Behind The Locks || ONC 2024

Chapter 21: How?

The keys where hidden where no one could find them? It took Arielline a trip on the floor and a flat-face fall.

Everyone had been silent from the moment Mirabelle begun reading the book, and all it did was addle them more.

“Crap. How does that help us? None of that happened, but fog flooding. Only in the library,” Arielline was going out of her mind. She knew there was something in her, and the fact that the night watchman had something too —though little was discussed about him— brought her more fear.

“Actually,” Nick stated after a desperate rant from Arielline. “There were whispers.”

“What do you mean?” Mirabelle, who should have been the least concerned, quizzed frantically a moment after Nick went speechless.

“I heard my mom whispering at me one day when I was passing by.” He paused as if contemplating about the next word to utter. “I didn't know it could lead to all of these,” he uttered apologetically.

Something about his tone made Arielline regret bringing up the topic in the first place. It wasn't her intent to hear her crush sob for the second time in one night.

“I summoned her, but it wasn't her that appeared, it was something else.”

“The imperium?” Zack quizzed, eager to hear the next chapter of the beginning of a horror story.

“I don't know. I escaped before it caught me, but I think it got her.” He pointed his finger at Arielline who ran speechless. “I did it the night before we found her laying on the floor.”

Arielline had no idea anyone had a clue that she held an entity inside. It took her by surprise and worsening the matter, it was her boyfriend to be, in her dreams, that had led to all this mess.

“I'm so sorry Arielline. I didn't know.. I didn't mean to..”

The apology felt rather uncomfortable than soothing.

“Its, ok. We just have to find a solution for all this and we will be safe and alive.” Her words didn't seem to console him.

She walked over to him, her heart picking up a pace that it only picked up when she was in danger or in a run. Her belly formed uncomfortable lumps.

Once she took a seat next to him propping their back against a wall, she laid her head on his shoulder.

He seemed startled by the abrupt confrontation, but he didn't bother to utter another word.

“Everything is going to be ok,” Arielline muttered in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Aah, I hate to break it to you guys, but we should be getting out of this room before the hour is over,” Mirabelle broke the peaceful moment with yet the smartest statement of her life.

It was ten minutes to eleven and no one wanted to know what would happen if a ghost from the afterlife would arrive and find intruders in his or her dominion.

They leaped from the room and locked the door behind them.

It wasn't until silence had devoured the surroundings and Nick's argony had subsided that Zack quizzed, “so, if my sister is the imperium, what will happen to her?”

Arielline raised her head from Nick's shoulder, waiting for anyone with an answer to put it on the table.

“They killed the night watchman, didn't they?” As uncomfortable as everyone else was, Zack seemed to be the most disturbed.

“No, we are not going to kill her,” Nick said in her defense.

Arielline was warmed up with his compassion, though she was beginning to think that Zack had a point.

“We have to get it out of her,” Zack suggested as if he had just the idea of how to do it.

“How?”