AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The cell is dark and cold, and it smells disgusting. The smell alone makes me want to throw up. There is a bucket in the corner. I scrunch my nose. I don’t want to find out what is in it or what it is used for. There is a small window in the corner of the cell, big enough to look out of but not to climb out to escape. I try to slip the chain on my wrist, but it’s not budging. Great, I’m stuck here.
I don’t know how to get out of here. The only way I can think of trying is to break my wrist. It’s going to hurt like a bitch, but I have to try.
So, I grab my hand with the hand that’s not chained, and I take a deep breath. One… two… three! SNAP! I scream with agony as the bone in my wrist snaps; the pain immediately spreads down my arm and hits my chest like a ton of bricks.
I carefully slip my broken wrist out of the chain and hold it close to my chest. With my other hand, I grab the bone that was sticking out and with a scream, I push it back into my wrist. I rip off the bottom half of my shirt and wrap it around my wrist to stop the bleeding and hopefully to keep the bone in place. I stand up and stagger towards the window to see where I am and if I am anywhere significant.
I don’t remember ever being here before. I’m in a basement in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The full reality of what has happened hits me. I stopped a ritual from happening. They used ME as the sacrifice. It worked, and now I’m damned for all eternity with something I didn’t deserve to happen to me. No matter what crime I committed, that was sick and disgusting even to comprehend doing that to someone.
I died! I became immortal. I’ll forever be twenty-six. I had my whole life in front of me, but no. They thought I needed to be punished by something far worse than death. This demon I carry inside me is a burden, a curse, but if allowing him to possess me stops the ritual from happening to anyone else, then I will live with it. I don’t want any more people to die because of the stupidity of the cult I once belonged to.
I look out the window, and all I can see are trees—tall, gloomy trees towering over the small, winding, crumbling path leading deeper into the woods. The pathway is only lit by the moonlight, and at the base of the trees is a thick layer of fog. It looks gloomy and scary, but I find it peaceful. It feels like I belong here.
“Where is this place?” I whisper.
I try to open the window but to no avail. It looks like I’ll have to do this another way. I look around the room and see the door on the other side, so I stagger towards it and trip over my feet, crashing into it. I hold my arms out to break my fall.
“Fuck!” I shout while clutching my broken wrist.
“Now would be a great time to help heal me, you know, Demon. At least be useful if I am stuck with you,” I say aloud, hoping he can hear me.
After composing myself and muttering curse words, because The Demon is fucking useless, I reach out to clutch the door handle and try and jimmy it open.
“Fuck, it’s locked.” I punch it with my bad hand and let out a howl.
I stumble backwards from the door, leaning against the stone wall, and slide down. This pain is fucking torture. My head feels heavy. My eyelids start closing as I wait for the darkness to envelope me. The Demon must finally be taking over, as my body is not strong enough to fight him off any longer.
Calliope-The Year 2015
Istare at the old trees beyond me. They stand tall and proud, something I am not. It’s a dark and cold autumn night. A chill in the air causes my cheeks to blush and my fingertips to pulsate from the cold. I can feel something or someone boring their eyes into the back of my head.
I know I am alone in this forest since nobody ever comes here anymore due to what happened 60 years ago, but something feels off to me. I can’t shake the horrible feeling that I’m being watched. As I move forwards, my heart quickens, and my breathing gets faster.
“Who’s there?” I whisper into the night. But nobody answers. A chill runs down my body as I continue walking. I hear a rustle, and then a twig snaps behind me. I turn around to see what it is; a black figure comes running up to me. I scream, and everything goes black.
I wake up in my room and bed, drenched in sweat.
“Fuck sake, it’s that damn dream again,” I mutter under my breath.
I have had the same dream every night for as long as I can remember. The shadow figure always runs towards me, like he wants to take me with him, but I always wake up before it happens.
When I first started having it, I couldn’t remember it in the morning, not as well as I do now, and I always thought something was wrong with me. Is it all made up? Is it from a past life? I’m not sure. It used to scare me when I was a little girl, but ever since losing my parents, nothing seems to scare me anymore.
I was six years old when they died, and I can’t remember them very well. My foster family tells me stories about them, but I don’t believe a single word. I was told my parents died in a fire, but I know deep down that it didn’t happen like that.
I believe my parents were murdered. Cliche, I know, but honestly, that is what I think and believe happened. Fuck the fire. Somebody killed them, and I will prove it. I think my foster parents told me they died in a fire because I was young. Maybe they hated me from the start? After all, they were friends with my parents, so why didn’t they tell me the truth?
I look over to my bedside cabinet, where there is a photo of my parents in a black sparkly frame, and they are smiling and looking happy. The picture was from a different time before I was born. I found it while I was locked up in the basement the last time, and I brought it back to my room.
“What happened to you?” I whisper to the photo with tears in my eyes, gently touching the frame.
I look towards my alarm clock—noon. I let out a breath, sounds about right. I struggle to sleep at night, so I always oversleep, and my foster parents hate me for it. My eyes noted the date on the calendar: 25th December. Christmas day. Brilliant.
I stretch and get out of bed. I go over to my en suite to brush my teeth and hair, and I admire my deep purple eyes in the mirror every morning. I always liked my eyes the most about myself. I feel like they remind me of my mother. You can’t see the colour of her eyes in the only photo I have, but I bet if I could, they would be the same.
There are specks of silver inside my purple iris. My hair is long and wavy, a shade of auburn with streaks of purple to match my eyes. It is naturally this colour. I have tried many times over the years to dye it due to being relentlessly bullied about it, but no colour would ever stick.
One thing about myself still puzzles me to this day, though. There is a scar on my face, long and jagged, going from just above my right eyebrow, down through my eye, and ending just above my cheekbone. Whatever caused the scar damaged my right eye, and it shows. The eye is missing the pupil, and it only shows my deep purple iris without the specks of silver. The left eye is fine. They just don’t match, and I’m okay with it. I’m just curious how I got the scar. Am I repressing a memory from my past? Did something terrible happen to me to cause it?
