S E V E N
Friends & Foe

MY FEET THUNDERED heavily against the wooden planks used as the boathouse flooring. It had to be barely even five minutes straight of running but I could already feel my breath coming short. Exercising in the cold had its clear downsides, all of which were acting against my chances of survival as of the moment.

The wailings had not completely stopped yet, now reduced to occasional echoes and a few random screams here and there. The further I got away from the room which I had originally woken up in, the colder it got. The air was definitely at icy temperatures, the damp old wood walls of the boathouse already starting to frost at the edges of each plank.

I couldn't help but frown, my eyebrows crinkling as I placed a hand against the wooden walls. Immediately upon contact, I jolted my hand back towards my chest, shocked at what I had just felt. The cold was prominent, the shivering frost creeping onto my fingers the very second in which I grazed the walls with the tips of my fingers. Whenever I opened my mouth, a puff of white smoke would appear, drifting off into the air as if I had just smoked a nice plump cigar.

Shaking my head, I edged away from the wall, giving it one last glance before continuing on into the darkness. Ever so occasionally, a random side table would be propped against the wall, a fake electric candle illuminating the hallways just the slightest. I had not noticed such a decoration until entering this particular corridor, and I soon understood why.

At the end of the hallway stood a large majestic set of doors, one in which I was so sure would be the entrance of the master bedroom of this old structure before it had been changed into a boathouse. Long ago, this building had once been a town hall and I was no doubt facing the old mayor's room.

Other than the room, the corridor was either a dead end or I had to continue on towards the right, back into an equally creepy-looking hallway. Knowing that my fate would be sealed if I had stayed cooped up in a room instead of openly trying to find the pieces of my soul, I turned right and continued walking.

How ludicrous! Do I even hear myself right now? I was on a hunt searching for extracted pieces of my soul, something that could only possibly happen in the darkest of fairy tales or the most insanely scripted horror movies. Wherever I was, it definitely was not part of the reality in which I had grown up in.

This creation of fairytale worlds and mythical monsters was not daily occurring in the days of modern society. To explain this on a rational side of thinking, I would have to be either insane or dreaming a rather vivid scene.

However, there was a part of me that wanted to believe. I wanted something more than my mundane boring everyday life. There had to be something more than the daily routine, something that could make my life more special. And this was what I was stuck with. The something special in which I had wanted. An adventure.

As I continued my journey down the hallways, yet another wail echoed down the hallways, this time accompanied by a freezing cold that swept my hair backward. I could feel my body actually moving along with the wind, pushed back as I struggled to stay on my feet. However, I was not able to pinpoint exactly where the sound had come from, causing me to run blindly into the fray, heading straight until I could find safety.

That was, of course, not a good decision.

There was a man lying on the ground, his body convulsing rapidly as if he was being electrocuted. His eyes were rolled back, face darting from side to side as a dark black mist hissed away from every part of his body, particularly his lips. His cheeks were forced in, carved in too intensely that I was almost sure that he had no bit of flesh, just skin and bones.

The rest of his body was the same. His pale skin clutched tightly against the prominent bones of his body, thin like a pastry sheet that was rolled out to perfection. It was pasty, something that closely resembled my own skin tone but much worse.

There was also something black and cloaked floating above the man. The creature's lips hovered dangerously above his own. It seemed as though the man was being kissed by the monstrosity.

In my entire life, I had never seen anything like it. For one thing, the creature was suspended above the ground, floating with a slight bob as its torn cloak trailed after it as it flew, almost dragging across the floor. It had arms of bones and a distorted half-covered skull with no muscle for its head. The back of the creature was wrapped up in its cloak, leaving nothing to my sight. But I could still see his face clear as the bright light of day on a summer's morning.

It looked like death itself, the image of grim reapers in most storybooks. Except this one could fly.

The walls that surrounded it had turned horribly frozen, a sheet of ice and snow-covered every inch of the wood the longer it stayed rooted in the spot. The wood had also started to shrivel in size. Unfortunately for its victim, the poor man that was trapped under it was starting to frost at the tips. His fingers turned blue, ice already starting to creep up its skin as the last bit of the black smoke disappeared.

Just like that, he stopped convulsing. His arms and legs dropped and fell flat on the floor, limp and lacking life. At this point, the man looked to be a set of bones himself, having completely no muscle at all. He looked like a starved soul that had not had a single meal since last month, left for famine to devour his being. Needless to say, that man was dead, long past the gates of hell itself.

All trace of warmth left my body, flooding me with pure fear as my eyes widened in panic. The creature, seemingly satisfied with its kill, started to turn its head towards me. And I could see then that it had no eyes, just hollowed out bones with no flesh to fill in the gaps. Yet, I could still feel its gaze on me.

Unlike what I had thought, the creature had not zoomed towards me immediately in an attempt to attack. It stayed there, hovering over the dead body with what could be his eyes staring right into my soul. Its head tilted a little to the side and it seemed as though it was examining me closely as my heart pounded against my ribcage.

