La Plume Noire

PRELUDE

What happened is not something any person, living or dead can put into words easily, though for some of those who bore witness to the actions that night it is much harder. It can only be described as one thing by others, an unfortunate disaster, but as for me, well, let's just say it was the beginning of my life.

It started out just like any other night. It was a frigid and unusually quiet October night at my house though, about fifty degrees perhaps. I was having some of my dear friends stay over for Halloween and there were ten of us all sitting downstairs in the basement, my parents were away on 'business' or so they called it. There were several of us, Gianna, Deana, Cecelie, Hayley, Julia, Cassidy, Rachel, Beth, Megan and myself. We sat around talking and laughing and having a good time, when all of a sudden, everyone looked up the brown dark wash stairs and heard the oven ring.

"Would anyone like to come up and help?" I quickly asked. There was no reply.

"Nice people, really nice of you to volunteer and help." I exclaimed quite sarcastically. There was a faint laugh in reply to this. I rolled my eyes and headed up the stairs.

No one was home except us girls, so I only heard a faint chatter from the girls and the sound of the oven creaking as I opened the door. I pulled the brownies out of the oven just as the timer went off and started to cut them evenly into tiny, crumbling squares, staring at them intently. I was almost done cutting them when I heard the loud screams of the girls downstairs, the sounds that I at first thought were just to scare me. I dropped the brownies, rounded the corner, and ran for the stairs as fast as my legs could carry me. When I arrived at the bottom of the steps in the foyer, the lights were out and every one of the girls was letting out loud, shrill screams, or so I thought.

I walked quietly, without noise over to the light switch and turned the lights back on. The girls were all huddled in the middle of the carpet, their faces drenched in a blanket of sweat, and each of their skins was as pale as a sheet.

"What's wrong?" I asked. They were all trembling in tune with my shaking hands.

"The lights went out and we just kind of screamed" said my friend Deana.

She was the tallest and most talkative of our group. She was always crafty too, coming up with some of the cutest costume designs and things of the sort. I counted the number of shaking girls sitting on the floor, I counted eight. There should be nine. I counted again, still eight.

"Where's Gianna?" I asked them.

The girls all looked around and shrugged as if it wasn't an issue at the moment. I wondered if they had some sort of apathy syndrome at the time because each and every one of them didn't seem as worried for anyone else as they did for themselves. Though if you put two familiar animals in a cage with a predator, one is bound to bolt and let its friend fall prey to the predator.

"Great!" I said.

"Gianna, if you're playing some kind of trick, it's not funny." I said, though I highly doubted Gianna was playing a trick, but just in case she was, I had said it.

There was an eerie silence and no reply from my dear friend. I walked around the corner, looking for Gianna, and went behind the bar. There, lying as dead and silent as night itself was my dear friend Gianna with a stake stabbed through her heart. Blood bubbled out from the wound in her chest and cascaded down her blood soaked clothes, pooling at my feet. I stared, at the look of pure horror that was to be plastered on her face for the rest of eternity, unable to move or speak. I felt sadness and horror start to creep up on me like a predator closing in on its prey. My heart skipped a beat as my eyes fluttered around the room, looking for something to save her. I sank to my knees and started to push weakly on her chest, desperately trying to start a heart that had long since given up beating. Tears silently slipped down my cheeks as I kept trying.

"Tori! She's dead; you can't do anything to bring her back." Megan yelled, grabbed my shoulder and shaking it roughly, effectively waking me from my strange grief induced trance.

So many problems whirled through my mind in a tornado of discord. First of all, my closest friend was dead and that hit me where it hurt most, in my heart, but not only there, it also scarred my mind. Plus, we probably had some kind of psychotic killer on a killing spree in my house and who knew where they were hiding? This was not good at all, I had to find them and dispose of them before anyone else was hurt. My main priority at the time was to keep the others safe. I searched the entirety of the house for anything misplaced that might give me a clue as to who might have killed Gianna.

