Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Secret Room, 8th Chapter

"Sit down, Will!" Jan glared at him. "You don't want to make Mrs. Banks any more suspicious than she already is."
Reluctantly he sank back into his chair. "Jimmy, what do you know about this Stella incident? I've never heard you mention it before."
"That's because I hardly even remembered it, till you brought up this whole Secret Room craze now. I couldn't have been more than five when my brother told us this."
"According to him," he continued. "Stella had two best friends when she was staying here. Both were about the same age as her, and well...they three were the inseperable sort."
"Stella herself was also highly curious about the Secret Room, and somehow managed to get her two friends involved as well. They tried all sorts of ways to gather information about the history of the room, and in some ways did find out a little. However, that didn't help much since it was mostly on the construction of the room, not what was inside it now. Furthermore, they were starting to attract attention from Mrs. Banks and it would be too risky to continue."
"So one summer, the three hatched a plan: they would break in the old-fashioned way. They read up all they could on picking locks, and sourced for any saws they could find in the orphanage. Heh, well, most of the time this meant stealing from the poor janitor and stashing it somewhere."
"Now, this is the part where the details are rather blurry. In the version my brother tells me, Stella and her friends take their chance during a fire drill. Then..."
Will and Jan swallowed hard.
"Nobody knows the conclusion. All I know is, Mrs. Banks caught them and her two friends were never seen again."
"But what about Stella? Why is she still here, then?"
He shrugged. "No idea."
"Well, now this is interesting," Jan said. "The version I heard is quite different from yours."

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