Missing in time // {UNDER EDITING BEFORE CONTINUATION}//

Chapter 1

Gravel crunches under the car's tires, and a house comes into view. It's three stories tall, painted white, with a wraparound porch. A gap in the dull curtains that cover the large, dusty windows give us a good enough view of the living room. The couches and the large piano are covers in white sheets. All the bookshelves have cloth drawn over them. The lights are off. The epitome of abandoned.

My car pulls up to the front porch, I turn off the music. For a second, all four of us sit in silence, staring at the faded, white paint. The doors unlock; I climb out, followed by Tess, Andrea, and Jessie.

Jessie shivers in the autumn breeze, her thin coat doing little to help against the frosty air.

"I'm cold, this is creepy, can we just get what we need and leave?" she asks, hugging herself.

"Yeah, come on," I start towards the porch, the wooden stairs creak beneath me.

"There's nothing to film here, Tess," I say, noticing Tess has her ever-present camera out.

"Ghosts!" Tess instantly says, maybe a little too excited.

"Yeah and whose ghost could we possible find?" Andrea asks, rolling her eyes, as I search beneath flower pots for the spare key. Tess doesn't answer, haven fallen silent. Although no one says it, the answer is evident in the stillness of the air; we're all thinking the same thing. Cassie.

I quickly grab the spare key, unlocking the front door. It swings open to reveal the front hall. The living room is visible to our left, the dining room to the right. Dust hangs in the air, floating visibly in the rays of afternoon light. I take the first step in, casting my gaze around.

I haven't been here in over two years- no one has. The last time I was here was the summer before freshman year, not even a month before everything happened.

The house feels cold, silent, like it's holding its breath, waiting for something. I walk through quickly, anxious to get out. Through the living room, back through the kitchen, turn right: a staircase. It leads to a small attic-like crawl space that no one was ever sure of the reason of. The mostly randomly placed storage area I've ever seen; the holding place of some dumbass lamp that Cassie's mom wanted us to get. I had offered to go find it, since I knew I would be in the area anyways, but now I'm regretting it.

Tess is behind me, filming, as always, as I climb the narrow set of carpeted stairs, coming up into the small space. It's filled with stuff. Random boxes, shelves dusty and covered, stuff.

"Alright," I say as the rest of my friends step inside, "we're looking for a kind of dark blue lamp, with like, a shell base, whatever the hell that is." We split up, searching through the shelves and boxes. Why people own so many things?

After a minute, I find a dark blue lamp, I pull it up- definitely not "shell bottomed". The base is triangular.

Minutes tick by into what feels like hours, into what feels like days. Lamps and random crap, box after box. Tess finally breaks the silence.

"Hey! Come here!"

"Did you find the fucking lamp?" Jessie asks, brushing dust off her jeans. She climbs out of where she was cornered by boxes and bins.

"No, but it's cool," Tess says. We all clamber over to where she is, my eyes land on a video camera in her hand, coated in dust.

"Is that what you wanted us to see?" I scoff, "are you going to add it to your collection?" Tess, if you didn't know, has a thing for cameras. As in she has a collection of over 40 from all different times. This appears to be fairly recent, not so different from the one she uses to film everything. I wouldn't think it'd be that valuable to collect, but who am I to know?