text: [Themes: horror]
  
  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?
  
  > try to sneak into the attic and work out what to do once you're there.
  You take a deep breath, climb the ladder and poise yourself. You're not sure how you're going to be able to get your sister out of there, but you're confident that the first step is going to be stealth; going in there like a bat out of hell is going to lead to a quick death more likely than now.
  
  > If you found the dagger, click here.
  You're trying to psyche yourself up for the attic infiltration when your mentor hisses at you up the ladder "The dagger!"
  
  "Dagger?" you whisper back.
  
  "The dagger we found in the piano. Use the dagger!"
  
  Oh yes, the dagger, you'd completely forgotten about that. You rummage carefully about in your pockets until you find the dagger in one of them. You test how sharp the blade is on your finger; it isn't really that sharp but with enough force behind it, it would still do a lot of damage. You tuck the dagger into the cord tied around the waist of your robes to keep your hands free but the blade handy.
  
  "It's time." you whisper to your mentor and you start to lift the hatch from the opposite side to where the hooded figures are standing so that the hatch will hopefully hide your entry to the room a little.
  
  You get really nervous the higher you lift the hatch, especially when you can't see the hooded figures to know if they have seen you or not. When the hatch is almost upright, it starts to slip a little and you panic as you grab it back to stability; you grab it with your other hand just as it started to fall and you breath a silent sigh of relief. Luckily the slip happened silently and the chanting never faltered, maybe luck is on your side you wonder.
  
  Your adrenaline is really surging through you now and your muscles are begging for you to run, use that adrenaline to get out of there, but you're not leaving without your sister, that's just a truth that you've known since you first read the letter they sent you.
  
  You get both of your feet onto the attic floor, still crouched as low as you can manage and you wait until you feel your mentor climb up into the attic too before you lower the hatch down, although you leave it only half covering the hole as you need to get out of here quickly once you've got your sister. You move as quietly as you can to the back of the attic, away from the hooded figures, still at a crouch and turn to look over at the circle of what you're sure now are cultists.
  
  > If you found the notes about who was needed for the ritual, click here.
  You think back to the notes you found in the parlour earlier and realise that might be quite important. What did it say again?
  
  Blood of an innocent. Magical blood, family connection.
  
  Find an apprentice, we don't want anyone with any real power here.
  
  Night of the full moon is the most powerful.
  
  They need magical blood as well as the blood of an innocent, which is why they sent you the letter, to get you to come here of your own accord, and it's why they chose your sister as the innocent, to make sure you would come. Now you're in the attic, you're giving them everything they need for their ritual, but you can't get your sister out without being up here. What you've also brought though, is your mentor and they have no idea she is here, you can only hope that makes all the difference.
  
  Suddenly, your mentor appears next to you, crouched down just as you are, with her eyes closed and chanting. You start with panic when you see her appear like that, you don't want the cultists to know she is here! She is obviously spellcasting though, and with nothing else happening, you realise that she hasn't just appeared to everyone, she has extended her veil to include you as well. You're not sure if she can listen to you whilst she's casting the veil, which obviously takes a lot more concentrated effort than just veiling herself, but you try anyway.
  
  "They need me for the ritual as well." you whisper, your mouth very close to her ear so as to only be audible to her. "We need to get her out without letting them grab me too."
  
  There's no response from your mentor as she continues to crouch there with her eyes closed and chanting. Then you notice a tiny nod and you can only hope that was her way of agreeing with you.
  
  "Ok, so we need a plan." you whisper hopefully and look at your mentor again. She continues on chanting and you wish more than anything you were back in the laboratory being taught by her again, no matter how hard the lessons were, they always made sense, you always knew what you were meant to be doing even if you couldn't do it.
  
  "Well, there's about a dozen of them," you whisper, trying to count the cloaked figures, "if we just try and take Amelia, even veiled, there's enough of them to stop us."
  
  You crouch there looking over at the circle of figures and wistfully whisper "If only I could look like them." At that, your mentor's eyes flick open and she looks right at you, nearly making you fall over backwards in surprise before she disappears.
  
  "Yes!" she whispers back to you and you wonder what she has planned now. You're feeling very exposed now, no longer veiled, but the circle of chanting cultists don't seem to be paying any attention to you luckily.
  
  You feel an energy falling over you and you realise it must be your mentor's doing. You look down at yourself and see that your brown apprentice robe is now black. You pull the hood up and find that it has deepened like the robes of the cultists, so that it now hides your face completely.
  
