Jennifer Rose June 21st, 2016
Samantha, Mystic Maiden
On the surface, Samantha seemed to look and act like any other 17-year-old girl, despite having dark purple highlights in her hair and eyes to match. However, in most other ways, she was much more than that. Ever since January, she starting having hysterical, involuntary fits of crying at night. Her father had no idea what to do with her.
He decided to stay up the following night, hearing her to make sure that she was sleeping peacefully. But then, he heard a scream. This wasn't like her typical screams at night. She seemed to be pained, even for someone who was constantly having rough nights.
After that night, she stopped sleeping altogether. At night she would wander around the house, mumbling incoherently. "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro, kept treading - treading - till it seemed, that Sense was breaking through."
"Samantha, we need to talk," he told her one day.
"Okay, Dad," she replied.
"Samantha, I've heard you've been acting up at night. Why is that?" he said, ruffling her hair with his fingers.
"I hear voices in my head and that's what frightens me," she replied to him.
Along with being concerned about his daughter's well-being, her father was baffled as to why this was happening to his daughter.
Why on earth would she be screaming at night like that, out of the blue? He thought to himself. After all, there weren't too many alarming events happening around. Except, of course, for the various doctors at his practice getting killed off for unknown, mysterious reasons.
"Daddy, I need to go to the hospital. I'm messed up!" she then cried.
"Samantha, my dear, can you tell me why you are like this?" he told her.
"I'm not too comfortable talking about it now. When we get to the hospital, maybe?" she said.
"Okay then," he replied.
Even though it was three in the morning and she was wearing nothing but her white satin pajamas and slippers, he still drove her to the hospital.
"Dad?" she asked in a meek, sleepy voice.
"Yes?" he asked.
"You stayed up all night to take care of me, and now you're driving me to the hospital. Aren't you too exhausted to drive?"
"Not at all."
"Really?"
"Nope."
"Wow. What's your secret, Dad?"
"I'm more powerful than most men. It's...um...a long story."
"Why? Please tell me!" she said.
He was reluctant to tell her about his back-story, but then noticed they were at the hospital.
"Oh, look Samantha. We're finally at the hospital!"
A beautiful light-blonde nurse came to tuck Samantha into a bed.
"Why are you here this late at night? Not to be rude, but shouldn't you be asleep now?" she asked, baffled.
Samantha had no idea what to say.
"She's been screaming at night, and I have no idea why," said her father.
"Oh dear. Well, sweetheart, you can stay here overnight, and we'll see what's bothering you," she replied. "It'll be like a sleepover!"
Her father said nothing, but merely smiled.
"That sounds like fun," she replied. "As for the reason I'm here, I've been seeing strange visions at night, of medical doctors being murdered in the most peculiar ways," Juliet told the nurse. "They kind of resemble the doctors that Dad works with. In fact, they look identical to the ones he works with…." she went on.
"I see," said the nurse. "Go on," she replied.
"I feel terrified for all the poor doctors who are getting killed!" she exclaimed.
"Samantha, as I was saying earlier, there is a reason behind your special power. Just like you are no ordinary teenage girl, your father is no ordinary man," the nurse told her.
"What do you mean?" she asked her.
"Well, he spent many years studying sorcery to become a master of magic..." Her voice seemed to trail off as she spoke those words.
So that explains why I have natural purple hair and eyes! Thought Samantha to herself.
Samantha was well enough to come home the next day, but slept the entire day- she was too exhausted to do anything else. While she stopped having the nightmares, she was still having outbursts- she would start thrusting all over the place, as if an invisible force were in control of her, and screaming loudly.
She decided to do some research on her father's practices, so she went to the library.
According to a book she found, her father was working alongside a man named Benjamin Dunham. Dr. Dunham was a fierce enemy of his, and apparently, one day a prophecy told him that the child of one of his colleagues would kill him. He was not sure who the child would be, which was why he was murdering various doctors and making them look like suicides. He didn't even check to see if they were married, let alone actual parents. Just the fact that they worked for him was enough to get them killed.
"What's that book that you're reading over there?" asked a mysterious man.
"Oh, it's just something that I was interested in," she said.
"Very well then. Are you, by any chance, the daughter of Dr.-"
"Why are you asking me about my dad?" she asked back.
"Because I am Dr. Dunham, one of your father's colleagues. You're not by any chance-"
"No…" she lied to him. This man might be her father's arch-enemy, and she surely didn't want to blow her cover.
After peering over to look at the book, he said, "The book says otherwise," he said. "You see, Samantha, I have heard of your night terrors. In fact, I have been putting them in your head. Now that you're here, I have a...surprise for you."
He reached into his giant leather satchel, took out an extremely sharp-looking knife, and showed it to her with a deadly grin on his face.
Samantha was so scared that she wanted to scream, but she remembered that it was a library, so she merely gulped.
Then out of nowhere, she let out a dark purple, almost black, burst of energy out of the palm of her hand, and knocked out the knife, which cut his hand.
"What on earth?" he exclaimed, looking at his bloodied hand.
"Oh my gosh! I am so sorry!" she exclaimed, getting paper towels to clean up the blood.
"Thank you, dear. You're too kind," he said.
"I don't know what happened," she replied.
She then went home to write in her diary. She wrote:
My name is Samantha, and I'm not an ordinary teenage girl. Well, not anymore, anyway. You see, up until recently I was doing alright. Then, I started to have these awful nightmares. I would see innocent doctors getting murdered in various ways. One was shot in the chest, another was drowned in the lake. One of them was even set on fire.
