here we go again!

    “It’s big enough for us to go through it.” Pete stared at the sky through the hole in the ceiling deep in thought. “But we’re on the fifth floor. We can’t just jump.”

    “Lets get on the roof.” Amy pushed an armchair under the hole and got on top of it. “We’ll see what we can do. I need some help.” Gerard lifted her higher and she climbed out.  Careful not to sleep and fall she stepped out on the roof. She walked closer to the edge unsteady on her legs. One of the roof-tiles slid under Amy’s foot and she fell. She dragged down to the very edge but managed to stop in time. “That was close.” she said and looked down. “It’s too high to jump!” she yelled.  

    “Is there anything we could climb to use to get down?” Christina said from inside the house.
 
   “Not really.” Amy looked around herself but didn’t see anything that could help them. “Just this really high tree but it’s almost 4 meters away. There’s no way we could reach it.”

    “Hold on, I’m coming!” Gerard’s head showed from the hole and he climbed out with someone’s help. “Amy! You’ll fall!” he said when he saw how close to the edge she was, “Take my hand!” he outstretched to her and she grabbed it. He pulled her away from the danger and hugged her. “You’re right. We can’t escape from here.” he was disappointed, it was his last hope. His eyes shifted to the tree she had mentioned and he sighed deeply. It really was too far.

     “At least we can see the blue sky.” she gazed at it. The sky was the one thing they all had began missing. Not even a single cloud blocked the sun leaving the blue color as pure and as calm as a frozen lake.

    “It’s beautiful just like you.” he smiled and she melted into that smile. “Lets go back inside.” they jumped in the hole and landed with thud in the middle of the room where everyone was waiting to hear what they had seen.  

    “Well?” Pete asked. They hadn’t heard their conversation and hope still filled them.

    “Nothing.” Gerard answered and they sighed and frowned. 

    “Now what?” Mikey asked braking the silence that had fallen upon them.

    “We could try and figure out what the hell is this place and why are we dying one by one.” Christina sat on the floor Indian style and rested her chin on her hand. She started thinking and so did the others. “Everything seems to have something to do with revenge.” she remarked after awhile. 

    “You’re right!” Mikey’s head shot as he was starting to make the connections. “I think we’re being… punished? I have no idea what for though, we haven’t done anything wrong.” he lied a bit there. He knew he wasn’t as innocent as the others thought, he was just good at keeping his mouth shut. ‘Some things were better left unsaid.’ were the last words his mistake said.

    “That makes sense.” Pete bit his lip hard enough to make it bleed. “Then we’re all goners.” saying it out loud made it seem a hundredth times worse than it was in his head. 

    “What do you mean?” Amy asked, her voice shaking.

    “No-one is perfect. I bet all of us have done things we’re not proud of. The only question left is who’s next?” they avoided each others eyes not knowing what to say. 

    “Um, now that we’ve got that straight maybe we should try to find a way out again?” Christina got nods from everyone, “Okay, it’d be better if everyone had to check one floor of the house. I’ll take the third.” three was her lucky number and it worked every time. She wasn’t going to take chances right now. Luck was all she had. Pete took the first floor, Mikey got the fifth, Gerard called the second and Amy was left with the forth.

    The fifth floor had a wide hall that was a very dark place that smelled of mould mixed with naphthalene and cigarette smoke. The carped had cigarette burn holes and various stains with an unknown origin. Green wallpapers decorated the walls but they seemed to be ancient and were peeling off the walls at places. Many massive cupboards in dark colors lined the sides of the hall and took a lot of the space. Dust, old pictures and boxes of all sizes hid away their surface.  

    Mikey walked slowly, careful not to trip on something in the dark. He couldn’t see more that the outlines of the furniture and barely the colors of things.

    “Michael…” a woman’s soft whisper filled the silence and made Mikey’s hairs stand up. “Michael…” the voice was so gentle, almost like singing a lullaby to a scared child. “Come with me Michael…” he was sweating and his heartbeat became so loud he felt he couldn’t hear anything else.  

    “WHO ARE YOU?!” he was screaming at the top of his lungs and his throat hurt like hell. “SHOW YOURSELF!!!” he looked all around himself desperately looking for the girl calling him.

    “They don’t love you, they don’t need you Michael…” he could even feel the cold breath on his neck. “Come with me Michael…” he fell to his knees plugging his ears. The words were invading his mind, feeling him with doubt, anger, fear, loneliness and so many other emotions at once.

    “YOU’RE A LIAR!!!” he yelled shutting his eyes to the point it hurt.

     “Michael…You will die Michael…” he hit his head in the floor trying to get the voice out of his head. “I can save you Michael…” his forehead was bleeding staining his slender face.

    “WHAT… DO… YOU… WANT… FROM… ME?!!” he hit the wall next to him, a blow between words. His knuckles bled. “Stop…” his screaming was now a faint whisper. That was all his emotionally exhausted body could master. 

