“Then how come I can’t open this door? You know that’s not like her at all,” Alice shouted, pushing against her friend’s bedroom door. “Bea! Bea! Let me in! Please!” Hearing no answer, Miss Clara’s expression changed to one of panic as well and joined her, knocking on the door and calling out Bea’s name.
Alice finally turned the knob, took a deep breath, and threw herself against it as hard as she could. It opened just enough for her to be able to get in. She wedged herself through the space in the door and grimaced as her bare feet stepped into something wet. What in the world did Bea go and spill this time, Alice thought as she made it all of the way into the room.
Like her own room, at night everything seemed an unusual combination of darkness, light, and shadows. Except for one. As her eyes scanned the room and readjusted, she jumped and let out a startled gasp as she saw a tall dark figure in the corner standing there watching, its hand held outwards, pointing. Him. Alice heard it laugh and it disappeared just as her eyes followed to where it was pointing. She then saw why the door had been so hard to open.
Bea was lying on the floor in front of it covered in blood—her own. And Alice was standing in a pool of it. Bea hadn’t just slashed her wrists—her forearms from her wrists to her elbows had been opened as if she had wanted to be certain. Her eyes, void of their soul, were rolled upwards staring, her mouth slack.
Then she heard it, that voice, whispering in her ear as if standing right next to her.
“Told you.”
Alice started to scream and was still in that same spot screaming when help arrived.
When her family came to collect Bea’s things, her sister grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her aside as they were leaving out.
“You were her best friend. Did you know anything? See anything wrong?” Bea’s sister asked with a quavering voice filled with a desperate grief. Alice just shook her head from side to side over and over again, her own eyes beginning to fill with tears. “Alice, the police are trying to say she did it over her relationship, and we all know it wasn’t. Johnson’s heartbroken. He was about to propose, you know. Had a ring and everything. We’re all just trying to understand what happened here.”
“I’m trying to understand too,” Alice said, letting her hand go.
Pay attention…
It was all that Alice could do not to as she tried to go to sleep that night, but it was insistent. She could hear the music, thump, thump, thump, and the now familiar voice was right in her ear—that even, low, caressing baritone that was soothing, yet not, at the same time.
“I told you before and you did not listen. Look what happened.
Will you listen to your mentor this time then?” it said.
Alice’s eyes flew open as she sat up in her bed, looking around. All she could see was that faded gray-blackness of the quiet of night, shapes and shadows and forms whose meaning had to be discerned first before everything was comfortable again. She thought of Bea and a visceral anger, deep and resonant, welled up from inside of her. Hearing that voice did not scare her this time as so many times before. This time invoked unbridled fury. For Bea.
For Miss Clara. For herself.
“You should’ve left her alone!” she shouted out into the darkness. “Go away! You are no mentor. You are not welcome! Leave me alone!”
“Aww, don’t be like that. Why would I ever want to leave you alone? Don’t you even want to know who I am?” it said with a voice as smooth and sweet as syrup. “You’ve been calling me “The Mentor” and I never said that was who I was.”
I said to call me “Tormentor.” Where you go, I will as well.
Alice’s eyes widened at the realization.
See…you weren’t paying attention at all.
Dyer Died in Silence
by Vocab
She went from a shutter to silence
Eyes glazed over with the void of stillness.
As if illness suffocated the sight right out of her sockets.
A pocket of air emptied out of her wrinkled throat
One last hallowed gasp before she passed
and the cloak of death covered over her frigid soul.
Sheol opened its’ gluttonous grasp to swallow her whole.
Boney hands reaching around the rope noose
that choked her esophagus and
asphyxiated her malevolent being.
She felt the slow collapse of her lungs.
Life was expunged from her sturdy tyrannical body.
She swayed oddly in the gallows like a broken wind chime.
She wavered awkwardly like a kite string entangled amongst tree twigs.
She died with her heart darkened scorched by wickedness.
Her soul was as pitch, as the bottomless abyss.
Fittingly, Amelia Dyer died, in the same manner in which she had
murderously slain hundreds of innocent infants,
stricken with unfortunate circumstances.
She died unwillingly, yielding only to the restriction of air.
She died suspended in midair.
Even in her death, no one is truly aware of how many children she
carelessly killed for profit and gain.
Only the Thames River will stream confessions of her infamous name.
Its’ waters quivering from the deserted bodies she buried there,
Countless babies forever enslaved in this liquid grave.
Many going unclaimed and some were never recovered.
Their grief stricken mothers went howling, like La Llorona, to the grave
tortured with uncertainty. Amelia took no pity.
Legions of greedy spawns feasted through her intentions.
Amelia killed as many as six children in one day.
Her stern thin lipped scowl will haunt the annals of history.
No darkness can hold a candle to her flame of vile infamy.
Cruelty was personified through her sick twisted mind. She filled 5 books
with her confessions line for line. ‘Baby farming’ and murders were her
crimes. She died on June 10, 1896,
Hanging from the scaffold, she shuttered into silence.
