Readers vote on where this story goes next! Welcome to Briarwich. A sleepy coastal town with a dark history. You are Morgan, a college student on a boating trip with your four best friends. When you and your friends become stranded in Briarwich, you...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Doctor Belasco
"If we know where a relic is – and an important one at that – we should go get it right away. Someone around here might catch wise to what we are doing. They could move the knife before we have the chance to go back for it."
The words you speak come out so confident, so assured that you are making the right choice. Now that you are walking the familiar path back toward town, and the hospital, you are feeling a mite less certain that you made the right call. There are no safe options to choose. Any villager you pass on the road could as easily decide to stab you as look the other way. You have no idea if the priest, Father Creed, still possesses the book or is even sane enough to be of any help. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
You strike out for your destination the next morning, and this time you come prepared. Camilla's lantern is clutched tightly in your right hand, ready to be lit and wielded against the forces of evil at a moment's notice. It is hours until sunset, but after losing almost a full day in the orchard, you aren't about to leave behind your most valuable weapon. The lantern's mystic blue light will protect you from all those things that go bump in the night, and the hatchet in your other hand will protect you from just about everything else.
As you clutch carved wooden grip of the brass lantern, you think about Camilla's expression when you declined to go investigate the church for the black book. You could have sworn that the blacks of her irises grew, breaking beyond their barrier and threatening to swallow the whites of her eyes whole. It was only the mention of the file on Benjamin Bellerose at the nurse's station that seemed to tip the scale in your favor.
"That quack has information on the Bellerose boy?" she'd said, leaning back into her chair thoughtfully. "All the more reason to circle back to the hospital, I suppose."
"Raiding the stocks for medical supplies also couldn't hurt," Val offered, validating your decision to the rest of the group. "Something tells me that I'm going to need more than a needle and thread to keep us all in one piece."
As grim a thought as that is, you know that Val is right. Being pre-med, she is the closest thing you have to a doctor among your group, which is why the sight of her now – clutching a butcher's cleaver in her trembling fingers – seems so out of place. To say she was reluctant to pick up any sort of weapon would be an understatement. She would have come along empty handed, had it not been for Malcom and Simon's insistence that she have something, even a sharp stick, to defend herself in a pinch. It only took Malcom waving his injured forearm in front of her face to remind her that nasty bites are the least of what awaits you outside the boundaries of Bright Manor.
The late morning sky above you is as dull and dreary as ever before. This day, the clouds seem fat and bloated, hanging low with the threat of real rain, rather than just blocking out the sun and all other connection to the outside world. The bulk of the storm front looms over the town, and the hospital stands guard near its western border, like a warning – stay away. You unconsciously heed its foreboding message, standing across the street, well away from the front gates.
