Authors: Nicole Lee
Rose had once asked one of the founders why they formulated the Midnight group to begin with. The individual responded with something that was a little over her head, something about keeping the kids away from bad influences.
Either way, Rose truthfully did not care, because she had fun as long as she was the one winning. The way the pastime worked was, if you were to see someone before they saw you, you would throw a paintball in your pocket at the person you had found.
This meant that the opponent you had just marked was now ‘dead’ in the game. She was good at sprinting for long distances without stopping and getting tired much later than everyone else, so she felt talented when partaking in the sport. Rose was a quick runner, mainly because she did not have much weight to carry. Her thinness felt more like a curse than a gift, but the one area it helped her with was the facility to jog faster than almost anyone twice her age.
She had to sneak out of the house in order to meet up with the Clandestine order with every tryst. Since she was not old enough to drive, she had one of the older members, Amy, transport her to the area where the rendezvous was set up.
Her driver was the sister to one of the chief coordinators. In the van, both her and the driver sang along to a song that came on the radio, one whose lyrics went something like Hey Jude, don‘t make it bad. Rose thought Jude was a good name for a witch, perhaps a very cool one she had not met yet. Even back then, she was still dreaming of meeting practitioners of Occultism who were talented enough to teach her their ways - yet this was a while before she had met Ms. Harvey.
Ten minutes later they was standing in the clearing of the woods, surrounded by a lot of other kids, each one of them holding flashlights, an assortment which ranged from the cheap red plastic kind to the most expensive that bargain electronic stores would never be able to carry.
“
Split up,” Amy said. “And remember, these woods are larger than the ones we usually play the game in, so try your best not to go astray. Understood?”
They all nodded, and before long, the pastime commenced.
For the next quarter of a half an hour, she hid behind trees.
Rose found Melinda behind a bush, and immediately threw a handful of paintballs at her by accident. Her clothes, the black jumpsuit, was soaked.
“
Nice job in splattering me,” Melinda said. “You’re Rose Whelan, aren’t you?”
“
Yes,” she said.
Melinda introduced herself, and they shook hands. She thought this girl was interesting, despite all the rumors that her father was an alcoholic and her mother a crazy person. Mean things were said about Melinda behind her back, but Rose was already mature enough to discern how everyone talked badly about everyone else for some reason. She tried not to imagine what they were saying about her.
“
Let’s go find the rest of them,” Melinda said.
“
You won’t rat me out so I’ll get tagged, will you?”
“
Of course not,” she said. “That wouldn’t do me any good when you won fair in square, right? Come on. We don’t want to be here much longer. It’s getting late.”
They continued wandering around the forest, and had no luck in seeing another person, not even the flashlight beam of another student. It became disturbingly quiet.
“
Do you think anyone could be hiding there in that cave?” Rose asked, pointing to the carved out fissure jutting from the ground, looking like a gnarled tangle of abnormal tree trunks that had once been wrapped around the foot of a giant.
Melinda stopped in her tracks. “We’re really far from the group.”
“
What makes you say that?”
“
If we come across a bear cave, that means we’re no longer in the safety zone. This wasn’t where we were supposed to end up, Rosie.”
“
It’s Rose,” she said.
“
Excuse me?”
“
Just Rose.”
“
Sorry. Let’s get out of here, is all. I don’t want to be eaten, do you?”
“
No,” she responded.
Freaked out by their paranoia of a huge grizzly emerging from the grotto and devouring them both in a demented frenzy, both girls began running in the other direction. Rose tried not to do so fast, because she did not want to lose Melinda either, so she slowed herself down in order to stay at the same speed as her new equally lost friend.
“
Look,” Melinda said, raising an arm to point in a direction, before stopping to catch her breath.
“
What? The owl? It’s pretty.”
“
Not that,” she said. “There’s a light over there. Maybe that’s where the rest of our group is at.”
“
It’s worth a try.”
They were off and sprinting again, pushing aside dozens of knotted branches. Although it was summer, it was still very cold past midnight in Lake Pines, and their clothing was failing to keep them warm as the hours became longer and the sounds of nocturnal birds became louder.
Soon they found out what the light was - a street lamp. They were now in the middle of a cement road. The only view was one of mountains in the great beyond, and the rest of it was flat land. The lane had no residences on either side of it, except one noticeable residence.
The large and two storied dwelling in front of them appeared as if it could have come from the seventeenth century. It was made entirely of black and gray stone. Turrets peaked from the surface of the roof, and at the very obverse part there was a spire which had been built taller than the rest, above the entryway. It looked menacing and discarded, as if it had not been lived in for centuries.
Nevertheless, on the second level, there was an old woman dressed in white staring back at them through a cobweb covered window. The stranger then receded into the background’s gloom. The lady is what motivated them to go inside. At this point, they were two lost and alone adolescent girls. The unearthly figure was the first person they had seen besides each other for an hour now.
“
Let’s try and meet her,” Rose said.
“
But she’s a stranger. I was taught not to introduce myself to people I didn’t know without my mother’s permission.”
“
Come on, let’s just do it. I want to go home. She‘s the only help we have.”
They walked up the cobblestone pathway leading to the wooden entrance. They both knocked on it frantically.
“
Over here,” Melinda said, walking in the hedgerows, crushing plant life with the soles of her feet. “The window’s cracked open. Let’s go inside. Maybe there’s a phone we can use to call our parents.”
“
You mean Amy,” Rose corrected her. “If we call our parents, we’ll both be in a world of trouble. Good catch, though, seeing the window.”
