Decay In Her Bones

CHAPTER 18

Their conversation ended with the two of them still clueless as to what could be their next step with regard their endeavor to give solution to Bobby's out-of-this-world problems. Under normal circumstances, the usual resort of people concerning paranormal activities is to ask help from the deities; normally for Catholics, they would opt to pray and ask for divine guidance. However, he seemed to have done that already. If praying is not enough, what could have helped him? Since they were running out of ideas, Mylene suggested that this very lack of knowledge was what they needed to deal with primarily. Hence, she obliged Bobby to make some research. He had to wait for her to finish her practice teaching duties anyway, so he had an hour of free time before they had to go home. After Bobby's last class that afternoon, he went straight to the school's surfing laboratory to do his research. www probably had answers.

The surfing lab was just a small room with glass walls on all sides except for its eastern wall. With its square floor and ceiling, the lab appeared even smaller than it actually was. Nevertheless, it really was not spacious enough to contain more than twenty computer units, which were lined on high tables against the walls. At its center was another long table with chairs around it where students waited for their turn. Lucky for Bobby, the lab was not full that afternoon. There were at least five units available. Bobby entered the room and settled his bag on a free seat beside him. After notifying the student assistant on duty that hour, he sat in front of computer Number 12 and clicked on the small icon that said Internet Explorer. Positioning his cursor on the search tab, he typed in the words 'Bloody Mary'.

After a full minute of loading, a page that showed the results to his search appeared one by one. On top of the list was a Wikipedia article about the Bloody Mary myth. He clicked it and the page slowly loaded its contents.

The title 'Bloody Mary (folklore)' appeared just below the tabs, followed by an image loading part by part. It took a few seconds before it completed displaying the photo, which now showed a colorful painting of a girl wearing a white dress with a red ribbon wrapped around her waist. She was holding a candle and in front of her stood a human-sized mirror with a reddish wooden frame, giving the glass and oblong shape. It stood on two feet with circular designs, complimenting the entire appearance. On it, however, reflected the girl together with a guy who was wearing a brown coat. What almost knocked Bobby off his chair was the dark shadow that appeared to the left; an image that seemed to have formed on the wall. He shivered, for it was an image of a witch with its pointy hat and a broomstick to her right. At the bottom part of the picture, there was a caption that read: ON HALLOWEEN LOOK IN THE GLASS, YOUR FUTURE HUSBAND'S FACE WILL PASS.

Bobby scrolled down to the middle part of the page, and there he read the first paragraph of the article:

Bloody Mary is a folklore legend consisting of a ghost, phantom or spirit conjured to reveal the future. She is said to appear in a mirror when her name is called three times. The Bloody Mary apparition may be benign or malevolent, depending on historic variations of the legend. The Bloody Mary appearances are mostly "witnessed" in group participation games.

Primarily, what he was able to draw from this article was that it usually happened to women, who for reasons unknown, wanted to see their future husbands. This folklore informed him that when one wanted to, she just had to utter the name of the Bloody Mary three times and her future husband would appear. Otherwise, for other reasons that might include death of the husband or a personal choice not to marry, the mirror would show a different image instead... a depiction of something else: the face of the devil.

With all his hairs standing up on ends, Bobby wondered and tried to think as hard as he could to comprehend what he had just read.

If the mirror last Sunday did not show Mylene, and if it was supposed to show him his future wife, there were two possibilities why he was seeing this girl whose face he couldn't see instead. First, he would marry somebody else in the future. This hurt him, for he could not express how deeply her love for Mylene was. The idea of not being with her in the future to share his life with was a hard blow to his stomach. Second, it was either he will not marry at all, or that his future wife is dead or will die in the near future, and the girl he was seeing in the past few days was actually the devil herself.

The latter, of course, was what made Bobby lose his senses.

His vision suddenly became blurry and his body was shaking inconveniently. It was the sensation when somebody is saying bad things at your back and you are trying your very best not to talk back. It was the sensation which can be compared to a balloon reaching its capacity to hold air and it's already on the verge of blowing.

He gripped his knees harder, pinching it to cause pain in a degree almost unbearable. He did this to enable himself to get back to his normal self. Finding it a success, he regained his sanity and wiped the droplet of tears that formed at the edge of his eyes using his arms.

This information is too much for him. These data corresponding to folklores would not have made him believe in such ideas, but his recent encounters made him believe in almost everything, even the impossible. It was like he was being introduced to a whole different universe he might not have believed a few days ago. Still, it was here, and the proofs he had been seeing around is more than enough to make him think that things such as ghosts indeed exist.

Even the explanation in front of him, which appeared peculiar, provided him with no other alternative. After looking for other sources, he ended up having the same explanation with regard the Bloody Mary myth.

Thus, he played around the two possibilities that had come to his mind earlier.

Oh Mylene, he thought

The idea of her not being his future wife and being the root cause of all his supernatural encounters bugged him to the deepest corners of his thoughts.

Finding out that he still had at least half an hour before Mylene's finished, he went back to the Wiki page and searched further. At the lower part of the page, there was a series of linkages lined up in no particular order. One of them picked Bobby's interest and he hovered his cursor over it. When the link had turned violet, he clicked on it.

History.

Unexpectedly, the page loaded to an article about some Mary I of England. It came with an image of a lady wearing a black gothic garment. On her right hand was a rose and the very sight of it made Bobby shivered. Intrigued, he read on:

"Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558) was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. Her executions of Protestants led to the posthumous sobriquet "Bloody Mary".John Knox attacked her in his 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and she was prominently featured and vilified in Actes and Monuments, published by John Foxe in 1563, five years after her death. Subsequent editions of the book remained popular with Protestants throughout the following centuries and helped shape enduring perceptions of Mary as a bloodthirsty tyrant. In the mid-twentieth century, H. F. M. Prescott attempted to redress the tradition that Mary was intolerant and authoritarian by writing more objectively, and scholarship since then has tended to view the older, simpler, partisan assessments of Mary with greater scepticism. Although Mary's rule was ultimately ineffectual and unpopular, the policies of fiscal reform, naval expansion, and colonial exploration that were later lauded as Elizabethan accomplishments were started in Mary's reign."

Finding it quite irrelevant to what he was after, he hit the red 'X' on the upper right side of his table and stared blankly on the screen. The logo of the school displayed itself back at him, filling his shadowy thoughts with a veiled background.

Suddenly, somebody from behind tapped him lightly on his shoulder. He slowly maneuvered and saw who it was.

It was Joey.