Diary of the Gone by Ivan Amberlake Page A

mean
it. Today a note has been found.”
    I even forgot a joke I was going to
say to pique my sister. “What note? Where?” I asked.
    Mom’s eyes filled with tears again,
and Bev came to her to give a hug of support, something I was lame
at.
    “ Chief Coleman found it on
one of the trees where the path to the Swamps goes. He said it was
difficult to miss,” Mom whimpered.
    “ What did it
say?”
    “ It said, ‘They are not
coming back’,” Mom said.
    I suddenly felt hot, the room lacking
oxygen. Bev stroked Mom’s head while I was thinking of what to do
next.
    I needed to see Wayne, the sooner the
better. Maybe tonight? Together we would figure out what we need to
do to save Audrey and Nathan. If they were still alive.
    I felt weak in my knees, as if I were
an old man, so I flopped down into a nearby chair.
    The worst part was that I couldn’t
leave the house at night, because Chief Coleman had promised Mom he
would watch me.
     
    ***
     
    The news of the note crawled its way
back into my head no matter how hard I tried to forget about
it.
    For once in a long while, I even took
my school books and made my home assignments. I still couldn’t put
up with the fact that while I was sitting at my desk, my friends
were out there, cold and most probably hungry, with someone keeping
them.
    Chewing at my pencil, I realized the
figures in my Math book turned into those words that Mom told us:
They are not coming back.
    I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened
them to take another look at the task in hand, but I sprang back in
horror.
    Worms ate their way through the pages,
wriggling and coiling in sickening patterns. Gagging, I hurled the
book onto the desk, pushing frantically with my legs to get away
from it. My chair keeled over and I crashed onto the floor, sparks
of pain flicking through my spine and the back of my
skull.
    I rubbed at my head, something wet and
warm staining my fingers.
    “ Oh, brilliant,” I spat,
eyeing blood on my fingertips, blinking hard to bring the blurry
reality back to focus.
    The room filled with the intense odor
of mold, the colors around me decaying to a lifeless
gray.
    “ I thought you would never
come,” a girl said close by, giving a soft chuckle.
    She stood in the doorway, her hair
fringing her ashen face and streaming down to her waist.
    “ Cynthia?”
    She slid across the room, the door
shutting behind her with a bang.
    “ Hi, Callum,” she said.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
    The sky darkened within a few seconds.
Lightning flashed, followed by thunder rumbling in the distance. I
realized my room had changed. Instead of my desk, an old mahogany
desk I’d never seen stood at the window. My posters on the wall
were gone, old-fashioned wallpaper peeling off the wall here and
there.
    A gust of wind sent the windowpanes
rattling; an icy draft passed me by, then brought Cynthia’s long
hair and gown to ripples.
    “ My friends are in
trouble. I need your help.” I preferred not to beat around the
bush.
    “ I cannot tell you where
to find them,” she said listlessly, as if hypnotized. “Their pulse
still vibrates in my chest, but they don’t have much time
left.”
    “ So they are
alive!”
    She nodded. “But he is too dangerous.
I’m not going back there. If he traps me again, he won’t let me
go.”
    Not sure how to comfort a spirit of
the dead, I sat on the floor watching her. She took a step to me,
then flickered like a hologram and vanished.
    “ Cynthia?!”
    “ I’m here,” she said,
sitting behind on my desk, flipping through the pages of my book.
“I liked him. He was so kind to me at first. I didn’t tell anyone
about his secret.”
    “ Secret?” I asked quietly,
but either she was too immersed in her thoughts to hear me, or she
just ignored it.
    “ And then…” She shut the
book and tossed it across the room. Lightning flashed as the book
hit the door and crumbled to dust. I stood transfixed by her sudden
outburst of anger.
    “ I want you to stop