There was great panic in the hall.
'Sparrow! Price! Price!' Mr. Benson and Mrs. Cooke called out.
Brendan's hunch was telling him that this was Mr. Price's doing. There was no one else Brendan knew in that room that had made a deal with the witch besides himself and Mr. Price. What's to say that Mr. Price owed the Finch some human skin, or liver and Mr. Sparrow was the unfortunate candidate for the sacrifice?
So much noise was vibrating through the hall, students jittery and disturbed and their eyes searching each other for an explanation of what the cause of the power cut might have been. They would all have gladly run out, if their feet were not frozen where they stood, and Mrs. Cooke's yelling only made the situation seem more ominous.
'Quiet, quiet everyone!' Mrs. Cooke silenced the students. It took ten minutes to have everyone completely quiet. 'Right…has anyone seen Mr. Sparrow or Mr. Price anywhere?' Mrs. Cooke asked the sea of unsettled students.
Everyone shook their heads ignorantly.
Mrs. Cooke and Mr. Benson stood baffled. How could they have vanished in such a short time? They had been there a second ago.
There was silence in the hall for a while but it was interrupted by the shrill sound of a kettle with boiling water. It kept getting louder and louder.
Everyone was trying to locate where the sound was coming from, twisting and turning their heads where they stood. Suddenly, there was a girl's scream! It was so loud and near but no one could tell where it was coming from. This was when deep fear enveloped the room.
They started running out of the hall; some were even tripping over each other trying to escape. Mrs. Cooke and Mr. Benson had not succeeded in keeping everyone calm but instead had joined the escape plan.
Brendan had kept his hand on Samantha's as they walked out, she too looked unsettled.
As soon as people got their feet out of the school premises, they made tracks as fast as they could, their feet thud-thudding on the ground, a stampede of screaming and desperate children. It was an "every man for himself" stampede, their feet digging into the ground like ploughs and leaving prints as deep as hooves. But they neither knew what they were running from nor where they were running to.
When Brendan and Samantha had made it outside, Brendan pulled her further to the side, away from the center of the hooves and clamor. 'Where's your car?' he asked her. Samantha owned two cars which were both Mercedes, one white and the other silver in color and used them interchangeably.
'It's parked behind the school grounds,' she answered after a while, her eyes still trying to accept the reality of the scene of screaming students before her.
'You should..,' Brendan tried to continue but the kettle shrill started sounding again but this time it was as if it was in his head. 'Do you hear that?' he asked Samantha.
'Hear what?'
'Don't tell me you can't…Aah!' His ears started bleeding.
'Brendan…your ears…they're bleeding!'
He stuck his forefingers in his ears in an attempt to block out the noise but it kept getting louder. In anguish, he looked around and saw that the noise was levelling down, no one looked like they were experiencing what he was experiencing. How was it that he was now the only one who could hear it? 'Sam, get to your car and leave, now!' he shoved her towards the parking lot.
'But you…your ears…you need a doctor!'
'Never mind me just go!'
She hesitated at first but then left, her face full of concern for him.
Brendan was left in agony; the shrill noise was still in his ears, vibrating as if bees had decided to breed there. He looked around and saw that the school was almost empty of all the students, the last of them fighting to get through the gate.
The sound was beginning to drive him mad. He began staggering towards where he thought the sound was coming from. Each step he took came with a punishment; the sound kept growing louder and louder in his ears.
He finally decided to use his heightened speed to get to where he thought the sound was coming from.
He stopped at the entrance of an abandoned warehouse.
The warehouse looked like it had not been in use for at least thirty years. There was no door and its mostly wooden structure looked unstable. There was no familiar landmark or any other building in sight except only a few trees and the road which led to the Divan Desert.
The sound suddenly stopped. He wiped the blood trickling from his ears and glared sideways in search of the source. Brendan was not expecting a logical or scientific explanation to the noise because he knew that would be like expecting a "1+1" question in an algebra test. This had to be the Finch's doing.
The trusses in the warehouse were all covered in pigeon droppings and this sight made him begin to doubt that this place was the source of the ear piercing shrill.
'Show yourself, you troublemaker!' he shouted into the darkness of the warehouse.
'Brendan..? How good of you to come.' It was Mr. Price walking on one of the trusses. 'Or maybe I should call you, Anonymous?'
Brendan made a violent shudder, 'How did you..?'
'Isn't it a little too obvious? Who else to crush a seven-foot Destroyer other than the boy of legend, a descendant of the greatest magician scientist ever to walk the face of the earth? A true Versatile with Versatile blood surging through his veins?'
'So you know?'
'Don't worry, your secret's safe with me, besides, the only people who know about your little secret are the prophets, the Finch and me.'
'How come?'
Mr. Price swooped from the truss and landed an arm's length from him without the slightest of a thud. 'The thing about magic is that not too many people believe that it exists. Humans only believe in things they understand. Things they can quantify. They'll never understand or accept the existence of creatures with such mind-boggling power. It's time we showed them what we can do.'