Sixteen Minutes to Midnight

Chapter 7

I awoke to the sound of the gentle patter of rain. It seemed odd, this surreal experience that maybe everything might turn out all right in the end. Things seemed tranquil. Calm. The storm raged on outside as the forces of nature pit themselves in battle with one another, but here inside we only had ourselves to contend with. And the murderer.

It seemed that I was the only one awake. I had done my shifts last night, two of them in fact, and yet my body felt little fatigue. What I felt instead was a gnawing hunger, a quiet growling that emanated from my stomach that would be not satiated until I had something to eat. "Shut up," I told my stomach, "people are trying to sleep." Looking back, that was a pretty weird thing to do. People do weird things.

There were a few questions on the back of my mind. Firstly, where did the murderer get the propane? Where did the murderer get the mushrooms? And how was the murderer able to sneak around the house without getting caught? They had the keys, sure, but how were they able to slink around undetected? That was the real question. Real chilling.

I nudged Darren, who was sleeping on the floor, a small bedcloth covering him. He was resting on his hands, and I pushed him over so he sprawled across the floorboards. After a minute or two, he blinked and awoke. "Huh...buhwuh....it's so early...." I kicked him and he wheezed before getting up.

"At least tell me if you're going to do that," he complained, clutching hs stomach.

"I'll keep that in mind if I ever need to do it again," I replied.

"Actually, please don't."

"Hey, come with me to get something to eat. I'm hungry and the house is big and scary."

"Fine...Alonzo's not even awake, is he? Bah...hey, do you want to tour the house later on today? We can bring everyone along to keep the company together."

"Let me think about it...in the meantime, help me unlock this door."

The ball and chain was suspended from a latch, and it was rough and made this irritatingly screechy noise as it slid. There was a click as the latch finally unfastened, and I turned the doorknob clockwise and pushes the large, foreboding doors open. The corridor was quiet, in the dead of morning, and the only sound came from the secretive ticking of the clocks. Tick tock, they went, tick freaking tock. I closed the door and locked it on the way out with the key Dmitri had lent us last night. He gave our group his key, and the two servants kept Alonzo's key.

We descended, just me and Darren, until we reached the servant's quarters. Every footstep we took made a muffled groaning noise, as if the supports from the floor were using everything they had to handle our weight. And I didn't even weigh that much.

I knocked on the servant's quarters. Alonzo must have been asleep, although I heard Dmitri groan. "Ugh, what time is it?" he yelled out.

"It's 11 past 8, tell Alonzo to wake up if he hasn't already and make something for breakfast. I'm hungry." I paused for a moment then added as a little aside, "very hungry."

Dmitri didn't respond. Then about ten seconds later he muttered "Shit. Where's Alonzo?" Darren recoiled back. "What?" he shouted, and banged the door.

"Shut up! Let me get the latch...oh never mind it's already unlocked. Alonzo must have gone out or something." He opened the door and looked at us through lethargic eyes, and met our gaze with tired blinking. The servant's quarters was fairly small. Apart from the two bunk beds, there was a desk, several chairs, a cupboard and a wooden casket, although its main purpose was simply to provide a place for the servants to sleep, and nothing more.

"Say," I said, "do you smell that?"

"What?" said Darren.

"It smells like coffee," I whispered, "Alonzo must be awake."