Archived

Meat monster

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"Statement of Keaton Whitfield, regarding a high school friend. Original statement given July 31st, 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims head archives  of the Magnus Institute, London."
"Statement begins."

"Your hormones can blind you to a great many things. That goes double for when you're a teenager, and already kind of stupid before the hormones enter the equation. In retrospect, thinking about it now, it seems obvious that something was off. But I don't entirely blame myself for being fooled by Sue D'Angelo.
Sue D'Angelo was a girl who transferred to my high school a quarter of the way into my senior year. And she was beautiful. When she walked into a room, no joke, it changed the entire atmosphere. Physically, she seemed to be flawless. Long blonde hair, kept straight down her back, perfect cheeks and eyebrows, magnetic eyes and full lips...her figure was a perfect hourglass, and she was tall enough to stand over the heads of most girls, but just short enough not to threaten any of the guys. Naturally, she was a bit shy and awkward, and needed a lot of help adjusting, and everyone who saw her was happy to give it. Somehow, it was my own little circle of friends she ended up absorbed into, our table she gravitated towards.
Back then, it was me, Jason Channing, Blaire Callahan , Phillip Allard , Keisha Varon, Tommy Dunne, and Christine Ward. And, of course, Sue. I remember it was Christine that had brought her over to our lunch table in an effort to include her, and while at first her awkwardness persisted, she melded in well enough. Our friends became her friends. And she was great, a real sweet girl, very kind and thoughtful, and nowadays I wish I'd seen what an act it was and cut her skanky eyes out with one of those shitty plastic spoons they give you to eat with in school.
For the first month, everything went smoothly, with no hint that anything was out of the ordinary except that every single guy in the school was nursing a huge crush on the same girl, and every last girl who found out about it got jealous, though it never ended up making a scene. After the second month, though, Blaire started to get sick.
That wasn't surprising; it's a school, illnesses spread like wildfire, especially once the seasons change. She took some time out of school, and a week later, Keisha got sick. She went home too...and then, a few days later, Blaire still wasn't back in class yet. That was kind of surprising. Blaire was a good student, and she'd missed school before, but never stayed out this long. Some rumors started to circulate that she'd cheated on a test and gotten suspended.
It turned out to be nothing. Blaire, at least, showed back up in the week before autumn harvest break. I remember being relieved that she was okay, and not suffering pink-eye or bronchitis or cheating whore syndrome, as an annoyed Phillip had put it. That one surprised me. Phillip and Blaire had used to date in their sophomore year, but as far as I know their breakup was amicable and it hadn't stopped them being friendly to one another when we all sat together or hung out after class. I didn't understand where this bitterness had come from.
When Christmas came around, nobody made anything of it that they hadn't heard from Keisha or Blaire, since everyone had to put a lot of attention towards their families during the holidays. But Keisha was the only one to come back in January, and it eventually got out that Blaire had transferred schools over the holidays. By now it was 'common knowledge' that she'd cheated on a test and been threatened with expulsion, thus explaining the move. The rest of us that were left were happy to discuss it, Sue included. It's obvious now, looking back, that it was all horse shit. It baffles me that none of us noticed it was always her to turn the conversation around to how untrustworthy Blaire had been.
February rolled around, and Keisha began to look a little haggard. She didn't sit with us as often, and she seemed quieter than usual, stressed out. Valentine's Day came and went, and she stopped coming to school. The rumors started to fly, of course, that she'd been harshly rejected by her crush, and was having an emotional breakdown and in therapy. The rumors got worse, with blood having been discovered on her pillow, and then everyone was saying she'd started cutting herself. Everyone thought that her parents had been the ones to report that, but...I can't remember anyone ever confirming it. Nobody questioned it when she never came back, just assuming she had dropped out. I was wrong for that...we were childhood friends, and looking back, I barely registered any concern for her. As if she had just slowly drifted out of our little circle and her problems weren't mine anymore.
That left Christine as the only girl in our dwindling friend group--besides Sue, of course. For the record, I had been nursing a massive crush on Christine since starting high school. It should have bothered me more when she went missing--actually went missing, with newspaper headings and everything, no excuses or masks--and yet I had hardly any reaction at all to it. There was only room in my head for Sue now, who had replaced her in my mind and heart as the sweetest, most beautiful, most deserving girl in the world...
And to make things even better, I was starting to think she liked me back, that Sue. She always seemed to have a cute little smile my way when we passed each other in the hall, her shoes were constantly bumping mine under the table, and she would even call me in the afternoons and evenings. Being the hormone pupped teenage boy that I was, I was falling for her hard and on a daily and nightly basis. She made my heart flutter, and my focus started to slip so much that my grades followed suit.
