OK, so a bit of explanation about this story: First, I am not a girl, though the main character is. This is primarily because I dreamt about reading this story and it was written by a girl. Her name is Ellamenope (pronounced L-M-N-O-P, [think Penelope]) and I'm not sure entirely of her background.
I'm considering writing more about her, but I put this in short stories rather than novels because I've always written better with shorter stories.
This is rated 16+ for violence, gore, some mild language and some sexual themes (nothing remarkably explicit). If you disagree with my rating, please inform me and I will see about changing it...provided I can change it.
He was dead. That much I was sure of. At least, he had been dead awhile ago, and it hadn’t entered my mind that he might stand again on two feet; let alone four.
As I fled to the door of the dark, abandoned school building, I thought back on what might possibly drive my best friend to ask me if I wanted to lose my virginity with him. I like him well enough, but I’d always thought I made it clear that I was saving myself for marriage.
Did he listen, though? No, he tried to get me alone in a room and do it anyway. I jabbed him in the eye. We don’t talk to each other anymore.
This would all be fine with me, but then my aunt got hurt and I had to go deal with her for awhile. She gave me a ton of interesting advice, most of which I was already following, like, “Don’t have sex until you’re married; if your boyfriend starts trying to change you during the first date, dump him; If a guy doesn’t respect your privacy, hurt him enough to make him reconsider; never leave a pot on the stove unattended; food made from scratch tastes better than that nasty, prepackaged junk; always clean your blade after you’ve finished working with it; don’t apologize unless it actually matters; life is hard, get over it.”
Then she died.
It was very abrupt and I was quite surprised that her last breath was so articulate. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, though; Aunt Jean was famous for talking, so it was fitting that she gabbed until she died.
I hadn’t been prepared for it, though. I had only seen Aunt Jean three times prior and those times had been something you might call interesting.
The first time was nondescript in comparison to the others; she came over for Christmas when I was eight and gave me a present. However, she didn’t let me open it until Christmas morning, which I was very put-out about. It’s a tradition at our house to open presents on Christmas Eve, so I was looking forward to it. She was adamant, though, and even went to the length of taking the present to bed with her so I would be deterred from sneaking downstairs to open it in the middle of the night.
Naturally, I snuck unto her bedroom and tried to open it. She didn’t wake up as I tore layer upon layer of wrapping paper off the box, but I never actually managed to get through all the paper. Sometime in the early morning, I gave up, left wrapping paper strewn all over the room and went back to bed.
Ten minutes after I closed my eyes, I was shaken awake by my dad, who told me it was time to wake up. I reluctantly slithered out of bed and went outside to chop wood for the fire. When I came in with the kindling, Aunt Jean was at the breakfast table, talking to Mom. She said a little mouse had come in at night and chewed a hole in my present, so now I wasn’t going to get it. I dropped all my kindling in the middle of the floor and said, “What? No! I ripped off a ton of wrapping paper and didn’t even get to the box!”
It took me awhile to realize that I’d just admitted my guilt, by which time Aunt Jean and Mom were laughing so hard coffee was coming out their noses. I got my present shortly after that and found that it was a good deal easier to unwrap than it had been the night before.
The box was plain, brown cardboard about six inches wide, two feet long and four inches high. With the aid of a boxcutter, I opened it up and revealed another box. This box was almost black and must have been some sort of wood. It smelled so good I paused and put my nose down close and inhaled slowly. I decided that it smelled like lost memories and pine trees. Aunt Jean nodded and said, “Don’t you want to open it, dear?”
The thought hadn’t actually occurred to me in the excitement of the black box. I pulled it out of the cardboard and put it on the table. It had a clasp on one side and I spent a couple minutes figuring it out. It was in the shape of a moth, I thought, but each time I thought I’d figured out what it looked like, it became something different. Eventually, I just pressed the sides and it clicked open. A thin line appeared down the middle of the side of the box and I pushed the top up.
