Chapter 1:
Loving Emily Blaine
The flames reached high, their searing heat licking at the air and filling it with the acrid stench of burning wood and ash, as if desperate to grasp at anything they could. The place I had lived and grown burnt all around me. The other orphans scampered to the exits as I struggled to fight off the strange man wearing the creepy plaster rabbit mask.
He appeared in the night outside of the window, staring at me near the end of every day. I had thought him to be nothing more than a nightmare, but here he was wrestling me to the ground, ignoring the flames around us. I punched and kicked with all of my might trying to get away, but he shrugged it off as if I had hit him with a feather. He spun me around, holding me on my back, grabbing both of my wrists with one hand. With his other hand he pulled a syringe from his black vest and stuck it in my neck, injecting me with god knows what.
The needle broke from the syringe and stayed in my neck as I continued to thrash violently to get away. Quickly my movements slowed to a stop, as if an unseen weight pressed down on me, leaving me paralyzed but painfully aware of everything around me. The man picked me up gently, but with great haste, as the building began to crumble around us and fire trucks began to pull up outside.
Throwing me over his shoulder, he jumped out of a window on the second story. He landed easily and ran to a parked hearse in the parking lot of the building next door to the orphanage, opening the back and dropping me into a wooden coffin. He threw the lid of the coffin closed, leaving me to stare into the darkness, only the burnt image of the rabbit's smile staring back at me from my mind.
My eyes jolted from side to side, up and down, as panic overwhelmed me. The back of my head felt fuzzy, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move a muscle. I screamed on the inside, a scream of anger and terror, unable to vent my feelings outward, barely squeaking at all when I tried. Echoing in the darkness of my mind, I only repeated my scream, foregoing any efforts to calm myself, the coffin being the main reason for my uninhibited dread.
The hearse moved slowly, stopping at regular intervals and turning so many times that it only confused me more. I kept up with the streets we were on for a while, reciting their names from memory as we passed, but that went quickly as the buzzing in my head grew denser, thick and heavy as iron. My body numbed, I could barely feel it as we ran over a street full of either holes or bumps, completely different from anything I had known before. It added yet another in the long list of distressing bullet points and labeled it: Lost.
Finally, after about fifteen minutes or so, perhaps more, the sound of the road changed to the soft, pliant trend of moist and healthy grass. The driver pulled to a slow stop, with an awful sense of calm, unheard of in a person of sound mind who had just kidnapped someone. Outside of the coffin lay a world burdened with the song of the wild. Insects chirped, and coyotes howled, all in a synchronized chorus of nature. The sound of the hearse door opening cut through everything else clearly. Silence fell over the whole of existence, not even the insects daring to speak out against the madness of my captor. I knew him, without knowing him. He was, at least in this moment, the embodiment of fear and absolute evil.
The back of the hearse opened with a loud pop that seemed to echo into the coffin. Quickly the coffin lid sprang open, blinding me as my now-adjusted eyes tried to focus in the light of a bright bulb that hung outside to light the field that the man had parked in. A dark rabbit-eared silhouette loomed over me in menacing glory, just as a reaper would watch over a newly departed soul. Fear overtook me once again as he bent closer to me. I panicked, unable to move, trapped in my own paralyzed body, as he scooped me up out of the wooden box.
He carried me in his arms, almost cradling me, as if to him I was delicate and needed care in handling. But if that were the case, why capture me so violently? Why inject me with some unknown poison, with which my senses dull and my body numb? What possible reason could there be in this madman’s mind for taking me against my will to this mansion of the most indescribable threat and ferocious enmity?
The mansion walls seemed to curve towards the black cloudy sky, as if drawn upward by some malevolent force. Their warped structure, combined with the jagged edges of the roofline, evoked an unsettling sense of distortion. The air around the mansion carried a damp, musty odor, mingling with the faint metallic tang of decay, intensifying the growing dread that knotted in my stomach. The windows and doors peered at me with eyes of unseen intensity, waiting to gorge themselves on my body. I could feel a palpable darkness emanating from the old wooden planks of the house that could only lend a feeling of supernatural tendencies that, for all I knew, was a figment of my panicked and addled mind. For all of my insensitivity and ignorance of the mystic and bizarre, I was no stranger to the sense of dread and foreboding that had grown tenfold just since nearing the house.
Up three stone steps and through the portal we went, transported from the rickety outside to an ornate and evermore haunting inside. In what ways did the beautiful décor and well-lit corridors give the house a more dangerous feel? I haven’t the slightest inkling, but it was there nonetheless. You assume that a place of horror, should you ever see one, would be dark, dimly lit to hide the atrocities theretofore committed to the unwary victims. But this place was lit in a pale yellow, as if to show off how uncaring my captor was, making me wish for darkness.
The lights bounced wildly around the man’s rabid face, changing his static expression rapidly by use of shadows falling on the rough and uneven texture of the plaster. The man breathed heavily behind the mask, only glancing at me every few seconds through the round but asymmetrical eye holes in the mask. The dark emptiness that lay beyond the mask's eyeholes showed just how far gone this being was. There was no light. There was neither happiness nor anger, but the odd chuckle that escaped his throat made a pretty convincing act at hollow jubilance.
The man walked me through a long hallway, traced by carved wooden walls of flowery splendor, topped with a slightly pinkish wallpaper that went up to the ceiling. The light color of the walls did nothing to alleviate the terror I felt in the pit of my stomach as we reached a door of bars like that of a jail cell. The man easily held me aloft as he opened the door with a quick kick, a feat you wouldn’t think he could achieve with a frame so slight.
Inside of the room was filled with a macabre collection of dolls, sewn together with what looked like thick surgical thread, and all with a disturbing disparity that lent a feel of inhuman origin. Their beady eyes seemed to follow me in an unnatural trick of light as the man laid me down on a bed with white laced blankets trimmed in a red velvet stripe, their mouths agape in a semblance of awe and horrific wonder. On the walls were pictures, all of the same man, handsome in looks but with a certain air around him that could unnerve the sturdiest of men.
I lay on my back, still unable to move, but recapturing my bodily sensations ever so fleetingly. The man bent over me, running his hand over my cheek and then his fingers through my hair. He retrieved his hand, slowly lifting it to grab his rabbit mask and pull it away from his face. And there he was, the same man in all of the pictures on the walls, only slightly different. A large scar ran from the left side of his mouth, starting at the corner and going through the cheek about halfway to the jaw, sewed together with the same thread as the dolls in large X’s.
With a crazed, slightly wide-eyed smile, he opened his mouth as words hissed forth. “Hello, Emily. Welcome.” He pulled a string, releasing a banner filled with confetti and written in what appeared to be smeared blood.
He jolted forward quickly, forcing a slight yelp from my dry throat. I struggled against my motionless body, trying to force some movement away from the man in front of me, failing instantly. His smile grew as he excitedly jumped back up and clapped his hands together.
“Oh, you love it! Mother said that you would,” the man trailed off for a moment, most likely thinking of his mother. “You know mother made all of these dolls herself? Let’s keep it to ourselves and not tell her you’re her yet.”
He waltzed to the door in glee and closed it behind him, locking it with a large key on a ring with others. He blew a kiss my way and then walked off, leaving his hand in my sight and waving before it had to follow him. With the terrifying distraction gone, I now was able to focus on what the banner actually read.
“Carson loves Emily.”
Panic welled up inside of me once again as the motive for all of this struck me. I struggled to move with even more ferocity as the dolls laughed in silent sarcasm. The true horror isn’t lost on me. I know why they mock me. Love is the most terrifying thing in the world.
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