Forty-One After Midnight (Completed)

Chapter Thirteen

We ended up staying up the entire night that time. Mrs. Reeves left us for a while to go dig around the school, hoping to uncover some ancient yearbook from over one-hundred years ago. We weren't going to get hopeful though. The odds of that happening were not very likely.

While she was gone we spent most of our time looking through books in the library. Most of which didn't even pertain to what we were doing, but we really had nothing better to do.

At one point I noticed that Jane was just sitting next to me. Watching me. She looked like she was staring at an old friend. I guess in a way she was, but she seemed to have a look of concern on her face and I had to know why.

"Is there something you'd like me to know?" I asked after a while.

She pointed to the journal I left sitting on the table next to the other book I was now reading. I closed that book and pulled the journal over in front of me. I looked over at Jane who made the number 104 with her fingers. I flipped to page 104, the last page.

It is hard for me to say this. I guess I did something bad. I honestly did not mean to though. It was a complete accident. Now they have locked me away. Mr. Williams thinks I did it, but I would never hurt anyone. Ever. She fell. I tried to stop her. I just... I wasn't fast enough. A teacher came and saw me standing there at the top of the stairs and she looked from me to Mary. Instantly she started screaming at me and no matter how much I cried and begged her to believe me, she would not.

She took me straight to Mr. Williams's office. He had me put in my room and locked there for the rest of the night. I heard him say I would not be joining my class the next morning. Oh I hoped I would not be locked in here forever. That seemed like it would be quite terrible.

Here I sit now at 9:04pm. I can hear people coming down the hallway. They walk all the way to my room and stop just outside the door. I am relieved when I hear whoever it is pulling out keys. It looks like they might be letting me out. Maybe they found out it was just an accident after all.

I closed the book, pushed it aside, and looked over at Jane. She was staring at the ground.

"Did... did they kill her?" I asked. She looked up and me and nodded, the sad look still in her eyes. "That must have been terrible," I said. "She was your best friend.

She nodded.

I realized something now. Something that was probably very important. I just didn't quite know why at the time.

"Wait a minute. How am I so important? Helena died before the trapping started."

She made more numbers with her fingers. This time it was number seventy-four. I flipped to page seventy-four.

Daniel Lewis got locked in his room last week and never came back. I wonder what happened to him. I miss seeing him around. I hope he comes back soon.

That was all I read and I already knew. What was going to happened to Helena at the end of her journal, had already happened to Daniel Lewis. They were murdering innocent children under false accusations. This was terrible. Again though, it made me think.

"Jane, did all of these kids, the ones we're finding, our past lives, did they all die before the trapping?"

Jane nodded.

So now I knew that in order to be involved, you didn't necessarily have to be alive. I turned to the rest of my friends.

"You guys?" They all looked over at me. "We were all dead before this happened. All of us kids anyway. What do you think that means?"

"You know what I think?" Kyle stood up. "I think there's a possibility we were used as sacrifices of some sort. If you really think about it, what else could we do being dead?" He started to walk around the room. "That... and I was just reading this book on sacrifices." He held it up. "I'm not really sure it relates, but I read that when doing rituals of any kind, and we're all assuming that's what went down here, sacrifices of some sort are always a key element."

That was always possible. I remembered the torn page that Kelsey and Jane dug up. It did mention the word sacrifice. I thought for a moment and then stood up.

"We need to find that book," I said and started for the door.

"So where are you going?" Kelsey asked.

"It's obviously not in here."

"Anyone could have it." Kyle started to walk over to me. "How do you expect to find it?"

"What if someone took it on purpose? That book had at least an inch thick layer of dust on it when I found it. Nobody has touched it since it was put there. I think, because they saw that someone actually took interest, they hid it. They probably know that whatever's in it works."

"Then I'm coming with you."

Of course he was.

"Fine,"I said. "The rest of you stay here though and wait for Mrs. Reeves to get back.