The box was upside-down. Not that anyone had gone to the trouble of making it obvious which way it was supposed to go, or anything thoughtful like that. There were four knives in the box; two daggers and two curved knives that I thought looked a bit like boxy bananas. They spilled out on the tabletop and one of the daggers fell on the floor, embedding itself deep in the linoleum. I reached down, took it by the hilt and, with a little effort, pulled it out.
I was largely oblivious to the chaos that the knives had caused; my mom was hysterical, my dad was indignant and my aunt was screaming at both of them. However, I was entranced by the patterns in the blades and handles. The odd-shaped knives were angular and had lines swirling from the sharpened edge. I tested the edge and drew blood as soon as my finger touched the metal. The metal itself was practically transparent and I discovered that if I left the knife on the tabletop long enough, it was difficult to actually see it.
At some point, I looked up and noticed that everyone was staring at me. My dad had a resigned look, my mom had a worried look and my aunt wore an impassive, unreadable look.
I got to keep the knives, though my aunt had several interesting proverbs about them, like, “Don’t just whip out your ace whenever you feel like it, darlin’; drink responsibly; don’t hang out with the fools or you’ll hang with the fools; always cut a notch in a tree trunk in the direction you want it to fall, then run like hell when it starts falling; be nice to your mother; be nice to your pa; like is hard, get over it.”
Then she swirled out the door like an errant zephyr.
I didn’t see her again until I was fourteen and I bumped into her at a coffee shop. She smiled at me, patted me on the back, asked how I was doing with the knives and asked me to show her what fun things I could do with them. I informed her that they were at home on my bed.
“Dear.” She said, “You always want to keep those with you in case you need ‘em. For instance, that guy over there is going to try to rob the store. What can you do about it?” I looked over at the man she indicated and felt mildly perplexed.
“Rob the store?” I said, “He’s going to blow up the store, actually. He’s got bombs strapped all over his body. Now if I had my knives with me, I might jump the gun and kill him, but he may or may not have a timer on the explosives or the switch might be a dead-man switch. I’ll have to make sure before I act, otherwise I may cause a tragedy.”
Aunt Jean shrugged, “It’s a timer. Good call, darlin’.” She then proceeded to behead the man with one of the odd-shaped knives and defuse the bomb. It was C4, so all she did was remove the detonation wires from the explosives.
In the ensuing confusion, we slipped out through the crowd and Aunt Jean presented me with a scabbard. I was reluctant to take it, but she assured me that it was old, worn and she had others. I asked her how I was supposed to fit the big, odd-looking knives in there.
She paused. “You mean the kukris? Did you not find out what they’re called?”
I shook my head, mystified and curious.
“Well, that’s what they’re called. Always remember darlin’; you can’t throw a kukri and have it hit anything in a useful fashion; wear layers in cold weather; do unto others as you’d have them do unto you; don’t talk with your mouth full; life is hard, get over it.”
Then she disappeared into the crowd.
The last time I saw her before she died was my sixteenth birthday. She burst in the kitchen that morning pursued by a man dressed in black tights. They trashed the living room and the man’s lifeless carcass eventually ended up bleeding all over my birthday cake. Mom and Dad were mortified, but when they started stuttering out protests, Aunt Jean leveled them with a sardonic stare and said, “Life is hard, get over it.”
Then she baked me a new cake and helped clean up the living room.
Her death was comparatively calm, considering it was because of heart failure. Never mind that the heart failure was the result of blood loss as a result of several gaping gashes and lacerations. She was lying in her bed, propped up with a bunch of pillows. She never liked hospitals, so this was sort of understandable. Sad, but understandable.
The schoolhouse was abandoned for many practical reasons; it was old, it was dusty, it might have had mold in it, and it was haunted. The real reason was that one morning several years ago a copier had turned out to be a bomb. They couldn’t figure out how to defuse it, since it had no discernible wires, buttons, explosive, or anything else you’d expect to find on a bomb.
