We need to go reaper, Exhibit B - The children’s room

I regretted not reading more about the supernatural considering what kind of man my boyfriend’s grandpa was. Nothing I could do about it at this point though.

The ladder inside the box led through a long dark shaft. I had my flashlight but still had to be careful not to slip and fall.

“A-Annie? Are you okay down there?” my companion yelled from above.

“I’m fine! It’s just a long way down!” I replied.

A good few minutes of climbing later and I could finally see the end of it. I made sure to peek into the room we were about to enter before committing though.

Honestly, this alternate dimension was getting weirder and weirder. The ladder was attached to a two-story bed. As in, it was supposed to end at the upper bed but instead kept going through the shaft in the ceiling all the way to the box up in the attic. How that made any sense I had no idea.

“It looks safe! You can come down!” I shouted up the shaft before lowering myself into the room.

The oddness didn’t stop at the ladder though. The top bed had dull gray sheets and a pillow, while the bottom one was the pinkest girliest thing filled with cute plushies I had ever seen.

Not only that, the bed seemed to have been splitting the room in two. The two sides being a mirror image of each other except one was full of plushies, dolls, ribbons, and all sorts of girly decorations, with a desk to hold all of that, and a chair fluffier than live bunnies.

The other side… was like a worn-down version of that. No decorations, no plushies, nothing girly, hard chair, an old withered desk losing its color. It was quite disturbing to look at.

There were no doors nor any windows in the room.

“Hup!” My boyfriend landed inside the room with me and scanned it whilst dropping the backpack by the bed. His expression told me I wasn’t the only one to find this room disturbing.

“Do you think these rooms have some kind of meaning?” I ventured.

“I… I don’t know,” he answered as he walked over to the withered side of the room. “This is really eerie, though.”

“Yeah… Let’s search through these. See if we can find something.” I gestured at the drawers.

He nodded and proceeded to open the withered drawers one by one and checking the contents. While he did that, I made my way over to the girl’s side and did the same. Initially, I found exactly what I expected. More stereotypical girl’s belongings like hairbands and pocket mirrors.

But then, I found something much more intriguing. A diary.

I sneaked a quick glance at my boyfriend, considering telling him, but decided he was already freaked out enough. I felt a little bad about reading someone else’s diary but at the same time… My intuition was screaming at me that this thing was somehow vital for us to return to our world.

I quietly opened it and began reading. At first, it seemed like typical thoughts of some girl. But at some point, I began to feel uneasy. It started with the line ‘I wish I could get out of here.’ nonchalantly thrown in the middle of a paragraph.

The implications of that line were disturbing, to say the least. Naturally, I had to keep reading and discovering more of these lines. They turned from idle thoughts to active plight, and finally to cries for help that took up more and more of the contents.

Who was this girl? Who was trapping her? Where?

Too many questions, and the diary never even tried to hint at the answers. In fact, if one ignored all the lines about wanting to get out of somewhere, the rest didn’t seem any special. Going to school, hanging out with friends, playing video games… and then a sentence basically screaming in agony. The disparity was uncanny.

I closed the thing shut and returned it to the exact place where I’d found it. I took a deep breath and kept searching.

A minute later, I found something even more disturbing than the diary.

“What the heck…?” I whispered to myself.

Photos of a girl, who looked like a grown-up version of the girl I’d seen in the photo book up in the attic.

For some reason though, her face was blacked out with a marker in all of those photos.

Why?

I recalled the diary and connected the dots. I felt like throwing up.

“Did you find something, Annie?”

I debated whether to show him the pictures or pretend it was nothing. But with how things were going, I was almost certain this was the theme of this alternate dimension. It wouldn’t do to keep him out of the loop.

“I found some… concerning pictures.” I gestured for him to come over.

“Oh… Uh… what pictures?” He didn’t move from the withered half of the room.

I pulled one of them and held it up for him to see. I could see his breath hitch as his eyes landed on it.

“I’m sorry but… Who is she? She keeps showing up. She must be important somehow.”

His intense stare met the floor as his fists clenched. I felt bad forcing him to possibly recall bad memories.

“Nobody,” he finally said.

“What?”

“She doesn’t exist. She’s… imaginary. Not real.”

That threw me in for a loop. Not real?

“Like… A fictional character? From a movie? Or a book?”

“No… I… It’s…” His mouth formed a line. It looked like he was fighting an internal battle over something.

With him getting so clearly uncomfortable with the situation, my heart couldn’t take torturing him any further.

“Well, that’s okay. You don’t need to tell me right now.” I smiled.

“Uh.” He looked at me, half shocked, half relieved.

“Let’s keep looking for a way out for now. You can tell me all about the fictional girl later.”

He nodded, seeming partially guilty, but also grateful I let it go.

We both kept searching our half of the room until we got to the wardrobes. He opened the withered one and found three identical shirts with faded blue colors, some nondescript socks, and a stack of pants.

Over on my side, opening the wardrobe revealed a kaleidoscope of colors. Dresses, skirts, petticoats, stylish summer hats, and so much more I couldn’t even see the back of the wardrobe.

In fact…

I reached to pull some of the dresses aside… Only to reveal that the wardrobe was deeper than it seemed. I pulled aside another layer of dresses, and it kept going.

I turned to my boyfriend and said, “Hey… I think I found our way out.”

“Oh?” he looked my way and grimaced for some reason.

“It’s like that box. It keeps going this way. Come on! Let’s go.” I gestured at him whilst walking over to the backpack and tossing it over my shoulders.

When I looked back at my companion, I found him standing in the middle of the room, staring at the wardrobe.

“What’s wrong?”

“I…” He glanced around the ‘girl’ part of the room, and then back at the withered part. For some reason, he seemed afraid of something. Afraid of… stepping into the girl half of the room?

“It’s okay, I’m here with you.” I walked up to the boundary between the room’s halves and grabbed his hand with a smile.

He looked at me for a second before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. With a sigh, he opened his eyes again and nodded. We made our way to the endless wardrobe and crawled inside.

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Argh! My old laptop died out of nowhere yesterday and I spent the whole day running around trying to fix it, then buying a new one and setting it up. And just in case I got back into the mood for writing, today, I'm finally getting my Covid shot. Hopefully, I won't have any side effects.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the next Elf chapter might be delayed. >.<