Midnight Creek Tales

#4. The Duchess' Lost Portrait / Chapter 11

"So when you heard me come through the secret door, did you know it was me?"

"To be quite honest with you, I wasn't going to take any chances. I didn't have a weapon, so I decided to grab the sharpest thing near me which was a pen, and then attack."

"If I remember correctly, there is an emergency weapon somewhere."

"There is?"

"Of course, this room is used to fool bandits, why wouldn't I have a weapon hidden somewhere to ward them off?"

"Then how come I didn't see it?"

"Do you honestly think I would put an axe in the middle of the library? I've hidden an axe somewhere in one of the book aisles. I'm just having a hard time remembering what I classified the axe under..."

"Maybe it's in the same aisle that we're looking for," joked Terry as he cracked his knuckles.

As we ventured more and more into the long, elaborate library, we soon began to lose track of where we had come from.

"Why in the hell did you buy so many bloody books in the first place?"

"For resourceful reasons Terry! Why not have thousands of books?"

"Because you're never going to read them!"

"Yes but if I didn't buy every book put on this earth, we wouldn't be able to find a weakness to destroy the Duchess."

Terry mumbled something under his breath and made a couple of confused turns, "I think we're lost Terry, the only way to see where we are is to climb one of the bookshelves."

"Are you mad?! If we do that, one wrong move means the entire library of bookshelves could come tumbling down, and that'll create a domino effect!"

"Even if that did happen Terry, how would that affect us?"

"Do you think she's deaf? She's going to hear the smashing and crashing and then we'll be exposed and vulnerable! In that case good luck trying to find the axe and the bookshelf about ghosts!" Terry took a deep breath and continued making random twists and turns in the library. And then from a distance, we could see something against the wall.

"What is that Cole?" I turned my head to Terry's direction and noticed something sticking out from the wall.

"I think it's the axe! Quick!" I began to run towards it and Terry followed behind me, and then I stopped dead in my tracks.

"What is the matter?" Terry asked.

He looked at the axe....

There was an imprint of it on the wall with glass shattered everywhere.

Slowly I turned my head backward to look at what was behind us. Little taps started to echo across the study... I could pick up a reminiscent sound lightly being shuttered, almost as if I could hear an axe being sharpened...