Darkness. A horror story.

Darkness

By The Z-Ster

This includes pictures by Mallika.

Clara had heard so many rumours. The rumours were all hard to hear. Her friends believed them, her dad believed them, her little brother, Toby, believed them and her older sister, Cindi, believed them. But Clara refused to be scared, even though the rumours crept in at night and made her cry. Clara was a brave girl, but when it came to wives tales and rumours, she couldn’t understand and she would cry and cry and hide every night and nobody would understand why or even know what she was facing. She was so scared deep down that she would wake up at night and dash across her bedroom floor to lock the front door. She would hide in her closet with her stuffed cat and wait for the whispers to stop. Some nights she would suffer in silence as the world slipped away into fear, but other nights, she would yell and scream to her parents.

One day, Clara dreaded going to school, especially since there were so many mirrors in the classroom. She hid behind the couch trying to find her courage, but all she could hear were the rumours and whispers and all she could see was a never-ending darkness in her mind. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she didn’t want to open them. Cindi’s calming voice suddenly broke out and silenced the nagging voices simultaneously.

“What’s wrong, Dust Bunny?” said Cindi, bending over to see Clara. Clara loved that pet name, Dust Bunny.

“Cindi,”said Clara, feeling almost normal, her voice started to break as a tear trickled down her pale cheek, half of her fears were melting, the others were daunting her still, “I feel unprepared. My very existence may be a lie, Cindi! As my very understanding sister, I trust that you will be the best person to confide this to. I feel like all those rumours are true, the folktales, the wives tales and the world being a game, and I cannot borne it! I try to shake the feeling, but I find myself lying awake, questioning everything, arguing with voices in my head, Cindi! I believe in Pennywise the Clown from that movie we watched last week, I believe in that scary story about the girl in the mirror named Mary and I really can’t live like this!! I cry only because…because….well because I’m just a scared little girl! Yes, Cindi, please help me be brave for real, not just bragging and boasting and joking when I’m crying and dying inside with the knowledge that I could be fake and I could die if I chant “Bloody Mary” three times! I want my memory to be lost, dearest Cindi! How do you do it? How?! CINDI! I can’t live my life with every waking second daunted by my own thoughts and the voices that tell me to try things! No matter how badly I want to forget and break through, they keep talking and whispering to me like there’s a million oracles that only I need to know, Cindi!” She burst into tears. She still held onto the hope that Cindi could help her.

“Dust Bunny,” said Cindi, “Poor thing. I didn’t realise they got to you. Of all people. Dust Bunny, if you just don’t go to school today, we’ll help you out. Just tell mum and dad about it and they’ll explain.” Clara didn’t know if she could trust her family. What if she chose not to trust them and it was just the voice’s idea, not hers? What if she wasn’t thinking straight and said no and then when she is in a mental hospital somewhere, she asks herself why she didn’t take the opportunity to get help from her family and end the troubles so she didn’t end up in a mental hospital, but that slight bad choice led her straight to a mental hospital? So many possibilities of making perilous choices. It was a simple yes or no, but Clara couldn’t even trust herself to lead her to the right future.

Yes could lead me into a dangerous realisation that my parent’s are lying frauds, she thought, but no could mean ending up in a mental hospital because I didn’t get help sooner. She needed to clear her head ASAP! She got out her notebook and began to draw. She drew her worries away, but it took a while to get rid of them all. She drew to relax. Drawing and writing were her therapists. When she was in doubt, she turned to her pens and notebooks to write or draw to repress or enhance her feelings depending on her emotion. She kept a diary where she wrote about if she was feeling fear, if she was feeling joy, if she was feeling sorrow or if she was feeling all kinds of complicated things that are always misunderstood.

“Diary,” Clara wrote in her diary, “I might be able to get help, but I need to come to terms with myself. I can’t let the voices decide for me. I can’t let them fool me. This pen with be my voice and whatever conclusion is written by it will be my own, as my writing and drawing cannot be corrupted by evil thoughts. My art is my place where no decisions are hard and I can trust the pen and the pencil to never betray me. They are my friends, my voices who allow me to do the things I enjoy. Visions of goddesses, please come to me as I write in my diary the answer that will lead me in the right direction.” Clara stop writing. The voice began to speak.

