PsyCHOtic AwaKE

Boxes

Christine, Sam and Anon dived onto a dusty sofa located at the far left of the room. They relaxed slightly and began searching through boxes they pulled from the shelves, whilst Abbie laid still. Anon had a medium sized cardboard box in his hands, his threw off the lid and began looking through the contents. A compass and a notebook sat on top of two small folders, filled with paper. The compass was old, rusty and rough. The notebook was presented as worn out, the leather straps that bound the book closed was torn and falling apart, yet still held the book tightly sealed. Anon took out the first folder. The first page was a glossary: Page 1-9 - Blueprints. Page 10-13 Land scape. Page 14-20 Inside map. Page 21-25 Outside map. Anon flicked to page 6, sketches upon sketches of room sizes and wall measurements filled the page, it didn't seem useful so Anon turned to page 11. Most of the page was covered by three to four pictures of a dusty wasteland area from different angles. The picture in the middle of the page had coordinates written the the centre with 'Bnkr' written in brackets besides it. Anon took a piece of glass from his pocket and started to cut the coordinates into his left arm, deep enough so it would scar. He then took a piece of cloth from his pocket and tightly tied it around his arm to stop further bleeding. He continued to page 16. Detailed sketches of corridors leading to rooms Anon hadn't even see yet lined the page, the neat handwriting and setup of the sketches showed high levels in OCD. Anon flipped to the final page. It showed a pencil sketch of the front of the Asylum, it was highly annotated with the same swirly hand writing. Anon place the folder to his right and picked up the other folder that was still hiding in the box. Anon flipped though all of the pages. Colour and creativity flooded from the folder, drawings of the building, drawings of people and drawings of faces were all shown throughout the folder. Although the picture were colourful, many of them were messy five-year-old-like drawings. 

Christine had a large box. She grabbed at the lid and placed it on Anon's lap. Inside the box was various tools and machinery. Another Polaroid camera sat in the box, beside it was a pair of binoculars, a monocle, a pair of glasses and a bunch of other miscellaneous tools. Nothing of any real value.

Sam had the smallest box. She flicked the top off and glances at the fifty plus pictures inside. All of them taken with one of the Polaroid cameras. She began filtering out useful ones and putting each picture into different categories. Pictures of people in one pile, test tubes and such in another pile and the rest in a miscellaneous pile. The miscellaneous pile were just landscape pictures and numbers, which served no information, they were discarded. Sam then looked at the test tube pile, picture upon picture of test tubes filled with colourful liquids, each labelled with different numbers. Some of the numbers were circled and shown in syringes, obviously useful to the project. Sam places the pile next to the other and picked up the last remaining pile. Pictures of scientists in front of a white background appeared in the pile first, they held numbers below their left shoulder and didn't seem familiar. Sam carried on flipping through the pictures. A few pictures of a younger version of Noah Shackleton popped up, making Sam snicker at his stupid face. A few more pictures of Shackleton rolled by. The last few pictures were confusing to Sam. The first picture showed Noah behind a little girl, his hands placed on both of her shoulders, both of them smiling at the camera. The second picture showed the girl again, this time in a square bedroom with grey walls, she smiled towards the camera. The last picture showed the little girl hugging Noah Shackleton as if Noah was actually happy.

Sam turned the picture over to see the back of it. A crumpled piece of paper was stapled to the back, Sam unfolded it slowly, her suspicion of the little girl rising. She gasped as read the paper out loud. 

"Adoption papers. Daughter and Father. Alice Shackleton and Noah Shackleton."