Behind The Locks || ONC 2024

Chapter 6: The Crooked Floorboard

“Ian and Jade. Wait… Don't tell me you saw it.” Zack had been in drama club his whole freshman year and sophomore, and that was more than enough reason for Arielline not to buy the shock in his eyes.

“I'll kill you if you are joking with me,” Arielline uttered between gritted teeth.

“No. I'm not, I promise.” Zack knew her sister like the back of his hand, and she was not into his words. “That was how the ghosts' takeover began. The Valley was flooded with thick, white fog.”

GHOST TAKEOVER? The new term creeped her out.

It better be true or else Zack would be a victim of a serious war. Not the remote kind of fight. A serious one.

The fact that the experience was dating from a similar ordeal in the mid nineties, she needed to know whether it was a reoccurrence. She would feel a lot better if it happened to the whole valley and not only her work place.

“Did you see any fog yesterday?” 

“No,” he answered as if the question in topic was precisely what he was waiting for. The glare on Arielline's eyes showed dissatisfaction. He continued, ”I slept at ten, and hadn't seen anything like it.”

All she could recall was her restoring books some minutes past eight, and after a moment of oblivion Nick told her that they had closed thirty minutes past, which was supposed to be nine thirty p.m, so if it happened within the range of time in the entire valley Zack would have seen it.

Furthermore, Nick and Mirabelle uttered nothing about it.

Could it be a small scale attack? Or was she just but some few moments to being possessed and puppeted by the imperium ghost for a bigger plot.

Could Twelve Locks Valley be devoured like Fridayvill? Speaking of Fridayvill, was the ghost/s threatening her with the books it/they dropped? Could it have been some sort of informal communication between a restless soul and a living being?

The fiddling details she read on the book covers were dreadful enough to shed the horror out of her, but they could have been conveying a message.

There was only one way to find out.

The library.

°*°

Tucked in the heart of Twelve Locks Valley, intersected between buildings shorter than itself, was the habitat of what could only be defined as the enemy.

Its bricked walls and flawless curves held undisputed beauty. 

Kaleidoscopic glasses shaped in incoherent signs and symbols domeing the library top reflected the faint glow of the rising sun, shimmering with a stunning spectrum.

It was peaked with a pointy pyramid-shaped precious obsidian stone.

If one was to judge by looks, deceiving would be an understatement.

Arielline stretched her eyes towards its door, a bunch of keys hanging loosely at the curved tip of her index finger.

She had reasons not to go back but had more to go back.

Still, there was something wrong. Why would everyone across the streets stare at her and whisper at each other?

Could it be that the ghost had left a sign or something? Or was there a ghost shadow dancing behind her? The diminutive idea made her swerve drastically.

But more people staring at her, there was nothing odder.

She downed her eyes to her feet, up her pajamas, and wait… PAJAMAS!

It flashed in her mind that she was wondering through the streets attired like a person who was sleepwalking; electrocuted-like hair, bags below her eyes, sallow face, and worst of it all the reeking mouth ordure, at least they couldn't see that but it didn't make the situation any comforting.

Let's put the blame on the ghost smoke; walking into town with a pink panther pajama, and don't forget the swinging tail, and furry oversized pink crocs.

Heat seethed through her face, embarrassment taking over invasively.

She scurred across the street for her nightmare job, unlatching its door as swift as her fingers could.

Out of embarrassment and into hell, she dived. 

Just like the first day, everything was in place; benches on her far right, book sections in front of her, others on top of others, and the reception desk on her left.

Judging from the previous day, it was safe until night time. 

It would be unwise to compare her situation to that of fictional horror movies, but darkness can never show up during the day, can it?

She braced herself and prayed for the night never to happen.

Foot followed by the other, she stepped, each step feeling more wrong. 

Not until then did she perceive how lost she was the previous night within the library sections. Her memories could hardly locate the whereabouts of either of the books; they were all mushed up and tangled like ropes.

The more she tried to recall, the more distant the memories felt. Sure her memory was not brilliant in storage but it wasn't as forgetful to forget the titles and locations of all four books the ghost/s had dropped.

She had tripped on a misshapen floorboard, one of the few excuses she could use in the court of ghost-possession, which was the only clear memory from the haunt.

It was a supremacy of darkness, corny how she could recollect a pale blue glowing hieroglyphic sign at the spine of a book her head fell adjacent to. 

The raw memory exhibit a lower shelf in one of the sections alleying towards the history section.

She toddled, keeping her eye on the books on the lower shelves and ears sharp for an unanticipated sinister thud.

It wasn't hard to locate its iridescent shade of color. It was conspicuous enough to call her at a distance.

She lunged towards it, eying the area around it. 

She was terrible at math, her grades could attest to that, but since her head fell next to the book, there was supposed to be a gnarling floorboard not further that seven feet away from it, assuming she skeeded after tripping.

A broken floorboard tile snapped into two served as an irrevocable reminder of the itching successive pain that throbbed from the tip of her strawberry-blonde hair to the bottom of her heels after the fall of the millennium.

She hadn't seen it during her survey, so her weight must have been the cause of its dilapidation.

She went to her knees and plucked out one of its scraps drastically. A hole was left of it, deepening to a dust-filled end. She plucked the remaining piece, noticing a hollow on the verge of the tile's extent.

Her reflexes were brisk to act before she could second guess herself. She swallowed in a vast myriad of air and pressured it out via her mouth, angling it towards the dusty pit.

A cloud of dust attacked, but her index finger and thumb pegged her nose soon enough.

Her other hand fanned the cloud of aimless dust grains out of her face.

Glowing signs, symbols, and unfathomable pictographs adopted from ancient egypt unveiled at the dark bottom of the pit. 

Streaks of shimmering blue and a marching pupple strobe summoning her.