Behind The Locks || ONC 2024

Chapter 3: Jeepers Creepers

Presuming ghosts did exist and they were haunting the library, was that cue for Arielline to man up for it like Sophia Grace did for Fridayvill, or would it be simpler to quit the job instead and let the next librarian suffer their wrath?

Finding the occupation wasn't a joy ride, certainly not in Twelve Locks Valley, it was mere grace from an old acquainted mother of her friend, Mirabelle.

She would hate it to show ungratefulness, not to one of the few adults who understood her. 

The town’s essence to serve as a punishment for her mistake was finally paying off.

A mistake. No. The mistake her sixteen-year-old self committed unwittingly to her long gone sister, Wendy.

She woke up to a phone camera pointed at her face. 

Her head was as bulky as every other part of her body, eyesight blurry, ears deafened, and mind clouded with both confusion and dizziness in equal measures.

Her mouth was stuffed with a metallic taste she desperately wished wasn't what she thought it was. 

It was exactly what she thought it was; blood gushing from the walls of her mouth, if not her insides or both, incorporated.

“Are you dead?” Mirabelle’s unmistakable theatrical sound quizzed.

Arielline was supposed to be the one to ask the question, but since she asked first, it meant that she wasn't.

She answered by barfing a swamp of blood beside her.

“She is awake,” Mirabelle uttered to an audience that didn't respond, instead footsteps grew towards her.

She needn't delve to distinguish the person, his indiscernible Dior Sauvage, lavender, perfume sold him out; Nick, Dan's best friend.

The just thought of him seeing her in such a state churned her underbelly.

Her attempt to get up was infirm, her body ached as if she had been dropped from a sixteen story tower ramming into every balcony. 

“Lemmi help you,” a tone that involuntarily gave her shivers mooted. 

Just before her vocals could clear and utter an arguing statement, he tucked his hands under her armpits from the back and hauled her, propping her back against a library shelf.

“Are you okay?”

His amiability was surprisingly warm. For a girl who ignored him most of the time all in the name of boundaries, she of all people didn't deserve his concern.

A swift rush of blood flooded her cheeks with crimson, her attempts to suppress it failing miserably. 

She considered herself a master paragon, yet from the first day she laid her eyes on him all that circumnavigated her mind was nonsense. 

She hoped the color matched that of the blood that had dried under her pointy nose and some circumference around it.

“Yeah, I.. I think so,” she answered a fragment of energy flaring across her dry vocals.

He pulled out a piece of cotton from a first aid kit, sprayed surgical spirit on it, and dubbed it against the lower part of her nose, so tenderly that she barely felt a thing, if there was anything to be felt.

The cotton came out soaked with dark red blood and was dashed into a white plate beside the kit. He tore apart another piece and did the same as the previous time, only this time he did it on her upper lip.

The glint in his eyes concealed more than just care, she could confirm by the way he slid from each curve and edge of her lips. The reflection of her lips in his eyes sent her own to his lips.