• Don’t Blink

    Midnight. However dark it may have been, the moon was high in the sky and was only hidden by a few small, wispy clouds. An exhilarating shiver raced up and down my spine and skittered across my arms. I gripped the flashlight in my right hand tighter, then glanced over to my brother and smiled slightly. I had managed to get him to come along with me to check out a small, old house with a cemetery behind it just outside of town. The slight breeze ruffled my hair and sent another shiver racing across my shoulders.

    “So you couldn’t get Jordan to come with you?” Kelland asked, glancing over at me, a small smirk on his face.

    I laughed and shook my head. “Nah, I probably could have. I just don’t want to worry him. And he’s got a ton of homework, on top of being uber tired.” I returned Kelland’s smirk and punched his arm playfully. “Besides, you’re the one who likes to stay up like me.”

    He laughed slightly, then nodded. “Okay, I guess you’re right, sis.”

    The rest of our trek was eerily silent. I looked up at the moon through the dead tree branches. It was full…and to make things even scarier, the wispy clouds were building up to hide the moon from view completely. Yet another shiver rushed through my body, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Now was too late to chicken out…but all the same, I really wished I did have Jordan to hold my hand.

    It only took a few more minutes to get to the large, wrought-iron gate that led up the driveway to the house. The house was a few hundred feet behind it, but it looked ominous. On the gate hung a sign that read: “Trespassers will be persecuted!” Kelland and I exchanged a glance and we both smiled, then started scaling the gate. As we approached the house, some graffiti on one side caught my eye. “Hey, Kell, shine your flashlight over here,” I said, gesturing with my hand to the side of the house. A chill raced across my shoulders and down my back as I saw it. The graffiti was two big, red, ragged words reading:

    DON’T BLINK

    I blinked wide eyes and exchanged another glance with Kelland. Now I was getting a little on edge. There was a very eerie feeling settling in…

    “L-let’s keep going, Kell,” I said, determined to find out what exactly was here. Before I did anything else, though, I took a picture of the graffiti with the digital camera I had in my pocket.

    Kelland only nodded in agreement and we walked around to the front of the house, to the door. I highly doubted it would be unlocked, but I tried the doorknob anyways. Strange enough, it was unlocked. The door creaked slightly as it opened, and Kelland and I stepped inside. It wasn’t very big inside the house…only five rooms in all. There was a very small kitchen/dining room, an even smaller living room, two small bedrooms and a bathroom. However small it may have been, there were large, bay windows overlooking all sides of the house that faced the cemetery behind it. Surrounding several of the graves, and also on a pedestal near the gate to the cemetery, there were four angel statues. They looked like they were weeping. How…peculiar…

    I pulled my camera out again and started taking pictures of certain things, such as the fireplace, the elegant dining room table, and the very large mirror in one of the bedrooms. When I looked up to the window overlooking the cemetery again, I blinked in surprise. Instead of the four statues being where they were before, two were now missing, and one had moved closer to the house. The one on the pedestal was in its place, though.

    “Hey, Car, come here, I found something,” Kelland called from what would have been the master bedroom. There was a small roll-top desk in the corner opposite the wall-sized window in the bedroom, and Kelland was trying to get it open.

    “Wow, that’s cool. Old and dusty,” I said, coughing, “but cool.” A minute later, Kelland finally got the desk open and rolled the top back. There were several piles of papers littering the surface of the desk, but the one that caught my eye had the word “Beware” written on it.

    I frowned and picked it up, then flipped through the pages under it. A few pages down, there was another cryptic message: “Beware the weeping angels.” My eyes widened slightly and I gulped. The weeping angels… The statues? I tossed the pages over my shoulder and kept flipping through them, finding messages every now and then, Kelland watching the entire time.

    The next one was, “Oh, and duck.” Okay, now I was confused!

    “Really, duck!”

    “Carissa and Kelland Swann…” I stopped and didn’t move a muscle. How did our names get here?! This was getting scarier and scarier.

    “DUCK NOW!” Kelland and I both blinked in confusion, then I squeaked as I realized we really were supposed to duck. The window was shattered and two huge rocks hit the wall exactly where our heads had been seconds before. I could hear my pulse in my ears by this time because I was so freaked out. Kelland and I exchanged a glance and silently agreed now was the time to get the hell out of there. When I got up, though, there was one last page in the stack I had found the other messages in. This last message read, “Love, The Doctor, 1936.”


    “Car? What time is it?” came a very groggy-sounding Jordan over the phone. It was about an hour later and Kelland and I had driven back into town to Jordan’s house.
    I glanced at my watch and grimaced slightly. “Uhh, it’s about 1 AM, love,” I said, feeling guilty for waking him up now.

    Jordan sighed and asked, “Where are you?”

    I laughed sheepishly. “Well…uh, me and Kell are at your front door.”

    “Okay…hold on,” he said. Two minutes later, Jordan opened the door and yawned. “You guys are lucky my parents and both my sisters are gone.” Walking into Jordan’s house, I gave him a very tight hug and didn’t pull away for several minutes. He blinked in confusion and held me at arm’s length. “What’s up, Carissa? You seem rattled.”

    I nodded and sighed slightly. “I am…well, we are,” I said, glancing to Kelland. “We went to that old house outside town…the one with the cemetery behind the house, you know? And…we got really scared, but also I need to show you a couple things,” I explained, pulling my camera out of my bag, along with the papers with the cryptic messages on them. Over the next ten minutes or so, I ran through all the events that happened barely an hour before and showed Jordan the pictures and items I brought back.

    Jordan sat on his bed and looked through the papers I showed him, one of his eyebrows raised skeptically. “Guys, this could all just be a prank, you know. This ‘Doctor’ guy can’t seriously know your names. And look at the date; it’s 1936! How could he possibly know who you are?”

    I nodded, knowing Jordan was probably the voice of reason in this situation, but my mind still couldn’t drown the fact that this was all very eerily connected and that whoever had actually written these little messages had saved both mine and Kelland’s lives and those angels… I didn’t know about the angels, but something told me to keep my eyes out for them. “I’ve considered all of that, Jordan, but… I don’t know, maybe my imagination is just getting the best of me.”

    “But it is a really weird coincidence,” Kelland commented, looking over the pictures on my camera again. He was strangely subdued since the experience at the house earlier. “Maybe this is all related and we’re just not seeing everything yet.”

    Jordan pulled me into a hug and nodded, glancing between Kelland and me. “I don’t know about all this, but what I do know is that we all need some good rest.”