Challenge #130
"crept quietly forward"
Challenge #131
"screech", "whisper", "wind", "silence" & "rumble"
Peeping Alice pt.2
Alice looked around at the other houses, the other side of the street, and yet everything was quiet. The rumbling faded away into silence, and yet...Eery silence, surely I'm not the only one that heard that. She glanced back and forth between the front doors surrounding the house from where the roar had errupted. Nothing happened.
Fear, and curiousity had Alice planted firmly on the sidewalk, facing the house she'd recently been observing. She waited. What am I waiting for? I should go before someone knows I was here. And yet, she waited. She felt her body relaxing, and leaning forward listening for even the smallest noise.
Around her the neighborhood was at peace. No strong winds, no cars choosing this moment to travel through and no one coming in or out of the houses. It's odd isn't it? That no one should've heard that? I couldn't have imagined it... She kept still on the sidewalk, and then, when she couldn't stand the stillness and the quietness any longer, she crept quietly foward, towards the house. She kept walking, until she reached the other side of the house hoping to see through the window she was not so long ago perched beneath.
I'll just take a peek, and be on my way. She strained her senses, hoping to catch a sound, a sight, anything that might indicate what was really going on. As she raised her head to get a look inside the kitchen, there was a whisper...barely audible from the outside even with the stillness of the wind. She waited, and once she'd determined she could make nothing out of it, she finally peeked her head up to the level of the window to see inside once again. Nothing... The kitchen was dark, yet with the light from the afternoon filtering in, she could tell that no one was currently there. No pacing man, no crying woman. And yet, the whispering continued, and her confidence bolsted by the emptiness of the kitchen, Alice stood a bit to see more of the house through the kitchen entryway.
Maybe it's not really a whisper. No one was in the living room outside the kitchen, or at least no one that Alice could see. She straightened to her full height, and yet she saw no one. Huh. I best be on my way, I've already wasted enough time here. She hurried back to the sidewalk, and yet once again feeling she'd missed something stopped as she watched the front of the house. In a moment, the stillness that had permeated the air in the neighborhood was gone. The wind picked up, the birds screeched and chirped happily in the air, and the odd moment that had come was finally gone. Was it all in my head?
The neighborhood seemed to erupt with activity, cars passed by on the street, and people called to each other across their lawns somewhere down the road. Everywhere, every house, but the one she stood in front of seemed bristling with activity, right like it should be. Every house but this one. Alice, for the first time as if remembering something she had forgotten searched the front of the house for the number. 4125. Check. And I'm on...Meadow Lane, right. Something tugged at Alice's memory about Meadow Lane, but she couldn't place it. It'll come to me later. Maybe I'll remember before I make it home. Or Vincent will know, I'll ask him. And, determined that the answer would come to her, or that she would have to ask her neighbor Alice turned to follow the sidewalk home.