? I put question mark on his name on the paper. 

'What if...' I stumbled at the thought. 'What if I had been imagining things all along?' The possibility of seeing things made me dread as schizophrenia ran in maternal side of family. My grandmother suffered from it, and my aunt also started showing symptoms of paranoia. I went to see a doctor two months ago for having auditory hallucinations, but she identified it as depression and asked me for follow-up sessions.

Did she misdiagnose it as depression? I shouldn’t have ignored her calls.

 I shook my head in denial and grabbed my throbbing head in hands. What if he was someone wicked or that place was actually hell? I cursed at the stupid book I had got from that old man in Paris and plopped down on the bed.

I decided to call my doctor, but went against it. If I told her, and those were the symptoms of psychosis, she would have called me back and I didn’t want to go back without finding the answer. 

Be it a netherworld, hell, time travel or another dimension, I was determined to find out the truth.

I had a hard time sleeping that night. In the morning, I was brushing my teeth when I remembered that he had mouthed something to me. 

'What was it?' I racked my brain, trying to recall what he could have said.

So...Sok...Sock? The statue of Carol I’s wife, Elizabeth of Wied, sewing socks.

I went back to the room and opened my laptop to look up the word. It definitely wasn't sock or soak. I searched for the homophones of the word 'sock' but couldn't find much. Then, the results showed another word, 'souk'. I looked it up immediately on the search bar. Souk is a type of marketplace in North Africa and Middle East which meant bazaar. 

'Bazaar?’' I pondered for while. ‘Why does he want me to look for a Bazaar and where do I find bazaar? Romania didn't have any Arab market and Granada wasn't in Middle East. I searched 'souks in Egypt' and the market in Dubai showed a shopping mall. I became frustrated and thought about which other country could have had souks.

'Morocco'. There were different markets in Marrakech and source of tourist attraction. I stopped when I realized what I was even doing? I should have treated it as dream or mere delusion, and returned home, but a part of me wanted to see him again. I needed answers from him. I looked for the nearest flight from Bucharest to Morocco, and started packing luggage.

Even if I was going nuts, I should have an interesting story to tell psychiatrists.