Author's Note: After finishing "A Continuation", Parts 1 and 2, I have finally come up with a fresh, original, and somewhat creative idea! Enjoy this story.
Chapter One
What Monster Are You?
Dear Die-ary,
It's raining again, and everything's saturated. Once again, I'm all alone in this house, sitting on soggy wooden floorboards, leaning my head on the glass window pane, and sobbing my heart out. And I wonder, what's raining more, the clouds or my heart?
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There wasn't a stir in house 777 that night, or anywhere else on the block for that matter. Everyone's curtains were drawn tightly, everyone's shutters were closed, the cars sat dormant like tree stumps in driveways, and the silence was deafening in itself. It had stormed all day and among the washed away drifts of dirt and rot were the dying seeds of flowers that some dim bulb had planted so late in the spring. They would never grow to bloom again.
And in this pitch-black night, heavy with death, stumbled a weary traveler.
He was tall and thin, like the night itself, drawn in black garb and stooped slightly, trying to walk with his painful limp. A watery mark of blood remained after each step he took.
The man stopped in front of a house and then reached out, tracing his fingers over the numbers over the door. Three long-necked digits with flat caps; this was his home. He pushed the door open. It gave in too easily though, malleable from water and rot, and clattered to the floor, unhinged.
He knelt down and picked the door up, propped it up in the doorframe, and then threw his suitcase down on the floor. It skidded on the tepid rainwater that had gathered in the room and clunked heavily on the wall to the opposite side of the room.
He turned slowly to look around his abandoned home. A clap of lightning illuminated his face, all sharp edges and angles, yet not skeletal. The lightning died away, but not before the moonlight streams of tears on his cheeks had gone unseen.
Pressing himself against the wall, he slid down to a sitting position. He yanked out a black notebook and began to write.
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Early the next morning, Johnny was surprised to find himself still writing feverishly in the notebook, filling page after tear-streaked page with morbid images of macabre murders and puzzling revelations about life and death.
His stomach ached, but not from the mortal need to eat that plagued him, but just a passionate yearning for something, something…
Something warm and gentle, softer and smoother to his touch than silk, but yet so far away that if he were to reach out and try to grasp it he'd only hold the bitter wind.
Johnny didn't understand this feeling.
His icicle-like fingers traced the wooden pattern on the floor, his index finger dipping into the hole in the wood beneath him. " What's wrong with me?" He asked, his voice a quivering rasp, " I've been away for so long, I thought I'd evolve into an emotionless beast. The people I've slain, the children, the elderly… and yet I come back with feelings more intensified?"
Johnny glanced outside and saw the mosaic of the rising sun, rivers of pink colliding with feathery gray clouds and dusty black ones. He looked at his watch, pressed "date", and watched the digits flashing 10.31. " Happy Halloween," He whispered to himself, " What monster are you?"
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He spent the whole day moping around, trying to waste time, hoping to avoid the quickly-approaching onslaught of children ringing his doorbell with the fury of a lynching mob. When the large grandfather clock on his wall struck seven in the evening, though, and official trick or treating time began, Johnny realized he had still found no place to tuck himself away in.
Instead, he was left sitting at the stoop of his steps, one of his hands halfway submerged in a plastic bowl of Tootsie Roll pops. He faintly recollected the day he got them – some lady threw a whole bag of them at him, just for extra protective measures. He intended to use the bag to hold her decapitated head, but she had run off before he could carry the plan out.
Now he had the candy, he had the bowl, but where were the children?
He watched as kids walked down the street, stopping at every house diligently, and then avoiding his house entirely, as if some invisible magnetic force was pushing them away. Ten, twenty, thirty groups of children – finally, two small girls approached him.
" Trick or treat!" One gasped out, just audibly.
Johnny pulled his hand up and put a candy in each of their bags.
" What're you dressed up as?" The second girl asked. She was slightly older, with long black hair.
" I'm Miserable, that's what," Johnny sighed, and then put another candy in the girls' bags, "Dressed as good old Misery, except I don't love company." He laughed at his own joke softly.
" Don't you want to trick of treat?" The younger girl wanted to know.
" I'm fine just giving out candy," He said with a thin smile on his lips.
" You're pretty," The older girl sighed, and then they ran off, tittering. They must have both been no more than five or six years old.
" Everything's pretty when you're that young," Johnny sighed, looking down at his fingernails. There was still blood dried beneath them, blood he couldn't wash off, no matter how hard he tried. And if he did get it out, he'd simply end up putting it back there again. It was hopeless.
Suddenly, he thought about the prospect of raising a child – it would be like taking something sweet and incurably innocent and hiding it from the evils of the world. How he wished to be a child like that, shielded from evil, kept under feathery wings of protection his whole life! Those girls would some day grow up to be cheerleaders, or perhaps nerdy outcasts of society. Either way, they'd become an image, they'd become some bitter segment of society.
But a child!
A child was a clean slate, and he wished to have a child to himself, to keep it a clean slate.
That's when he birthed a new idea – he would take a child. He would find a child nobody wanted and raise it. Johnny had no intentions to father anyone, simply of the inconvenience of having to find some already life-worn female to procreate with. No, Johnny wanted a child that was a complete clean slate to him, a child that was not made of his blood and semen. He wanted an innocent child that had sampled life, but would be fine with being shielded.
Squee.
He would find Squee, wherever he was, and kidnap him.
Johnny couldn't help but chuckle deliciously, watching the crowds of children on the street. "Halloween, what monster are you?" He whispered to himself again, " Protector of the Innocent, that's what."
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Author's Note: Johnny… a father? And kidnapping Squee? How will he ever pull that off? Ooh… and will getting a kid under his thumb help him win the favor of a certain special lady in his life?
Review and Find Out!