Into The Unown

The Man Beneath the Mask

It was past midnight when the drone returned.

"What does it say?" Gary whispered as small fly shaped device landed on Charlus's wrist. "Come on, old man, work fast. I've got the jet up and running."

Even though darkness had wrapped its claws around the place, the annoyance on Charlus's face was as visible as in broad daylight.

"Let the fly breathe," he whispered back, "transmission takes time."

Waiting wasn't Gary's strong suit. He quickly snatched the device from Charlus's wrist and played the transmission which came in shades of green. As he read the readings, his frown only deepened.

"What's wrong?" Charlus immediately asked. Not 'what did you find', he asked him what was wrong.

"There is only two heat signatures," Gary looked up, nudging Charlus to check his findings. "Look, this looks like a woman and this is a man, age is approximately early twenties."

"What? That's impossible." He checked the footage again. "How can there be only two signatures?"

There was good news and bad news. Good news was that the fly showed that there was a 98.7% chance that the heat signature belonged to Dawn. She was alive. She may have been harmed, but she was alive.

She's going to stay that way, Gary thought.

But then came the bad news. Gary couldn't look away from it, no matter how much he tried to focus on the flicking heat signature which came from Dawn.

Gary curled his hands into a fist. "Have you ever been inside the Castle of Jorum."

Charlus snorted. "It has Jorum in the name, son, what do you think?"

It didn't make sense. The fly was designed to see everything. It caught transmissions from electronic currents and the heat dissipated from humans. For the fly to not have caught anything, meant two things. Either the castle was open—there were no traps, no guards, no sign of life except for Dawn and Calem.

Or...

"What was the signal—" He asked, "—which you transmitted from Dawn and Calem."

Charlus took a deep breath. "There was no signal, Gary. It was the lack of signal which led to this."

Gary took a deep breath. Or... he thought, or whatever awaits us isn't human. 

True to the flys transmission, the Castle of Jorum was dead. There was no guard, no trap, not even a single fly. The castle was dead, had been for years.

Gary and Charlus stealthily stepped through the broken architecture of what was once a castle—a home. Now broken and long forgotten.

Moonlight slipped through the cracks in the ceiling. Wind flew past them, but nothing moved. Everything was still. Frozen in time.

The deeper they walked in, the deeper Gary's distress became. There were no traps to walk into, no alarms to rig, to guards to shoot at.

The last time we'd walked into something so quiet, Giovanni was found dead.

They were walking into a trap. There was no doubt. All Gary wished for was for Dawn to be alive... and intact.

The two did not break their focus, no matter how many emptied rooms they walked past. They did not share any words, but both knew deep inside, something was wrong.

Not long after, they found the room with Dawns heat signature. The door was open and the chamber was enormous and right at the center of it all were Dawn and Calem.