Charles knew he would have to prolong his stay in the basement to get to know about the secret slab-covered trapdoor. He looked at it. The looked strange, as if it had been prised open once before, yes, before, but long long ago perhaps even before Charles was born.His father had told him the house was very old and crumbling, the reason they got it for cheap, but till now he didn't know how old .He couldn't exactly get hold of why he felt thus, it was..it was like a gut feeling...instincts working like a well-oiled machine when we laid eyes upon that trapdoor. Charles' fingers were curled upwards, as though he was trying to grab the root of this peculiar feeling out of thin air.
The empty space of the trapdoor was lined with moss, moss formed ages ago...it was too big to be a rabbit hole...yet no adult could get in, perhaps on second thoughts , if the adult were as thin as a ruler..there was a glimmer of hope but there were no such humans of such description that Charles knew of.
Charles had always had had a peculiar belief that ghost's were fascinating creatures, perhaps only because the misfortune of meeting one had not befell him, at least till today.
His mother had read to him on many nights the stories of Civil war soldiers returning to mortal Earth in search of their deepest desires, desires which had remained unfulfilled due to their sad death.
He had always listened with terror, but that terror developed awe, which molded over the days into fantasy… don't get him wrong, the stories made him want to curl inside his quilt, but that fear only made him want to hear more.
But now pondering about what he was faced with, his thoughts took on a more understandable mature angle. Restless spirits were definitely not things to fantasize about. Them and historical artefacts are better left alone.
Yet his curiosity was even larger than his fear. He felt like he was meant to find the thing under the trapdoor for the ghost,and perhaps earn some fame as a nice bonus.
He could already picture The Statesman's headlines.
"Brave Teen Excavates Long Lost Treasures"
But he was torn between the two options. Yes, the choice of fame was tempting, very tempting. But the idea of going down there and getting lost and perhaps...never returning again was very very intimidating.
Relatives and friends alike, had often told him, complimented him rather, that he was brave, only because he was the only one who could manage to hold through till the end of very un-PG horror films without ending up in a huge mess of tears and wet pants. However looking back now, it wasn't really bravery, he was fascinated with the supernatural and you aren't normally scared of things you are fascinated with.
But looking back at the hole,his life passed before his eyes,No, it would be too exaggerating to say that his life passed before his eyes, it would be more befitting to say that the two consequences passed before his eyes.
In the first vision, there sat at the BBC Headquarters, sitting with big studio headphones around his ears before a mic which really looked more like a metallic contraption used while fighting.
He was sitting beside Sir David Arterborough. His heart leaped a little. Sir David Arterborough, those three words expressed all his ambitions. From his very childhood, well he was qualified a child still, but let's not dwell on the technicalities, all he wanted to be was an archaeologist , perhaps even study a bit more to be qualified as a historian, discover treasures, write about them, encourage people to explore and discover , state out the biological and historical world's problems and spread awareness as precisely and spread awareness as convincingly as Sir.
But before he could linger much on that wishful thought, his thoughts took on another edge.
He was there down in the gutter , but well..the person in the image didn't exactly look like him, it was him...but it wasn't him.