Where The Liars Sleep

Chapter Twelve

T

he week had really drained me, social battery, and all not that I really had a social battery to begin with. So, when I was lying on my bed getting comfortable with my laptop perched on my bent knees scrolling through my camera roll trying to find this one specific photo, it was buried deep in my files, and I just needed to look at it one more time.

That was when I heard aggressive knocking on my door, I tried to turn my music up like I said social battery, completely gone. But the rapping on my door would not stop, I really, really wanted them to go away but after a good minute of the incessant knocking before I conceded and lifted myself begrudgingly and swinging the door open.

"Finally!" Abel was exasperated and he was antsy, his eyes flitting around as though he was waiting for someone.

"What's wrong? Why can't you leave me in peace?"

"No time, we gotta go now!" and he pulled me from the room slamming my door shut in the process.

"Abel what the hell?" but he didn't seem to hear my voice, he was too lost in his own world and pulling me through corridors, routes I had never even seen before. I tried to drag my feet try and stop him, but I couldn't he was fast, strong, and determined.

"Nadine, just trust me this is important," and that is what shut me up for a second because there was a certain urgency in his tone. And all the while he was still doing that thing, looking around like someone was trying to snipe him from a hidden corner.

Suddenly, we stopped at a door that was so well hidden I didn't even notice it at first. It was so pressed into the wall that if you didn't look for the grove where the three was thin black line you would not have known it was there.

Abel's soft palm pressed against the wall, and there was a slight creak as he pushed, and I knew that I was holding my breath because I didn't know what this meant. This felt wrong, like something I wasn't supposed to see.

He turns to me as this door that shouldn't even be here open, he looks around, trepidation in his every move. There is darkness through the door and for a moment I think this is it, Abel is leading me to my death and he's super guilty about it that's why he keeps looking around him like a robber afraid of tripping up a high-tech security system.

"Is this some rich people cult sh-" but Abel hushed me as we walked into the darkness. This was getting weirder and weirder, and I was desperately missing my bed, and my laptop, my camera even. In the rushed stupor I hadn't even been able to grab my phone or change, I was literally in my pyjamas, and they weren't the most, mature, I had soft pink bunnies painted in across the white of my trousers and a t-shirt that was far too large for me, with a bunny on it with a sleeping mask that was soft to the touch the same plush material that made up the bunny's ears. I hadn't really cared about it because I was in my room, but in the dark chill of this secret hallway I felt entirely exposed.

I could feel my heart in my throat, and it was beating erratically in a mocking sort of way as though it new I was walking towards my imminent death.

It got real when I started to see flickering candle lights, burning wax that pooled and melted caking onto the side of the wick and dancing across the walls.

"Abel," my voice was shaky, this was it, I was so going to die, "Abel, this isn't funny, where the hell are we?"

My stomach began to twist in on itself as he remained deathly quiet, it was only when we turned into a room that was much brighter with wooden walls that resembled the rest of the school and there was actual real lighting in here that my heart began to rest.