Chapter Twenty-Four

She did not see Gabriel again since the night he forced his way into her room to fuck her thoroughly. She once wondered how he managed to get in, but was reminded that his last name was Blacken, and he practically owned everything in Crestfall. That night stayed constantly in the back of her mind, her emotions still reeling from what had happened. Part of her wanted to scream at him and drive a dagger deep into his chest but part of her yearned for his next touch.

Sitting on her bed, she took the annotated copy of Sublime he had given her. She flipped it open, and tears falling from her eyes stained the yellowed pages. The bottom of her lips trembled and hate filled her chest. She grabbed hold of the top of the right page and tore it away from the binding, before she grabbed onto another page, and another, and more pages from the book. The torn pages fell around her bed, scrunched up balls of meaningless words. Then she threw the book across the room and it hit the window ledge, ricocheting off it towards the ground.

But Gabriel wasn't her only problem. There had been several reports of students going missing. Other than that, she often saw the trio of friends about the school, though she made sure to keep her distance from them especially after what she caught them doing the other day. They seemed to take the hint, and did not bother her. But as the days wore on, she noticed that the group trickled from three to two.

Abbie was no longer there.

Curious, she walked up to their table at the food hall during lunch to ask them about Abbie, and all she received were ambiguous excuses. Oh, Abbie is busy now. Oh, Abbie is not feeling well today. Oh, Abbie is at town fetching some supplies. It didn't take a smart person to know they were evading her questions.

So she left them and went on her way. There was one thing she knew she could do and she headed to the library. Renting an hour on a computer, she sat before it and got to work. Abbie was someone who loved to record her life on her social media, and she perused her feed on the bigger screen to glean more information from it.

Her last post showed that she was sitting on a tree stump at Glacier Forest, gazing up at the dark sky. Lucianne knew that exact tree stump and she clocked out of the computer in that instant to retrace Abbie's last steps.

When she arrived at Glacier Forest and found the tree stump, she was immediately struck by how there was a patch of dirt that seemed to have been tampered with. She stuck her hands into the mound, tearing it apart until the sand parted to reveal a digital camera.

She removed the camera from the hole in the ground, dusting the dirt on it away. She hit the button to power it on, but nothing happened. Giving it a solid whack to the side, a red light shone and the camera powered on. The screen flashed blue before it turned black, the colour of the dirt the viewfinder was pointed at.

But she wasn't interested in taking more pictures. She clicked on the buttons on the camera, going through the settings. She launched past photos, and pictures of an unsmiling Abbie filled the screen. One was a selfie at the food hall, another at her dorm, another at Glacier Forest. She pressed the button quickly, until one flashed by and her thumb hung in midair before she pressed the back button.

It was an odd picture. It was dark everywhere and the picture could only be seen because of the light emitting from the camera itself. The camera was lying on its side, and all she could see was dirt and the trunk of the tree in the distance.

Why was this picture taken?

She pressed next, and saw another picture with the camera flash on. But the objects she had taken a picture of were a stick and two rocks. They were placed side by side, and though Lucianne wracked her brain, she could not tell what had caused her to take those pictures.

Spooked, she closed the camera and turned it off. She did not want to see more pictures. She buried the camera into the dirt again before she left the scene hastily. The sun was about to set and she definitely didn't want to be anywhere near where she was at.

She brisk walked through the forest, the bewilderment thick in her emotions. In the next second, her feet started to run and she sped back to the edge of the forest. Panting, she felt darkness crowd into the sides of her vision. She ran and ran, until it hit her.

She was lost.