6A.N: Thank you to the few of you who have reviewed. I hope this chapter is satisfactory. I've made it very exciting, if I do say so myself. Enjoy!
Chapter Three: Mysterious Happenings
After looking around the dinning room for a few minutes, Marla and Jake got bored and decided to take a look upstairs. Once again, they passed the front door, and once again, they found the door open.
"This time I'm sure that I closed the door!" Jake declared.
Marla looked around nervously. "Um… really strong wind tonight, huh?"
Jake closed the door again, and for a few seconds they stood there watching it. When nothing happened, Jake nodded. "Yeah, the wind."
…
Meanwhile, back in the living room, Chris and Jennifer were talking about how they were nothing alike.
"Oh come on, we're both American and we're both sixteen. How different can we be?" Chris was saying.
This 'argument' had started when Jennifer commented that she was more brave than Chris, and Chris, of course, saw it fit to point out that she had been too afraid to search the house with the others. After that, she said that no matter what, they were both really different. And that's where we came in.
"Oh please," Jennifer said. "You can't relate to me in anything!"
Chris took this as a challenge. "Oh yeah? Name one thing, just one that I can't relate to."
Jennifer stared into space for a few seconds, then turned back with a much more sober look on her face. "I bet you can't relate to your mother leaving you and never paying any attention to the fact that you still exist."
Chris stared at her for a second, then looked down at his feet. "Actually… I can."
Jennifer looked up in shock. "What? I thought your parents were still together."
Chris nodded. "They are. But I can relate to the part where your parents don't pay attention to the fact that you exist. My parents pretty much ignore me. They're always on business trips, and when they are at home, all they ever say to me is 'hey can't you be a little more quiet!?" Chris sighed. "Don't try to tell me that your situation is worse than that."
Jennifer and Chris sat in silence for a few minutes. "Um… I guess it's not that bad."
Chris gave a small laugh. "Well you were wrong; I can relate to you after all."
Jennifer returned his laugh and gave him a friendly little hug. Chris hugged her back.
Suddenly, they heard a loud, high-pitched scream coming from somewhere inside the house. At the same time, Chris and Jennifer gasped.
"What was that!?" Chris demanded, grabbing Jennifer's shoulders and shaking her. "WHAT WAS THAT!?"
"I don't know," Jennifer said. She then saw that he was still shaking her. "Oh Chris stop."
"What should we do!?" Chris asked.
Jennifer looked around. "Uh… " suddenly the screaming got much louder. "RUN!"
…
The first thing Marla and Jake thought to do when they heard the scream was to run back to the other two and make sure they were alright. But when they got back to the living room, Jennifer and Chris were nowhere to be found.
"Where did they go?" Marla asked in an urgent and slightly frightened voice. "Do you think that maybe they were they ones screaming!?"
"I don't know," Jake said. He too was getting scared. "It's possible."
Marla took a few steps closer to Jake. She felt that at any time someone would sneak up behind her and put gun to her back. "Maybe we should go look for them," she suggested.
"Yeah, come on."
When Jake started walking out of the room at a fast pace, Marla panicked. "Wait for me!"
Jake stopped and realized that Marla must be way more scared than him. When she caught up, he took her hand to calm her down.
"It'll be fine, Marla. I'm sure there's a good explanation for all this."
…
Chris and Jennifer ran through the kitchen, opened the door that led up the back stairway and through the second floor hallway. Looking around, they spotted the door closest to them, and with the intention of hiding where ever the door led to, they opened it.
They shouldn't have.
Jennifer screamed, Chris yelled. For when they opened the door (which had ended up opening into a small closet) out fell a body! For a few minutes they just stood there hugging each other; too frightened to do anything else. But when the shock finally wore off, Jennifer got the courage to turn the dead person on his back so they could see his face. When she did, they gasped.
It was Derek!
"Oh my gosh!" Jennifer breathed.
"I have made up my mind," Chris said, his voice shaking. "I'm leaving! Come on, Jennifer."
With that, Chris started pulling Jen back to the stairs. Jennifer was also eager to get out of this house. And yet she couldn't help but wonder why Derek had come back to the mansion after he had supposedly left with Eddie over an hour ago. A thousand questions flooded her mind, and she tried to sort them all out, but with the reality just now sinking in that Derek Coleman was dead. Murdered in the very same house that she was currently in, she couldn't find it in herself to calm down.
Halfway down the stairs, they met up with Jake and Marla who had followed the sound of their screaming to find them.
"What happened!?" Marla asked, almost dreading the answer.
"Derek Coleman has been murdered!" Chris declared. "And I, for one, am out of here!"
"Murdered!?" Jake exclaimed. "HOW? Who did it!?"
"We don't know!" Jennifer said, on the verge of tears. "But when we opened a closet door, he fell out, and he was dead!"
Marla was speechless, but not for long. "I'm scared! I wanna go home!" she declared.
"Me too!" Chris and Jennifer agreed.
"Hold on, guys!" Jake said. "We have to find out who did this, we can't just leave."
"Yes we can!" Chris declared. "Leave this to the cops. We're no detectives, and I'm not planning on being one any time soon."
Before Jake could say anything, Chris pushed past him and started down the rest of the stairs. Suddenly, the door at the bottom of the stairs slammed shut. Alarmed, Chris tripped down the last few stairs and tried to open the door. But he couldn't.
"The door!" Chris exclaimed. "It's been locked!"
A.N: Please review! I'd like to know what you guys think of the story so far. And if you have any predictions, please tell me. I'd like to know what you think is going to happen next!