Dead Connections

Chapter 8 - Goodbye

Chapter 8

Dallas really didn’t lie when he had said that the house he stayed in wasn’t ‘exactly’ his. In fact, there was another family in there. A family of 6. Dallas was simply hiding away in the house while he was dead, since he couldn’t be seen, heard, or felt.

The house was a big, posh red brick house, three stories high, with small glass windows and a small garden out the front. Inside the house, lived a mother and father. It was funny because the mother and father looked practically the same. The only difference was that the father had a beard. I assumed that the oldest looking boy who wandered meaninglessly around the house on his phone, with his earphones plugged into his ears, was their oldest son. He looked around 17, if not, older. There were also twin girls, who had to be about 9. They both had whitish blood her tucked back into tight pony tails. The other kid was probably 5 or 6, and had bright ginger hair. He was a short and stubby boy, with the hearing of a hawk because every time he was mentioned by the family, he’d burst into the room demanding to know why they were talking about him. I stood at the side of one room, flooded with lights and open space. Dallas stood in front of me.

“So you seriously live like this?” I questioned. “Everyday. And it isn’t hard?”

“Not at all,” Dallas said, placing his crutch against the wall and rubbing his hands together to keep himself warm. it was October now, and it was beginning to cool down. “They can’t see me, and I can just block them out when I want to. Plus, it’s like going to the theatre. There’s so much drama in this house that it’s unreal.”

“What about your actual family?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go back to them?”

“I was adopted,” Dallas explained. “They’ll never be my actual family.”

“You were adopted?” He nodded. “No way! Me too!”

“Really?” Dallas asked, his face filling with integument. “That’s strange then. Two of the three people Unseen murdered have defiantly been adopted. I should write that down.”

“Write it down?” I frowned. “Why?”

“I wanna know who my murderer is,” Dallas explained eagerly, turning away and beginning to walk. He left his crutch behind, propped up against the wall, and he was still an incredibly fast walker without it. I had no choice but to follow him. “And why he’s taking who he’s taking before he prays on anyone else. He’s already taken you and me, and this girl called Ember.”

“Was she adopted?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dallas admitted sorrowfully, scratching his nose and skidding to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the wall. “As I said, she didn’t like what was happening, and she didn’t stick around. I have looked for her on the occasion but then you came into the picture.”

I smiled at him. A sort of apologetic and sympathetic smile.

“Is there anything else we have in common?” I asked optimistically. Dallas hesisated, then began to looked me up and down.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “How old are you?”

“14,” I replied. The boy straightened up.

“I’m 14 too,” he declared, with a flash of hope.

“Yeah but there’s millions of 14 year olds out there,” I explained, watching the hope drain from his face. “It has to be something more specific.”

“Uh, well he carries that notebook around doesn’t he?” Dallas pointed out, standing up and pacing around me in circles like the eccentric he was. “Did you ever see what was in there?”