Nothing, I found nothing at all that could be out of its usual spot in my house. Well, there was a shadow that nothing was casting. It was just sitting in the middle of my room on the floor. I had seen this type of shadow before. I called them outcasts. I always thought they were harmless and that they couldn't hurt myself and I believed that all the way up until now. Now I had reason to believe they could be very dangerous and vicious because I believed this was what killed my friend and my assumptions were soon to be proven correct. As soon as I saw it, it darted with speed and precision like an arrow down the stairs toward my friends, or what remained of them. Then I heard screaming and lots of it, and one of the shrill, ear piercing sounds was coming from me. Luckily, three of my friends including Julia, Cassidy, and Rachel were with me at the time when this happened. The outcast had just grazed Rachel's foot as it was fleeing and upon this she fainted, falling into my arms. Apparently the outcast had special effects that accounted for Rachel's fainting. I picked her up and my friends and I darted for the stairs at the same time.

When we arrived in my basement we found Deana, Hayley, Megan and Cecelie huddled in the corner with looks of pure terror plastered on their faces.

"Oh my god, are you okay?" I asked.

They looked at me, then at the floor. I followed their gazes. There right in front of them was the outcast simply rippling like a pool of liquid. I stared at it, wide mouthed for a few minutes. I then regained my strength and walked over to the huge black puddle and reached out to deal it a blow, but it went darting out of the room like lightning. In the process it touched Rachel and she awoke with a startling gasp, which caused her to fall roughly from my grasp. The outcast apparently had an affinity for putting things to sleep and waking them up.

I then heard a disembodied moaning sound come out of nowhere and I knew it wasn't Rachel. I whipped around and there was Beth, with a black belt fastened around her throat. Blood poured from her throat and mouth, staining her bright orange hair and I knew there was nothing in my power that I could do to save her. At that thought, I bowed my head and began to cry for the second time within the past hour of my life.

The tears rolled slowly off my face and hit the carpet without a sound, leaving spots on it that were a darker stain of silver than the carpet was. I was having the worst night of my life. I decided that we all had to hide somewhere that the shadow couldn't follow us. We decided to try outside first. We also decided to send Cecelie to make sure it was okay. We put about twenty pounds of armor on her too, though it was really just pillows taped to her for protection. I can't exactly say that that was one of my brightest ideas ever.

"Can't we just send Cassidy? She'll definitely scare it off." She stated sort of playfully.

I turned to look at Cassidy. She was trembling in the corner spouting some nonsense about 'the awakening' and saying that 'The Indelor has come of age; the Indelor must be someone close to Him, I must make sure that She lives to revive the Prelylium." I figured she would be of no use now, not that I knew anything about what she was speaking of.

"That will haunt and scar me for the rest of my life." Julia said honestly.

After a few minutes of discussing Cecelia went up the stairs towards the front door and she yelled down. "I still think we should send Cassidy!" We followed close behind until we reached the top of the steps. Cecelie ran through the kitchen and to the back door. We then watched the door creak open as Cecelie pulled on it slightly and she stepped through.

After a few minutes I decided it was safe so we started to walk back to the door. I wondered why Cecelie hadn't said it was okay to come outside… Then, a loud crash emerged from outside the door along with the sound of glass shattering into tiny dagger like pieces. A sound that is most terrifying in this type of situation. I wildly flung open the smooth wooden door and glanced around the deck. It was vacant, desolate. As I wondered where Cecelie was, I noticed my flower vase had shattered and there was a red liquid substance dripping from a few shards of glass on the deck. I walked over and examined the substance, and then proceeded smelled it. It reeked of copper and death; I wrinkled my nose in disgust. It was blood and lots of it. I looked down from the deck and on the grass beside the deck support post was a very, very dead Cecelie. It seemed her spinal cord had snapped in half. I sighed and whimpered sadly, though I wondered how she had come to that much damage from a five maybe six foot fall.

"Three down, seven to go." I said.

"What?" The girls shrieked in harmony.

