Chapter 3: 3

I stopped at the tree we had first met up at. My hands trembled as I raised them and looked at the deep red lines there. I picked out the pieces of glass one after another. Each one was on fire in my skin. Each one had dug a little trench into my flesh. Most came out easily, but a few took many attempts and several breaks to let my eyes water the pain down before they fell to the dirt.

Lee was the first to find me. She had her phone out and I could see the maps app there, looking at everybody’s locations. She was flushed, but somehow pale at the same time

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded. And carefully removed the camera from around my neck to hang on one of the sturdy lower branches.There was so much blood on my hands I didn’t dare touch anything else.

Lee saw this and pulled me into an awkward one sided hug. “Do you need to see a doctor?” she asked. “Did you fall?”

I shook my head. “I crawled out a window,” I explained. Then, in a calm voice that surprised me, “I just didn’t do it very gracefully.”

Christian joined us then. He panted and leaned against the tree exhaustedly. Ellias was close behind him, also panting and looking beyond hot and sweaty, but he was safe. I guessed that was what mattered.

Looking around Christian asked, “anybody see Sierra?”

I shook my head but no sooner had I than Sierra appeared from the bushes, pulling her foot free of some thorns ans walked over to us. She was silent, but calm. A few scratches on her legs showed she’d been running in the woods. 

“Good,” Lee said. “We all got out.”

Another silence.

“I said we shouldn’t trespass,” Christian commented. He sat down on the grass, avoiding some of the ant hills. 

Ellias took my hands and turned them over so my bloody palms were facing the sun. I felt everybody’s stares on me. I didn’t like it. There was a reason my place in the band was photographer/test-listener. 

“Are you the one who screamed?” Ellias asked me.

Sierra dropped her bag to the ground with a thud and began to rummage through its contents. She produced a first aid kit and handed it to Ellias.

“No, I…” I didn’t know how to explain what I had seen. I looked at Lee, who had her brow furrowed in a worried look.

“Who knows what happened?” she asked. “I heard the screams. They didn’t sound good.” She looked at Sierra suspiciously. 

“The guard was…” my brain tried to put it together. As it was, the event was still scrambling around in the back of my brain. “He got dragged— this thing— it dragged him.”

“You mean like a ghost?” Lee asked.

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“Maybe?” I guessed. “Or some kind of monster. It had these glowing red eyes,” I explained. “It was too dark to see much else.”

Lee frowned. “That sounds like a demon. And it dragged him?”

I nodded. “It dragged him into the darkness… and I think it might have killed him.”

“Nah, nah,” Lee protested. “Demons don’t have that kind of power. They kill people by making them suicidal or pushing them down the stairs. They can’t physically drag a person off and…”

“Rip them apart,” I filled in. My stomach felt sick. “Ow,” I jerked my hand away from Ellias’ where he’d been wiping at the cuts with a damp cloth.

He just took my hand again and continued on. I gritted my teeth at the stinging. 

“But that doesn’t make sense, manifesting to that degree would freeze the building over.”

“I’m telling you what I saw,” I snapped. 

The group all stared at me again. 

Christian spoke up then. “Maybe it was somebody’s sick idea of a joke,” he offered.

“I don’t think so.” Ellias stuck some extra large bandages over my cuts and pressed them down. I felt the squelch of antibiotic ointment in there. It felt relieving.

“Should we go to the police?” Christian asked.

“No,” came from both Ellias and Lee.

“I think,” Lee said. “We’ve done enough for one day. Let’s go home and figure out what to do tomorrow.”

There was a resounding silence after the statement.

“Aye,” said Sierra to break the quiet.

I think we all agreed. And we all went home.

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