Hopes of Paris

Chapter XIII: Citadel

Sally hung up after talking to Jacquie on the phone in the kitchen. She was standing infront of the counter, eyeing the calendar that stated Sall's birthday. Jacquie had asked her to search Sall's room for anything that may seem funny, and asked her to check things they had previously talked about. Sally hesitatingly agreed. She felt like this was a violation of her brother's privacy, but she wasn't the only one that had a feeling Sall has been acting weird lately. Jacquie was feeling that too, along with Sam and the others. Thus, if this could somehow explain things or guarantee her beloved brother's safety, then it was more than necessary.

Determined, she went into her brother's empty room. Sall's room has changed so much throughout the years. He went from being such a bookworm into a video game addict. His room was now filled with consoles, discs, had a small television for gaming and a bit of shelves for boxes that had gaming merchandise inside of them. Sally took a deep breath, and started taking these boxes off the shelves and searching them one by one. Each one of these boxes, as she expected, had nothing but ridiculous gaming stuff inside of them. Nothing was of interest. That was when Sally stood up and put her hand on her chin, and looked around the room carefully.

"If I was Sall, I'd hide important things in places others can't see," she carefully ran her eyes across the room. "Where, though?"

Her eyes fell on Sall's bed, and she immediately thought of looking under it. Sally kneeled down and started running her eyes beneath the bed. Nothing at all was there. She sighed, then started sitting up, but just before she stood up, she got an idea. She looked underneath the bed again and reached an arm, started tapping the upper part with a fist of her own. The sound of the wooden texture hinted there might be an empty space upwards. Her eyes slightly widened, so she stood up and struggled to move the mattress of Sall's bed aside, revealing there was stuff tidily placed into the bed's wooden bottom. A collection of papers neatly placed on top of one another, and an open cardboard box.

"Bingo."

Sally took hold of the papers first. The paper on top was titled "Chopin's Real Birthdate" and looked like a printed article of a sort. It's the same article Sam had given to Sall three years ago. Sally read the content with a look of pure terror in her eyes. She flipped through the papers and realized how oddly convenient all of this was. The article spoke of Chopin's misery during his life and that his real birthdate is on the twenty second of February, which happens to be Sall's birthday as well. Oddly enough, Sall chose this very day to do the storytelling with his friends; his very own birthday.

She shrugged it off and proceeded to put the papers aside to search the opened cardboard box. She found plenty of stuff inside. Drawings, sketches, a school notebook, and a few shirts and other stuff of no interest. Something was off. She turned the box around and saw text written with a thick permanent black marker. "Zen's Belongings" was written. Sally quickly let go of the box and moved away from the bed, holding up both of her hands against her mouth. She was frightened, surprised and confused all at the same time.

"I thought he gave them back to Pierre... What's going on here?"

She started by examining the drawings and sketches. One of them was a sketch of a male hand holding a female's. She flipped to the next one and it was of the same hands, but the difference was that they were letting go of each other, with the male's hand still reaching. The female's had a stream of blood going down from it. And then, Sally came across a frightening sight. There was drawings everywhere showcasing a car accident and a young boy leaving the flipped over car to run away. There was three corpses inside of that car. Each drawing showed an angle. The male driver's smashed head against the wheel, a female that had been ejected feet away from the car through the front glass and a young girl in the backseat, with a large shard of glass pinning her against the seat into her forehead.