RAPTURE ! ( it )

twenty.

RAPTURE !

020. ' the phone call from nowhere '

THAT NIGHT

THE CLOCK TICKED MONOTONOUSLY
ON THE KITCHEN WALL, as Amelia slumped in a chair at the table. A red marker was tensed in her hand while her eyes sought over the map that Bill had retrieved from his garage for her that afternoon. She had flattened tape over any of the splits inflicted on it from when Eddie had furiously wrenched it from the wall.

Her parents had retired for the night a few hours before under the assumption she was still away in her bedroom, requiring her distance from them. However, the moment she could distinguish her father's irritating snores drift down the corridor, she slid out from her bedroom with the map and set of markers close against her chest.

And now, the girl sat at the breakfast nook's table with the map lain across the oak surface and the markers interspersed among it. The well house had already been recognized from the first time they surveyed the map, but she still repeatedly circled it with the crimson marker to present it as the most prominent point on the map - it was where she would meet the others early tomorrow afternoon, and they'll venture in with the belief of seeing their friends alive. Or, at least, to avenge Eddie and Beverly, if they had already been murdered.

But, she urged that thought from her mind.

Abruptly, the buzz of their corded phone sprang in a noisy peal throughout the kitchen, and Amelia nearly toppled off the chair in startlement. With a heart banging against the bone of her ribcage, she yanked the phone from its cradle and stifled the deafening chime, only hoping her parents hadn't been roused by it.

"What is it?" she whispered sternly into the phone, believing it to be one of the boys as she cast an apprehensive glimpse down the murky corridor.

The opposite line cracked rather loudly and through the repetitive sound, low breathing emerged through. Amelia furrowed her eyebrows somewhat, her forehead creasing as she angled a shoulder to the wall.

"Hello?"

The static burst noisily out in her ear and she nearly released the phone onto her foot. She drove her head away from it, chest heaving faster with each moment. What the fuck? What is this? Reluctantly, and gradually, she bent her ear back against the phone's speaker, "Hello?"

Through the hiss rushed a distorted voice that caught her breath in her throat. "Lia! Lia!"

Her skin grew clammy to the range the phone nearly slipped from the crook of her palm. Her insides bitterly contracted and she squeezed her grasp on the phone - she was tired. Ah yes, weary and overwrought. This wasn't real. She hadn't heard that voice.

"Lia! Lia!" the voice ripped through the speaker once again and the constricted feeling increased as well as the hold on the phone.

"Eddie?" his name emitted from her raspy throat despite her need to remain quiet, and she clamped a hand over her extended mouth to restrain herself - you're tired, tired, tired. Not real. It couldn't be Eddie! How the fuck could it be?

"Help! Help! Lia, you need to help! You have to go back to Neibolt with everyone else! Just help!"

"We are, we are," she guaranteed to the boy, shaking and horrified while bolstering against the wall. The static emitted over on the line, her exhausted breaths ricocheting off the phone's curved surface and back upon her cheek. "Eddie? You there? Eddie?"