Ashes (Flame Ash Burned Backstory)

Chapter 4: Panic

31st October 1998

It had been exactly one year since the nameless man had entered the family's life. It had gone from sitting around a fire telling stories at midnight to sitting by your mother and sister's graves. It had gone from laughing and joking together to wondering who would be dead and buried next. It had gone from a happy life to an unbearable one in the space of a few minutes.

Ever since she found them, Lula had been studying the letters and pictures that she had found in her mother's bedside drawer. She had found that the majority of the letters were between her mother and unknown father, who always signed his name with H instead of writing it out fully, and only a few were between her and close friends.

One letter in particular mentioned something about the nameless man, and confirmed that the grey-haired girl in the second picture was her daughter. The letter revealed that this man had been following her ever since she was thirteen, and when her first daughter was born, he tormented her, too.

When the girl had turned six, he took her away and threw her into a hole he had made in the ice on a frozen lake. She had died within minutes from the exposure to the icy water and from drowning as she had been held under by the man, and the mother was forced to watch.

This letter was between Lula's mother and one of her close friends. It also explained that she couldn't take it anymore -had thought of suicide a few times and just wanted her baby girl back- but H had promised everything would be alright if she could get away from this man, and so she was going to leave the place she was living and run away. Lula had checked the date of the letter, and found that Lyric and Evie had been born one year after the letter should have been sent.

Lula felt terrible about what her mother had to go through, and even worse about how she had died by the hands of the man who took her first daughter away from her. She could only imagine how terrible it must have been for her mother: as she laid on the ground, dying, and watched the man heading upstairs, knowing there was nothing more she could do to protect her kids.

With everything she had found out, the little girl found it hard to enjoy her third birthday. That, and the fact that the first thing she saw as she looked out of the window that morning was that there was one more grave on the front lawn.

Upon noticing the one extra grave, her stomach dropped and she felt sick with worry. Lula scanned the room. Lyric and Joe weren't there. Her heart began racing; pounding so loudly that it was all she could hear. It felt as if a wave of ice had washed over her, and she couldn't catch her breath. Her body began shaking uncontrollably as she curled up into a ball on the ground.

"Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop..." The little girl began begging, her voice quivering. "Lyric, Joe.... Make it stop..."

Feelings of helplessness and terror pinned her down and refused to let go. She knew only one of her siblings would answer her call. Maybe nobody would come. Maybe the man was going to come, instead.

Was she going to die, too? She felt as if she might. 

Lula wanted to get up and search every inch of the house until she had discovered which of her siblings were left, if any. But the worry and fear ate away at her until there was nothing left but a quivering, desperately helpless wreck of a child begging and pleading for the life of torture she physically and mentally struggled to survive in to be over.