* * *
Matthew and Stephanie soon got to a hidden château in the hills with their rescuers. Here, the kids were handed over to a fat jovial-looking woman, who led them into her large grizzly kitchen and gave them bowls of soup.
Stephanie was still scared and started crying when the woman moved over to serve the resistance militia in the sitting room. “We must do something, Matt,” she whispered to her brother almost hysterically. “I cannot take this anymore.”
Matthew withdrew the book from his coat pocket and opened it. The pages were hot!
“Matthew, what must we do?”
“I’m trying to find out,” Matthew whispered. Why were the book’s pages hot? What was the source of this heat? He couldn’t discern anything from the written names. The mediums with which they were written were slowly changing color. ‘Tarnishing,’ the adults called it. His sister stared at this strange change beside him without a word. None was needed. Slowly the names were turning red, and then they started glowing!
A new fear gripped Matthew. He realized that all this was happening because of him. He was so scared that when the book’s pages started smoldering, he only realized this when the heat got to his hands, and he dropped the book altogether and moved away from it, shaking all over.
“What are you doing?” Stephanie demanded.
“It must be cursed, Steph,” Matthew exclaimed, breaking into a sweat. “It must be! We were pushed back into the past because of it.”
“You’ve already said that.”
“I wrote their names, myself,” Matthew told himself with guilt. “And ours as well! This is all my fault.”
“I thought you said it was harmless,” Stephanie said, but her foster brother was mumbling incoherently to himself. “What are you saying?” She tried to pick out his words and became alarmed when she realized what he was trying to say. All those names he wrote in the book! What must have happened to all those people?
Gunshots came from outside.
The children looked at each other with renewed dread.
“We must look for Nora,” Matthew stressed.
“How do we do that?” Stephanie cried. They heard more gunshots and machine gun fire from outside. The intensity was deafening.
“We’re under attack,” Matthew exclaimed. The men in the next room had opened fire. One cried out in pain. The enemy had more firepower.
Stephanie picked up the book. Her brother took it from her. Someone fell into the kitchen. This person was the woman who had earlier served them soup and she was dead!
Bravely, they both looked away.
Matthew opened the page on which he had written all the names. His hands were shaking.
“There are so many names,” Stephanie cried. “Were you crazy?”
“I didn’t write the first half,” Matthew implored. He was sweating freely. The gunshots were now dying down in the next room. A Frenchman crawled into the kitchen with blood on his shirt. He was wounded and dying. A German soldier followed him.
He shot the man dead!
Quietly, Matthew and his adopted sister drew back into the darkness. He was repeatedly whispering Nora’s name as he stared at it, hoping fervently that something spectacular would happen.
But nothing did.
In the darkness, he placed a finger on her name and quickly removed his hand when he discovered that her name was very hot. “Yeow,” he unconsciously cried and the soldier heard him.
“Matthew, he’s coming this way,” Stephanie blurted out.
The man appeared before the kids and simply glared at them. He stretched out his hands towards the two of them and darkness befell them both.
The Black Book Page 29