Unforeseeable Events

Part Two: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall - Adelaide

When Ashley's candle went out, I caught a glimpse of movement in my peripheral vision and jumped up. 

"What is it Addie?" Sarah asked.

"The mirror! Look at the mirror!" I whispered. 

"I don't see anything," she answered.

In the large ornate mirror over the marble fireplace, everyone's big-eyed faces stared back at me. Nothing more.

"I know this sounds totally weird, but a pig ran from that corner over there, toward the table." I pointed to show the route he'd taken across the polished oak floor. 

"Addie, there's no pig in here. Don't be absurd. The Ouija board message is scary enough. We don't need you hogging all the attention by making up some story about seeing a pig in the mirror!" Ash sounded more scared than angry.

"I suppose it could've been my imagination. The room's pretty dark. It happened fast and I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, not straight on." Could I really have imagined it? What was wrong with me? I don't usually hallucinate. I sat back down.

Someone squealed. I couldn't tell who. "Whoever did that, it's not funny. You sounded like a pig." 

I looked around the circle of girls and one by one, each of them said, "Not me."

I rested my elbows on the table and covered my face with my hands. "I just want to go home. I've had enough of this place."

"No, we haven't figured out what the message means. 'I need you'. What does it need from us?" Ashley asked.

"Yeah, Adelaide, you can't go home now. We wanted to contact a spirit and now that we have, you can't chicken out. This is the real deal. We need to ask more questions." Sarah wasn't going to let me off easy. 

I decided to stay. These were my only friends. I didn't want to disappoint them.

This time I sat down at the Ouija board with Arielle. Ashley was done with Ouija boards forever, or so she said.

I asked the first question, "Why a pig?"

Several loud snorts filled the dark air around us and the planchette went crazy. Arielle kept her composure, "Never mind clowning around. Answer the question."

The planchette began to move toward the first letter, "I" and then pointed to several other letters one after another until it had spelled out a whole sentence. "It's a clue."

"You're going to have to tell us more than that. 'Pig' is a clue? What kind of clue? Can we have another clue?"

Just then someone knocked on the door and everyone jumped a mile. Reilly screamed. 

Sarah said, "Calm down and try to act normal. We don't want anyone to know what we've been up to." She went over to the door and opened it. The library tech support guy walked in.

"Sorry to startle you. I just wanted to know if I should connect you to the smart board, so you can put your writing up on the screen."

I almost said, "What writing?" then I remembered we were supposed to be a writing group. So I answered, "Sure, Ash, give him your laptop. The story's on Ashley's Wattpad account."

Alex was so flummoxed by Ashley that he didn't care what was on her laptop. She was a total distraction with that loud, bossy voice and messy blue hair. Finally, he got up the courage to speak to her and introduced himself, "I'm Alex. I go to a private high school in Boston. But I live here in town and work part time at the library as an I. T. guy."

The whole time he was introducing himself, he was plugging an adapter onto her computer and connecting it to the screen. "There, you're good to go."

I felt relieved when he turned to go because he hadn't even noticed the candles, several of which were still lit. I'm pretty sure that's against library rules, but Alex was just a high school kid with a part time job as a library tech support guy. He'd probably never hooked a super bee-atch's computer up to his smart board before. 

"Hold on a second." Alex stooped to pick something up off the floor near the doorway. "Did one of you girls drop this?"

It was an old fashioned key that we had totally missed when we walked in.