❝Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.❞
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Alissa Cameron was just an ordinary high scho...
[ THE HUMAN CONDITION ] CHAPTER XXIII: SHIT'S CREEK
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❝ We are all capable of doing every terrible thing that we are capable of doing. ❞ Mokokoma Mokhonoana
❀
THE DOOR EASED ITSELF ajar upon my push, the lock clicking open with just a little twist and pull from the key Billy gave me. The lights were shut off, my fingers mindlessly feeling around in the darkness for the switch. After several tries with no luck, my fingertips grazed a bump on the wall. I froze and backtracked, finding a switch was the origin of the bump, my mind a jumbled mess of the possibilities. I tossed a finger up decisively.
Fluorescent light spread through the room, every object from the cabinet desk to the file stacks over under the windowsill under fire. I let the door shut behind me, but it kept open with a creak, disobeying my mute order.
Secretly, quietly search was the agenda, no witnesses was the safety measure. I kicked my foot blindly backwards, the breakable wood emitting a loud slam that made me wince. Good thing old places like this kept old. No security cameras. No one wanted to break into an archive, anyway.
I tucked my key into my back pants pocket and set to work.
Out of the window came daylight, shining like a candle in a sealed room. It was a treasure as I got to sifting through documents. My greedy hands went straight to the aged desk drawers, knowing they were most likely for Archives entries. Written thoughts were almost sacred to an archivist—history in the making if I aimed to flatter.
I was shit out of luck there. The only useful information I found were leaflets for the reserve's history and a journal that, upon thumbing a few pages, revealed itself to be a self-made dictionary translating Quileute from English, English from Quileute. There were no folders containing journal entries from any time period, not Arcus's time or the decades before. I searched through the next three drawers and I expected a different outcome; nothing came out of my pursuit.
Truthfully, I expected to find what I was looking for in that first drawer. It was a disappointment that unsettled me when expectations were met with the opposite.
"Goddammit, you old asshole," I muttered to myself, taking out my frustration on the air. I wandered over to the far wall, feet from the windowsill, where I again used my fingers to go through a cabinet of files. "Where'd you put your files if they're not at your stupid desk?"
Obvious answer: he'd hidden them.
The obvious answer was the in-your-face answer, and usually it was stupid. This one ticked the mark excellently. Why would my father, the council emissary and seasoned archivist, hide entry journals when he had to write his own every day? When he was checking back to compare this generation to the last?
