The End [Completed]

6

The next day Adam and I went to the address and knocked on the door. It was an old house in the middle of nowhere. It looked entirely abandoned, as if nobody had lived there for years. It had to have been a mistake. How could our teacher send us here?

We knocked again but there was no movement. Adam tried the door, it was locked. I peered through the grime filled windows and only saw darkness within. How was this supposed to help us? I walked around the back and discovered one of the windows hadn’t been latched properly. I looked around for a flat stick and found a flat metallic window bar among some of the random parts lying around in the back yard.

I pushed the bar between the latch and the window frame and jimmied the latch completely off, the window slid open and I was just the right size to slide in. “Adam!” I called “Help me up into this window, will you? I’ll see if I can open the door from the inside to let you in.” “Are you sure this is okay? Don’t you think that we should wait for the owners to come back first?” he asked “I honestly don’t think there has been an owner of this place for years. It’s totally safe, just help me up and keep watch, will you?” He sighed and clasped his hands together to make a step for me to put my foot in to climb in through the window.

I landed on something soft. When I looked down I saw that it had been an old mattress. Somebody must’ve put it there to either sleep on or step on when climbing through the window. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw that it was just one room. The whole house consisted of one room, in the corner there was a kitchen and in the opposite corner there was a door that must have led to a toilet. I went to the kitchen, assessing the lock and realising that it was only locked with a common latch bolted to the frame. I unlatched it and Adam came in through the door, letting in some light into the stuffy, dark room.

As the light came flooding through, that’s when I noticed it. Adam and I stood frozen, just staring at the room in which we stood. Aligning the walls were heaps upon heaps of books!

“this is not supposed to be here” I whispered to Adam, suddenly my stomach was in knots as anxiety kicked in. If someone found us here we would be in big trouble. All books were supposed to be burned, if you were found in possession of a book, you would be imprisoned. What we were doing, was sure to get us locked up. “We need to leave Cattleya.” Adam said. “We need this Adam, lets just look around. See if we can find any useful information among these books and then we’ll just leave okay? Pretend we were never here.” Adam sighed and shook his head, but he approached the furthest wall and picked up a book. “This project means so much to you that you would risk going to prison for it? You are some really weird chick, you know that?” he said. I chose to ignore him at that moment. Because it was the first time in years that I was able to physically touch a book, to feel its pages. That is why I wanted to stay. Not because of the assignment. Regardless of how important it was to me.

Going through as many books as we could, we managed to find some information on our case study and wrote down as much as we could in our tablets. Referring to our source as anonymous. Adam went through the door and I latched it behind him, once again climbing through the window, he helped me get back to the other side, and we proceeded to close the window the way we found it.

We headed back home in silence, and Adams stop was first. He whispered goodbye to me and as he climbed off he took one last glance back at me. I continued to stare at him as he walked towards a small house in the centre of small houses. His house looked like everybody else’s in the neighbourhood and for a moment, he hesitated before opening his door. Then he disappeared inside.

Getting to our neighbourhood I walked into the house and found Mom in the kitchen cooking dinner. “Hey honey, how was the interview for the assignment?” she asked with a smile “uh, went great mom.” I lied. Lying was starting to become too natural to me. I grabbed an apple from the fridge and headed upstairs to pore over the information we had gathered.

I didn’t get to find out information on my vision this time, unfortunately. But I found out something just as valuable. There are people with dangerous secrets. People I might be able to find and maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to get some real answers.