    “Michael!” the faint whisper was getting louder and seemed so much closer. Mikey felt nauseous. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he crashed down on the floor with a thud.

Before he could completely slip into the darkness he opened his eyes and saw a transparent vision of a woman as pale as a ghost wearing a nightgown. She was walking and inch above the ground and her every move was very slow. As she neared Mikey she made the air colder and it became even harder to breathe. With one final sharp movement she went through him causing the most horrible feeling a human could suffer. Someone was screaming far away from him. It sounded so much like him but he didn’t feel like he was producing it. The force pushed him into a cupboard and a box fell down opening. Suddenly, music started playing; it was a music box. The relaxing melody drained what was left of Mikey’s energy and he fainted.

    Amy paced the forth floor’s corridor slowly. The wood was creaking under her feet and that sound was all you could hear. It was dark so she traced the walls in hopes to find a light switch which she did. When she could finally see properly she took a good look around. She noticed her fingers were now dirty after tracing the wall. The house was obviously vacant for a long time.  

    Amy stopped at a door on her right and thought for a second. Should she open it? With everything that happened in the past few days anything could be there. She turned the doorknob and pushed it lightly. The room that came into view was truly beautiful. The walls were a deep color of red; an idea that once popped into Amy’s head. She asked her parents to paint her room red but they never let her. A few amazing paintings decorated them. The massive black wardrobe next to the door had a picture of a forest craved on it and handles were silver. Amy gazed at it in awe for a while. Then she opened it to find a single short backless red dress hanging, waiting, begging for her to put it on. She touched it and was surprise at how soft and light it was. She took it and went over to a mirror she just noticed was at the other end of the room. She hesitated for a bit but then quickly got undressed and put it on. It made her look even more beautiful, if that is possible. She spun around and smiled. Then she finally saw the big bed with many pillows right behind her. How could she miss it? It was perfectly made and had a note on the red duvet.

    She sat on it and lifted the note to read it. 

                                             “A friend in need, is a friend indeed.
                                               Tonight you’ll lose what’s sweet.
                                               But angel don’t you cry!
                                               I promise, you won’t die”

    She dropped the note in sheer terror and gasped. And than it was like she couldn’t breathe. The dress was getting tighter and tighter, suffocating her. She fell on the bed and started trying to remove the deadly piece of clothing. Her lungs were burning for air. The more she moved, the more she sank into the bed. It was swallowing her. In mere seconds she was completely gone.

     Christina slid down the wall and hugged her knees to warm herself up a little. She was on the third floor. Alone. And it scared the shit out of her. She took out her cigarettes and her lighter. She had quit them five months ago with much effort. Gerard was supposed to quit with her but he caved in. She carried them for desperate times and now sure was a desperate time.

    She lit up one and took a drag. The toxic smoke invaded her lungs and it felt so good. She faintly smiled and relaxed. She rubbed her eyes and groaned. How did she get in this nightmare? And more important, how would she get out? Remembering what she was there for, she got up and opened the first door she saw. Nothing. The room was empty. A part of her felt relieved it wasn’t something horrible and another part of her was disappointed to see there was nothing that could help her in there.  

    She moved on to the next rooms. All of them hat nothing inside and looked so much the same. Every time she hoped the next room would be different, that it would hold the answer to the escape, but the disappointment just repeated itself again and again. It seemed like there were so many rooms and the more she searched the more they got. She didn’t remember the house being that big.

    At maybe the hundredth chipped old door she ran out of cigarettes. She threw the box away and sighed. She should have saved some for later. She looked at how much of the hall was left to check.  

    “What?” the hall was so long she couldn’t see the end of it. It wasn’t like that when she started. She was sure she saw the end of it before opening the first door. She looked behind her; same thing. She walked by all those room, fastening her pace with each step until she was running. “Hello?” no response. She checked the rooms on her way as fast as she could leaving them open. She came to a place where the hall separated in two ways. “Always turn right.” She spoke under her breath to herself. The turn was fallowed by many more and she always went right.

    After running for ten minutes she realized she was lost. She was tired, hungry and hell she needed a cigarette. Her phone didn’t work. It was the worst case scenario. 

    Then the ground shook beneath her feet. She lost balance and fell down twisting her wrist. The ground shook again and something made out of glass broke. She didn’t remember seeing glass anywhere. The thing that made the small earthquakes was getting closer at a scaring speed. Christina got up ignoring the pain in her wrist and ran. She didn’t care exactly where she was going, she just wanted away from the thing. It was after her. She could tell it was one of those monsters you check under your bed for. She opened the first door that she had time to stop at and slid in to hide. She was breathing heavily and her heart was racing.

