The Horrors of Montwood Mansion

Chapter Two

I have always known that I'd kill myself one day. I have always felt the scorching gaze of death burning against the nape of my neck, waiting. Watching. Is it time? Not yet. Soon, but not soon enough. By the time I was sixteen, my enthusiasm for life started to wane down, like a bicycle running down a pathway without being peddled; it'll go on, but not for long. I knew. I tried to fool myself for a while, but Death always caught up with me. I couldn't run fast enough and after a while, I just got tired of running. I didn't want to run anymore.

Do not slit your wrists, I've tried. It isn't pretty. Why leave such a mess behind, anyway? Knowing you want to die and actually killing yourself are two very different boardgames. It's like tying a noose around your neck, at the branch of the very tree you spent years watering and nurturing, but all this time, you knew. You knew your fate. You cannot run away from it. So, you embrace it with open arms. There's no escape. After a while, you even laugh manically at yourself, for being stupid enough to believe that you could ever escape.

Tie it around your soft, tanned neck, tightly. You can come home then. A few moments of breathlessness, for a lifetime of liberation. You can do it, can't you, darling? I believe in you.

There, there. Exactly like that.

You are home now, darling. You are home.

Avery Rose had a pretty illustrious and memorable childhood. Every time she thought of her childhood, endless memories of her huge beach house used to flood through her head, overflowing her intake of reminiscences and leaving her lugubrious. Her mother's apple pies were the staple of her childhood. Avery's mother was a renowned baker and for as long as she could remember, the appetising aroma of her pastries was enough to cheer her up after a bad day. The girls in her high-school were always jealous of how she could just eat all the cakes and pastries in the world and still not gain weight; she was naturally slender, blessed with her mother's high cheekbones and full lips. During every family gathering, she'd be suggested to take up modelling as a career but Avery-Rose had other fish to fry. She remembered collecting her mother's fashion magazines and cutting up pictures of the slim, curvy models with bright hair and tanned skin and pasting them up in her scrapbook. She would give them names and personalities and even accessorise their outfits using her coloured markers. She'd always loved clothes and accessories and when she found out the multitudinous ways in which she could dress herself up, she started sketching up her own designs and that's how the spark of Avery's dream to become a fashion designer caught fire. She was an earnest student, acclaimed by all of her teachers. Her resilience and hard-work presented her with a scholarship to one of the best colleges of fashion designing in the country. She thought she'd sussed it all out until the inconceivable happened. During the last semester of her senior year, she found out she was pregnant. This was like an instant blow to all her aspirations. At this stage, Avery and Jonathan had been dating for a few months and clearly, neither of them were ready for a child. After days of arguing, Avery's parents decided to give the baby up for adoption since she was too scared to get an abortion. How could she? To kill a living being? No, it was too much for her. She was totally against the idea of adoption but she knew all her dreams of going to college would rapidly fade away if she decided to keep the baby. In the end, she agreed upon giving away her child, whom she'd loved so dearly and told Olivia's social worker that each and every detail about her whereabouts must be provided to her constantly. She often fell asleep while working like an elf on her assignments, dreaming about bathing and feeding her Olivia. She was stuck cutting up satin sleeves when all her heart desired was to embrace her little girl. How dearly had she dreamed of having her own child, particularly a girl. A mother-daughter bond couldn't really compare. As happy as she was when Lucy was born, she regretted missing out on Olivia's childhood. Her first.