Never Fated To Be |✅|

Chapter 22 : Enter, Sleep

Then again, a lot of things are possible in my life.

And a lot of things have already happened.

I met Rick.
I met Simpson.
I killed both of them (which I never wanted to, and you know that).
I met Mr. Hudson.
I joined high school.
I met Jake, Zayla and Luke.
Expecting nothing was not an option anymore.
Even though I was the victim, people around me were more keen on finding the antidote of my curse, as if they were the ones whose lives depended on it.

Or maybe it kinda did.

'There has gotta be something to it.' Zayla said, 'Those pages have words on them, I know. We just need to find a way to read them.'
'You mean like, heating them, the words will become visible or something? Like they show in the movies?' Jake questioned.
'I guess.' Zayla shrugged.

On the other hand, I was on the ground.
My legs were water and my head was burning coal. I couldn't exactly figure out what was happening to me but it was definitely happening because of the book in Zayla's hands. And she was right. There had to be something about it which would make those words in it come alive.

'Um, guys. . . .? A little help here . . . ?' I uttered with great difficulty.
Jake and Zayla seemed to jerk back out of their deep thoughts and Jake immediately rushed to help me up.

A sudden rumbling echoed around the place and I seriously doubted that it was just me, but Jake and Zayla heard it too.
Instantaneously, our eyes shot up to gaze at the sky. Dark clouds had appeared suddenly, out of nowhere.
We decided to get out of there before all of the stored contents in the gloomy looking vessels started to pour down on us.

I ran my eyes over the ruined rubble spread around for one last time and since we couldn't find anything else under all of it, I didn't have any other choice but to hold my tears again.

I didn't want that to happen to Simpson's house.

We drove back to the school in intolerable silence. The gates were kinda surprisingly open. The guard allowed us in, knowing us and our often entries and exits in the school.
We made our way to the library and pondered on how to take advantage of the book we had found.

Honestly, I hadn't actually expected to find it that easily. Maybe the book did want us to find it.

It wanted me to find it.

My uncertain sickness had somehow managed to get worn out a bit. And now I was almost too sure, all the feelings of "pain" that I had received had been experienced by someone else before. But it was not someone I had met or ever known. Somehow I had a notion that it was someone from the past. My past.

We commenced our work on figuring the book's mechanism out. Zayla managed to produce a candle and a matchstick from the chemistry lab using her unnatural sneaking powers. Jake lit it and we immediately started heating the papers of the book one by one. Or at least, we tried to.

Time passed and we almost burned a few of the pages but no words made any apearance on them. I became frustrated. We tried rubbing the pages, scanning the pages, printing the pages and even sprinkled a few drops of water on a few of them but all of it went in vain. Zayla brought out a magnifying glass and we looked through it to see if we could spot anything written in a really tiny font but we ended up observing a line of ants walking past a table and down a hole in one of the bookshelves instead.

When we realised that we had tried almost everything and nothing had seemed to work, we gave up. At least for the evening, since Zayla and Jake had to return home.

In the end, we had to stop continuing our experiments and make plans to attend them later. Jake was reluctant at first but Zayla firmly stated that she had to leave and thus we disbanded.
'We're not giving up though.' Jake said before he left along with Zayla.
'I'm gonna try and find out more clues from the forbidden book if I can.' Zayla suggested which made the lost atmosphere to regain some light.
I thanked them both for all that they were doing.