Not wanting to take my chances with a being from hell itself, I turned on my heel and ran in the opposite direction.

As I curved corners, wails and screams echoed after. I recognized it immediately as the creature that had just murdered a man right before my eyes. Its screams of horror bellowed after me, ringing down the walls as I ran blindly ahead.

I did not dare to turn back; I did not want to see the creature up close again. It was a product of pure nightmares.

With how I was so blindly running, I had not even noticed a figure coming towards me, causing me to collide with the person as we all came crashing down towards the ground. I was ready to curse, reading to beat the shit out of whichever person was my attacker before a familiar voice drew me out of my state of shock.

At once, my eyes lit up as I beamed, throwing my arms around the necks of my two best friends as they grumbled about the fall.

"Girls!" I exclaimed in delight, quite nearly hugging the life out of them. "You guys are alive! Thank goodness you guys are okay."

"Of course we are okay." Bella squeaked, wiggling herself out of my grip and back to her feet. She reached out both hands, one for me to grab onto and the other for Minnie. Easily, she pulled us back up to our feet. "It's you that we were worried about."

"We saw what happened back in the main hall, Addy," Minnie whispered, eyes wandering to observe our surroundings with caution. Her hands were, however, rubbing a sore spot on her elbow where she had most likely landed on. "I—we thought you were dead."

"That man was horrible, Addy. We saw how he killed the other guy in cold blood. We were so worried. You could've died!" Bella agreed, creating a small distance between us three. Her hands were still clasped tightly around our own.

An image of Death swept past my eyes. Though I could see his face clearly the last time he was near me, I could not forget his beautiful stormy gray eyes. It held the world inside of his irises, showing colors that were impossible in monochromatic tones. I thought I saw hurt among the emotions that could be found in the grays and silvers. Black dotted the rims of those irises, like ink leaking and swirling in a pool of water.

He was a deadly sort of beautiful, a siren that lures its victims to their demise.

A small cold trail ran down the back of my spine when a soft consistent ticking of the second hand drew me back to the state of reality. The reminder of the mysterious alluring man was enough for me to think about the slip of paper that held the riddle and forget about the freak of a scene I had just witnessed.

I turned about, withdrawing the piece of paper and shoving it into their hands.

"I'm going to die either way if I don't solve this thing." I hastily spoke, raising one hand to tie my hair into a messy ponytail before turning my attention back to the paper. "There are riddles here. Well, one riddle here. According to it, more clues will appear when I solve the previous one. Help me with this."

Both of the other two girls stared at me as if I had all of a sudden grown a second head, their eyes wide with bewilderment as they stood in stunned silence. Slowly, Bella let out a nervous chuckle of laughter before shaking her head.

"You've been watching too many horror movies, Addison. This is not a magic piece of paper. If there's a riddle here, no more will appear. And besides, Death? Really? The guy could've come up with a better name. If he was the host of the party, there could be many other names that start with the letter 'D'. David, Desmond, Dimitri..." Bella tapped onto each of her fingers as she listed more and more names.

"I don't know, Bella..." Minnie trailed off, toying with the loose threads of her sweater. "He did kill off that guy in cold blood. What if this is... real?"

"The most real this could get would be that we're locked in the boathouse with a serial killer on the loose. That's real. Highly unlikely to happen to ordinary people like us, but real enough. Not this magic, celestial voodoo what not. That stuff only exists in fairy tales, Minnie. For children."

"There's no harm in solving this one." With a shrug, I silently cast my watch another glance before quickly turning back to my friends.

1:14

"We are locked in here anyway. Maybe this riddle will give us a way out. Maybe we can find weapons on the way. You know, in case there really is a serial killer on the loose."

The brunette raised a single eyebrow, studying me carefully as I crossed my fingers behind my back. "Fine. We'll solve this one riddle. Speaking of which, why are you so pale?"

I had almost forgotten that I was see-through, and Bella's comment made me study my hands once more, eyeing the bits of skin that colored a sickly light blue-green. It was as if I was already dead.

I shrugged.

"I don't know. But I want to find out why. So let's go, we're wasting time here."

And without another word, I stepped past my friends and back down the hallway. I turned back for a split second to look at where I had come from, my mind drifting towards the surprisingly passive-aggressive creature. It had spared my life right after killing another man. Why is that so?

What I hadn't prepared myself for, however, was that once we were a little more down the main hallway, the walls and floors were drenched in pools of red. The walls gave off the stench of rusting copper, a putrid pungent that made me sick to the guts.

I could see Minnie withhold a gag from the corner of my eye and frankly, I too was struggling to do so.

As we journeyed further down, the walls of red seemed cleaner off than before. However, there was a line of words written in blood that stood out against the light walls of wood, making my heart skip a beat in dread, my worst fears confirmed.

Time is ticking, princess.

-----

social media:

instagram: twelvewonderingstars (private: aurorayeo)

twitter: aurorayeo (private: aurorayyq)

facebook: twelvewonderingstars