Parallel [ONC 2020] // Shortlisted

Chapter Eight

Ricky kept watch at the door for any teachers since she was the only one who could come up with an excuse quick enough to lead them away, whilst Mitch and I started to move things off the shelf to expose the hole. Although most of the study had been redone, the brick had been repainted and the hole had gone unnoticed by whoever may have renovated the property. Father's hiding spot had remained hidden.

We moved the few books and trinkets that blocked the hole in the wall, and I watched as Mitch grabbed a ruler and eased it into the small gap between the stones to work the brick out. When the brick had been loosened, he grabbed it and pulled it out to expose the gap between the bricks. I reached in and gathered up the items that were inside, taking them out and watching Mitch slide the brick back into place before we snuck back out of the room and retreated further into the house to make sure no one would find us or the items from the wall.

The three of us moved up the house to one of the rooms that Ricky said acted for storage. It was filled with disused desks and chairs as well as cabinets and an assortment of other items. We settled into the room perching on a series of desks or sitting on the chairs that weren't stacked haphazardly around the room. I placed the items onto the desk and the three of us started to sort through it all.

"This place has been renovated plenty of times in the past and not one person saw a loose brick? Mad!" Ricky exclaimed, looking at the items on the table.

"What is all of this?"

"The book is the family Bible, the small ovals are the photographs of myself and Luke and I don't know about the other trinkets, I've never seen them before."

Mitch reached across the desk and grabbed one of the photograph frames. He used an abandoned dust sheet to wipe the thick layer of dust off the glass and exposed the black and white photograph within. The photograph was off Luke a few weeks after he had been born, Mother always said he was remarkably difficult to keep still and that remained true the older he became.

"This is insane." Mitch places the photograph back on the desk. "Do you want to check the Bible?"

"Yes."

I grabbed hold of the edge of the Bible and pulled it towards me, wiping a dust sheet across the top to reveal the gold pattern that covered the hard-bound cover. The binding of the book groaned slightly as I opened it, having become weathered with age and a lack of handling. Inside the Bible, the pages were withered and tinted yellow, I had to be extra careful in handling it to make sure the pages didn't tear. Every detail about our family was in this book, from the things I knew to the things I was oblivious to.

"I've never seen one of these in person." I gave him a strange look. "They're not commonplace these days, no one I l know has one. I reckon only those who live in places like these still have one."

"We went to a stately home once and saw one, mum said that if we had one it was long gone. They kept it in a glass case and the person showing it to us wore white, fabric gloves to protect it. If this place had been a museum and not a school, I reckon you could sell it for thousands," Ricky said.

"This is a part of my family, my life, I'm not going to sell it. It's going right back where we found it because it is a part of this house, it always will be, regardless of what happens to this house and what it may become."

I turned the pages and gently smoothed out each one as I passed through our family history. From births to baptisms and deaths, everything about our family had been detailed within this book including family members I had never met before. Our family had owned the house since the first brick was laid and the Bible was a testament to that, a showing of our legacy and the mark we were leaving behind. Father wanted our legacy to go on forever, but our home had been turned into a school and everything about it was different. We had lost our legacy.

The pages felt rough under my fingers until I continued to turn the pages in the book until I came to the page that contained my birth date, baptism date but unlike everyone else, no death date. To the world and to my family, I had disappeared into thin air without a trace and no one knew what had happened so my death date had not, and if I couldn't make it back in time, would never be recorded. If I didn't make it home, the page would stay blank.

"Anything?" Mitch asked.

"Nothing. I have no recorded death date, although that isn't much of a surprise. Everything else is the same as I remember, though."

"So it's another dead end?"

"We're going in circles with this, there is no documentation of this type of phenomena, so we have nowhere to go and no definitive way of getting you home. The only thing I can think of is stone tape theory but that's supposed to be echoes of the past, not the past itself. It's not like past lives or anything like that, this is a real person from the past in our present with no way back."

"Then what do we do next?" I asked.

"I don't think there is anything to be done about it. There is nothing we can do to help since we don't know how you got here in the first place so we can't replicate it to get you back."

"What your saying is that I'm stuck here?"

"Yes."

~~~

A/N - Chapter Eight!!! YAASS