Little Nightmares: The Damned Child

Chapter III - Woman in the Attic

The girl slowly came into the light. She was wearing grey shorts that didn't reach her knees and a dirty blue sweater that clung to her thin frame. Her midnight blue bangs concealed her eyes from view as she hesitantly came out of her hiding place. The paper bag boy held his hands out for her to take. She reached up to grab his hand, only to swiftly change her mind, pulling her hand away and running past the boy, knocking him over. She dashed out of the door jumping over the splinters of wood. The paper bag boy picked himself up, running out of the broken door to follow her.

The girl was already at the top of the stairs and out the door. The boy ran up after her. Calling out as quietly as he could. The girl dashed around a corner into the next room as the boy quickly followed after her immediately stopping in his tracks. Seated at a table were three unmoving figures set up as though they were having a meal. The only light in the room illuminated their faces. The guy on the left was hunched over. A white mustache settled neatly under sunken eyes. The back of his bald skull was stitched to his wrinkly pasty skin. The child in the back had a fairly normal appearance. 

Her brown straw hair pulled back into pigtails. Her only deformity was that her right eye had swelled up to five times its original size and currently popped out of its socket. The figure to the right of the table seemed to be a woman judging by her greying hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was too warped to even think she was human. All of them, even the child, were giant compared to the boy. He'd be lucky to reach their knees. The boy crept across the floorboards staying hidden in the shadows. An open cupboard made a suitable ladder that he used to reach the vent in the wall.

Dropping into the room only lit by the moon through the window the boy found the girl again in the middle of a rug beneath a handle on a string. The pale white door to the right had a heavy padlock on it. The girl jumped up to the handle grabbing it. But she seemed to be too light and couldn't pull it down. The wallpaper in this room was torn at the bottom. The beginnings of it rolling upwards. 

The girl had to let go as the paper bag boy got closer. She crouched in a defensive stance. The boy held his hands out to his sides, appearing as unthreatening as possible. He had scared her when he wielded that axe beforehand. The girl straightened herself and looked up at the handle. Her skin was awfully pale. The girl gestured to the boy. Beckoning him with her hand, mimicking him from before by whispering.

"Hey." She linked her hands together and knelt down to create a foothold. The paperbag boy stepped into her hands as she hoisted him up to grab the handle. He hung there, not being heavy enough the girl grabbed onto his ankles and tugged him. Opening the stairs to the attic. The ladder sliding down with a groan. The ominous sound of heavy breathing could be heard beyond the vent to the previous room. The paper bag boy and the girl climbed the ladder. His olive trench coat bounced as he climbed to the top. 

The attic was filled with sacks of cotton, prosthetics and miscellaneous items like cloth. The two of them pushed a heavy suitcase up against a small cupboard. They used the suitcase as a step to climb over the cupboard. A key hung on a hook attached to the ceiling. Out of their reach. There was an unsettling collection of bags that looked suspiciously like grown bodies. One of them were strung up to a pulley system, but it was missing the crank handle. 

The girl leant against a cupboard and hoisted the boy to the top. Letting him venture ahead to find the crank handle while she waited. He dropped down the other side, crouching to crawl through a narrow space into another section of the attic. The boy found the crank sealed tightly in the grasping hand of a hunched over woman in a chair beside a broken mirror. Her face was obscured by shadows. The boy shivered and proceeded to grab the handle. Expecting it to come loose fairly easy considering the woman was fake, right? Instead it was stuck.

 The boy pulled at the handle before falling back when the woman's arm tore off at the shoulder. The arm landed on him. The boy scrambled away from the dismembered arm. He stepped warily around the limb, picking up the crank handle and crawling through the narrow space again. Walking up a wooden plank ramp and dropping down to where the girl was waiting. 

The fall wasn't kindly to the boy's knees as he'd landed flat on his face, the handle clattering to the floor. The girl took the handle and inserted it where it needed to go. She wound the crank up slightly. It pulled the sack up slightly. The paper bag boy walked over to the bag and grabbed onto it, climbing as the girl cranked it up the rest of the way. He jumped off of the bag to the hook. His small hands wrapped around the hook as he swung. His hands slipped off of the hook and he fell to the floor. The key was flung from the hook, clattering back to the floor. The boy licked up the key and attached it to a loop on his coat.