Falling In Love With Slender Man

Chapter 12

--CHAPTER TWELVE-- 

Sage threw her hands up in frustration. She had shed only slight light on her past. She had best friends. Ellie was one of them. Ellie was also the one who had threatened her.

So had they worked that out? Had Sage been exaggerating when she wrote that? Surely three teenage girls weren’t capable of committing murder, were they?

Thousands of questions bounced around in Sage’s head. She had to find the answers. But how on earth could she do that? It was more than likely that they had died along with everyone else in the town. Nobody else would know anything about what she had written. She wished desperately that her memory would return to her.

Shoving the diary back into the trench coat, she stood up off the bed. Ash had gone somewhere, leaving Sage the perfect opportunity to snoop around. Something told her Ash knew everything that had happened. She just had to look in the right places.

Shrugging her thin arms through the baggy sleeves of the coat she headed toward the door. To her surprise it swung open easily, allowing her entrance into the hallway.

She gingerly stepped outside, half expecting something to explode or a large army to come out and push her back into the room. Nothing happened though.

She walked down the winding path, finding no forks in it. Many doors appeared, but all were locked up. She pulled the coat tighter around her as she continued on, the icy air biting bitterly into her skin.

She had been walking for at least a half hour when she saw a warm glow bloom in front of her vision. She hurried along toward it, tripping over her own feet in her rush.

It was the door they had come in. The one that had magically closed behind Ash, shutting out the two boys who had been chasing them.

Why was it open now? Sage wondered idly. Surly Ash he made sure it was secure. He wouldn’t risk them coming inside and harming them.

She shrugged. What did she have to loose? She walked out of the small cave like corridor and into the candle lit area. To her right were more hallways, to her left a set of stairs.

She knew she had come from the right, so she opted to go up the staircase. The stairs were rickety and they creaked as she made her way up them. She wondered if they would cave in. Maybe Ash never used these steps.

She reached the top and was greeted by a large flush of moonlight. Her eyes grew as she saw the room that the steps led to. It appeared to be an old ballroom. The walls were well over twelve feet tall, with floor to ceiling windows that were set in intervals through out the entire space.

The marble floors were cracked and covered in a light blanket of dust. Large velvet curtains fell in heavy folds around the windows, looking like tall, lumbering people.

Only faint traces of the ballrooms former glory could be recognized through the ruinous remains. Sage imagined women in large, puffy skirts waltzing with handsome men, an orchestra playing gently in the background. The room lit with candlelight, glowing an earthy and warm gold.

She walked to the middle of the room and started to elegantly spin to the imaginary music in her mind. Her shoeless feet made small imprints in the soft dirt as she moved her slim legs around, the way she remembered doing before somehow.

She arched her back, folding her hands high above her head and executing a perfect pirouette. The faintest of memories caught at her as she did the much practiced dance move. She remembered a redheaded, middle-aged woman barking at her to try again and again, her hair pulled back in a sever bun. It was her dance instructor.

How she could remember these moves was beyond her explaining, since she couldn’t even recall how to do a simple algebraic expression. Still, it was like riding a bike. She’d never truly forgotten how to dance, even with the amnesia fogging her head.

She spun around and around, jumping and leaping to her own melodies. She couldn’t remember when she started dancing or how many recitals she had gone to, but as she danced around in the moonlit room she recalled her love and utter dedication to ballet.

It fit her, she thought. She couldn’t recall if she had been on the cheerleading squad or not, but she thought that she made a much better ballerina than a cheerleader. Her small, thin frame seemed just right for the sharp spins and large jumps.

She heard a quiet noise, nearly inaudible. She stopped her movement and stared toward the sound, cursing it for interrupting her. It was the first time she had felt carefree, the first time she had a small inkling of what she was really like.

As she was glaring into the darkness a shape started to form. She blinked her eyes, trying to dispel the movement as the blackness messing with her mind. But the form kept coming, slowly turning into the figure of a man. Her breath caught and she waited to face the person coming toward her.