They say if you pull the covers up over your head, the monsters won't be able to get you.
Well, they were wrong.
My name is Jo. You don't need my last name. I wouldn't have told you even if you did. They're out there. They're looking for me, even now, as I write to whomever may pick this up. I'm writing it only so someone knows what's out there.
Everyone else is already dead.
That's right, dead. Those who knew didn't have the sense to keep away from the terror. If they could have kept their mouths shut, they might have lived. Or maybe they were just tired of running. Being chased will wear you out quicker than anything I can think of. Especially when no one else can see what's chasing you.
Someone once had a theory that if you didn't believe in something, you couldn't see it. That doesn't make much sense anymore.
Damnit. It's Dahlia. She thinks I don't know what she did. She thinks I really believe Alessa was accidentally burned in that fire seven years ago. I'm not stupid. I know what she and Kaufmann had planned for that poor girl. They keep her down in the basement of the hospital where no one can help her. She has nightmares every night. And now they're here. She's paying us back for all the pain we caused her.
Why was I the only one to not look away when Dahlia was mistreating Alessa? Why didn't anyone else try to stop her and Kaufmann? Even that nurse, Lisa, knew what was going on. I think that maybe, towards the end, she made a stand through the haze of White Claudia that had destroyed a lot of her brain.
It made us all hallucinate. Maybe that's why no one saw anything clearly. But the moment I saw Alessa in that inferno, twisting and writhing and screaming, I saw things all too clearly. She tried several times to get back up. Dahlia and Kaufmann just pushed her back down.
Seven years old! My God! How could anyone do that to a beautiful seven-year-old girl? Why would they? I just don't
"Is bringing about Hell a valid answer?" Dahlia Gillespie rasped from Jo's left. The young man looked over and cocked his sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.
"No," he said. "There is no valid answer for what you did to that girl."
"Alessa was just a vessel," said the old woman, waving a hand dismissively. "She was never meant to be anything more than that. Kaufmann and I created her for the purpose of harboring Samael. Seven years was long enough to wait."
Jo growled low in his throat and aimed his firearm at Dahlia's head. "How can you be so callous toward the life of a young girl?"
"She did not suffer much. Her soul left her body to escape the pain. That's how this place came about." Dahlia gestured to the rusted grates, the industrial wasteland outside the school, the corpses hanging from the ceiling, and the rotted walls surrounding Jo at the notepad he was writing on.
"She suffered more than she should have." He set down his pencil and held the gun steady. "But I won't make you suffer. I'm just going to kill you."
"I'm afraid that's going to be rather difficult for you," a voice from behind said evenly. Without dropping the line of fire his shotgun was fixed to, Jo turned to see Dr. Michael Kaufmann standing with his hands in his pockets, looking much as he always did: a somber Robert DeNiro.
Kaufmann sidestepped into the shadows, allowing the passage of several demon children toward Jo. Before the man could move his gun, Dahlia had pinned his arms behind his back and pulled up on the joints, breaking both of them at the elbow. Jo screamed, but held onto his shotgun, refusing to give up as long as there was breath in him.
The two conspirators dragged him, kicking and fighting, into a bathroom stall down the hall. They slipped a noose around his neck and hanged him from the ceiling.
As he struggled to breathe, Jo watched Dahlia smile almost lovingly at the zombie beasts that had gathered around her.
"Do what you will with him," she cooed. "He belongs to you now."
The children, giggling insanely with demented glee, progressed toward him with short spasms of shuffling steps. Kaufmann nodded to Dahlia, then shut Jo in with the demons.
"I belong to no one!" he choked out as the parents of Samael left. In the last moments of his life, he saw Alessa's sad, gentle eyes watching him as the small, malformed children stabbed him, strung him up like a puppet, and decorated him with IVs.
One last exhale of breath before the death rattle. The shotgun dropped to the floor.
In her realm of fear and nightmares, Alessa cried for him.