  "How do I look?" you whisper to your mentor but she doesn't respond; keeping up her veil and maintaining the robe change must be using up all of her concentration like the double veil had.
  
  You stand up and try to emulate the postures of the cultists in the circle, upright with steady shoulders, robe hood well forward but head up straight. You pat your waist and find that the dagger is still tucked into your, now black, cord belt and that gives you an idea on how to approach this, you only hope your sister will forgive you.
  
  You stride confidently over to the circle of cultists and as you approach, you get a view of what they are surrounding. In front of the cultists is a seemingly random array of black candles and other small objects which you can't make out. There is a white symbol painted onto the floor which swoops around and has a line intersecting the curve.
  
  In the middle of the shape created by the lines is your sister, lying on her side, bound and gagged with tears silently running down her face.
  
  You see a gap wide enough between a couple of the cultists and go to stand in between them but before you get there, you realise that you're not chanting as they are and that might give the game away. You quickly try to emulate the sounds they're making though they don't seem to be making words other than Langdown in the middle of it.
  
  "Ffloo mwaf gralk Langdown wahg ftah" you say with them.
  
  "Fnloo mgwaf grthalk Langdown wgahn ftag" you try the next time.
  
  "Fngloo mgwnaf grthalkth Langdown wgahnag fhtagn" you manage the third time.
  
  "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Grthalkpth Langdown wgah'nagl fhtagn" you flow into saying just as you reach the circle and stand between the cultists. They don't seem to even acknowledge you arriving there.
  
  You stand in the circle of cultists, chanting their strange phrase with them a few times whilst you decide the best way to do this. You take a deep breath and step forwards towards your sister with the dagger drawn.
  
  You sister starts to write about in her bonds, clearly terrified and you hate yourself for doing this to her, but it's the only thing you can think of. You crouch down and pull her up into a sitting position and hold the dagger in front of her throat with your other hand holding her by the neck. The cultists haven't moved but their chanting is getting louder and you manage to suppress a shiver. You draw the dagger across her neck and blood trickles down through your fingers.
  
  The chanting is reaching a crescendo and you pick up your sister, hoping that the cultists can't see that the blood is coming from the slice you just made on your own hand and not from your sister at all. You use the dagger to cut the bond tying her and you stride out of the circle and towards the hatch.
  
  It takes the cultists a few moments to realise that whatever they were attempting to do hasn't happened and that someone taking the girl away wasn't part of the plan. By this time, your mentor has uncovered the hatch again for you and you have already lowered your sister down to start climbing down the ladder and you're halfway through the hatch yourself.
  
  The cultists start running towards you but your mentor suddenly becomes visible, stood protectively next to the hatch. She shouts a word and the cultists run into an invisible wall. You use the time your mentor has bought you and hurry down the ladder yourself, pushing back the hood on the cloak as you do and give your sister a big hug when you reach the bottom of the ladder whilst your mentor climbs down behind you.
  
  "Just go!" yells your mentor at you and you pick your sister up and run as fast as you can.
  
  You run around the corridors of the servants' quarters mostly by memory with the candle you held before abandoned in the bathroom and the hallways dark with little or no moonlight. You make it all the way around to the staircase you came up and as you reach the door at the top of the stairs, there is a light behind you. You daren't look behind to see if it is your mentor providing the light or someone else; you fling open the door and descend the stairs two at a time until you reach the bottom where the secret door is still stood open from when you came through it earlier.
  
  You charge into the games room and out into the corridor outside it, your sister still in your arms but she's manoeuvred herself to be clinging to you as well which you're very grateful for as it's taking less effort to carry her as a result.
  
  Once you're in the corridor, you hear the secret door in the games room click closed and you do look back this time. Your mentor comes running out of the games room, sees you looking back at her and yells "Keep going!", which you do.
  
  You run down the sweeping staircase back into the moonlit hallway below and head to the front door. You're amazed when the door actually opens when you try it, you thought it would have been locked behind you but maybe they never thought you'd be getting out.
  
  Your mentor is side-by-side with you as you run through the grounds towards the exit, your speed being slowed by the weight of your sister. When you reach the gates to Langdown Hall, you find a taxicab waiting there patiently. You don't question it, you just get in with your mentor close behind and yell "Just go!" to the man who shakes the reins of the horses and sets off at a trot.
  
  You found out later that your mentor had managed to arrange the taxicab, you don't know how you will ever repay the debt you feel you owe to her.
  
  When the police went to Langdown Hall after you explained to them what had happened, all the cultists were gone and the attic was completely empty. Your sister was safe though and that's all that mattered to you.