Hunter

Chapter 8

         Last night before the full moon. I knew Arthur was not sleeping well at all. You could hear him moan. Yet I had eventually fallen heavily asleep. I was exhausted by all these questions spinning around in my skull, bumping into its thick walls, allowing my fears and worries to echo in me.

** I was dripping with sweat. Again. Outside, the moon was high and proud while I could not sleep. When I would closed my eyes, freezing chills would go through my whole body, forcing me to open them again. And when I would finally fall asleep, I would be haunted by nightmares I never remembered once awoken. My head hurt. The discussion I had spied on came back to me. My father was hiding something from me, something about my own existence. I wanted to ask him directly, but... If he hid it from everybody, it was no doubt because he had a good reason. Nonetheless, I had to know.

I sneaked out of my room, careful not to let the door creak. I checked that my father was asleep before going to his office to snoop around. He was. Once in front of the door of the office, I pushed the handle. The door did not move. Dad had locked the door. There was indeed something he did not want me to know. I would have to pick the lock since I had no idea where dad kept the key.

Mom's old bobby pins.

In a few moments, the door was open. In the office, the moon gave enough light for me to see without turning on any light. What a luck. Dad and I had stopped closing the shutters a long time ago... Mom used to do it. Something had change since my last visit. Books were missing. Books did not interest me anyway. What I needed were my father's logbooks. The one I had started last time, the fifth one. At least that is what had been written on the flyleaf. The stories it told dated back to three years. I needed to take a look to older ones. If the colleague who had come thought my "case" suspicious, maybe I would find information in the logbook telling stories dating back to my birth year. I went back in time, opening the logbooks frantically, looking at flyleaves and dates of the first thought which had been lain on the paper. It is that way I discovered the third logbook had disappeared. It was the one matching my birth year, for sure. Thus, there was a secret my father was trying to keep. Anxious and angry, I put the logs back and dropped heavily in the chair of the desk. I stared at nothing. Then, my eyes fell on sheets of paper where scientific articles were printed. I read some... They were all about the same thing. Dad was doing research he had forgotten to hide.

A theory assembled in my head. My hands started to shake while I looked for a moon calendar in the drawers of the desk. Knowing my father's job, he had to have one... He did have one. I looked at today's date. The next day was the full moon. My agitated sleep had not stopped worsening as the week went by and tonight, the night before, I could not sleep more than an hour. The calendar dropped at my feet. I could hardly breathe. I left the room, passed through the hallway like a gust of wind and went quickly downstairs to the bathroom. I splashed my face with cold water. If I were correct... No, I could not think about that! I looked in the mirror.

My nose was bleeding. 

**