The Horrors of Our Mind [COMPLETED]

Photo Album

Missing posters of Amelia Lowrenski were hanging up everywhere in the city of Salem, Oregon. No one knew what happened to her; she was here one day, gone the next. Gone without a trace. After a while, the photos faded, just like everyone's concern to find the woman.

Months after her disappearance, Mrs. Lowrenski was sitting on the couch next to the fireplace, flipping through an old photo album that contained all the photos from Amelia's life. While flipping through the pages, Mrs. Lowrenski noticed something odd in a photo from when Amelia was a little girl. She was holding a doll she didn't recognize. It had a gray fabric body, wearing a cult-like black hood, covering its face. Mrs. Lowrenski knew she never bought her daughter anything like that, nor did her husband, but she did know that Amelia was always finding odd toys at that age, so she brushed it off, thinking it was just another toy she found.

Smiling at the captured memories, she flipped to the next page, but her smile faltered. The photo was of Amelia swinging at the park smiling a smile with a couple missing teeth, on the ground next to her was the strange small doll. What made Mrs. Lowrenski uncomfortable wasn't the doll, but the person standing in the background in similar attire of the doll, a gray outfit accompanied by the black hood. This terrorized the mother, and she flipped through the other pages, noticing more and more hooded figures in the background of each picture.

Mrs. Lowrenski soon flipped to the pages that were supposed to be empty, waiting for new memories to be created. Instead of empty pages, the old woman found pictures of her daughter no one took. Pictures of Amelia sleeping, driving her car, eating dinner on dates. Mrs. Lowrenski couldn't stop looking at the horrifying pictures, she flipped the page were what she saw took her breath away.

The hooded figures had Amelia, where she was tied and gagged to a wooden post that had some odd symbol carved into it. Her daughter's face was full of fear and was covered in dirt and tear stains. Mrs. Lowrenski didn't know what to do, so she kept looking at each picture, flipping the next page. There, they were cutting her daughters arm, blood pouring out in a wooden chalice. As she went to flip to the next page, there was a knock on the door.

Mrs. Lowrenski stood up and walked over to place the photo album back onto the shelf with the others, but sitting in its place was the black hooded doll. She grabbed the doll and tossed it into the fireplace where it quickly burned up, with nothing remaining. She then walked to the door and opened it. There was no one there, but instead, a picture of Amelia's dead body, positioned in the same way as the symbol that was carved into the post.

Not knowing what to do, Mrs. Lowrenski called her husband to show the horrid photographs she had discovered in the photo album. When she turned around to the bookshelf where it was placed, the carvings were engraved in the spine of the book. She quickly grabbed it off the shelf to review the pictures of the cult figures again, hoping to see a face she could possibly identify, or give to the police, but when she got to the figures, she noticed that they weren't solid figure, but almost transparent, as if they were never there in the first place.

While she was looking at the blurry faces, shadows surrounded the old woman, shadows of hooded figures. She could hear chanting but there wasn't a source of the sound. Suddenly, she right forearm started burning, causing her to drop the photo album. She pulled up her cardigan sleeve only to reveal burn marks of the same strange symbols that she was seeing everywhere that night, marking her the next victim.

As Mrs. Lowrenski stared at her arm in horror, the front door locks clicked and the front door swung open revealing her wrinkled, age-spotted husband. He quickly rushed over to his wife and spotted the photographs that laid a strew across the hardwood floor. He picked them up and looked at them with the same frightful eyes his wife had moments before. The haggard, frightened woman looked at the photographs once more with her husband, she noticed that the hooded figures were closer in the photographs than they once were, and in every photo of Amelia, she was gone.