Behind The Locks || ONC 2024

Chapter 4: Healed Wounds

Arielline needed to know more about the library, but getting home late wasn't to her advantage. Zack, the Twelve Locks Valley history avid, was deep asleep and trust me not even landmines or earthquakes could wake him up.

After a day like that, how could anyone sleep?

She couldn’t help but wonder what happened when she was out and her friends had not yet made it. What the white smoke did to her.

Frankly, apart from scraped knees, elbows, and a few more bruises, she couldn't say there was anything out of the typical taking part in her body.

Who knew? Maybe it was like a set time bomb, tick-tick-tick and out of a stormy oblivion she would find herself as semi-transparent smoke.

On her to-do list was no picture of her lifeless, nebulous form gliding and haunting people.

The just thought gave her chills. 

Reasoning out of fear had never been the best idea, so she had to purge the horror images and decide whether to appear at work on the following day or the resignation letter instead.

If it was in a fantasy story, this would be the part where the benevolent, misunderstood witch is in dilemma; she has to choose between going back to Crystal Kingdom raining with havoc or venture into unknown lands with no guaranteed welfare, except protagonists never die, and in the plot of her life there was no promised second.

Waging with ghosts in the same room was neither what she signed up for nor vile she was ready to cope with.

On condition that she was going back, she had to be promised that that was the first and last time to ever see it. If not, it was never going to work between her and the library job.

Nick promised that it would be safe, if only he knew the darkness lurking behind those library walls.

His compassion, in contrast to her anticipation, blew her mind. 

The last time she could recall uttering a word to him was when she went to purchase coffee in the Crispy Donuts Cafeteria and both Dan and Mirabelle were busy. 

“A cup of coffee please,” was not worth practical doctoring and a free ride home, was it?

Considering the fact that he was at the bottom of the people-who-can-save-me list, after Scooby Doo and dinosaurs, a dollop of guilt galloped down her gullet.

She often considered handsome boys dangerous, but Nick wasn't worth that much of a distance. Maybe the stereotype was old fashioned, or just pubescent.

She had to deflate the boundary between them, but not too intimately. It would end up like her and Gary.

°*°

Throbbing walls and a piercing rough rhythm of a familiar guitar rampage, moored her from sleep. 

How she conked after such a devastating day could only be explained as a side effect of working under the same roof with ghosty smoke.

Ill-fatedly, their four bedroom duplex was adjacent to that of a rockstar, if not an old fella with a relentless obsession of hard rock music.

For a good morning, he almost blew her ear drums.

Lucky for her alarm, it didn't have to bother waking her up.

She stretched her arms, merely feeling any pain from the stale wounds.

Her elbows and knees ached less compared to the previous night, and as far as she could recall, they had been ripped off their vail.

The sterilized gauzes enveloped around them seemed to excel in their job; keeping her skin intact, and so did the painkillers.

If she had a terrible memory, she would have been safe to say that she wasn't hurt. It was a morning just like all others.

Dr Nick, surprisingly, had talent in the field of fixing cuts.

They say curiosity killed a meow-meow, but it wouldn't hurt getting a glimpse on the massive progress her injuries had undergone overnight.

She screened one of the looped bandage on her left knee, jabbing her plastic nail extensions on its end. She thrusted out pins tacked to it and began unlooping.

Dr Nick had a lot of bandage to waste, judging by the number of loops, and by each count curiosity apace. 

She rolled her hands above the knee and below its bridge countless times before she met a stained gauze. She couldn't say she was surprised, she had been bleeding before Nick patched it up, so it could have continued a moment after treatment.

The dry, light-red stain thickened as she got rid of the gauze until the last layer she excruciatingly expected to ache like dilating a row wound, in the process of ridding it.

She took in a deep breath and out, holding the gauze as tight as her thin fingers could. Unceremoniously drawing it off her skin, she felt nothing as planned.

She kept her eyes closed for the agonizing aftermath, but nothing happened for a solid three seconds. She slowly ajerred her pressed eyelids, in unison, baring in mind that pain could strike any second.

Her eyes located the knee and were whacked with a magnitude of shock.

The wound was gone.

She lured her face closer, doubting her sense of sight. Maybe hallucination was also a side effect.

It was gone. Not even a nick of its remnants was visible.

She grazed her fingers gently on the skin, and her eyes were proven right.

Her skin was equally fair, and evenly colored. 

Like nothing ever happened, it was as good as new.

She couldn't hitch the urge to unknot her elbows, other knee, and peek under her pajamas.

Swiftly, she detached anything that was supposed to be covering a wound. She couldn't believe it.

All pain and wounds were gone and out of them was her skin restored, healthy and evenly colored, like its adjacent skin parts.

Her dressing table’s mirror bought it too, it displayed no bruise on the lower part of her right chest cage. 

From books, TV series, movies, and other reliable sources, the connotation of ghosts was empty of anything resembling life. Riot, violence, and murder were common terms in its basic description. Indubitably, healing was not on the list. 

What was happening to her?