THE MARGINALS

The Thirteen Chapters of Mabel the Scared

"Nobody will believe this. This is crazy." Mabel Red was staring in disbelief at the electrocuted rabbit outside the Power Plant, directly across the street from her home. This is where it began. Every night before bed, Mabel would go to her window and see something lying dead in a heap across the street. It started with the rabbit. Then it was a pidgeon. Then a little black squirrel. And each night she looked up at the moon and made a wish. If it was a full moon, she made two. If there was no moon, she made three. Just for luck.

Each night, the same wish. "Please God, make it stop!". Mabel wasn't superstitious. Just scared. Scared that the world was about to end, right there, before her very eyes. Her lavender eyes. Mabel was convinced that she would see it all explode right in front of her. Pyrotechnic explosions and frantic screams filling the night air. Yes, yes, yes; she knew how dramatic she could be. She got that from her mother. But Mabel had her reasons. Very good reasons as a matter of fact. Big horror-story-zombie-like reasons. But don't take her word for it. (Or mine, for that matter) Read her diary entries that started on that first night when everything changed from bad to worse for little Mabel Red of Casa Loma.

It had already been a horrible year for Mabel Red. A year where she didn't think things could possibly get worse. But they did. First she lost her Mom in a sudden accident and reluctantly became heir to a Victorian mansion her mother had left. A mansion Mabel never even knew existed. A fully-furnished mansion in the oldest part of town, directly across the street from an abandoned Power Plant. Mabel thought it was haunted. I mean it certainly LOOKED haunted. But Mabel was known for being overly dramatic and she had nowhere else to stay so she moved into it anyway. She couldn't bare the memories of her old home without her Mom around anymore and sold it to the first offer and packed up all her belongings and moved in the next day.

Mabel had just turned twelve, and in Casa Loma this meant she was legally capable of being left alone to parent herself. This is what she wanted anyway. To be alone. It was the saddest year of Mabel's life. She wept more than she ever thought humanly possible. But then again, poor Mabel wasn't human. Not fully human anyway. Her Dad was human and her Mom was a monster. Half human, half monster. Mabel Red Morphenstern was a rare combination of human and monster. what they called a Humon (mostly behind her slightly hunched back). A Humon with lavender eyes, no eyebrows, a button nose, a gigantic chin (and much to the neighbouring Monsters chagrin there was NO wart hanging off the end of it either) She had bright electric blue hair as fine as silk, not like the wooly mess of hair found on most of her monster friends. Mabel was more human in appearance than Monster and considering that she lived in Zekial, the planetary system inhabited by mostly Monsters, Mabel was often teased. You see Monsters never cried and they found Mabel's salt water tears to be quite amusing. They could make her cry at the drop of a hat. Which they did ALL the time. She hated that she was different. And as far as all the other monsters of Casa Loma felt, well, they agreed.

So much so that when she was a kid she couldn't go out for a walk without people staring at her and pointing their long hairy fingers directly in her face, shrieking: "Look! She has purple eyes! How terrible. What a freak.". So Mabel eventually stopped going to school. Stopped going out for walks during the day. Stopped walking her pet 'Frankie' the Chinchilla, at night. Then she stopped going out all together. She stayed away from the other Monsters in her neighbourhood and was home-schooled by her Mom. Her human Dad was kept a secret and people just thought that Mabel was a freak of nature. Her mom had Mabel when she was 48 (which is considered young for a Monster who usually lived to 200 in Earth years) and never made it public who the father was, so people thought it was some sort of celestial abnormality caused by her mother's age. (Humans were just myths found in story books in Zekial.) So Mabel was sworn to secrecy and only knew of her Dad, Archibald McTeer, from her mother's beautiful stories.

The family lawyer, Ms Kishnn, would drop by to check on her, but mostly, Mabel was alone. She became a recluse, home-schooled herself on her computer and hoped for the best. Mabel also kept a journal. The only two things Mabel cherished in all of the world was: Her Chinchilla Frankie and her leather-bound journal Woolly (it had a big woolly heart glued to the front of it).

Life for Mabel seemed peaceful for awhile. But then it happened one night right before bedtime. As she closed her closet door and turned towards her bed something soft and pink jammed the door open. It was a delicate little hand. A human hand. A hand with five fingers on it, and it was waving, desperately... at her! 'What an ugly little hand,' she thought. 'Must be human' ... (The only thing Mabel cherished about her appearance was that she had the requisite six fingers on each hand like a Monster. This made playing the pianosichord SO much easier). But this soft looking delicate hand looked anemic compared to her monster hands. The hand kept gesturing for her to follow. It pointed at the door and cupped the air as if to say, "This way. Get going now. Come on. Time is a ticking!"

Mabel had never felt more disgusted and scared at the same time. She fell back on her pillows in bed. Frankie quickly zipped himself under the covers shivering. Before she could say a word the hand spoke in loud clear words : "Mabel, It's me. Mom. Sweetheart come this way. Trust me" Mabel's heart lifted in her throat . "Mom? Am I dreaming? What is going on? I am being trapped by some sorcery?" 

No answer from the voice now.

"Don't move Mabel, don't move!" she thought to herself. But she just couldn't resist. Her body rose off the bed and with Frankie tucked under one arm and Wooly in the other ,she took three small  steps toward the doorway, paused, took a deep breath and walked through the opening. 

Mabel never looked back...

She quickly discovered that her bedroom closet was some sort of passage way between worlds. Worlds filled with all sorts of different things. 

Worlds that only had one thing in common...

LOVE.