My demons (book 1)

Them

"That's where he kept them," he murmured, pushing the door open. His brain didn't even pick up at the sight of bloody stains and fingerprints all over the wall, indifferent to it all after all of these years. Aisha, however, felt as if she had just been transported into a nightmare. On the floor she could see a weathering mattress, torn apart, seemingly by some wild animals that once took residency inside this well hidden room.

A single lightbulb was hanging from the ceiling, crushed, as it seemed, with someone's bare hands, bloody glass pieces still laying under it. Harsh lines of blood and charcoal covered the walls, forming a bizarre web of overlapping pictures and writing that were almost painful to look at.

Decoding the images would take some time, but the words were unmistakable. Drawn in thick slashes of rusty red and dusty black, they appeared over and over, perhaps a dozen times in all. "HELP"

"Can we go? Please?" she let out, her voice shaking. Her heart was beating faster and faster, pumping fear through her veins and she felt dizzy.

"Of course," Lucas nodded, taking her hand.

He led her out of the house of horrors on to the local playground.

It was as if the playground had been taken away and replaced by something sinister. As the colours drained away, the swings became gallows. The rusted tube of a slide, which was once covered in yellow paint, appeared ominous, with paint completely scrubbed off at some places, covered with dark red stains on other.

The slow creeks of the swings, rusty and weathered, pierced the silence as they sat on them.

"Are you okay?" Lucas asked, giving her a worried look she had never seen on him before.

"What the hell happened there?" she croaked out, trying hard not to throw up.

"I don't know...never asked. We moved when I was around 4 years old, remember?"

"Why have you moved, really? And why would you ever want to come back?"

"A girl died. Dad found the body and buried her. But he wanted to get my uncle out of here, so no one would ever find out about it. And I come back here to remind myself how I became the way I am today. You see...my dad, he was so focused on his work and reputation he didn't actually care about the dead girl or what my uncle did or was doing...he left me with him for years. I didn't know what exactly was happening but I didn't dare to ask any questions. I learned quickly enough that my uncle will leave me alone as long as I don't show fear or talk too much. I was still a child when I already knew it was time...time to bury my screams in my bones, shut my eyes and empty my head. The only way out was inhumane levels of self-control. And I exceled at it. I haven't shown an ounce of fear since then. He hung himself when I was 15. I guess he just missed them too much."

"You always say them, but you said that only one girl died... what happened to the others?"

"I honestly have no clue. But he had a list...with their names. I found it carved onto the wall of his room after he passed; around 10 female names rewritten over and over again."

With that, he got up and indicated that he wanted her to follow him.

"It must have been hard; finding your uncle like that," she said gently as they started walking the lonely, dusty road once again.

"It was a relief, actually. He wasn't really pleasant to live with, to say at least. We had to live in some old cabin deep in the woods so he wouldn't have any human contact, yet he still managed to find new victims. I can still hear the screams..." with that, his voice wandered and so did his mind.

For the first time, she felt sorry for him. She wanted to help him somehow, but found no words that could make him feel better.

"I didn't even bother telling anyone that he died. I just left the cabin and told my dad I'm sick of living there so he took me in without asking any further questions. I bet the animals got a hold of his meat and bones, and the rope most likely perished to dust by now."

He looked at her before continuing; "Look, your face says it all. You think I did something really bad by leaving him there to rot. But he didn't deserve to be treated and buried like a decent human being. He didn't give that to his victims either."

She tried to form a small smile in understanding before asking "What about any other family members?"

He just smiled and shook his head. "My mom died when I was still a baby...car crash. There are no relatives on my dad's side and well, since my mom was a minor who got pregnant and ran away at age of 16 her family never showed any interest in us. They didn't even bother showing up for my mom's funeral, or so I've heard."

His mind wandered once again as he opened the rusted gates of an old graveyard.

The disembodied voices of souls that once walked the earth seemed to be carried through the fog that was rising from the cracks in the gravel path. It sounded like wind was whistling through the trees, but...there was no wind. Large, angel shaped statues that were robbed of their beauty by weather and time were rising from the ground around them. Crooked headstones were standing proud, keeping their duty even as time wore away the messages they bore.

After some time they stopped at the seemingly empty spot. Only a few lonely pieces of stone suggested that someone was buried underneath it. The gravestone, once an expertly engraved monument to a beloved mother, had crumbled with decades of weathering. Ivy creeped over its face in a last insult to her memory, casting her deeper into the gloomy oblivion of unrecalled history.

"Hey mom" whispered Lucas sitting on the cold floor next to her grave. Aisha sat next to him on the ground covered with soil, the soil that covered so many nameless bodies, forgotten by the town they had died in.