In the Manor House

by Christos Makis

There was no possibility of going for a walk that day. It was raining cats and dogs outside and the air could freeze you to the bone. That’s why we preferred to stay indoors. We didn’t have much to do. The rain was interfering with the TV signal and the WiFi had been dead for hours. Thank God, Alice’s home had a fireplace to keep us warm. I went to the basement to get us a few drinks while Brock was in the attic searching for board games.

It took me a while to figure out how to switch on the lights and how to open that huge fridge. When I went to the living room, Brock was freaking out, pale with terror. He said that Alice was nowhere to be found in the house and on top of that, the door was now locked and the keys were missing.

At first, I told him to calm down and that there had to be a reasonable explanation for all this. Alice had nowhere to go in that bad weather and I was sure that obviously she had locked the door from the inside for safety reasons. We split up and went searching for her... she could be at the bathroom or something.

It turned out that she was nowhere around the house and, to be honest, I was starting to totally freak out as well. We tried to call her on her cell phone but we couldn't reach her. We had no signal. Alice was our friend and we totally went crazy. We were kinda worried about ourselves too, but mostly about her.

She could have gone out and got hurt in that frightening rain, trapped in a huge puddle or a fast-flowing torrent. As if we didn’t have enough problems, suddenly there was a blackout. The phone was dead before we could call 911. The best thing we could do was to try to get some sleep, waiting for the power supply to be restored or for her to show up, but that seemed to be beyond possibility.

After the longest hour of my life, there was a sound that caught my attention; it was the door...