Morgan Rice - Found

After moments of thick silence, Caitlin couldn’t take it anymore. She had to know.

“Is it real?” she asked, cutting right to the chase.

After a long silence, Aiden finally turned.

And slowly, he nodded.

Caitlin couldn’t comprehend what was happening. He was confirming her reality. This book. It was real. Everything was real.

“But how is that possible?” Caitlin asked, her voice rising. “It talks about the most fantastical things. Vampires. Mythical swords. Shields. Antidotes. It’s thousands of years old – and it’s all in my handwriting. None of it makes any sense.”

Aiden sighed.

“I was afraid this day would come,” he said. “It just came sooner than I thought.”

Caitlin stared back, trying to understand. She felt as if some great secret had been withheld from her, and it frustrated her to no end.

“What day would come?” she demanded. “What are you telling me? And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Aiden shook his head.

“It wasn’t for me to tell you. It was for you to discover. When the time was right.”

“To discover what?”

He hesitated.

“That you are not who you think you are. That you are special.”

Caitlin stared back, dumbfounded.

“I still don’t understand,” she said, frustrated.

He paced.

“As you know, history is part fact, part myth. It is our job to determine what is truth and what is fiction. Yet it is not as much of a science as we’d like to pretend. There are no absolute facts in history. History is written by the victors, by the biographers, by those with a cause and purpose and agenda to document it. History will always be biased. And it will always be selective.”

“Where does that leave me?” Caitlin asked, impatient. She was in no mood for one of Aiden’s lectures. Not now.

He cleared his throat.

“There is a fourth dimension to history. A dimension discounted by scholars, but one that is very real. The unexplained. The esoteric. Some might call it the occult, but that term has been grossly misused.”

“I still don’t understand,” Caitlin pleaded. “I thought you would be the one person who would explain it away. But it sounds as if you’re saying that it’s all true, that everything in this book is true. Is that what you’re saying!?”

“I know what you came here wanting me to say. But I’m afraid I cannot.” He sighed. “What if some history has, in fact, been obscured? By design? What if there was, indeed, a time when a race known as ‘vampires’ existed? What if you were one of them? What if you had traveled back in time? Had found an antidote, had wiped out vampirism for all time?”

He paused, collecting his thoughts. “And what if there was one exception to the antidote?” he asked.

She stared at him, hardly believing what she was hearing. Had he lost his mind?

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The antidote. The end to vampirism. What if there was an exception? One vampire who was immune? Immune because she was not yet born at the moment you chose to come back?”

Not yet born ? Caitlin wondered, racking her brain. Then, it struck her.

“Scarlet?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“You were warned once, long ago, that you would have a very great choice to make, between your legacy, and the future of mankind. I’m afraid that time has come.”

“Stop talking in riddles!” Caitlin demanded, standing, her fists bunched, red in the face. She couldn’t listen anymore; she felt as if she were losing her mind. Aiden was the one man in the world from whom she expected rational answers. And he was only making things much, much worse.

“What are you saying about my daughter?”

Aiden shook his head slowly, distressed.

“I understand you’re upset,” he said. “And I am sorry to have to tell you this. But your daughter, Scarlet, is the last of her kind. The last remaining vampire.”

Caitlin looked at Aiden as if he’d lost his mind. She didn’t even know how to respond.

“She is coming of age,” he continued. “She will soon change. And when she does, she will unleash it on the world. Once again, our world will be besieged by the plague of vampirism.”

Aiden took two steps towards Caitlin. He placed a hand on her shoulder, looked into her eyes, as serious as she had ever seen him.

“That is why this journal came to you now. As a warning. You must stop her. For the sake of mankind. Before it’s too late.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Caitlin snapped back, but feeling unsure. “Do you even realize what you’re saying? That my daughter is a vampire? Are you for real? And what do you mean, stop her? What is that even supposed to mean?”

Aiden looked down at the floor, grim, looking much older in that moment than Caitlin had ever seen him.

And then, suddenly, she realized what he’d meant: kill her. He was telling her to kill her own daughter.

The realization struck her like a knife in the gut. She was so horrified, so physically sick from it, that she couldn’t bear to be near Aiden for another second.

“Caitlin, wait!” he called out.

But she couldn’t. Without a word, she turned and bolted out of his office.

She ran, as fast as she could, like a mad woman down the halls, determined to never, ever, come back again.

The entire drive home, Caitlin was sick with worry. She felt there was no rational person left in the universe. She had thought that driving into the city and speaking to Aiden would calm her, would make her return home feeling better, with everything explained and back in its rational order.

But he had just made everything a million times worse. Now she wished she’d never visited him – and more than anything, she wished she’d never gone to the attic. She wished she’d never had that dream, and had never seen that journal. She wished she could just make it all go away.

Just yesterday, everything was perfect in her life; now, she felt that everything was upside down. She almost felt that, by going to the attic, and opening that box, opening that book, she unleashed something horrible into the universe. Something that was meant to be kept locked away.

A part of her still told her that all of this was ridiculous. Maybe Aiden had lost touch with reality after all these years of teaching. Maybe that book was just some weird relic of her childhood, some collection of fantasies she had scrawled as a young girl. Maybe she could just put that book back in the attic, put today out of her mind, and everything would be fine, go back to normal, just as it always was.

But another part of Caitlin, a deeper part, felt an increasing sense of foreboding, one she could not shake. It told her that nothing would be fine again.

Caitlin’s hands trembled as she finished her two hour drive back and pulled into her idyllic village. She pulled down her quiet side street and hoped the sight of her house would calm her, as it always did.

But as she pulled into her driveway, she sensed immediately that something was wrong. Caleb’s car was in the driveway. He was home from work, in the middle of the afternoon. He never came home from work early.

She immediately checked her cell to see if she had any missed calls, and that was when she realized: her phone had been off all day. She looked down now and saw it flashing red: 9 missed calls in the last two hours. All from Caleb.

Her stomach dropped. Caleb never used his phone. That could only mean an emergency.

Caitlin jumped out of the car, ran up the steps, across the porch, and burst through the front door – which was ajar, compounding her dread.

“Caleb!?” she yelled, bursting into the house.

“Up here!” he screamed. “Get up here! Now!”