Blood on the Water
Chapter IX:
It was late in the night and the woman had snuck down to the basement to watch them sleep. She was tired and it was these times in the night that reality would suddenly sink into her. She wasn't crazy all the time, no one truly can be said to be completely either or. Her eyes had gone slightly misty as she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the child slumped in her chair. She reached out to touch the child's cheek gently, but her hand stalled and she regretfully pulled it back to her person. Memories were floating loosely through her mind only they were in third person, almost as if they weren't even hers. She saw, possibly, herself as a child being shunned by other children at a playground while she wrote ferociously in a little black notebook. Saw herself at home being ignored while her younger siblings were given attention by her parents so she would write more and separate herself from them. Then she saw herself at fourteen, standing with the blood running off of her hands in angry drops of crimson, her father's lifeless body below her. It had been her first kill, but a self-defense one. The butcher knife he had drunkenly tried to run her through with now rested in his chest and her mother lay in a slumped mess by the couch from a drug overdose, barely alive.
The police had to carry her away from the crime scene, place her in the car themselves. She was taken to the police station and then put in an orphanage until she was sixteen when she was adopted by a psychologist and his wife. When she was eighteen she had run away from home to another state, told her adoptive parents that she'd joined a college in upper Ohio but never told them where she was. She bought a small one-bedroom house with the money she'd saved over the years of having summer jobs through high school and allowances. She was determined to make her life as normal as she possibly could after the incident. No one ever knew that she was the 'Colorado Kid' who killed her own parents. In that same year she had married an older man so that she could live in an actual home with heating and space. It was also in that year that she'd done something else, but she could never remember what she had done, just that it had caused her great pain in her head and made her see things that weren't truly there. It had literally driven her up the wall.
Her old nightmares from her childhood and teenage years had flooded back to her and it was then that the thought to kill had come over her. As a child she had loved mysteries, they were her life, what she had striven to be and solve. When a young man named Peter Bauchman had become a well-known detective her urge to challenge and solve and kill surged higher in her mind and she had started the first game. Every day ever since, every year that has passed, she has challenged and killed and every day her thirst for closure and blood had grown to the point that she was as many called her insane. She adopted the title the press had given her as 'The Harlequin,' she became world known as she killed and challenged and killed again. No one has ever resisted her game, she always laid too much on the line. It was only a matter of time when the young ones too would snap.
She sighed and raised herself off of the floor, she kissed the child on the head. She didn't know why but she felt a strong pull to the girl. She immediately spit and cursed herself before grabbing a knife and running upstairs. She sat in the bath and cut small scratches down her legs and the water turned a warm dark crimson. In an hour she made herself go to sleep it wouldn't do to dwell in times long since passed in another lifetime. Now is the time to focus.
Xx
The gang got out the van with the detectives in tow and into the snow. An icy wind rushed against then and Scooby immediately pushed himself against Shaggy in fear of the place itself. In front of them was a frozen lake Erie, the same lake that Shaggy and Scooby had nearly frozen to death in thirteen years ago. Fred put a hand on hand on Shaggy's shoulder and Shaggy gave a small nod. They walked to the edge of the lake and Velma, being the lightest in the group put a pair of ice-skates on and prepared to skate across to see if a note or a clue was anywhere to be found out on the frozen expanse of ice. Before she left, Shaggy grabbed her arm. "Look, Velms, just... please be careful out there." Velma nodded and kissed his cheek before skating out slowly over the lake towards the place where the ice had fallen through that winter.
As she skated out she glanced around her at the barren trees and snowy banks. It always astounded her how an area so full of life can go to a graveyard in less than a month. She shivered and brought her thoughts back to the ice. She skated around a crack in the ice and came to a stop in front of where Scooby and Shaggy had fallen in. A newer sign was staked to the land warning people about thin ice dangers after they had fallen in. She looked down at the ice but didn't see anything right away. She knelt down on her knees and scraped some of the snow away from the surface of the ice hoping a note might be there, but there wasn't one to be found. She looked closer though at the ice. She could of sworn she saw something white move beneath the surface. As she leaned even closer though, a loud crack was heard and she fell through the ice suddenly and into the ice water. She felt something grab her and drag her under farther but the water was so dark she couldn't see a thing.
The rest ran out, slipping and sliding on the ice to where she had been kneeling only seconds ago. Shaggy was shouting and pushing others out of the way, but it was useless. By the time they had gotten to the opening in the ice, Velma was no where to be seen. Lassiter swore under his breath and radioed in to the chief letting her know what just happened. In about half an hour a team of divers and policemen had arrived on scene at the ice and the divers went down into the water. When they came back up after about an hour, the verdict was clear. Velma was gone.
AN: I am so sorry it took me this long to update '^^ I had the first week of school and I was so tired after coming home! Anyways, I thought Harley deserved some insight to her past :)