Young Writers Society

Bobby nearly kept out of his skin at the loud bang of a door nearly being kicked off its hinges. He regained his balance on the counter and turned wide-eyes to the newly open door. Kazimir was standing in the doorway, not completely unaware of the panicked racing of Bobby’s heart.

It’s just Kazimir. It’s just Kazimir. It’s just Kazimir.

A glance at the lock showed that it had been completely snapped off, leaving just some splintered wood in its place. The wood was probably already weakened. Damaged. Bobby didn’t want to think about why Kazimir might know how to kick down a door that was still sturdy.

Jack got up when he saw Lorcan coming.
"What happened?" He said, looking the blood stained cloth wrapped around his hand. He looked slightly unsettled.

Chloe was more worried about Jack, but waited for Lorcan's answer.

"I cut myself on the glass when I was coming in through the window," Lorcan sheepishly admitted. He temporarily ignored the throbbing of his hand as he scanned the bakery for any kind of salt. He hadn't ever been inside a place like this before; he just knew what they were for.

The only salt he could see right now were the salt shakers on the table. There was a door behind the counter that Bobby was near - maybe that had the salt they needed.

He took a deep breath, hopped over the counter with a little extra push from his hands to make sure he cleared the top, and went to open the door.

The moment he did, he was immediately met with the smell of decay. Lorcan's cloth-covered hand immediately shot up to cover his mouth. Images of dead, decomposing bodies sprung to mind.

But when Lorcan glanced in the direction of the smell, all he saw was molding, old piles of what must have been fruit. They were too far gone to tell what kind of fruit they had been, but it was clear that they weren't anything to be afraid.

His gaze traveled down.

Propped against the rack was a bag of salt - but not the kind of salt Lorcan would have thought was used for cooking. It said road salt on the cloth sack, in faded black marker.

And right next to it was a spot where there wasn't any dust.

"I think I found where the person who helped us got the salt," he said, staring at the spot.

Kazimir watched Lorcan, but kept track of Bobby in the corner of his eye. He followed over to the counter and looked over it, into the room Lorcan had found. He quickly spotted the road salt and did the math. The salt waster was storing salt here.

"Great, we'll bring that with us, then," he said, launching himself over the counter so he flew into the room beside Lorcan. He weaved around Lorcan and squatted beside the big bag of salt, then put his hands under it. With a heave, he lifted it up and turned around. "We just won't waste it all on one ghost. We'll be uh, smarter with it. More economical."

Bobby scooted to the edge of the counter and dangled his legs over it, watching the others dig around in the big pantry. They'd found the salt, but there had to be something else in there.

He slid off the counter, landing silently, and slipped into the pantry. There was a door on the side that the others were ignoring in favor of looking at the salt, but Bobby tried it. Locked? No. The handle was just rusted in place.

Bobby glanced over at Kazimir. Bit his lip. No...there was no telling what was behind this door. They couldn't just glance in a window and make sure it was clear, not that Kazimir had bothered with that.

No. He wasn't going to ask. Kazimir was busy with the salt anyway.

Instead, Bobby went looking in the baskets for something to use to get the door open somehow.

He rifled around in one of them full of petrified bread, probably. That or just rocks. He picked one up and tested it in his hand, its weight, its hardness. It would be fine.

Sparing a glance at the others, who weren't paying much attention to what he was doing - they probably thought he was just looking for some surviving food - he returned to the door and positioned the roll over the door handle. He brought it up, then down, slowly. Three...two...one! He slammed it down, hard.

The handle snapped off, falling to the ground with a thunk.

Bobby pushed open the door to reveal the baking part of the bakery. A big stone oven, counter space occasionally dotted by a bowl or a wooden spoon, plenty of cupboards.

He wandered inside, careful not to disturb anything.

Lorcan spun around the moment that he heard the noise - jumping a little at the sudden thunk. He had been trying to figure out how he could help carry the salt when Bobby had slipped past them into a room filled with a giant stone oven. It looked like the place that they did the baking in.

Lorcan quietly followed Bobby in.

He scanned the counters and cupboards for anything useful, but nothing popped out at him. He was about to suggest that they go and look somewhere else when he heard the ground creak behind him.

Which was strange, considering that no one had been there earlier.

Lorcan turned.

There was a ghost right behind him.

The ghost didn't look as ancient as the first one had - he was wearing clothes that matched what Lorcan had seen people in Charlotte's town wearing. But Lorcan didn't really have a chance to contemplate how old the ghost was. The moment the ghostly man - baker? - met Lorcan's eyes, he grabbed Lorcan and covered his mouth with a cloth. The cloth didn't smell like anything, but Lorcan couldn't breath.

