Victorian Tale

by K. L. Somniate

  Victorian Tale

  By K.L. Somniate

  Copyright © 2016 K.L. Somniate.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1545195598

  ISBN-10: 1545195595

  1

  My name is Victoria.

  My name is Victoria.

  Victoria is my name.

  I know who I am.

  I just don’t know what I am anymore.

  I don’t know if I am alive or dead.

  I don’t know what either of those words mean anymore.

  All I know is that I am Victoria.

  Many have tried to take even this away from me.

  But I will keep this name, and who I am, close to heart as long as I can. Not until death, because that is much closer than I was lead to believe, but until the day when I may understand what it truly means.

  2

  It begins and ends with pain.

  But as you’ll find, there are many kinds of pain, some more agreeable than others.

  Victoria.

  A powerful name.

  One with purpose.

  Victoria Vasser, a girl without purpose.

  But that changes.

  And what brings about her, and indeed every, change?

  Well.

  I’ll give you a clue.

  It hurts.

  3

  Choking, gasping, struggling for air, but the pressure is too much, a grip like iron clasped around her neck.

  Wake up, dear, you can’t stay in bed all day.

  “Steady, steady, breathing is unnecessary. You don’t need it.”

  Dad’s right, there’s nothing wrong with compromising, there’s nothing wrong with admitting your faults, there’s nothing wrong with settling, isn’t happiness-isn’t happiness the most important-?

  “What do you believe in?”

  They love her, they love her in the children’s room of the Callahan Church, they adore her songs and her stories and all of the lovely pictures she draws for them; there’s something fantastic in her eyes when she looks at them, some kind of fire that they, young and inexperienced, have not yet encountered in any other human on earth.

  “I don’t believe that, and you don’t either. Come on, we’re alone here. Dig a little deeper. Tell me what you really believe in. Is there anything?”

  Sometimes at night, she lies in bed staring at the ceiling and wishing she knew what she wanted, if grades or boys or books or art or dance possessed the answers she craves. If there’s a choice to be made, can it be re-made? If she makes the wrong decision, can she come back from it, or is it set? Do human beings have only one shot at the thing, whatever it is?

  “I think a few days in here will suffice, don’t you? There’s nothing quite like a nice little safe space to hunker down in and think, undisturbed, for a while, is there? You’ve never had such a space, have you? Well fear not. The outside world doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists in here is you.”

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, can’t think, can’t think, the air is too tight, her lungs are going to burst, she’s going to scream, but she’s already screaming, the worst noise is silence, and the worst feeling is fear, filling her up inside, filling up her space, this safe, finite, infinite small space, a universe composed of mindless, wordless, palpable fear.

  “Skin that doesn’t scar is a blessing, isn’t it? Nothing anyone does to you will ever leave a scar, isn’t that wonderful? Do stop thrashing, it’s distasteful to look at, dear.”

  i told you he was creepy. i told you he was fucked up. i know them when i see them. little girl, you’re in over your head now.

  This is all your fault.

  no.

  i don’t think it is.

  and i think you know that too, don’t you, little Tori…

  4

  “Come on, Tori!”

  Victoria Vasser, 15, smiles uncomfortably.

  The late autumn wind bears the slightest nip of approaching winter, so she’s only wearing a sweater, one her father had given her as a Christmas present. It rests comfortably on her body like a blanket, trapping in the warmth of her beating heart (let it burst let it burst let it rip itself apart and end this) and the blood flowing through her veins. She tugs at the fabric absentmindedly, fretfully, as she stares down her friends.

  “Please don’t.”

  In her friend Larissa’s hand is her copy of Lord of the Flies, which had been purchased for her long before it was assigned in any class. The copy is old, battered, well-loved, and most importantly, has her father’s clumsy scrawl inside.

  She waves it at her, her friend Wanda giggling and Rana staggering away, apparently so amused that she no longer possessed the ability to walk straight.

  “Guys,” Victoria pleads. “Please…”

  “How do you expect to go anywhere in the world being such a scaredy cat?” Larissa taunts. “Cowards get nothing!”

  With her arm, strong and hard and skilled from years of softball training, she hurls the book across the short lawn and into the window, just barely skating through the already-shattered glass.

  She can’t help it; tears cascade down her cheeks.

  “Oh my god, she’s crying,” Rana squeals.

  How could she not?

  The house, standing tall, dark, and alone, seems to stare disapprovingly down at the teenage girls, its windows cracked and boarded up, its cold and austere wood peeling and scratched almost as if by an animal. The paint lies on the dirty brown lawn in strips, and the imprints where it once hung respectably on the house are like scars (scars scars no more scars for you, dear, aren’t you glad, beautiful girl like you), evidence of some terrible wounds inflicted in the past. There are holes in the roof, holes in the walls, a crack in the formerly white door, and worst of all, a battered rocking chair on the porch.

  “Oh my god,” Larissa laughs. “Girls like you are why guys can’t take us seriously, jeez. Ok, well, good luck with that. I’ve gotta get home. See you tomorrow… maybe.”