The only way they knew it was a bomb was an incident at another school. A coffee machine in the teacher’s lounge had some sort of box strapped to the back, and most of the faculty just thought it was part of the machine, since no one actually knows how coffee machines work. The science teacher put on a full pot of coffee one day, the box on the machine started beeping, and the school became a blazing fireball shortly after. The only faculty member who escaped was the math teacher, who was home sick that day.
They tried several courses of action, but eventually the school board decided the cheapest and most logical thing was to just find another building. It wasn’t really cheap, but they found another building and used it as a school until a little box on a water fountain exploded, decimating an entire city block.
I heard about the school awhile back and was, after awhile, given permission to snoop around. I like old things, so my interest was not so much in the bomb as the rest of the school. It wasn’t an ordinary school, being approximately two hundred years old in some parts and purportedly older in others. The odd thing was, it was built for occupancy of four thousand children and was the largest building in the city from that era.
So I was given a guide and a week to snoop around. I was told that I could take anything I wanted, from office supplies to chunks of masonry. The owner cared very little. He owned thirty abandoned buildings and had enough money from his business to not care what anyone took from them.
My guide kept trying to hit on me. He was about my age, and constantly mentioned how many hours he worked out; as if he didn’t smell rank enough or have arms the size of a good-sized tree limb. Of course, his case was not helped by my recent run-in with Finn and I regarded him at arms length the first day.
The second day I knew my way around the school well enough I could just ignore him and explore on my own. I found that the wallpaper in the second floor was peeling, so I got a steamer and helped it along. It didn’t take very long, since most of it was already on the floor. The walls behind the wallpaper were stone. I felt along them and noticed that they were engraved with some sort of design, but I could not see it at all. I sprayed some water on the walls, but still couldn’t see, so I eventually just gave up and moved back to the first floor.
As I was descending the stairs, my guide caught up to me. His name was Rodney, though he told me I could call him “Hot Rod” if I so chose.
“Hey, princess, where were you?” he asked, trotting up the stairs to meet me on the landing.
“Don’t call me princess. And it’s none of your business where I was; I like my privacy.” I said, pointedly pushing past him and continuing down the stairs.
He didn’t take the hint. “Well, if some debris fell on you I wouldn't know where to go so I could pull you out.”
“Just follow the noise and look for a dust cloud.”
“It’s really damp here; the dust settles real quick.”
“Really quickly.” I corrected him. “I can manage; why don’t you go pick me up some food?”
“Can’t.” His face was a bit pained as he said this, “It’s in my contract that I can’t just up and leave you. Not that I would, of course; I’m not scared of commitment.”
I rolled my eyes and tried to think of ways to get away from him. Nothing immediately flew to mind, so I just practiced ignoring him. This was tricky because the school building was not actually that interesting.
When I stepped off the stairs, however, I saw that things had just become a good deal less mundane. There was a woman walking in the hallway. She did not seem to notice us, though I must have made a good deal of noise when I stumbled on the last step and fell. Rodney rushed to pick me up off the floor. Since this was the first time I’d seen him act like a gentleman, I let him help me up and said, “Thank you.” in a strangled voice.
“You’re welcome; are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good. Wanna go out?”
I didn’t waste time for a sneer, since I had just seen the woman in the hall. I called out and she didn’t turn around. I thought this was odd. Jeremy was odd. I’d talked to him that morning and told him I was going to be going to an old abandoned schoolbuilding. He said something like, “I hated school.”
He’s like that. I’m not sure if he just doesn’t care if he offends anyone or he just talks before he thinks. Most times after he talks, he puts his lips together and looks at the ground. He always looks at the ground. If he would look up longer than half a second, he might be handsome, but I really don’t know. He works at Dalemart down the street, so sometimes I’ll talk to him at the checkout. He’s not much different at either place, really. His manager seems to like him, though, and treats him like a son. I reminded myself I needed to get more milk, since I was almost out.
The lady turned left and entered a door marked, “principal’s office.” I remember I used to hate getting sent there. I got in fights at school with some bitch named Marcy. She called me names and pulled my hair and I naturally broke out some fighting techniques my mom had taught me. Then we got sent to the principal.