The Mankana-kil
by L. Penelope
Akasha’s mother had first seen the house in a magazine. She’d ripped out the page featuring a two-story, clapboard Colonial perched at the edge of the world on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It had taken Akasha’s father two years to locate the house and another year to convince the owners to sell to him. The owners were an older couple who’d stubbornly insisted the house was bad luck, but her father suspected they didn’t want to sell to a black man. His solution was to throw money at them until they relented.
By then Akasha had been born. An unexpected first baby for her middle-aged parents. There was joy at her birth—a miracle that snuck up on them long after they had given up on the idea of children. However, when the reality of child rearing penetrated their imaginings, they did not know what to do with her. Years of quiet evenings and immaculate furniture disintegrated into dust with the sheer force of the infant’s cries. The longed-for baby was a puzzling accumulation of tiny mysterious parts. An enigma too exhausting to unravel, and so they soon stopped trying.
Akasha’s mother focused her attentions instead on concrete, easy to understand tasks, pouring her tenderness into the selection of drapes, upholstery, and wall coverings for her beloved house.
So Akasha faded like the woodwork, leached of its color by the sea salty air. Aside from her bedroom, the first-floor study was her refuge. The space was close and musty, the windows having long ago been painted shut, but its main attractions were the floor to ceiling bookcases. The driftwood floor sagged in places under the weight of the massive shelves, and Akasha would lie down, head propped up by a stack of dusty tomes, getting lost in their pages.
She often came across words she did not know or concepts too advanced for her young mind, but she drank them in all the same.
&n
bsp; Some days she did not see her parents at all, rising after her father had left for work and her mother had gone off on whatever errands occupied the majority of her time.
There were no neighbors, no playmates; the house’s solitary beauty was rivaled only by its remoteness. A long, narrow, sandy lane led away from the front porch to a private dead-end road. Not even drunken tourists returning to their rented houses from beachside bars would find themselves down such a road.
When not reading, Akasha spent a great deal of time hanging out of windows, staring down at the surf crashing below, alternately imagining herself soaring out over the white-capped waves or crashing down in a tangle of bloody limbs on the craggy rocks.
She started school a year late due to the cavalier attention of her parents toward registration deadlines. Some time in December her mother came across a letter sent by the county, but having missed the start of school by several months, she thought she might as well wait until the next fall.
Walking into a classroom filled with children for the first time, Akasha came to a realization: she was not like everyone else.
Row after row of scrubbed pink faces topped with corn silk hair regarded her curiously. When she took her seat, the girl next to her, Jennie Meyers, asked if Akasha’s skin was so dark because she was from Africa and if she’d ever seen a monkey before. Akasha responded, no, but she had a pet mouse, a little creature she had befriended after discovering it nibbling on crumbs on the pantry floor. By the end of the first week, the nickname “Mouse Girl” had stuck, solidifying her identity as a freak.
The only other person in the school who even came close to her level of oddness was Norman Chang, the Chinese boy, who also happened to be the only other non-white student. Norman Chang wore his shirts buttoned up to his chin and unwrapped foul smelling lunches that ensured a wide berth were kept around him in the cafeteria. He was in the other first grade class and always kept his eyes on his shoes when moving through the halls.
Social status notwithstanding, Akasha enjoyed school. For one, the library there had far more appealing books for a child than her parents’ collection. Also, even though she was alternately teased or ignored, she still enjoyed being around people. She would drink in their interactions, observing how they laughed together, gossiped and bickered and used it to fuel her own rich imaginary life.
Weeks went by where she wouldn’t speak aloud outside the confines of her home. Teachers often forgot to call on her, and she was allowed to do group projects by herself. Her brown skin and neglected tufts of spongy hair should have made her stand out, but instead they made her easy to overlook. Some days she felt more like a shadow than a person.
At fourteen, she still slept with a nightlight. The static of waves crashing was often soothing, but sometimes she would hear other noises mixed into the din. Could those be mermaids shouting? The cries of a fisherman as his boat smashed into the rocks? Or some poor lost soul out for a moonlit walk who slipped or jumped down to his death? The possibilities kept her up at night, straining to hear the secret sounds inside the surf.
One night she lay awake, covers pulled up to her chin, particularly spooked by a scritch, scritch, scritch just outside her window. She waged an internal battle on whether to peek her head out to look, when a shadow began to move inside her room.
The figure unfurled itself from beside her mirror and perched at the edge of her bed. It was unnaturally dark, seeming to absorb the light around it and was shaped oddly, with long, stick-like limbs that folded up giving the appearance of an insect. As it moved, the shadow clicked and popped and let out soft bleating noises. Akasha shivered, too afraid to move.
“We are your friend,” a voice whispered from the midst of the darkness with a mechanical wheeze, breathless and whispery.
“What—what are you?” Akasha asked.
“We are Mankana-kil, Shadow Eater, Warden of Illusions and False Eyes. We have been watching you.” Each word sounded like it was pulled from the bottom of a well.
“Watching me?” Akasha replied. “Why?”
