Ghost Silk (Ghost Perfume, Book 2) | ✔

8 - Let me through - Part 1

Sunflowers.

Millions of sunflowers marching as far as you could see, stretching out under a star-studded night sky and a vivid, blazing moon.

The heads were monstrously large. They swayed on supernaturally tall stalks; if I'd stood among them, I thought, they'd far eclipse my height.

They didn't all bloom the same, or bloom perfectly. Some were past their prime, the heads tilted down and the petals wilted inwards around the huge dark center. Some were reaching the peak of their life, their heads turned up, catching the silvery moonlight.

I made to step forward and nearly fell into air. I stood on broken stone, on the edge of a series of stone steps.

I gasped and stumbled back.

The flight of steps curled, narrow and crumbling in sections, for at least a couple hundred steps. It disappeared into darkness, into the sea of flowers.

If I squinted, I could just barely see what was perhaps a path: the thinnest gap in the sunflowers growing at the bottom of the stairs.

A creepy feeling stole over me.

The flowers in the field had begun to turn towards to me.

A gradual, unmistakable movement.

The turning movement created a wave that rustled and spread farther and farther across the field. The blank round faces within the petals were a dark red-brown, like blood, and they increasingly seemed to fixate on me.

I swallowed. Where was my portal?

The death notebook was still in my hand and I could sense the portal behind me, but only faintly.

I turned and saw that I was standing on a kind of small stone platform in the middle of the field. Behind me had been a squat building with an ancient and half-ruined appearance. It was made of those huge stones, each one cut bigger than a person, that makes you wonder how it could have been built in the first place.

I thought the portal might have been inside.

The entrance was half-smashed. One side of its double doors hung sideways. The other lay in a broken heap.

Something had smashed through them.

I approached with slow steps, frightened by the long wail of the wind behind me and the silence of the looming structure.

The fear eased as soon as I came inside. My portal was there, dim in the corner, but emitting enough light that I could see inside the building.

I was in a large, plain hall. Dust drifted on the air. The floor was like ice under my bare feet.

A circular stone slab of a table stood in the hall, twenty or thirty uncomfortable-looking stone chairs around it.

Several of the chairs were fallen on the ground. The ground had cracked around one.

Even in the shadows, I could make out a dark smudge on the dusty stone floor. It looked a lot like a stain of blood.

I scurried to my portal. It pulsed gently at me but stayed dim and low.

"Are you hiding? From what?" I whispered.

Sh.

The chill of the abandoned place seeped into my skin. Get over it, I told myself, and made myself explore, nudging the portal to stay with me for light. Hallways branched off from the big hall, like spokes from half a wheel. Down each hallway, I found a series of what must have been personal rooms and living quarters.