Now we’re best buddies, and I went to see her the week before when her son had a fifth birthday party. Marcy and I had a long talk about relationships, since I had just almost gotten into a really bad one with Finn.
I used to like Finn, and I had originally thought I might grow up and marry him. I thought he understood the whole thing about no sex before marriage, but then he tried to rape me and I decided I could do much better.
Marcy concurred. “Ella,” she said, leaning forward more in her seat, “you can do a lot better than Finn.” Marcy has a habit of sitting on the exact edge of her seat, so she looked kind of funny leaning forward, since her legs were supporting most of her, leaving the chair to support a small portion of her butt.
Her husband Morgan said, “Who’s Finn? He sounds like an asshole.” Morgan is just full of the “right things to say.” Like, “You’re beautiful, darling, but that dress is horrendous; I much prefer you without it.” which he said directly after the remark about Finn.
Marcy rolled her eyes in a frustrated look which was offset a good deal by her smile.
Jeremy asked me why I looked troubled that evening. When I hesitated, he said he didn’t want to pry and was about to drop it, but I made him very uncomfortable by telling him everything. He was appropriately aghast and said, “What a creep.” Then he cleared his throat, started to say something, decided otherwise and said instead, “That’s terrible.” It was awkward for a couple minutes; then I nodded at him and went in my apartment.
After hesitating briefly, I trotted after the lady into the principal’s office. She went to the receptionist’s desk, picked up a piece of paper and went to the copier. She set it, put the paper in and it scanned. Nothing happened. I suppose I should not have been surprised, since the power was out.
The lady, on the other hand, had not been informed of this, so she spent a good deal of time looking for a problem. I told her what was wrong a couple times, but she didn’t hear. Finally, she found something and flipped a switch. She then went through everything again and waited. Nothing happened again. Her face took on a puzzled expression and she went to the side to see if there were any copies.
The copier whirled into life in that moment and paper shot out in a blur. The lady, unfortunately, didn’t last past the first sheet. It tore through her body, followed by innumerable copies, and displaced a good deal of her all over the wall.
I was shocked at the gruesome spectacle. It had been almost humorous before, but now I just wanted to get out of the school. I backed out of the room too quickly and collided with Rodney. Before he could get out much more than, “Well, hello!” we found ourselves falling through the floor. I scrabbled for the tiles as I fell, but as soon as I got a handhold, Rodney grabbed my ankles and I lost my grip.
I landed on top of Rodney and I heard something crack. He screamed. I hastily removed myself from his person and surveyed him to see what could be the problem. His leg was broken; a piece of bone jutted out from the middle of his calf.
I would have made him a tourniquet, and tried to get him to a hospital, but as I was casting about for a rod of some sort I noticed that we were not alone; there were several people standing around us. They appeared unmoved that Rodney was bleeding out so I decided asking them for help would be useless.
I didn’t have much time to register their presence, as they grabbed my arms before I could react. I was dragged through some darkened areas of the basement, then some lighter areas and finally they came to a large circular room lit by torches. There I was tossed in an unceremonious heap on the floor and promptly tied up.
Rodney had also been carried in, but they didn’t bother tying him up. They took him to the middle of the room, where it was slightly raised and there was something that resembled a large, stone, coffee table. They strapped him down to that and drew back, chanting something.
Nothing happened for a little while, then I heard a rushing noise, followed by creaking. The chanting stopped abruptly.
One of the people procured a large knife from his pocket and said something in another language. Everyone else drew knives also and shouted something similar. Then they plunged the knives into their own necks, effectively killing themselves.
For a brief moment, I dwelt on the horror I had just witnessed. Then I decided to make the best of it by untying myself and looking for a way out. I had just managed to get my hands free when the walls started shaking. The floor in the center of the room developed huge cracks and red light shone through. I hastily untied my feet and ran for the doorway. Just before I got there, however, I heard a scream behind me. I turned to see what was happening and gasped.
