The Blainter

16...

Abbey walked over to Mr. Evan's jacket and picked it up. It wasn't dirty nor ripped or anything; it was in perfect condition. She smelled the fabric, and it smelled of Mr. Evan's cologne and light smoke from the torches on the walls. Judging by the nonexistent signs of a struggle, Abbey determined that their art teacher had stumbled upon the room as well. Of course, he entered at an earlier time and left, but he had been in the room, is what Abbey's thoughts were on. None of the things that she has been able to put together made sense. She couldn't wrap her finger around why their art teacher would tell them not to move from the main room, before the horror. 

It was very strange to her that he would request that they stayed put if he was going to light up the whole corridor. It seemed, to her, that he even had time to light up the room, that Lina and herself retreated into. Something wasn't right about the whole situation, and she was going to get to the bottom of it. Abbey looked at Lina and held the jacket out.

"It's Mr. Evan's!" Abbey reported, "Was he here? Did you see him?!" Lina looked at the jacket, wiping the rest of the tears from her eyes, before shaking her head. She grabbed the jacket from Abbey and put her arms into the sleeves of it. Getting frightened so many times had made her body temperature drop, and she had goosebumps running along her arms.

"No," Lina said while fastening the buttons in the front of the jacket, "No sign of him at all. Don't you think that it's strange that he wasn't around when all of this happened? If you didn't see him, then where did he actually go? Didn't he say that he was just going to light the hall and return to us?"

Abbey nodded her head. She didn't want to believe that her art teacher was up to no good, but they haven't seen him for hours! Her only thought for his whereabouts was that he had ventured onto the hall that neither of them had explored yet. 

"I haven't seen him at all, since we first got here actually. Zoe and I ran down the whole middle corridor, but we didn't see any signs of him. No light, no sounds, nothing!" Abbey was getting ready to mention her thought of him possibly being in the final hall, but she stopped speaking when Lina gasped from a discovery she'd made. There was something inside of the jacket! 

Lina patted the front of the jacket, trying to get a good feel of whatever it was that she felt. She opened the top button of the jacket and put her hand inside. Her fingers searched the fabric on the inside until they stopped on a long slit, revealing an inside pocket. Lina pushed her hand into the pocket and retrieved a tiny black book from it. It was plain, save for a tiny, golden symbol of a paintbrush in the very center of the book cover. Lina's head was spinning with too many thoughts already. She didn't want to cram more information in her sizzling brain, so she passed the book to Abbey.

Abbey grabbed the book and opened it immediately. She flipped through the book, starting from the very first page. She recognized that the signature on the inside of the book cover belonged to Mr. Evans. On the first couple of pages, there were drawings of an older woman and what looked like a younger version of Mr. Evans. The older woman shared some of the same facial features as Mr. Evans, which helped Abbey to determine that the elderly lady was Mr. Evan's mom. The detail in the drawing was amazing, but Abbey thought it was a bit odd for him to draw his very own self-portrait, especially with his mom! 

She didn't waste too much time on the thought and decided to keep flipping through the pages. She saw more pictures, some random buildings with the coordinates of the buildings' locations underneath them. She surfed through more random drawings until she came to one in particular. Unlike all of the other photos that she'd seen in the book, this drawing didn't have any color-filled within the shapes. It was a drawing of a person, female in particular. The female in the photo was very familiar, and Abbey looked up to Lina. She compared the photo to the teenager standing in front of her.