*End of Flashback*
Iggy never did cry after the people living nearby found her, all burnt and cut, the little girl screaming in confusion about her mother trapped in the burning Flannigan Mansion. They found Jennifer Grey, two weeks later after the fire died down and the mansion was searched. There was no doubt, she was dead, all burnt and broken in fatal places, and significant amount of blood lost.
5 year old Iggy didn't even cry at the funeral, even when the adults were giving her that pitiful look. After her mother went six feet under, all the little girl did was stare at nothing in particular, she was also found speaking to thin air. Iggy never figured out who started it, or why the rumor became so terrible. All she knew was that by the time she finished kindergarten, it was said that she was the one that killed Jennifer Grey, that she was the little witch that lured her poor mother in that house in the middle of the forest and started the fire.
And no one ever let her forget that. The kids at school would always whisper behind her back and hurt her, physically and mentally. They would beat and cut her, call her names and many insults, but Iggy stopped caring after the 3rd time. She couldn't feel it anymore, it didn't mean that she couldn't feel the pain, it just meant that she stopped reacting towards it.
The adults didn't help either. They believed the rumors and shunned her. Talked behind her back when they thought she couldn't hear and teachers ignored and forgot her in classes even though she passed all of them with the highest marks. Society would judge everything she did and accuse her of all the wrongs in the town. It was all "It was probably the fault of that little witch that Jeremy died." or " Blame that witch, not yourself."
But it wasn't the people that bothered her, it was them. They never left her alone once she started to see them. The stupid bitches kept finding her no matter what she did. It was partially their fault why she landed in the hospital for the so called "crazy". They came in all types: children, elders, middled age, innocent, evil, sinful, or holy. People thought she was speaking to no one when Iggy was talking to those spirits. Many of them tried to posses her, while some cried to her at night, haunting the child with their tears, screeches of pain and sorrow.
It was her father, the man that caused all this torment to Iggy and her two younger siblings. Iggy was always just a little afraid of the tall man with foggy glasses and his mysterious background. Her father tended to always be in the basement working on something unknown other than spending time with her.
It was after Iggy's mother died he was the one who went insane. He would beat the Grey children until they would no longer be able to move and they would lock them in the cellar or dark rooms with no food for days. Allison and Frederick, Iggy's younger brother and sister, became so weak every year they nearly died from the torment. Iggy helped as much as she could by trying to keep her siblings out of the house away from their drunken, crazy father.
But that was before that day not that long after Iggy turned 8 and Allison was 7 and Frederick was 5. Darren Grey had just stumbled into his house drunk and in a foul mood to check to see that his terrible excuses for children were still locked in their rooms where he left them. That's when he slowly peeked into Iggy's room to find her raising her voice at hell knows what.
Without any warning, he charged into her room and bashed her on the head. The last thing Iggy remembered hearing was the footsteps of who she thought was her father run into the hall and heard the lies on the phone about his daughter bashing herself on the head. Just to her luck, it had just happened that Iggy was speaking to the ghost of a young girl and somehow the girl started to annoy the child so Iggy decided to raise her voice at her, without knowing that her wicked father was right behind her.
When Iggy had finally regained consciousness, she was strapped to a stretcher and being hauled into the back of an ambulance, with a crowd of satisfied neighbors looking at her. Only that it wasn't just any ambulance, it was an ambulance for the insane. Little Iggy screamed as she was put at the back of the vehicle, kicking and biting the doctors, yelling until her voice was hoarse that she wasn't the crazy one, but that her father was.
-
And that was 8 years ago. It had taken Iggy 5 years to escape from the horror of the Asylum, the doctors with their experiments and the nurses that bullied her. She was cut open, examined, and had pieces added into her. She remembered sitting there in her straitjacket, in her little cubed corner, with a variety of chains and metals from all four walls and the ceiling strapping her down, a heavy metal mouthguard and a lead helmet that seemed to always to be crushing her brain, restricting her will to try to move faster and get out of the place of horror and death from every corner.
Iggy's hand brushed her stitched up left arm and winced, not from pain, but from the memories. Not long before she had escaped, the main experiments were taken upon her. One day, after the doctors finished transferring the electric bolts in Iggy's head, they put extra straps to the table she was on in addition to her straitjacket. That was when Iggy started to feel fear again. They produced a large cut on Iggy's left arm from the forearm to just above the elbow. There, the doctors places large mechanical gears inside the cut and sewed it up, ignoring the screams of pain coming from the 13 year old's mouth. They did the same to the other parts of Iggy's body. Gears and screws placed in all limbs, mechanical parts filled her up. The worst one was when they put the wind up gears in her head. Probably the first act of mercy she got in years, they knocked her unconscious. That's when they took out her left eye and cut from the socket across, putting the gears inside her head and in the brain, at the end, placing her eye back in the empty socket.
Three months after that she escaped. She had managed to swipe a large knife from the experiment before and hide it in the back of her strap jacket. Sure, it cut her and was painful, but it was worth it. Later that night, she was able to sneak out of her cell when the reckless new nurse forgot to check behind her when she closed the door.
She gutted the old bitch of a nurse first, stabbed her in the gut, and threw her body out the window. After she slit the throats of 2 nurses and four doctors, ripped the heart out off a certain pediatrician, and stabbed seven more people. As the blood continued to spill around her she then ripped the sleeves out of their position of her strap jacket and sewed a hood on the back of the collar.
Iggy thought of running far off and disappearing from the real world for the rest of her life. But Allison and Frederick were still trapped in that wretched house. That's what drove her home. In the dark of night she finally reached her town and snuck in through an open window. The next day her siblings were extremely surprised and gleeful to she her. Their beatings did them worse than she expected. Allison had her front tooth knocked out and large cuts from a blade on her arms and legs. She was so thin that she struggled against the wind when she walked. Freddy was worse, all bruised and cut missing three teeth, also thin, and cigar burns all over his body, making him look like a rag doll.
Since Iggy's father was a heavy drinker, he didn't remember that he sent his oldest away to a far away hospital for the crazy. He just went back to the same routine, torture to all Grey children and locking them in.
For 13, usually they would watch their younger siblings, but for Iggy she was so sick and weak Allison took that role and watched over her, taking care of her and Freddy. The ghosts still came to Iggy, many begging her for help, others trying to kill her or make her kill again. She still didn't know what happened to her that night in the hospital, she just had a urge to taste...blood, to feel it on her skin, to bathe in the blood of her victims... maybe she was going crazy after all.
That when, whenever she had the chance, went to the forest alone, starting to trigger the thoughts and hallucinations....
That day, when she walked in the forest, hands in the pockets of her strap-jacket hoodie, walking towards the spot where she said would meet her...