The floor had gone and a column of fire spewed upwards into the ceiling. The ceiling crumbled at the impact and the whole building trembled. The flame roared with the voices of millions of tormented souls and I found myself screaming along with them. It died down a few seconds or hours later and I collapsed on the floor, feeling drained.
I looked up and saw Rodney’s body lying on the ground a short distance away and I thought I might drag him out for a decent burial. Before I could act on this thought, however, his frame twitched. I paused. He twitched again and this time his head snapped back and his skin started rippling like flame. I watched numbly as his body lengthened and another set of legs grew from his stomach. His head looked like it was being crushed into several different shapes until it resembled something akin to a dog.
He looked at me and I saw no longer the eyes of Rodney my guide; inside this twisted form resided no human soul, but a dark, unknowable evil.
I found my feet and ran, not looking back to see if I was being pursued. I saw some stairs and leapt up them three at a time. The door was off its hinges, so I just pushed it out of the way and ran out into the hallway. Behind me, I heard a crash as the doorframe was demolished. I could see the double doors before me and the light of day shone brightly behind them. I got to them, however, and found them to be locked.
I had only time to register this unsatisfactory fact before the monster that had been Rodney was upon me. I had no escape and there was no strength I could find as it grabbed me around the waist and threw me through the doors. I burst out into the sunlight and tumbled onto the front steps. I felt pain, though it was in too many places for me to localize it. I was bleeding, and in my state I wasn’t entirely sure if that was normal in this situation or not. I watched idly as the blood dribbled down the steps until it hit the pavement and pooled.
Then I looked across the street and saw the last person I expected to see in the crowd gathered at the stoplight. Traffic was still moving, so no one could cross, but as I watched, Jeremy broke from the crowd and began walking briskly across the street. A bus honked at him and would’ve hit him, but he flicked his hand at it and it diverted as though hit with an invisible wall.
As I watched the proceedings, I couldn’t help but think of how clumsy Jeremy was. A couple months prior I had been carrying groceries in and he offered to help. At the landing he tripped and fell down the stairs that he’d just climbed. He had several places to fall, since the landings contain about five apartment doors, and are quite large, but he chose the most painful place to fall and ended up taking all my groceries with him; including the ones I was holding. He did not seem to care a bit that he’d taken a can of soup to the head; he was more concerned with the melon that smashed. I told him it was fine, but he bought me another one just the same.
As he walked through the traffic, head held high and an expression of direction and focus etched on his face, I thought of all the times he never looked up. I discovered he had green eyes that day; I’d never known ‘til then. I almost thought it was someone else, but for the clothes that he wore, and the way he walked; almost leisurely, as though there was no hurry.
In actual fact, by the time I was thinking that, I had lost a good deal of blood and he was really running through the intersection. He stopped on the step below me and addressed the monster. I’d never heard him speak that way before. He said something about a demon and Jesus Christ; then he thrust a hand out, made a fist, and pulled back. Blood spattered everywhere, and I later learned that it was from the monster.
I couldn’t tell very much, since I’d lost much of my blood and I thought maybe Jeremy was wounded. He picked me up and said, “Ella? We need to get you to the hospital. Don’t go to sleep, Ella.”
I nodded and smiled lazily. This had to be the best day of my life. It didn’t even hurt anymore. I gave an odd-sounding laugh and said, “I didn’t know you had green hair, Jeremy.”
He gave me a concerned look. “Stay with me, Ella; we’re almost there.”
I noticed he was running and remembered that there was a hospital a block away from the school. My head lolled back and I could see the sign for the emergency room, then I looked up and saw the sky.
It might have been the shock, but the sky was bloodred and lightning crackled in the clouds, resembling shiny fish in a stream. I said, “The sky…”
Then the sky disappeared and gave way to a grey ceiling. There was a bright light in the ceiling and I winced, closing my eyes in the glare. I suddenly felt very, very tired and as I dozed off I could hear Jeremy’s voice as from the other side of a pillow as he yelled, “Ella! No! WAKE UP!”
Then I embraced the darkness and fell into oblivion.
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