They crawled inside. As soon as their feet hit the pavement of the main hall, inexplicable noises could be heard in the detachment beyond.
“
This person has more toys than I do,” Melinda said, looking around. “And I grew up in a house with sisters.”
There were old, abandoned children’s dolls lying everywhere on the floor. None of them looked modern, or for that matter even very American. A lot of them reminded Rose of those ancient Russian tea sets that she had seen on television cartoons, only these were broken and malformed by time.
“
Let’s go upstairs and get her,” Rose said.
“
Do you think she’ll be mad about us coming through here without even asking?”
“
If she has grandchildren, no. She couldn‘t want hurt us.”
They kicked aside all of the clutter with their feet while making their way to the staircase. After climbing its grubby stone steps, they walked down the wide hallway.
“
I didn’t expect hide and seek to ever have anything to do with this,” Melinda said. “Hey, here’s a door.”
She twisted the knob and walked in.
“
Is anyone in there?” Rose asked, standing in the passage outside.
“
No,” Melinda said. “There’s not a person in here, except-”
That was when Melinda fell into the floor. The wooden board beneath her gave, and she bowed through the cracks. Rose screamed, wanting to do something helpful. Yet she also knew that if she were to step into that room then she would find herself in the same predicament.
“
Are you okay, Melinda?” Rose screamed out the words.
A few seconds passed. “My ankle’s hurt. Find that woman! Tell her I need help!”
“
I’m going right now,” she said, turning away from the empty room and running
down the vestibule. She stumbled through spiders netting, before finding another doorway.
Rose opened it and cautiously stepped inside, making sure the ground she was about to cross was not hollow. Finding that it was secure, she entered it. The place had chains hanging from the ceiling. Rose would, later on in life, realize that this room was actually the slave quarters; that was how old this creaking mansion happened to be. Finding no one there, she made her way out into the hallway once again. The place was darker with each step.
Coming across another access, she opened it and stepped inside, afraid that this wooden bottom would collapse as well.
This room had nothing in it except a table with ivory legs and a set of primordial, dirt encrusted cups. At first she did not see anyone. A whisper formed behind her.
Rose could have sworn that an insect flew out of the older woman’s mouth, but thought of it rationally as a gob of saliva.
“
My friend is hurt. We were just playing around in the forest, and we got in serious trouble. Melinda, my friend, fell through your floor.”
“
What are you doing here?”
“
We need help. You were the only person we saw for miles. Please believe me.”
Rose moved a few steps in reverse, feeling the cold window against her skin. She went to grab the woman’s dress, before seeing something out of the ordinary. Her hand went directly through the material, as if it were nothing more than air.
She looked up to find the woman wearing a sinister smile.
“
You will die,” the woman said. “All of you will die.”
The stranger released a distraught cackle, before vanishing into a large vapor fog.
The howling wind picked up outdoors, loudly carrying foliage against the glass.
Rose ran out into the passageway, and then started running faster than she even knew her feet could carry her, especially after such a wearying time.
“
Melinda!” Rose screamed the name out again.
She could hear her name being called back. “Rose!”
After finding the main foyer in a matter of minutes, she discovered her there. Melinda’s foot was bloodied. They hugged each other, not so much to just embrace, but also for Rose to help Melinda carry herself out.
They escaped the manor, trotting into the empty avenue and going across a vacant dirt lot. Soon they were in a neighborhood, although it looked to be a block full of run down tenements. They found a police car after two streets of carrying along, still filled with panic. The officer jumped out of his vehicle and ran up to them.
“
What are you two doing out so late in a place like this?”
They didn’t answer him, but they climbed into his car hastily. They shouted their real addresses, and the officer told them something in reaction. “I’m going to take you to the hospital, first. Then I‘ll call your parents to come and pick you up. Is that okay?”
Both nodded, even though they were dreading having to explain this to their mothers and fathers.
In the lit up phosphorescent emergency room, however, Melinda had turned to Rose, gazing at her with an expression that was both worried and critical. “Let’s not tell anyone about this. Not even ourselves.”
Rose shook her head in agreement, wondering if the color that her face had gradually lost was regained at all.
They would ask around for the next few remaining years about that manor, and everyone claimed it did not exist. They did on-line searches, and even attempted to go back there one day, together, only to discover a barren road. The place where they knew the mansion to be was nothing more than a large square of dirt.
“
What did you experience when you collapsed through those floorboards?” Rose asked years later, after they had agreed to never converse about the incident again. They were sitting in the computer lab during break on a wintry day.
Melinda said, “I saw what you saw. A ghost.”
“
The same one?”
“
No,” Melinda responded after a long while. “A boy whose skin was burnt.”
“
Melinda,” Rose said, ignoring her observation, “remember-”
“
I know,” she said. “We read a paper about it together. On-line at the school library? The manor we were in did exist at one time, although it‘s not there anymore, and it sure as hell wasn‘t supposed to be standing when we had the bad luck of going around inside of it.” She stopped, before finishing her thought. “The place burned down in the 1920‘s.”
Rose knew there was an explanation for this, although she would not find it out until much later.
When two blood related witches who are in discord with one another find themselves in the same area, two things occur to the region they are occupying. Firstly, the dead rise and can be seen by those who practice the paranormal arts. The second thing is that in addition to a slew of unexplained phenomena, a curse of bad luck soon befalls whatever town the family are in. Rose would later theorize that Karen must have been in Lake Pines back when they were in the hide and seek group, for something far worse than the experience in the mansion would happen during her Senior year. Hemera would make a second visit.