STOP
Have you read the preceding chapters?
If not then read it from the beginning
or
Previously on The Child
The elevator dinged telling me that I was
on floor 61 B and though I was expecting everything to be dark and black, I
wasn't surprised to see many shades of red and blue instead. Right out of the
elevator was a rather large round room with twelve-foot ceilings with scattered
ribbons on the walls above me. Directly in front of me on the other side of the
room was an arched hallway that went on for several feet into another room. To
my left and right were two more identical hallways leading to other rooms as well.
Lining the hallways were various stone statues of scantily clad women; some
didn't even have clothes but all were wearing similar looking masks.
Old renascence Venetian masks covered the
faces of these statues. Some were square, others round but nearly all of them
were blank, covered in white and that was it. It seemed peaceful but I could
only feel chaos in my mind; the eyes that were carved in stone were something
else. Looking closely at one of the statues I realized that nothing was done to
the pupils of the eyes so the entirety of the eye was just one solid shape.
This made me think of Ville and the thing that he could do with his own eyes,
to turn them into a vacuum of nothing, pitch black. The masks weren't stone
though, porcelain for most, paper mâché for the rest, all of which were painted
white.
I remained on my toes as I headed down
the central hallway that laid directly in front of the elevator. The main round
room was fairly well lighted but the hallways steadied themselves with a low
glow of light. As I made myself midway between the first round room and the
next I could begin to make out what was in the room I was heading to. On top of
a rather large table that sit—from what it appeared to be—in the center of the
oncoming room I noticed that something large was laying on it. My first thought
was a body—it's what I have seen in the past and nothing has changed—but it
could have been an animal. It was smaller than an average person would be but
from the lights that stood only a few feet above it I couldn't make out
anything definitive.
Like a patient ready for surgery,
something was waiting patiently on the operation table; waiting to be cut open
or even worse, just to die. A few steps closer and I began to hear a slight melody;
it took me a few seconds to realize that someone was humming it from around the
corner of the room. Now that I was only a few feet away from the entrance I
could see within the room and distinguish what was on the table. There were a
few spotlights pointing up the walls to illuminate the rest of the room and the
sight wasn't greeting me with hospitality. The walls looked like white paneling
that segregated every eight feet and large pieces of paper hanged from every
corner of the room. On these papers that covered the walls were charcoal
drawings of buildings, people—naked and clothed—scenery and the most unsettling
of all, me. With all the shades of black and grey, another colour stained the
paper. It was red and my only assumption could be blood, that is the nature of
these people and it would only seem fitting.
On top of the table was a petite woman
that could have been twenty. Long dark brown hair stretched past her shoulders
towards her waist and a small skimpy white dress rested on her shoulders and down
her body. Before I stepped into the room the humming of another stopped and a
loud bang echoed through the halls. Looking at the woman in the table no
flinching occurred and a smile began on her face. Even though it was bright on
the small woman I could tell one other colour on the woman, more red. She was
bleeding and my best guess would be her arms and wrists but with her palms down
and to the sides of her I couldn't be for sure.
'My daddy told me you were coming, I'm
sorry I wasn't able to clean myself up, everything happened last minute.' She
turned her head towards me and black filled her eyes as mascara and eyeliner
smeared down her cheeks. 'I'm sorry where's my manners, I'm Emily. My sister,
Emmanuel, just left the room to clean herself up. You look scared Emery, I'm
not going to hurt you.' She sat up and twisted her legs over the table to
dangle them down towards me. 'Here. Let me fix something.' She closed her eyes,
looked up and breathed in heavy. After a few seconds she opened her eyes and looked
at me. Soft green with a mix of brown. She looked so innocent with her stare and
her eyes being as such, everything else gleamed. Bright red lips, simply pale
skin but rosy cheeks, she was beautiful.
‘See? I'm not so bad.' She got up onto
her feet and walked a few steps towards me. A blood trail followed her and
dropped from her arms to down her legs and she whispered. 'Look, I'm bleeding.'
She raised her arms directly in front of her to show me with her arms fully
extended. I broke my gaze from into her eyes and on her arms. It was
traumatic.
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