    There was a mess on the second floor. You couldn’t see the color of the carpet from paper sheets scattered everywhere. They were mainly sketches of people on the streets or meaningless words. He wondered why when they checked the house the first time they got there they found bedrooms and now it seemed like there was nothing besides the living room on the last floor and some useful rooms downstairs. By now he had realized the house was changing all the time so it wasn’t so surprising.

    He picked up some of the sketches and went through them realizing they were all so familiar to him. He searched at the back of his head to try to remember where he had seen them but failed. Giving up, he threw them down and continued he’s way. All the rooms seemed normal to him. Most of them were just ordinary bedrooms while others were libraries, bathrooms or closets. There were many twists and turns in the hallway and after time it gave him the feeling he was walking around in circles.  

    He opened another door leading to a library. He chose to enter for a difference and the smell of old books hit him. It was a soothing smell he loved as a child. He inhaled deeply went between the shelves of books. They were pretty well presumed. He chose one randomly and opened it.

    “The story of Lily Maintree” was on the on the first page of it. He Sat down on the floor and started reading. It was about a girl and her life, about how she never really got any attention and went to extremes to get. Gerard couldn’t stop reading until he came to the part where she killed her boyfriend and ended up in a house that made her go mental and kill herself. When it ended Gerard suddenly got back to reality and noticed he was on page 742. How did he get so far? And how long had he been in there? He checked his watch. Only ten minutes had passed since he separated from the others.

     “No way!” he stared at his watch and thought and thought and thought. What was going on? It was maybe the hundredth time that question plagued his mind in the past couple of days but it still was unanswered. He got an idea and quickly stood up. He noticed the books were carefully placed in alphabetic order and went over to “M”.

    He finally found what he dreaded; “The story of Mikey Way”. Eager to find out what it contained, he opened it. It started off with some ordinary days and became more complex further on. There was this particular chapter in which you could see how he got involved with the wrong friends and started doing drugs. He pulled some girl into it all. Apparently, she was a very promising student and a good person. At the end of the chapter the girl died from overdose and Mikey blamed it on himself. After that he quit but still couldn’t forgive himself. 

    It was all too overwhelming. So many questions popped out. Why didn’t Mikey tell his own brother for all that? And how could he not notice? Suddenly, Gerard felt as if he had never actually been in his brother’s life. He always thought they were the closest people on earth. He wondered if it was true. His mind went blank. Every sound in the room was ten times stronger and there was an echo. He heard the clock ticking and it brought him back to reality. It was like a rollercoaster.

    He shook a little and gazed at the clock. Half an hour had passed. He got up and found all of his friends’ books and placed them on a coffee table in the corner. Even with the speed the time was going with when he read it was still too much to read at once and way too heavy to carry at once. Maybe he could read just the endings of some? 

    He picked up the book on top of the pile and skipped to the last page. It turned out to be Pete’s life story. He was in the kitchen.

    “Shit!” Gerard was terrified from what he read next. He jumped to his feet and ran. 

*before Gerard even went inside the library*

    Why was it so important to search the house? And especially the first floor. Pete had seen enough to know that they were all goners. It wasn’t even worth wasting their time. But his time wasn’t really worth anything without his best friends. Of course he had the ones that were still alive but the loss was far too much for him to handle.  

    He didn’t pay much attention to drawers he going through. Thoughts of his childhood with Patrick occupied his mind. His friend’s seventh birthday when he got his first hat and swore he wouldn’t take it off. That time they broke the neighbor’s window with a batman action figure that was supposed to fly to the tree and save a cat. The memory flow was suddenly interrupted by the bottle of Vodka that caught Pete’s eye. It was just what he needed. He took it eagerly and unscrew the cap.

    The minute the alcohol hit his lips and burned his throat he felt better. Or worse. He couldn’t tell. He made his way to the kitchen and sat on the table. For the first time he was alone in the house. He could think without distraction. The events repeated themselves in his mind while he drank. He realized he had no luck whatsoever. Nothing worked out the way he wanted it.  

    He got up and went up the stairs. He reached the fifth floor and stood under the hole in the ceiling. After taking another sip he got the courage to climb to the roof. Walking over the edge he felt empty. They didn’t care for him. He lost the one who did. He figured out he didn’t have to wait for death to come to him in the worst way imaginable. He could do it himself.

    He gazed upon the world in front of him. What a beautiful and lonely place it was. Taking in the last moments of his life as every singly detail sank in his mind and stained his memory forever he prepared to take the last step.

    “Pete, DON’T!!!” Gerard’s voice startled him and he turned his head sharply to see him. He slipped on something fell backwards ever the edge.

     He could hear his friend screaming in panic as he was falling. It was the longest fall he had ever had. It stretched on forever and he thought about everything he had done till this very last day of his life. Nothing special came to mind but the mere fact someone -even if it was only Gerard- cared enough to try to stop him from taking away his own life. It was now too late but it gave him comfort.

    And then it happened. His body hit the ground and it all went black. It was over