The Mankana-kil shifted near her feet, bending its massive folded legs the opposite way until its whole shape changed entirely. The creature was hard to look at. Her eyes glanced off its body as if her mind couldn’t quite process what it was seeing. She could not tell if it had a head, but there was a larger void of darkness somewhere near the top that she thought might be it. Looking at the thing gave her an odd feeling, an intensifying of the yawning emptiness inside her.
At the same time, the idea of something, anything watching her, paying attention to her, lit a spark of delight within her that warred with the terror.
The creature clicked and whirred as its limbs moved idly. “We watch many people. We see many things,” it hissed.
Akasha scooted up her bed. “What do you want with me?” “We want to train you. We need an apprentice.”
She bit her fingernail and continued to listen.
#
The English class was in the library for the week, doing research for their term papers. Akasha headed for the table in the back corner, next to the window overlooking the football field. It was where she usually sat. However, when she rounded the row of shelves obscuring it from the main section, she found Norman Chang seated in her chair. Norman Chang was not even in her English class. In fact, she had never shared a single class with him since the first grade. An amazing feat in a school as small as theirs.
Their eyes met for a moment, and she registered the surprise on his face before he looked away, back down at the notebook in front of him. Akasha wasn’t sure what to do. She stood still for a full minute processing her options. The larger tables in the center of the library were already full of giggling girls who would slice her with weaponized glares if she dared sit with them. Choosing a table full of boys would be similarly perilous, though the trauma would be blunt instead of acute.
There was another study desk on the other side, but it faced the multimedia rooms and offered no privacy. With a glance out the window, she decided that she could not deviate from her routine and sat in the empty seat.
Norman Chang did not look up again or in any way register her presence. Akasha thought this was a good thing, she would just pretend this was a normal day and she was alone. If she tried hard enough she was sure she could un-see him and not be inconvenienced at all by his presence.
She pulled out her notebook, her favorite pen, and the giant tome of Renaissance poetry she had checked out for her paper. The clock overhead ticked obnoxiously, bisecting the silence.
Outside, a gym class was stretching before beginning their track and field drills. Norman Chang did not even seem to be breathing.
Akasha startled when she heard a scritch, scritch, scritch, just like the one from her bedroom. Norman Chang had produced an array of colored ink pens and was filling in a design in his notebook.
One arm was propped on the table, hiding the page from view, and Akasha had a powerful need to know what he was drawing.
She shifted slightly in her seat to get a glimpse, but he must have sensed her because he held the notebook even closer to his body. Finally, she stood, stretching, pretending to look out the window, then to scan the shelves nearby for a book. The table was in the World History section. Akasha meandered behind him, so that she was essentially standing in the corner with no excuse or way to play off her curiosity. She peered over his shoulder and let out a gasp.
“You’ve seen it?” she whispered.
Norman Chang turned to look at her, his face carefully blank. He blinked, owl-like from behind round glasses. Akasha pointed at the fully realistic drawing he was working on. “You’ve seen the Mankana-kil?”
He had drawn the creature in the center of a battlefield, explosions going off in the background, the dead bodies of gruesome monsters strewn around the ground. He must have used up an entire black pen because the drawing held the realism of the creature—it seemed to suck up all the light around it. The monster was presen
ted here as some kind of avenging hero, victorious in battle. Faceless and comprised of spindly limbs, bent at strange angles.
Akasha was so drawn in by the picture, she didn’t realize that she was now leaning over Norman Chang’s shoulder, almost cheek to cheek with him. He cleared his throat, and she backed away quickly, rounding the table to take her seat again.
“Has it come to you too?”
Norman Chang nodded, blinking rapidly. “What did it say?”
He put down his pen and looked at his drawing for a moment. “It said it could give me everything I dreamed of, that it would teach me the secret to things if I would become its apprentice.”
Akasha had never heard Norman Chang’s voice before. It was gravelly with disuse, but still pleasant, like laying on warm sand before the day got too hot.
“That’s what it said to me too. I wonder how many apprentices it needs?”
He shifted his glasses on his nose. “I don’t think it needs any.” Akasha leaned across the table. “Why?”
He flipped back several pages in his notebook and turned it around so she could see. “I’ve been having these dreams since it first came to me, so I’ve been drawing them.” He turned the pages slowly, revealing gorgeous images of alien landscapes, more battle scenes, other strange creatures.
“Do you think it’s giving you these dreams?”
He shook his head. “I have dreams sometimes. Ones that come true. It’s just a thing. My mother says I’m slightly psychic.”
Akasha looked up from her fascination with his drawings. She had never really looked at Norman Chang before. Her eyes had glanced off him like everyone else’s did, treating him as background furniture, or wallpaper. He had lost the baby fat of childhood and seemed to have passed through the bulk of adolescence skipping the gangly awkward stage. The size of his limbs and head fit the size of his body quite well, and his face, while a little on the round side, had a strong jaw and decisive mouth. He still wore dress shirts buttoned up all the way, but the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows revealing lean, almost hairless forearms, tanned golden brown.
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