“Clarabell,” it said, “Say no. Reject her! Would I lie to you? I am giving you the answer. God has spoken!” The voice stopped. Clara let the voice fool her. She thought that God had told her to reject her sister’s offer. But her pen could not lie to her and she wrote, “I have decided to trust my sister.” After reading what she had written in her diary, she realised that she was going to be fooled if it weren’t for the pen, her friend, being ever so loyal to her, she would descend into insanity.

The voice took over. It yelled at her, “You are disobeying the words of Satin, child! That pen will only be your friend for so long, Clarabell Delifica!” Clara screamed. Cindi ran to her.

“Help me! It’s Satin!” she shrieked, “Cindi, go tell mum! Aaah! CINDI! TOBY! RUSSLE! HELP!” Her parents and her two brothers rushed to her as the voice spoke to her as she lay, yelling, “No!” on the carpet.

“Holy water, Russle !” yelled her mum, standing over her.

“Mum, dad! The devil is in my head. What do I do?” Clara screamed, panicking, “He’s telling me to obey him. No, Satin, no! I won’t! Mum! Tell me what to say to him! He says he’s going to live in me, ruin my life and eventually kill me after listening to everything everyone says.”

“Russle,” said Eveline, Clara’s younger sister, who heard the whole commotion from her room and was panicking too. She asked her dad to call an exorcist. He frantically pressed the numbers on his phone to call the exorcist from his church.

“My daughter is being spoken to by the devil. He’s threatening her and we can’t hear him, but we all know he’s there. She’s screaming and saying no to his deals,” he told the exorcist. The exorcist told them to feed her holy water and pray in a circle around her, each reciting a repelling verse from a book about ghosts and communications from the devil. Fortunately, their family had many prayer book and books on the devil.

“Here. Take holy water,” said her dad, feeding her a cold bottle of holy water straight from the fridge. He stopped holding the bottle to her mouth, but she grabbed it and started gulping it down. The others started praying and chanting.

“It’s working. I can hear the voice getting softer,” she told them, squeezing the bottle and violently sucking the holy water out, “Just a little more… and I will… be fine…!” She started feeling better. The devil was being driven away by the holy water and it couldn’t control her and her emotions anymore. It couldn’t make her stay awake at night, afraid of the rumours. It was being pulled away from her sweating body that was twisting and turning as her, once corrupted, mind was filled with fears and worries.

The next day, Clara wrote in her diary, “Yesterday, I trusted my parents as I said. I almost got tricked, but my pen was loyal to me. This pen was my only gift for Christmas last year, my grandma’s fancy fountain pen with strawberry red ink. I think I’m cured of my fears of those rumours, Diary. I was lying on the floor, drinking holy water, scared, crying and screaming.” She thought for a while and continued writing, “And I was very relieved to hear the voice fade. Afterwards I had a nice, cleansing shower.”

She dropped her pen under her desk. She reached to get it. Ink spilled on the carpet. A wave of fear came over her. She was suddenly face-to-face with a living darkness like a shadow that moves independently.

Clara reached out her hand. The shadow dragged her across the river of her fears. The rumours were everywhere, unfolding and coming to life. Then Clara saw a familiar cat. It wasn’t a black cat like in the superstitions she believed. It was a snowy white cat. It watched as the shadows grim face turned to Clara. Clara was shocked.

“I knew I would be back for you, Clarabell Delifica,” said the shadow, “I am Satin and the shadows are my vessels of communication. When you see them towering over you at night, Clara, I was trying to get a closer look. The shadows whisper to you as I do. They whisper to each member of the Delifica clan, but I possessed you! I chose to posses this scrawny member as I could enhance her fear, and when the time was right I could fool her into thinking I’m helping her calm it.” Clara was scared beyond her wildest nightmares.

Suddenly, the cat curled up at Clara’s feet as she was being dragged across the ground. She looked down and realised that the cat was her beloved pet, Stella.

“Wake up,” she heard her mum’s voice yell.

“Why isn’t Stella waking her up?” asked Eveline.

How do I wake up? she wondered, aren’t I already awake?

She felt Stella biting her foot. Toby hit her over the head with her diary. Her mum poured holy water into her mouth. Her dad hurled Eveline at her. Cindi held her hand and recited verses from her book on possession and the devil, as Russle just panicked.

The devil took her deeper into the shadows. She almost cried, but somehow, the tears simply didn’t come. Was she being controlled by the devil and what was going to become of her if he succeeded? It wasn’t going to be long before her questions were answers.

“What? Aaaaaaaaah!”