The Last Snow | Ghorror [C]

Chapter 20 | Clean Up

Ryan and I stayed in the office until Chris showed up. With the snow, he ended up being about forty minutes when he said fifteen, I think it was. It gave us time to actually catch our breath. I watched the monitors, seeing Chris walk in finally. He went through the back entrance and took the long way up to assess the damage. I could tell by the way he was acting that we were dead meat.

Chris gets pissed easily. It's just his personality. He's an angry, aggressive person. Tonight, he wasn't pissed. He was disappointed. That is an emotion you don't ever see him wear. I felt like a child that knew they did something wrong. Even if it was out of my control, the guilt was unbelievable. That is my best friend and I just majorly fucking failed him.

He made his way to the security office. Chris opened the door with the darkest look on his face. You'd think someone just murdered his mother in cold blood. Of course I instantly went into saving my ass and my job mode.

"Chris, I'm sorry about all this. I really tri-"

"Save it." He cut my off, dead in his tone.

He began to walk towards the controls on the desk. I scurried back from my seat to give him room. He typed a few things, pushed some other buttons. I looked up at the monitors to realize he was rewinding the security footage.

As he was, Ryan very quietly said, "If it's worth anything, Ricky saved my life tonight."

Chris glanced down at him for a moment. I couldn't read his face at all. He said nothing and went back to the screens. Starting at the beginning of the night, you could see an overhead view of me getting cornered by those three maniacs. Followed by them setting the Rake free. Chris set the cameras to fast forward just a tad. He paused them when he caught Slenderman in the alien exhibit.

Intently, he rewound the footage and watched it over again. He continued to skim through everything from tonight. We just sat there awkwardly. Like we were in high school again, waiting outside the principle's office or something. He finally let out a long sigh and stood up straight. I worriedly looked at him because he still wasn't saying anything.

"Am I fired?" I asked quietly.

"No." Chris finally spoke, giving me some much needed relief. He continued, "You did everything you could and the important thing is no one died tonight. We're supposed to close the museum for a few days next week for the wedding. We'll just have to close a week early. I'll send the damaged statues off to get repaired. Until then, I want the tablet left in a disabled position."

"Are you ever going to turn it back on after this?" I replied.

"Yeah, I will. It's not fair to the others. Even with everything that happened tonight, you would've been fine if Alien was never set free. Laughing Jack didn't plan on that to happen either. He wanted to fuck with you, but he didn't want to kill you. Someone else did."

Ryan felt his hand over his throat, rasping, "You mean Slenderman."

"Yeah." He said as he glanced back at the paused screens, "I knew he would be difficult but never like this. Whenever the tablet gets turned back on, I'll have no other choice than I have to take him out of the museum at night and move him to a separate storage unit. It's going to be a bitch to do but I doubt any of us will ever get him under control."

"He's different than the others." I said, "Even Alien, she has some emotion. Even the fucking Wendigo does. It might be pure anger, but it's an emotion. Slenderman doesn't. I could see it in him. He is programmed to kill and nothing else."

"Being here has made me realize what actual pure evil is. He is the only one here that is pure evil." Ryan added as he pointed towards the monitors.