My friends gasped in unison when they looked down below. Some cried, some shook with shock and pain, and some just stood there frozen with fear. My new mission was to keep my remaining friends safe at any cost. I told everyone that we were going to run down to my grandmother's house which I presumed would be like a safe haven for us in the state of mind that we were in though it wasn't one of the brightest plans ever. I still have no idea why that would help us. We gathered supplies for the trip down the road and Hayley went downstairs to find some flashlights for us all.

After a few minutes there was a clatter and a loud scream that was shrill like a bird's whistling call. I winced in pain as I knew Hayley was now dead too. I couldn't bear to see her dead. It was wearing me down every single time that one of my beautiful and precious friends died by this monstrosity's hand or tentacle or whatever it had. This bringer of torture and death was the blackest of blasphemies that had ever successfully entered into the desolate realm of infinity in my mind. The time for action was coming soon as the hour drew near. We were planning on leaving my house at the stroke of midnight, quite ironic being the midnight on Halloween was the time we decide to run. We all were bustling around my house trying to keep as quiet and careful as it was possible to for six teenagers. At 11:45 I assembled groups of whoever was left. At about 11:53 I made a change to the groups because somehow in all the middle of this, Deana managed to 'fall' down the stairs onto the point of an umbrella that just happened to be there. It was sad to see her name erased from my roster of remaining friends. She was one of the most cheerful of all of us which meant that things would become even more gloomy and desperate without her.

"Cassidy kind of scares me more than the shadow thing I think." My friend Julia said in a kiddingly shaky voice.

At 11:58 I started talking again. "Are you girls ready to go out into what I think will be the biggest war in your lives?" I asked solemnly.

Almost shakily they said "We're ready to follow you into Heaven or Hell as long as your there to lead and guide us to your best ability." I sniffed as new tears were born and rolled down my pale white cheeks.

"If you're prepared to follow me into Hell, then I am proud to be both your friend and your leader" I announced.

I always was held high in their respects because of this very reason and it pleased me to no end that they actually meant everything they said before then. I unlocked the door and we took our first step outside.

The air was frigid, crisp, and cold all at the same time and it was pitch black all except for the moon shining bright and luminescent above our heads. There was a strange feeling in the wind as it howled and whistled through the trees. The gusts of wind whipped our hair into our eyes, making vision of the long twisty road ahead of us impossible. I found some hair ties in my bag and passed them out to the girls. As soon as we put on the hair ties, we were off again. I saw something black dart past my foot and yelled "RUN" to the girls. We took off, our feet hitting the pavement, the sound bouncing and echoing off the trees.

As we went past my friend Kourtney's house we saw her and my friend Stephanie jumping up and down and waving, yelling "HI!" to us. When we didn't answer them they looked around us and caught a glimpse of the outcast zipping by us. They looked at it terrified to move a muscle, let alone speak, then ran screaming back into Kourtney's house I scoffed. Then the outcast whipped around in front of us and halted, stopping us dead in our tracks. It was blocking our path, so I had to figure out how to get past it. I made a plan so that our group could keep going. On three we were going to split into the groups I had formed and run down the street on either side. I quietly whispered the first two numbers just loud enough so they could hear, then I screamed three.

We shot down the road like comets in a moonlit sky. When Julia and I had gone behind a car and had come out, I realized the other girls had been massacred, even Megan from my own group. They all were lying strewn across the road, covered in blood. Shards of glass, rocks and twigs protruded from each of their bodies. I saw Megan smile from a distance and mouth something to me but I couldn't hear it. What had she said? Tears of fury burned off my face for all of my friends. Julia and I were at the cul-de-sac of my street and were about turn into my grandmother's driveway when the outcast sped by me and grabbed Julia, she screamed out into the desolate night where no one would ever hear her but me. This frightened and angered me the most. I had already felt like shit for not being able to protect the other eight, there was no way in Heaven or Hell that I was going to lose her too. "NO!" I screamed with anger and fury. I stared straight at the big outcast. "I have had enough of your damn games tonight!" I said. "Just Leave Us The Hell Alone!" I screamed as I started running towards them at full speed. When I was close enough, I grabbed Julia and jumped straight into my worst enemy and nightmare. This was the most deadly thing I could possibly do, or so I thought…