The Chambers

It was October, Friday the 13th, me and my dad Frank, were sitting on the couch watching the new installment of a horror movie trilogy waiting for mom to arrive from her nursing job at the hospital. It was 7:26pm mom’s shift ended at 7 but we shrugged it off thinking she was stopping by the nearby fast food place for dinner. The clock ticked 8pm and that’s when the worry set in with my father, he called her co workers and asked if she had left since she had yet to arrive home. I overheard the phone conversation over the deafening screams from the movie, “Are you sure she left? Maybe you confused her with a patient or someone that looks similar to her'' my father argued. My fathers words and reactions started to worry me, what if something did happen to her? My father returned to the living room and assured me everything was fine, and I started questioning my father due to his lack of emotion with mom missing.

The next morning with mom still missing, my father refused to file a police report for a missing person. “You shouldn't be worrying too much, she'll turn up eventually” my father stated. His unemotional reaction last night and now his refusal to call the police made me suspicious of him. “Why are you so calm? Mom is missing! She didn’t just disappear!” I shouted. “You don’t know her, you don’t know her like you think you do!” my father yelled. Our screaming shook the walls, I stood there in silence like a blade of grass in the wind. After he left the house for work I sat in my room replaying the encounter in my head in a loop rethinking what he said to me since I couldn't wrap my head around it. After a while of my dad having left for work I heard a dog-like growl coming from outside. Being too scared to look out my window I looked through our security cameras through my phone when I noticed something was hiding behind a bush. I started zooming into the frame when I heard a knock on the front door, I went and opened the door to find nobody. My initial thought was maybe a ding dong ditch but I didn't see any teenagers scrambling to hide like cockroaches in a closet when you turn on a light. After a minute of standing at the front door without seeing anything I returned to my room to keep looking at the security cameras where the thing was hiding. When I turned the camera feed back on I noticed it was gone and there was no movement anymore.I rewinded the feed in hopes of seeing it move out of the way, i rewinded so far back i ended at the time dad left for work when something caught my eye. My father left for the other direction of where his job is which made me start to wonder where he actually went.

When my dad got back home after work I waited until dinner time to ask him where he really went in the morning since he didn’t go his usual way. He stared at me in silence then said “Were you spying on me?”. “No, I was just looking for something through the security cameras then I noticed you went a different way than usual” I said. “Don’t ever do that again, what I do is of no business to you. Go to your room.” he stated. Without backtalk I stood up from the dining table and went to my room. There I just laid in bed thinking about what had happened these last two days. My head was filling up with thoughts and emotions. I didn't know what to do. I felt so helpless. I wept until I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of my father getting ready for work. I had a bad feeling in my gut but was conflicted on what I should do. I had the idea of either following him or staying home again.I set my mind and grabbed a flashlight from my closet and decided to follow him. I waited until he left in his truck then I went after him on my bike staying out of sight with a baseball cap and hood on to try and hide myself. I followed him for what felt like one hour to an abandoned building that looked like it was falling in on itself. I saw him enter the building through a door and go down into a hidden basement trap door that was hidden under a file cabinet. I waited around five minutes for me to go in behind him. I grabbed my flashlight and went to the trapdoor, opening the trapdoor was surprisingly quiet due to its old rusty appearance. Down the hatch there was a flight of stairs and at the end was a blue light. I went down the stairs and turned the corner to see over 20 cryostasis chambers. There were multiple people who had gone missing over the course of a couple of months, and one caught my eye specifically. There she was, my mom. I couldn’t even process what I was seeing when I heard “You shouldn’t have come here.” The last thing I remember happening was a towel getting put over my mouth and nose. A couple days later a missing person report was filed for Chris and Lisa Rodgers.