My ties with my male friends had started to wither somewhere along the way, of course. A gradual weakening of our relationships, while everyone was focused on the drama with the girls. We just didn't seem to like each other as much as we used to, and it was Sue--and our respective blinding crushes on her--that was holding the group together now. So when Jason started to sit away from Sue, and it got to the rest of us that she had asked him on a prom date and been cruelly rejected, it made it easy for us to turn on him. I remember Phillip chewing him out in the hall, and I called him up one afternoon to get on his ass. So he started sitting away from us at lunch, on the far opposite side of the cafeteria. None of us bothered calling him back over or paying much attention to him, which made it easy to forget him, so that he could go missing without any of us noticing. This was around the same time Tommy had started skipping school, of course, and eventually just stopped showing up altogether as well. Something about getting in with the wrong crowd, and doing drugs...
And if I envied Jason for catching Sue's affection, it was nothing to how jealous I was of Phillip 'comforting' her, the sly bastard, and they had a short fling that lasted about two weeks. And, of course, he stopped coming to school once it was over, as well...
I know it will be easy to deride me, hate me even, for failing to notice what was going on. But I was young, and stupid, and I believe Sue, or whatever the thing calling itself Sue was, knew that. Knew it was the case for every kid around her. So, when it was just me and her at that table then, and my birthday arrived and passed...you wouldn't believe how ecstatic I was. I was right! It was me, it had always been me, I was always the one she had truly loved, and would I mind too terribly letting her come over to my house one evening...
It would've been my first kiss. We were sitting there on my bed, my parents weren't home, and our hands were atop one another on the sheets. She was leaning in, and I leaned too, she closed her eyes, and I closed mine...and if I hadn't opened them, or had been a single second late, I'd have been eaten, I'm sure of it. To this day I still don't know why I opened my eyes. It wasn't some Eureka moment, I hadn't realized anything of worth. I was just nervous, and my eyes opened...and I saw all those teeth, and the tongue was too long...I jerked back, and in that moment, my body took over. I grabbed my desk lamp from my bedside table and hit her across the face with it. She had tried to hide it, taking my moment of shock to bend her mouth back into a human shape, but she wasn't quite fast enough, and I saw the teeth she was hiding just before the light bulb broke against her cheek. She screamed at me, and asked me what the hell I was doing. I aimed at her with the lamp again.
At that point, I guess the ploy was up, and she fled down the stairs. I followed her--I don't know why, it wasn't like I was suddenly into killing monsters, I could've just locked the door--but she surprised me in the kitchen, came at me and went for my neck. She bit down, and she was so much stronger than she should've been. But when her teeth were sunk into me, that was the moment I grabbed a kitchen knife from the stand behind me, and plunged it into her neck. She let go.
Sue was sitting there, a monster with my blood around her jaws, and I got to stabbing. I could feel the spell breaking, and suddenly she wasn't gorgeous anymore. Suddenly she was the ugliest, most disgusting thing I could ever remember seeing, and I didn't stop until she was still, well after in fact.
The body was burned, of course, and left no skeleton. I cleaned up the kitchen before my parents got home, and told them a big dog had bitten me on the way home from school, and they had me looked at by a doctor. Everyone seemed to miss Sue, though during the last days of the school year, I was pleased to find that not everything I heard about her was as glowing as it had been before. In the months following my graduation, I did my digging, and of course, none of my friends had dropped out or transferred. They were all dead, eaten. Along with their parents, in most cases. I'm the only one left.
I still haven't actually had my first kiss, even though I'm enrolled for university in the fall. If I never kiss a girl...I won't be surprised. The entire experience has left me a little at odds with women and the idea of being in bed with one, really. Maybe one day. And maybe one day, I'll be able to let go of this guilt. Guilt that it was me that survived, guilt that I never noticed what was happening to my friends.
I'm sorry. That's all you should need from me, and I really want to go drink now."
"Statement ends"
Credits to Glowdarks on AO3

"It seems this girl had no record of actually being a citizen, it seems that Sue D'Angelo was just that a monster. Yet I still can't explain the other children? He had said they were eaten yet there were records of 3 out of the 6 having transferred to the same one Westminster city school. All graduating the same year."

"Seems obvious that the girl was coordinated with the flesh, but i've never heard it described like this. Cannibalism yes, but not in this sort of way?  Guess that's just another mystery that this building has to solve."

"Oh, I heard from Marcus. it seems like he had explored the ruins of what was left of that old wax museum, according to him Tim is still leaving hint on where he is. Yet again it could be just another trick from another Circus, but that's going a longs way considering the Circus was blown up during the Unknowing..hmm."

"I'll have to speak with when he's back."

"End recording."

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