One night, I had a nightmare that was incredibly terrifying. I was at my house, and I saw one doctor being disintegrated into dust. Though he screamed for help, and I wanted to save him badly, I couldn't do anything about it. I was completely paralyzed by being trapped in a chair with metal restraints. The psychological pain was so numbing, that I screamed so horrifically that night, as if I was dying. Dying horribly like all the doctors in my dreams.
Because of this nightmare, I got so frightened that I decided not to sleep at all. At night, I would wander around the household, barefoot and in my pale-white nightgown, muttering incoherently Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain." Because, well, I did feel like someone had died. A group of people, in fact.
My father, who was deeply concerned about my well-being, decided to take me to the hospital, in the middle of the night. The nurse had told me that my father was not a normal person, but an all-powerful wizard- which was why he could drive late at night without being exhausted. She had also told me there was a reason behind my special power, but didn't specify what it was.
I had slept beautifully that night in the comfort of her. So beautifully, in fact, that after staying at the hospital that night, I stopped having the nightmares. However, in the nights my body started doing these bizarrely horrible things of which I had no control over- I would get thrusted around like a ragdoll by some sort of an invisible force while I screamed hysterically, for instance. Sometimes, I would even crawl all over the walls as various parts of me twisted and turned.
My father was horrified at the sights, but had no idea on what to do. I did, however, and decided to go to the library for a book about mystical hexes. After finally finding a book on magic, I had found out about an evil scientist by the name of Dr. Benjamin Dunham. I very vaguely remember witnessing his name in one of my dreams, but not quite who he was.
According to this magical book, Dr. Dunham, while trying to find the secret of eternal youth, did deeply unethical experiments that turned innocent people into lifeless husks. By doing so, he would try to drain various bodily fluids out of them, especially their blood. Because of this, an ancient prophecy told him that one of the children of his colleagues, one of whom was my father, would kill him. But since he had no idea who that child would be, he started killing various doctors in gruesome ways. Of course, he did his murders in secret- so secret, in fact, that only the fated child could truly witness them. In fact, he was so adament on changing his destiny, that he didn't even care for the marital status of the doctors he murdered.
I had finally witnessed the reason behind my clairvoyance.
One day, Samantha went to school as normal. After she left her homeroom, however, she collapsed onto the floor without warning.
"Samantha? Samantha? Are you okay?" asked her friend Arya. She didn't respond.
Arya called the hospital, which was the same one that Samantha had stayed at before.
"Hello, is this a nurse? My friend here is lying unconscious and I don't know what to do," said Arya.
"Not to worry," replied the nurse. "We'll get her here soon enough."
After being driven to the hospital, Samantha was finally awake.
"Good morning, sweetheart," said the nurse.
"I...uh...must have had a terrible vision. In it, my father was brutally murdered," she said.
"Oh dear…" said the nurse.
"So that means that-" she said before she was cut off.
Suddenly, a ghostly figure entered the room.
"Dad? Daddy? Is that you?" she called out.
"Hello there, dear," said Dr. Dunham to her. "I have your daddy. All he has to do to be set free is to sacrifice yourself to me."
Samantha immediately jumped from her bed and chased Dr. Dunham to what appeared to be his secret lair, in which she found her father. He appeared to be more disheveled than usual, and was trapped through a magic spell that Dr. Dunham had made.
"Do whatever you want to me, but please leave her alone," he said.
"Make me," he replied, grabbing Samantha with the knife he previously had.
"Oh, I'll surely make you…" he said. He then set himself free with a magic spell, then transferred some of his power into Samantha.
"Daddy, what's happening-" said Samantha.
"You'll see," he said.
Samantha felt the power that was growing inside of her. Suddenly a dark purple light shined on her, and she rose up as if she was flying in the air. She then realized that she was actually levitating.
"Wow…" she said quietly.
When she started to come down, she back-flipped. She then karate-chopped his neck, which made him drop the knife.
"Samantha, how do you know this man?" her father asked her.
She then told her father why the strange man had tried to kidnap her.
"So you see, this doctor found me at the library, he recognized me as your daughter, one thing led to another, and, well…"
"Dr. Dunham! I had forgotten about him!" her father replied.
He then turned to him.
"If you so much as lay a finger on Samantha, there will be a terrible price to pay!" he shouted at him, while thrusting a bright neon beam of energy at him.
He meant business, but Dr. Dunham couldn't care less about what he said. He wanted to kill Samantha.
Suddenly, he grabbed one of his experiments from his desk nearby, and chugged down a potion he made. While it was technically intended to be one of his experiments, he eventually decided to save it in case he was attacked by someone like Samantha.
Samantha gulped with fear as Dr. Dunham grew in size to become a horrific, skeletal monster. She then screamed.
After letting out a scream, she then thought for a moment. Monsters are terrified of loud sounds, aren't they? That's their Achilles heel.
Samantha found a gigantic organ, which was the size of a whale, in Dr. Dunham's study. All she needed to do was to play a few notes and he would be gone for good!
She found the loudest, most startling keys on the organ. She then pressed the lowest key, than the highest key.
Dr. Dunham screamed.
She then decided to press both at the exact same time.
Dr. Dunham screamed in pain, then finally disintegrated into the floor, where he morphed back into his old self. When he finally died, Samantha hugged her dad, then smiled.
"You are more powerful than you could ever imagine," he told her.
"Thank you," she said quietly, then thought for a little while. "Hey Dad?" she replied.
"Yes, my dear?" he replied back.
"What will happen when his company knows he's dead?"
"Not an issue. We'll just say he died in a car accident. That will give him a taste of his own medicine, wouldn't it?"
"It sure would!" replied Samantha.
Her dad said nothing, but just smiled.
My work here is done he thought to himself.