  She shrugs and begins to leave, her friends following suit.

  “You-!” Victoria starts to say.

  Larissa turns sharply.

  “What?” she asks challengingly.

  Victoria flinches.

  “I…I don’t think…you’ve…been in…this house before,” she stammers. “So…”

  “I’ve slept in the haunted house before,” Larissa scoffs. “I’ve held parties in that house before. Nice try. I’ll give you till tomorrow to come up with a better one.”

  Rana makes an ohhh sound and covers her mouth while Wanda smirks, looking imperious.

  Victoria can only watch as her friends turn their backs on her and leave, chatting amicably about rehearsal and who was going to be chosen to represent their team at districts.

  Then she turns back to the house, fear skittering through her heart like a rodent (rats rats rats oh god there are rats, no scars, no scars, flesh, meat, bone, red cracks, black cracks in her hands). She wants to leave, to just turn tail and never come back this way again, but if the former is possible, the latter certainly isn’t.

  Larissa and her friends always come this way.

  There’s no avoiding it.

  And she can’t leave her father’s book in there…

  It has his writing, his annotations, his scholarly observations, his notes on literary devices, the ones he used to impress all of his students with on their first day of college.

  She can’t lose it, she has so little of him to preserve.

  Maybe it hadn’t gone far.

  Maybe she could just scoot in there really quick and grab it off the floor, brush it off, and skedaddle.

  It can’t have gone far, right?

  Victoria takes a deep breath.

 
; But nothing happens.

  She doesn’t feel any braver.

  Come on, get in there. Get in and out. Get in and out. It’ll be easy. Just do it and stop thinking about doing it.

  Her foot slowly inches across brown grass.

  But it’s going too slowly.

  At this pace, she’ll start thinking too hard; she’ll have enough time to reconsider before she even reaches the porch.

  Decisive, swift action is needed.

  And yet, she just can’t. Can’t do it. Can’t make a run for it, can’t even move.

  She should just abandon the stupid idea, it’s just a book, she’ll buy a new one-

  “Your father never could hold onto the things he cared about.”

  Her mother’s voice cracks in her head like a whip against flesh (bruises fade, pain is eternal, this pain will follow you for the rest of your life, in your dreams, in your nightmares, in your waking world too). She can’t leave it.

  Before she can think about it anymore, she pulls her backpack tightly against her shoulder and bolts across the lawn, ponytail flying, sneakers kicking up loose, dry dirt.

  She steps quickly onto the porch and is relieved that it can bear her weight.

  She seizes the door knob and pushes.

  It’s not locked.

  The first thing she’s greeted with is the smell.

  It smells like decay and neglect, a mothy kind of stench that pervades even the cleanest of grandmothers’ houses.

  The second thing she’s greeted with is black stains on the wall.

  She stares at them, frozen in horror, her shoulders shaking.

  It looks as though someone had thrown watery black ink at the walls like they were a canvas.

  She shudders, because they might not be blood stains, but they certainly don’t belong there.

  She looks to her left, where Larissa had thrown her book.

  But there’s nothing there.

  She frowns and tentatively approaches the window.

  There’s a door she hadn’t seen from the street.

  It’s not quite across from the window, but it’s certainly lined up well enough to explain why the book hadn’t simply just fallen to the ground.

  And it’s wide open.

  She peers anxiously inside.

  A set of stairs leads down to the most foreboding, terrifying basement she’s ever seen.

  Or not seen, as it’s so dark that her eyes cannot penetrate the shadows that seem to be creeping up the stairs towards her.

  She seizes the door and almost slams it shut.

  But at the last second, she pauses, her hand on the knob, just inches from shutting it completely.

  She’s come this far.

  Surely she can go a little further, just down the stairs? It can’t have fallen too far…

  But one look through that door destroys any sense of comfort she might have drawn from the thought.

  No way, no way, no way, her heart clamors. Can’t, can’t, can’t.

  Scaredy cat.

  Tori Terrified.

  Little Tori-fied.

  Pulling a Tori, which had come to mean doing something silly like letting out a little scream when a fly flew in through the window or jumping when a big roach landed on the desk.

  Vicky-ventilating, just like hyperventilating but specifically referring to little Vicky, so freaked out one day that she stopped breathing and they had to carry her to the nurse’s office where she remained for the rest of the day out of shame.

  Victoria, who did not like being called Tori or Vicky, squares her shoulders.

  Her knees trembling like a newborn fawn’s.

  If Larissa saw she didn’t have her book with her at school tomorrow, she would smile that saintly, condescending smirk and offer to get it for her.

  She would offer her help and wordlessly ask her for appreciation, gratitude.

  Little Tori Terrified, she’d call her.

  It’s ok.

  Lioness Larissa, the fearless leader of the pride, here to rescue you. Loquacious Larissa, outgoing and talented, social and emphatic, charismatic and intelligent. Lovely Larissa, who read more books than her, who was smarter and more knowledgeable, who knew how to talk to people, and was going places.

  Places where scaredy cats can’t go.

