Silence

Chapter Three - Illuminating. Alone.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait - its how we behave while we're waiting. – Joyce Meyer

Chapter Three - Illuminating. Alone.

Jaron's bed had not been touched. The creases in the sheets had been smoothed out and the quilt on top had been tucked into the sides. All nicely made up for someone to slip into and fall asleep in a mountain of warm hugs from the blankets. But Jaron couldn't sleep. The kerfuffle he had just heard downstairs was preventing him from drifting into dreamland. In fact it was actually energizing him. All the thoughts and questions running laps around his head were putting his brain into overdrive, like one too many cups of coffee.

Jaron pressed his face into his hands, in an attempt to shut off at least some of his brain's speculation. Somehow his parents weren't who they said they were. Despite all the uncertainty surrounding them, there was one thing he knew for certain; he had to find out what they were doing, and Jaron had horrible feeling that he only had until his birthday to find out.

And then there were all the other things he had to take into consideration as well. The Shift. The man. The woman. The folders.

The folders! Jaron stood up abruptly knocking a pillow off the covers. The folders. Surely somewhere his parents had made copies on their computers or something. Somewhere in their office they must have hidden a record of the details. It was just a matter of where exactly...

Shoving aside the rambling thoughts in his head, Jaron crept towards his door. He edged it open and peered onto the landing. As he expected the dark hall was empty, but it never hurt to be careful. He eased the door open slightly more, enough for his body to fit through, and he stepped out into the dark.

Jaron's parents' office was at the back of the house, overlooking the back garden. When he was younger, he often saw his parents watching from the windows, hidden behind gauzy curtains.

The amount of times Jaron had seen his parents stow away in their office greatly overshadowed the actual amount of time Jaron had visited the room. He had only been in there a grand total of twice. Once when he was four and didn't know any better, where he had learned the obligatory lesson to "never enter again". The second was a dare in 6th grade. His parents had been on another business call and his old nanny, Freya, had been asleep on the couch. Somehow in the 36 and a half second he had been in there with his cousin, a table had fallen over, not the fault of the either of them mind you, and a shelf with numerous stacks of paper had ended up on the floor. Needless to say his cousin hadn't been over since.

Jaron carefully crept down the stairs once more, this time actually reaching the ground below instead of stopping halfway. The entrance hallway was quite dark, only illuminated by a window above the door that allowed moonlight to seep through, casting creepy shadows with the various antiques scattered about. Jaron shuddered.

He had never been someone with an overly active imagination. Certainly he had a good one, and his writing displayed that distinctly, but growing up mostly alone had conditioned him to the difference between rooms with light and without. In short, the dark didn't frighten him anymore.

Well not up until the weird stuff took a front seat in his life. And grabbed the keys. And drove off with the little information Jaron had, leaving him with a pile of unanswered questions and no means of answering them. So he was really hoping that the files might, at the very least, get him on the right track.

Within a minute of skulking in the dark, Jaron had reached the heavy door to his parents' office. He twisted the handle tentatively. Surprisingly the door was unlocked. He assumed his parents thought Jaron to be a quiet and trusting boy, not ever, or at least rarely, noticing slightly off things about them.