Creepypasta

The Curious Case of Marianne Reynolds

Imagine I sat you down. Imagine I asked you to describe your interpretation of evil. My guesses would suggest you described to me a shadowy figure in the corner of your eye. A figure with pale white skin, sunken red eyes and a haunting and crooked demeanor. Now imagine if I told you that you were wrong. Imagine I told you that you hadn't the faintest clue what evil was...

I'm not quite sure where to begin. My name is Doctor Scott McAlastair, professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh. And I have seen the true face of evil.

My story begins 15 years ago, just outside of Glasgow. I was working as a child psychologist, helping children to overcome common childhood phobias; darkness, spiders, the bogeyman under the bed, all the usual things children face during childhood. My expertise at the time was far beyond what I was doing, but knowing I had helped these children meant I was perfectly happy in my job. Happy, until the day I met her. Marianne Reynolds.

Her parents had called me one winter morning, explaining that over the past few weeks, their daughter had become afraid of almost everything. She was afraid to go to sleep at night, she was afraid of empty rooms, afraid of talking to her friends. It was even a struggle trying to make the girl eat. When her parents confronted her about it, she simply told them that she was scared. She would go quiet when asked for an explanation.

Later that afternoon I set off to meet the girl. After a half hour drive out of town, I found myself at a ramshackle old farmhouse alongside the River Gryfe, surrounded by old abandoned stables and grain silos. I knocked on the door to be met my two anxious looking parents. I followed them upstairs into their daughter's bedroom. They opened the door, and what I saw made me feel faint for a moment.

In the middle of the room, sat the little girl. Her knees pulled up to her chest, her shoulders wrapped tightly round her shins. Her head drooped down, long locks of greasy blonde hair shielding her eyes from the room. Her faint voice whispering unintelligible sounds. Wallpaper had been torn from the walls, leaving only small shreds of paper hanging from the plaster. The carpet was in a similar state, only small sections remained, exposing the filthy, ancient floorboards below, engrained with scratches made by tiny hands. In the corners of the room, lay piles of hand dismantled furniture, broken down into sharp, splintered planks of wood.

"Everything was fine until a couple of weeks ago." Her father told me. "At first we thought it was some kind of game she was playing, but her condition has deteriorated ever since."

I found the sight incredibly disturbing, it chilled me to the bone. Her parents led me down into the front room.

"Is there anything you can do for her?" The mother begged.

"I'll see what I can do." I replied, but the truth of it was I felt immediately out of my depth, it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I pressed on with questions regardless.

"Tell me about Marianne."

The girl's mother fought back a tear in her eye as she cast her mind back to before everything had happened...

"Marianne was always a normal girl, she was never in trouble at school, she had lots of friends, always tried her hardest. She was completely fine until she started with this whole 'angel' business."

"Angel?" I interrupted.

"Her imaginary friend" Mrs Reynolds paused for a moment. She went on to explain that the little girl had been out playing in the snow one evening when she claimed to have seen a bright light in the sky. The child had claimed the light came down to her and said it was an angel lost on its way to heaven. Since nobody else in the family could see this figure, her mother had just assumed it to be a figment of the young girls imagination and shook it off as just part of a passing phase.