Hawk Point *ON HOLD*

Chapter Thirteen: Letters

*Unedited chapter...sorry for typos and small mistakes*

 This tiny room in the attic is dark, it smells of mothballs and old books, and it is filled with boxes of all sizes, each one coated in a thick layer of dust. There are labels on some but most of them hold unknown contents. Luke had made sure that the door is firmly shut before lifting the cover off the box nearest to him, Emily's voice drifting under the small crack  between the bottom of the door and the floor as her conversation on the phone rises in tension. She's not going to be noticing his absence for a while, although Mildred might.

The box is full of papers.

The pages are brittle and yellowed with age and the words are scrawled out in thick black ink. Letters, Luke realizes, this is a box of old letters. With careful hands, he takes a handful of letters, smoothing them out against the surface of a box. The paper makes a crinkling sound, like the sound of leaves being crushed underfoot.  They all vary in length; some are only a few sentences long while others are the span of a couple pages.

August 27th, 1997

I know you're not going to read this because I know that I will never send this to you. I just...I can't; you don't need to know about what you ran away from because you were right about Hawk Point all along. You were right to leave. This place...it's secrets...It's too dangerous, not just for us but for the entire planet. And I'm not over exaggerating; as horrifying and outlandish that it seems to be, it's the truth...

"Luke?" The door creaks open and Luke leaps away from the box, shoving the papers into his back pocket, his heart rate accelerating. Light spills into the room and Mildred's head pops through the doorway, her flaming hair disarrayed. "There you are! You shouldn't be up here and isn't Emily supposed to be watching you?"

"She's supposed to be." Luke mutters, his blood ponding in his ears. Did she see him take the papers?

An exasperated sigh tumbles past Mildred's lips and her eyelids flutter shut. "Of course she should be watching you." Her tone is tired, a bone deep tired that seems to weigh her down. There are dark half moons decorating the skin under her eyes. "Come on, this is no place for little boys like you." She walks into the room, her feet scattering dust particles through the air.

"I'm not a little boy." Luke says coldly. Mildred stops, her hand outstretched as if she is going to take him by the arm and drag him out of the attic. A peculiar expression darts across her features before she schools it back into the concerned mother look she always seems to have on around him.

"You sound just like someone I used to know." Her tone is soft and holds hints of a deep melancholy   that surprises Luke.

"What happened to him?" He inquires.

Mildred pulls a considering expression, as if pondering how to properly phrase her answer. "He fell with the wrong crowd. He died in an...accident." Luke pulls his brows together, his lips forming a tight line; something about Mildred's tone implies that whoever she was talking about didn't really die in an 'accident.'  Shaking her head, Mildred places a hand on the small of Luke's back, escorting him out of the room.

~~~~~~~

 

"Can someone please tell me who Silver Scar is?" Cif inquires, her glaze slewing from Eustace to Aven. Eustace looks startlingly pale, even for a ghost.