text: [Themes: horror]
  
  You walk along to the corridor to the middle door and push it open. There is a small, lowset window casting a very small amount of moonlight into the room but your candle lights up the room quite well.
  
  In the left-hand corner of the room, by the outside wall, is a small stove which looks as though it could be used for both cooking and for keeping the room warm. There is a small, threadbare settee facing it close by and another settee of a similar condition on the other side of the room. In the middle of the room is a long, wooden table with 8 chairs around it, all unfinished wood and very plain in design. In the far corner on the right of the room is a small desk with a single chair in front of it and a bookcase to the side of it.
  
  You walk into the room and head over to the stove. There is a cupboard next to the stove which you open and find it has a couple of pans and a few mismatched plates inside which confirms your suspicion that the stove had been used for cooking in its past. Now though, it looks as though it hasn't been used in quite a number of years.
  
  You turn around and go over to the settee nearby. There are no cushions or other soft furnishings left on it and you lift up the cushions of the seat but find nothing underneath and you wonder to yourself what you even expected you could find underneath there. Nevertheless, you repeat the process with the second settee across the other side of the room and find the same result, nothing.
  
  You walk over to the bookcase but there is only one book left on the shelf, a leather-bound copy of 'The Holy Bible'. You flick through the book, causing a cloud of dust which makes both you and your mentor cough and choke a little, but otherwise the book looks to be perfectly normal and you return it to the shelf. You do notice that some of the dust has settled onto the invisible form of your mentor though, meaning you can see where she is now.
  
  "The dust!" you whisper, pointing to where it is lying on your mentors arm and shoulder.
  
  "Oh!" she says and in a couple of seconds, it has vanished and you marvel at how her spell is able to compensate for such small particles being added to her form and then veil them as well.
  
  You stop staring at where your mentor was partially visible a moment ago and finally, you turn your attention to the desk. There are a couple of drawers in the desk, neither of which have locks on them and both of which prove to be empty when you open them up. Disappointed not to find anything useful, you leave the room and return to the corridor.
  
  Where do you go?
  
  > go into the third door.
  You walk along the corridor to the find room and this one has a small plaque on the door which reads, in a beautiful fluid script, 'Bathroom'; the door is ajar and you push it open.
  
  Inside is a small, very basic looking tin bathtub, which is only big enough to sit in unless you were an infant. Next to the bathtub is a small sink with one tap which looks grimy with age. There is also a toilet with the system suspended above it and the chain hanging down with the handle missing from it. Given the size of the bathtub, you're surprised to see a modern, flushing toilet and you wonder if it was a more recent addition.
  
  There is one thing out of place in the room which you couldn't fail to notice though. Suspended from the ceiling is an extendable ladder with a small hatch above it which looks as though it leads to an attic.
  
  There is a pole leaning against the wall which looks as though it is for pulling down the ladder but you're just about tall enough to reach it without needing the pole. You pull the ladder down and it extends to the floor whilst hinging on the ceiling so that is it perfectly positioned to allow access to the attic hatch.
  
  "What do you think?" you whisper very quietly to your mentor.
  
  "I think we go up." she replies at the same volume and you turn to look at the ladder.
  
  What do you do?
  
  > go up the ladder and through the hatch.
  You put your candle down on the floor of the bathroom, grip the sides of the ladder and climb up towards the ceiling. Your legs are feeling wobbly beneath you and you're not sure if it's nerves, exhaustion or a combination of the two. You reach the hatch in the ceiling, and you climb as high as you are able to so that you are bent over with the hatch above you; you place both hands firmly on the far side of the hatch and slowly lift it up until there is about an inch high gap that you can peer through.
  
  As soon as the hatch is lifted, you can hear chanting coming from the attic room and you know you must be in the right place, you know that your sister must be here. Although you can hear what must be the people who have taken your sister, you can't see anything through the gap you've lifted up other than a plain wooden floor and then the beams of the roof sloping back towards you, lit by candlelight which isn't coming from the candle you placed on the bathroom floor below you.
  
  You carefully lower the hatch again and, with some difficulty, turn yourself around on the ladder so that you're facing the opposite way. Once again, you slowly lift the hatch about an inch, the sound of the chanting is clear again and you peer through the gap you have made. This time it is much further until the sloping beams on the opposite side of the house but the floor in between the hatch and the beams is completely empty. You can see some shadows being cast which fall into your view of the floor though, and it's clear that the people up there are positioned to your right.
  
  Once again, you close the hatch, manoeuvre yourself on the ladder until you are facing the direction the shadows were being cast from and you lift up the hatch again.
  
  You can see that the light in the attic is being cast primarily by a variety of thick church candles near the edges of the attic room. In the centre of the room, you can see the lower half of a group of people stood in a circle in black robes. You lift the hatch a little higher and you can see that their faces are covered by the deep hoods on their robes and they are still chanting. You try to make out the words and the word Langdown jumps out at you from what they're saying, which makes some degree of sense as that's where you are after all.
  
  You lower the hatch gentle back down again and climb down the ladder and explain to your mentor what you could see when you lifted the hatch door.
  
  "I think they've got her surrounded in a ritual circle." you whisper quietly to your mentor after you've told her what you saw.
  
  "No amount of stealth is going to allow us to just take her then." replies your mentor, equally quietly. We need a different tactic.
  
  What do you do now?
  
  > burst into the attic screaming, hoping the distraction will catch the hooded figures off guard,.
  You take a deep breath, climb the ladder and poise yourself, ready to be as much of a distraction as possible so that you can try and find your sister, grab her and get out of there before they even know what's hit him.
  
  > If you found the razor, click here.
  As you stand on the top of the ladder, hunched over and preparing to fight, you remember the razor you found in the master bedroom downstairs. You fish about in your pockets until your fingers fall onto the unmistakeable handle of the razor and you pull it out from the pocket you found it in. You pull the blade out from the handle and hold it in your hand, trying to get a feel for how to hold it to be able to use it as a weapon. Once you feel happy with how to hold it, you grip it tightly as you lift the hatch up, slowly at first and then you throw it up so that it topples behind you onto the attic floor with the great big bang.
  
  You're already halfway through the square hatch when the noise alerts everyone in the room to your presence and all of the hooded figures abruptly turn to you, but the chanting doesn't falter for even a second. As you climb high enough to get your first foot onto the attic floor, you start to scream, a battle cry to you but possibly the way it was rising in pitch means that the hooded figures will hear it more as a scream of terror. Either way, you have all of their attention and you don't look very mentally stable. Something moves in your peripheral vision to your right but you don't have time to check what it was and you just hope it was your mentor.
  
  As you get the second foot onto the attic floor, raising the hand which grips the razor, you hear your mentor yell "Look out!" just as you get hit from behind by a great big weight and you go flying forwards onto your face. Your arm holding the razor is pushed underneath you and before you even realise what is happening, the razor's blade is buried deep into your neck and your hand is already covered in blood.
  
  You find the strength to pull yourself up a little from the floor and between the legs of the hooded figures, you can see the face of your sister, lying on the floor, staring at you with silent tears rolling down her face. The razor comes out of your throat as you lift yourself up and a river of blood pours down your robes.
  
  You collapse back to the floor again, your face landing on a pool of blood already formed underneath you and then everything goes black.