GLASS CHILDREN [Completed]

ENTRY

"W-Where are we?"

"Rosewood Asylum."

Nikolas froze for a moment or two at the sight of the decrepit place that stood before him. Indeed, it was an asylum...a very old one at that.

"How l-long has it been here?" he asked, brushing some of his dark brown hair from his forehead. The question that he'd asked wasn't his only concern; "How long have you all been here?" was the question he really wanted to ask William, Judith and Arthur. He didn't, of course.

"Fowever." Arthur answered Nikolas's question. His substitution of the first 'R' in 'forever' was a common speech impediment for children at that age, if not most.

"No one knows," William chimed in with a deep sigh. "Wanna go in?" he asked, hopefully looking up at Nikolas with a smile. Most of his teeth were chipped and dotted with black cavities; it only made him more terrifying to the ten-year-old. "We have a garden i-in the backyard if you want to see..." the boy offered, looking over to his friends. Judith and Arthur were still looking mindlessly at the macabre building with their gasmasks in hand.

What he really wanted to do was dismiss William's offer and do something else. Something that didn't make his stomach churn and send shivers up his back. "I...I, uh,"

"Please?" Arthur questioned, putting his gas mask back over his sunken-in features. "We'll have fun in thewe." He said. "I pwomise."

William frowned. "We're friends, aren't we?"

Although he wouldn't consider them friends, he couldn't hurt the boy's feelings—it was almost as if he were a physical child standing there and not a ghostly form wearing some long-ago clothing and a dusty mask over his fragile face. None of that mattered to Nikolas anymore since they were 'friends' due to their similar situation of being stuck in some realm for the souls that had yet to leave earth.

"Yeah..." Nikolas said, a little on-edge with the situation itself. "I guess so..."

"So," Arthur began as he adjusted the gasmask on his face. "If we're all fwiends, does that mean that we can show him the—"

"Hush!" William shouted, coughing horribly afterwards. "We can't tell him that much yet..." he said, looking up to the obviously frightened ten-year-old as his eyes began bleeding once again; this time, Nikolas was used to it.

"Tell me what?"

"Nothing."

"Yeah," Judith cut into the conversation. "Nothing. Just come on!"

With the girl's sentence of triumph, she grasped the boys' hands and smiled a toothless grin as they all turned around and faded into the tall grass outside of the asylum. The place was already bizarre enough without the fact that three dead kids were holding hands while trotting into the place as if it were an old maze for children to play and run along in.

Hesitantly, Nikolas took his first step with his mud-covered sneaker into the four-foot-tall grass that stood almost above his head in the pathway of the asylum's entrance. He was scared and skeptical of the place, but the more he heard from William and the other children like him, the more he was getting sucked into their sick and twisted universe of endless nursery rhyme-singing and playing.

The role that he played in this so-called 'game' reminded him of chess; in order to get to the king—in this case, his sanity—one would have to take away the horses and pawns—mentality and state of mind—until there was nothing left to pick away at but the king himself.

And that is what they all intended to do.