  Victoria shoves the door open.

  And she stomps down the stairs, taking special care to make as much noise as she can to scare away any rats.

  She pulls out her phone and uses it as a light.

  Or tries to.

  As soon as she pulls it out, the need for a light becomes irrelevant.

  The phone drops from her hand.

  It hits the floor, but the noise is muffled by the louder sound, the thump of her body hitting the stairs hard.

  She rolls down them, her body limp, falling on top of the thrown book, which had come to rest on the last step, her brilliant red hair glinting weakly in the sunlight before she sinks completely into the darkness of the basement.

  Her forehead now bearing a red bullet-sized hole in the middle.

  The back of her skull as open as the front door.

  “Shit!” a man curses.

  Another man steps briefly into the light.

  He scuttles over the teenager’s corpse and slams the basement door shut.

  Then he flips on the light.

  “I told you that hiding out in here was a mistake,” he says angrily. “The stupid kids come in here all the time.”

  “It’s illegal, the sign outside-”

  “They’re stupid kids, of course they’re going to ignore the goddamn sign. Fuck, what do we do?”

  “Get rid of the body.” The first man rolls his eyes. “Gotta…gotta…fuck, I dunno, I’ve never hidden a body before.”

  “Well, you made this mess,” his companion snaps. “Why the fuck did you shoot her?”

  “Because she scared the shit out of me,” the first man says. “I mean, Jesus, a book comes flying in here, and I think what the hell, but then I hear someone stomping like an elephant down the stairs a few minutes later, and I just… I panicked! What the hell was I supposed to do? I thought she was going to turn on the light and see all of the stuff we snagged…”

  His companion rolls his eyes.

  “Idiot. She’s what, 14? We could’ve just threatened to kill her or something, she would’ve believed it.”

  “Well no use arguing about it now,” the first man grouses. “Come on, let’s…let’s just leave her body here. Why not? We’re going to be leaving soon anyway. When they bulldoze the building, she’ll probably just get crushed, no questions asked, right? They’ll do the cleanup job for us.”

  “Ok, but let’s get her out of the way,” his companion sighs, grabbing at her backpack and wrenching it off her back.

  He walks away from her body, unzipping it and dumping it out on a desk. Boxes and boxes of antiques, jewelry, and other valuables crowd the right half of the room. They’d been hiding out in this dump for a few weeks now, carefully covering up the boxes with a foul-smelling tarp whenever they thought someone might come by, like these pesky nosy teenagers. Occasionally, a city inspector or property evaluator drops by too, but they never stay long, and they usually leave as unsuspecting as they arrived. So far, this contingency plan had worked. This had been the only hitch so far. “Check her phone, does it still have any value?”

  “Yeah, the screen isn’t even cracked,” the first man says, inspecting it closely. “Damn, old phone though. I thought these teenagers liked getting the newest Sheer products as soon as they’re released. Why the hell-?”

  His words stop abruptly.

  His companion ignores him for a moment, staring at her assorted books and folders, feeling just a little guilty for a split second as he thinks about the mother and father who must’ve bought them for her, who would never know what happened to her.

  But then he frowns and turns.

  “What is it, Anth-?”

  The noises die in h
is throat.

  But only temporarily.

  Because the next second, a very sharp noise, shrill and piercing, leaves his mouth.

  It’s the kind of scream that tears through the air and reverberates off of walls, cutting through pleasant silences and sociable clamors.

  But it too is cut short.

  You might hear the scream briefly from next door, as soft and unimposing as the whistle of the midnight train, but unless your hearing was supernatural, superhuman in some way, you would not hear what cut it short, a soft, wet, glrch.

  The kind that ends screams permanently.

  tori, tori-fied tori, little terrified tori, tori-nado, a messy, crying little girl with nowhere to go, no one to save her.

  no one but me, hm, little bird?

  5

  Victoria yawns slowly, enjoying the feeling of the cool breeze on her reddened cheeks. It’s a fine autumn evening, the kind fair-weathered people enjoy, neither stifling nor chilly, with the low murmur of crickets, the falling red ember of an early sunset, and the comfortable humming buzz of a vibrant occupied city going about its errands.

  She stretches, intertwining her fingers and pushing outwards, hearing them crack. She pulls them up over her head and stretches her arms too, feeling just a little sleepy as she blearily looks about.

  Then her location dawns on her, and she bolts out of the rocking chair on the porch of the haunted house in a panic.

  She trips and falls hard on her face, floundering clumsily on the disgusting grass.

  She hastily forces herself off her knees, her backpack tugging on her weary limbs, straps digging into her skin as she scrambles away.

  Victoria pelts away from the property as fast as she can and doesn’t look back.

  She doesn’t slow down until she comes back to her home, Bromwell Place, where she shares an apartment on the top floor with her uncle, her aunt, and their daughter, Sharon.

  Exhausted from running, Victoria shakily drags herself to the elevator and hits the sixth floor button.

  A man in the elevator gives her an once-over, decides he isn’t interested, and then ignores her until he gets off at the third floor.