Losing Blaine had hurt. They had been friends since middle school. Eric had noticed him sitting in the back of the classroom, and decided that he needed a friend. Blaine never really got much louder, always staying quiet. So Eric spoke more.

Eric wasn’t too sure if Blaine even saw him as a friend in the first place. He didn’t know what went through his head, more often than not. But Eric saw him as a friend. And that was why his death hurt.

They had both gone their own ways, going to different colleges, but where Eric had moved into the dorms, Blaine had moved into an apartment by himself. Eric should have visited more. He should have dragged Blaine out to socialize more. Now, he would never get the chance again.

During the night, Blaine’s apartment building collapsed. Structural instability, combined with a minor earthquake, caused it to fall. It took them a full day to dig his body out from the rubble.

From what they could determine, his death hadn’t been a peaceful one. His lungs had been punctured, eardrums ruptured, spine broken, rib cage shattered, and brain swelling. Enough to kill, but not enough for it to be quick.

Eric hadn’t even gone to the funeral. He was too torn up about it. He skipped class, he stopped going out, his appetite decreased. His friends could tell something was up, but none of them knew exactly what.

It was during this time, while he was laying on his bed, when something strange happened. For the briefest of moments, he thought he saw someone.

A little girl, standing in the middle of his room. She had wolf ears and a tail sprouting from her body, and in her hands was a knife. She was looking at her arm, knife poised to slice it, and multiple red lines already lined her arm.

And then she was gone. But Eric was sitting upright in his bed. Sure, the lack of food might be messing with his head, but he didn’t think he’d see something so out of place as a hallucination.

Besides, the knife was familiar. He had seen it before. It was supposed to be on Blaine’s dresser in his parent’s house. Something wasn’t right here. Eric rolled out of bed and got dressed, grabbing his car keys and wallet on his way out.

A short ten minute drive later, and he pulled up in front of Blaine’s parent’s house. It was only when he got to the front door that he realized he didn’t know what to say. He stood there for around a minute, trying to think of what to say, when the door opened.

Standing in front of him was Blaine’s father. They each stood there for a moment, staring at each other in silence, before Eric decided to speak up.

“Hey, Mr. Brooks. I uhm, I’m sorry for not attending the funeral. Do you mind if I say goodbye to him now?” Eric had never been all too good at coming up on things on the spot. That had always been Blaine’s area of expertise.

Blaine’s father continued staring at Eric for a moment, before he nodded. “Sure, come on in. Belle’s making dinner, if you want to stay.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly intrude. Besides, school has different places to eat that I can go to for free.” Eric passed through the door nervously, glancing around. Blaine’s father shrugged.

“Up to you kiddo.” He wandered to the kitchen, leaving Eric alone. He seemed almost…sorry? Eric gave one last glance towards where Blaine’s father went, before going up the stairs to Blaine’s room.

Eric hadn’t often visited Blaine’s house. Blaine had always been against it, for some reason, but when he was pressed for a reason, he just said he couldn’t put it into words. As a result, Eric had only been here twice.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Despite this, he was still shocked when he entered Blaine’s old room. There was nothing. Sure, the lack of some main items was understandable, such as the bed and the desk, but everything was gone.

He could still see some pale spots on the wall where paintings and decorations had been hung. Eric rushed to the closet, and was greeted with the same sight. This didn’t make any sense. All of Blaine’s stuff was just gone.

Eric fell to his knees. What had he even been trying to accomplish? Sure, the knife that girl had been holding looked similar, but that didn’t mean it was Blaine’s. Had he seriously been hoping that Blaine had survived? He was hopeless.

His head fell into the wall, and a small slip of paper peeled off from the bottom of one of the shelves that was visible through the closet door. Curious, he finished pulling it loose, before giving it a glance.

It was an address. Judging by the extra numbers, it might’ve been a storage unit of some kind. He still thought it was hopeless, but it might give him some answers as to why Blaine’s room was empty.

He went back down, bid farewell to Blaine’s parents, who were indifferent to him not staying for dinner, and hopped in his car. Setting up the GPS on his phone, he navigated to the address on the slip of paper.

After finding a parking spot, he hopped out and tried to find his way to the unit the paper mentioned. It was a veritable maze however, and took him longer than he cared to admit to find his way there.

He still made it there eventually. The unit was unlocked, which was strange when compared to the locks he saw on every other unit. A flip of the light switch revealed a vast majority of Blaine’s stuff. Sure, most of the furniture was missing, and a lot of shit was in boxes, but it was still a lot.

Though there were a few items that weren’t in boxes, like those sketchbooks in the corner. Eric didn’t even know Blaine drew. A deep sorrow filled him as he approached the sketchbooks, reminding him of all the time he had spent with Blaine. A sigh escaped his lips.

Eric picked up the first sketchbook and flipped through it, finding only mediocre drawings of landscapes and parks. No people were in any of the drawings, strangely enough. Those were all in the second sketchbook.

The second sketchbook contained hundreds of thousands of different positions of the human body, facial expressions, and different size and body type. At the beginning, they had been rather low quality, but by the end, the quality was incredible, even if it was only in pencil.

It was the third sketchbook that surprised him. It started off with a drawing of Blaine himself, sitting in front of his computer. He flipped to the next page, but it was only slightly different. He started flipping, and quickly discovered that it was like those flipbooks you see every now and then.

The thickness of the paper made it difficult to flip quickly however, so Eric had to resort to flipping through, page by page, as fast as he could. As each page went by, the scene slowly changed in subtle ways.

Blaine slowly stood up and grabbed a walking stick from where it was laying on the wall. He made to walk out of the room when Eric realized something. He was shorter in that drawing than he was in the first one of him standing. He quickly flipped back to verify that, yes, Blaine had grown shorter in the story.

Eric shrugged and went back to flipping through the story. Blaine walked out of his room, directly to the base of a mountain, where he then started climbing. It was at this point that Eric noticed that Blaine’s face seemed…softer in a way. He was also still growing shorter.

Blaine kept hiking, going up and up until he was forced to climb vertically to keep going. Finally, Blaine reached the top of the mountain, and, from the way his back was drawn, Eric could have sworn his body had shifted ever so slightly. The loss of height was more intriguing to Eric though.

Eric slowly stopped flipping as fast, turning page by page as the drawing slowly rotated to capture Blaine from the front. Standing in the exact same spot Blaine had been in the drawing was a little girl.

A little girl who looked extremely familiar. She sported a giant grin on her face, walking stick clutched tightly in her grasp. In big, bold letters, emblazoned beneath her, was the name “Rose.” But Eric didn’t care about that all too much.

It was the exact same girl he had seen in his room earlier, just without color and cuts on her arm. But, how could he have known about the girl who only made an appearance in one of his deceased friend’s sketchbooks? It made no logical sense.

Something was wrong here, and whatever it was, it didn’t seem like something Eric could fix, if he even knew what it was.