Gone In A Flash

Chapter One: Friday (1)

Chapter One: Friday (1)

The wind and rain whipped through the open window and through the second-story bedroom of the umpteenth time that evening, sending paper and furniture flying and crashing everywhere. The door to the room banged open in the gale, slammed shut just as quickly, and then proceeded to do it again, this time crushing a stray page from a torn-apart book in the process.

Winter was cruel to the inhabitants of Twinford, and this year was definitely no exception to that. The gale that was wrecking the bedroom on the second floor of the Green-wood House was currently being experienced by the whole of Twinford. It was so intense that it could easily be classified as a hurricane; hands-down the most destructive storm that the town had been witness to in at least a decade.

On the streets outside of the house, bins that had been set out for rubbish collection later that morning banged and clashed together as they fell over themselves like dominoes, scattering bags of trash down the street. Some of them split open and by the time that the storm died down, the storm would be completely covered in rotten fruit skin, egg shells, and plastic wrappers – not a pleasant sight, even on the best of days.

Inside the bedroom, the sheets were blown off the bed from where they had been neatly folded at the foot of the mattress, as if the usual occupant had intended to return later on to make it up properly. The disturbed sheets knocked over a stack of books, and were summarily plastered against a wall by a particularly forceful gust of wind and a quick spray of rain that might have actually been hail. One of the books in an overturned stack flipped open, pages rustling past each other, and tumbled end-over-end to join the sheet where they were stuck to the wall by wind pressure. The book hit that wall with a crack that would have made a librarian wince.

The doorknob of the single exit to the room turned, and for a moment the door creaked and groaned before giving way and opening, albeit reluctantly and with far more effort than was probably required.

"Kid, you awake up here? It sound like you're throwing some sorta party – emphasis on the throwing part –"

The person attempting to enter the room immediately hit a problem in doing so in the form of several rain-soaked sheets that almost seemed to have a life of their own. It took him a few minutes to untangle himself from the mass of fabric. After doing so, he gathered them up in his arms, quickly tossed them out into the hallway to deal with later, and then crossed to the open window, closing it and latching it shut. The storm raged on, still as furious as before, but no longer able to get inside the house.

Hitch, the Redfort's house manager and unofficially named butler – who just so happened to work part-to-full time as a field agent for one of the world's most clandestine secret organizations – surveyed the bedroom, which now resembled as close as you could realistically get to ground zero after a nuclear explosion. He took in the piles of books, now dispersed carelessly across the floor; the walls – irregularly splattered with rain, leaves and dirt – and the desk, of which all but one of its piles of notes were scattered to every corner of the room and beyond – the remaining pile having been saved from the same windy fate by a conveniently placed butterfly paperweight. One of the bookshelves that had previously lined the walls had been catastrophically toppled over, and now presented an ideal picture of exactly how not to arrange your furniture.

Finally, Hitch's gaze travelled to the bed, which - quite apart from having been ignobly stripped of its sheets and blankets by the wind – was conspicuously absent of its usual occupant, who by his time should have been under the covers, fast asleep and dreaming.

He didn't move for a long moment, and then he crossed over to the intercom button mounted on the wall, clicking the 'whole house' button down. "Hey, kid. Looks like your room got trashed a bit; you left a window open. And come find me when you've got time - I got some things you might find interesting."