Hidden In Plain Sight: Chapter 8

Artemis waved out the front window as the headlights of her mothers Subaru backed out of her driveway. Still slightly shell shocked from today’s turn of events, she sat down on the couch next to Biscuits to try to do some processing. She scratched his shoulder and Biscuits rolled onto his back so Artemis could scratch his belly. She, Artemis Verlone, was an actual enrolled student at McClaren College. She would get to write her own name on the papers she wrote now and see what the professors actually thought of them. When there were exams scheduled for the next class, instead of skipping, she would stay up late and study her notes meticulously so she could attack the tests armed with everything she had learned sneaking into classes for the last few years. Buzzing with excitement, she went and poured herself a glass of wine to try and help her settle down. Meeting with the President and answering his questions would be awkward, especially since she had some questions of her own for him now. Angela had explained the situation a bit over burnt pie and Merlot, but Artemis still had questions that needed to be answered. Why had she been accepted now? Her string of misdemeanors when she was in high school had crushed any chance of her attending McClaren after graduation. What has changed? Was Smith some love sick puppy trying to suck up to her mother? Had he pushed the envelope to get Artemis into McClaren with a scholarship to score brownie points with Angela? Was the whole thing a ploy to get her out of hiding so they could arrest her for breaking into buildings and living in this flat? She took a sip of wine and sat back down next to Biscuits, anxiety slowly seeping into her enthusiasm.

“This guy likes mom,” she thought to herself “I don’t think he’s going to try to have her daughter thrown from her home and arrested the first time he meets her.”

She relaxed a bit. The most logical thing was that he was trying to impress her mother. Artemis knew she had written the hell out of the papers that Angela had shown him so Smith knew she wasn’t an idiot. But, was that really enough to get into the school on a full scholarship? “I guess when you’re in charge you get to make that call." Thought Artemis.

She needed a distraction to get her mind off of it. She wouldn’t be meeting with Smith until he got back from the holidays with his family somewhere in New York. She would have plenty of time to role play how the conversation might go before then. She got up and moved over to the table and examined the bound book again. The plan had been to talk to mom for a bit and then spend all day trying to unravel this mystery, but days rarely go the way they are planned. She pulled it closer and ran her fingers over the line of markings surrounding the lock, mind spinning about what they could mean. “Maybe the lock was added by someone else, and the inside is in a language I recognize?” she thought to herself.

She sat down her glass of wine and grabbed her lock picks out of her shadow suit that was hanging by the door from the previous nights. Once more, she examined the tiny markings on the lock and couldn’t ever remember seeing anything like them. They looked almost Egyptian. More like pictures than letters. Artemis got to work on the tiny gold lock and it gave way in moments. Carefully, she unwound the golden chain from the cover of the book and sat back in her chair, the gravity of what she was about to do flowing over her. This book has been locked shut and hidden away so long that everybody who knew its secrets, or even knew the book existed, had died decades, possibly centuries, ago. She could be the first person to learn its secrets in hundreds of years. She leaned forward and very delicately opened the front cover of the book.

The book flew open! Pages flipping back and forth in a gail of wind that hadn’t been there a moment before. Biscuits yelped and scurried into the bedroom tail between legs as Artemis was thrown back in her chair so hard she toppled over. The pages blew around as if caught in a storm before coming to a stop as suddenly as they had started. Stunned, Artemis cautiously sat her chair up and hesitantly leaned forward to look at the open book. The page the book had stopped on was somewhere near the middle. She swallowed, steeled herself, and leaned forward to look at what was inside. The left page was filled corner to corner with very neat, but cramped, handwritten text in what appeared to be the same language as the cat on the cover. The right page was entirely empty. Artemis squinted at the small text searching for patterns or anything remotely familiar, nose inches from the ancient page. Paper fingers burst out of the right page and entangled themselves in Artemis’s hair. She shrieked in terror and ripped her hair away from its grasp, stumbling backwards to watch the monstrous scene play out in horror as the fingers grabbed the outside edge of the book and quickly grew into a full hand, and then two! Heart pounding against her chest, eyes wide in terror, Artemis could only watch as the hands reached out of the book and grabbed the edge of her kitchen table dragging paper arms behind them. The crown of a head appeared as the paper monster dragged itself out of the page and into her kitchen. Artemis’s skin crawled as the thing shrieked in muffled anguish like a gagged man touched with a hot poker as it freed a round featureless head from the page. Using its paper arms to push down on the book like a man getting out of a swimming pool, it howled again and freed a wide shapeless torso and hips. Gasping for air the humanoid paper monster, now sitting on Artemis’s kitchen table, reached its arms back into the page and, giving a seemingly Herculean effort, pulled free one of its legs and swung it off the table before reaching back into the page and freeing the other free. Time seemed to stop as the figure stepped away from the book. It fell to all fours in the middle of her kitchen, gasping for air. Dead still just a moment ago, Artemis’s heart now pounded in her throat as she stood frozen in her kitchen, the creature prone on the floor just feet from her. On pure instinct Artemis grabbed a knife out of the block behind her and hurled it at the beast. The paper creature dodged right and caught the projectile in a paper white hand. To Artemis’s horror, the thing stood up and turned to face her, she screamed in terror and backed further into the kitchen. Where there had once been empty whiteness, a face was now materializing. The paper had stretched forward to form a nose, and eyes as cold and dark as a frozen lake now peered out at her. The thing moved towards her, the knife she had thrown clutched in a half rendered hand. The closer it got, the clearer it grew. Like stepping out of thick smoke, the man-like creature, gradually materialized into a man in a long dark grey cloak. He was tall and muscled with long ragged brown hair and those eyes that spoke of death and despair. Artemis had backed herself into the corner as far from the man as she could get. Suddenly, he glided across the kitchen with unnatural speed and grabbed her bare trembling arm causing her to go rigid, paralyzed with fear.

He leaned close to her ear. “Thank you.” The man spoke in a breathy serpentine hiss that would live in Artemis’s nightmares. He slowly released her arm and stepped back from the petrified woman. He raised the hood of his cloak casting a shadow over the top half of his face. He lifted his chin and nodded at Artemis. Without saying a word, the man raised the hand not holding the knife, snapped his fingers and Artemis’s world went dark.