The Keepers' Evil

Eighteen: I was only trying to help

Song- Notre dame: Paris Paloma

Trigger warning for major descriptions of domestic violence and child abuse.

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"I was only trying to help."

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When I was a child, my parents had repeatedly tucked us into bed as per our normal routine with Anne on one side of the room, me on the other. They kissed our foreheads, said their goodnights, but they always stood for an extra few seconds outside of our bedroom door when the lights dimmed and our eyes hadn't yet adjusted to the dark because they knew Anne would scurry her tiny feet across the room into my bed because she was scared of the dark.

My mother giggled every time as she came back to ret-tuck her in beside me, and she had sat on the edge of the bed by my legs, smoothed the stray, sleepy, pieces of hair behind our ears and simply whispered be brave.

And those words had never been more present in my mind as when I came back to the archway the very next day.

The same glowing flow of pinks and blues shimmered sequences of sequins between the embellished silver that formed the door to a mind that I had always wished to be in, until this moment when I finally could.

"Back again, Mr Sallow?" Bakar always sounded somewhat smug, as though he were taunting me and my apprehensiveness that pulsed as freely through my body as blood. My limbs felt thin, like the small, elastic, strings of muscles were snapping one by one with every betrayal I let myself commit. It was at a moment like this, that I wished the thickness of my blood would congeal to stand me up straight.

"Will it hurt her?" I let my finger dip into the swirling space before me, letting the feeling of another life, another world, engulf just my fingertip. It felt like an intense pull, like the gravity on every planet in the solar system had come to yank me into her troubled mind.

Terror's fingers peeled over my shoulder, like a haunting devil with hands of black ice that were too slippery to yank me back into what was right. I knew that Madeleine's mind was a collage of memories, each image, each feeling, each hurt, stitching squares into a patchwork quilt that blanketed over everything good.

"She may just receive some unfriendly dreams, but she won't know." Unfriendly was putting it lightly; knowing Madeleine, the hauntings of her past would take shape in nightmares that changed her entire emotional being. With every scream another piece of her soul fell, irretrievably. With every sob another channel of her mind darkened, irreversibly. With every nightmare, another avenue of hope became an alleyway of danger, incurably.

I gulped too hard as I faced back towards the space beyond the archway, and my impatience seemed to claw inside of my throat like the shards of unease were ready to spike me to death.

I didn't have a choice once my arm became engulfed in the smokey texture that the archway's glitter emitted. It was as though Madeleine's memories needed a fresh look, like it needed someone to see exactly what she did so that finally someone could understand, just to say I know when her tears weighed too much.

There was almost no distance between where The Keepers stood and this world which wasn't really a world. I stumbled forwards, the bannister in front of me breaking the fall completely. As I looked beyond where my hands caught me against the wood, I could only look down to a house, a manor, that was bigger and darker than Madeleine had ever described of her home.