His vision started to go dark on the edges as he tried - and failed - to break free of the ghost's grip. He could feel strands of darkness started to spring up from the floorboards. They were weak and couldn't do anything, but his body was tapping into the magic it could reach right now. The strands of darkness were the most he could handle.

Kazimir was getting a good grip on the giant bag of salt when Bobby broke into the kitchen. He stood at the doorway, watching as Bobby went in to explore and Lorcan followed after.

At least, he’d been planning on just observing, until the ghost baker appeared out of nowhere, trying to kill Lorcan this time.

“Oh, not on my f***ing watch!” Kazimir growled as he hurried up behind the ghost and tore open the top of the bag. He swung the bag of salt back and swung it forward, sending a shower of salt over the ghost, and, predictably, Lorcan.

Bobby jumped out of the way the moment he saw the ghost. He didn't try to jump in this time, and he didn't have to.

Fear pounded on his chest like even his heart wanted run away and abandon his shock-frozen body to the horrors of this place.

The salt only helped a little. The baker recoiled as sat hit both him and Lorcan, but it wasn't anything like the shower of salt that had fallen on Kazimir earlier. And when the ghost moved away from Kazimir, Lorcan was pulled back with him. The most helpful thing about it was the brief gasp of air he was able to get.

The darkness reached for the sky one last time - only making it up an inch or two - and disappeared once more. As his vision grew black again, his body acted on autopilot. He knew he was tapping into his magic. He wasn't really thinking about what would happen after that. He just knew that if he was going to get out of this, he'd needed to somehow slip out from the ghost's grasp.

Darkness danced across his skin, coating every inch that was visible to the others. Then he felt his body condense; it grew smaller, and his weight shifted. His arms became wings. His clothes were replaced by fur. In the back of Lorcan's panicking mind, part of him remembered Juniper saying once that if the darkness hadn't covered him, he'd fit right in on a documentary about evolution - or on the cover of an Animorphs book.

But there was always one problem with shifting when he wasn't close to the ground. He suddenly found himself with his feet several feet off of the ground, and no easy way to flap his wings to save himself from hitting the ground. The ghost, surprised by his victim suddenly becoming a bat, didn't try to tighten his grip.

Lorcan fell to the ground.

He struggled to regain his balance, but his body was still going off of adrenaline - he flapped his wings, lifted himself off of the ground with a few solid gusts of air, and went awkwardly flying straight into the person closest to him.

Which was Bobby.

Lorcan slammed right into Bobby's chest.

Bobby screamed and stumbled back into the counter. His mind and heart raced as he struggled to keep up with what was going on. Where was Lorcan? Bobby thought for a moment that he might have been turned into the bat, but that couldn't be right. Had the ghost taken him?

As these thoughts raced through his head at a mile a minute, he tried to shoo the bat away.

Kazimir was dissappointed when the salt didn't really do that much, but the moment he saw Lorcan turn into a bat he lost his shit.

"Oh shit! What the fuck! Motherfucker! Fuck!"

He kicked in the air at the ghost, who had finally backed off. He splashed another wave of salt at it, this one bigger.

"Don't just do fuckin' shit like that! Giant vampire bat bastard! God!"

Jack just went pale. Chloe figured that Kaz's reaction might have been that way because he saw Jack and assumed that Lorcan was still there and the bat was something else... But of course his past sentence made her wish her speculation was true. "Jeez he's turned an albino," she though and giggled to herself.

Lorcan went crashing to the ground as Bobby shooed him away, salt clinging to his fur from the initial salt attack and from the second. By the time that he finally was able to prop himself up off of the ground with his wings, the ghost had vanished - Kazimir must have gotten it covered in just enough salt.

Lorcan coughed and took a shaky breath of air in. He had barely been able to breath earlier; now he was struggling to make up for all of the air he had lost. When his head had finally cleared and he felt like he wasn't suffocating, he looked back at the others in the room.

And then he realized something.

He had just transformed.

In front of everyone.

Lorcan wished he had enough magic to cover himself in darkness right now.

Bobby was hyperventilating. He could feel his pulse thudding in his throat; he felt ill.

"Where..." he managed, stumbling a step away from the bat. Of course there were bats here, why was he dumb enough to think otherwise? He tried to finish his question, but he couldn't only stutter a few unintelligible syllables before he gave up.

Kazimir, recovered now that the ghost had disappeared finally, let out a frustrated little growl mixed with a sigh and closed up the salt bag so it'd be less likely to spill over with any jostling.

"Okay. That was just freaky. Ugh. Ghosts. Okay, anyways. You okay, kid?" he looked to Bobby, who did not look okay. Maybe that wasn't a helpful question.

"Jack! Chloe!" he called out. "It was just another ghost! We're okay in here. Lorcan just went a little batty."