When 'I' divides
Sister Allende tried to fight the temptation, she really did. After all, wasn't that one of the things written in the small print when one signs up to becomes a member of the cloth? However, the monotonous drumming of a thousand finger tips of slick rain on the banged up, wheezing specimen of a Chevy's windshield just wasn't enough drown out that little nagging voice no matter how hard they tapped.
'Just one look…'
No… she must be strong. It wasn't right to pry and
Before the nun could stop herself, she could already feel the hot rub of the cheep, synthetic head rest on her neck as it inched round, craning towards the dark of the car's musty rear.
It took a second for her eyes to adjust after mindlessly watching a smudged take on the world roll by through the sodden front window for all this time. For a moment, what little light there was out there still clung to her vision and everything seemed dim, nothing more than a mass of black framing the grey, dripping view provided so lovingly by the rear window.
And then things began to fit into place.
The darkness morphed. Ambiguity became seats, the trio of limp, slack seat belts that hung along them and the mechanical details of the parallel doors. But these things were all ordinary and mundane, none of them holding Allende's attention for more than a tight handful of seconds. No, the thing that caught her roving eyes was the small bundle huddled up in the corner where the moth eaten seats met the door, hiding away from what pale, sun light smothered by the over-head rain clouds dared creep into the car.
It was so small and… well, pitiful to look at. Suddenly Allende found it very hard to swallow the sight that she'd been retching herself horse at only half an hour ago or the title that the little thing had been dubbed by that frantic, breathless woman.
'monster' The word played over in the nun's mind like a skipping record and suddenly, she could see nothing but that woman's blood stained face screaming up at her from her knees as she grasped them in supplication.
'Monster, oh save us, it's a monster!'
You see, at precisely eleven thirty three of the am, a lady, one of the guardians from the orphanage up the road to be precise, had burst into the lonely little nunnery that lay just beyond the remote, rural town of Dobbs Ferry. Since visitors were something of a rarity, Allende and her fellow sisters had come flocking eagerly to welcome her almost the second the doors to the building had banged open.
The vision that greeted them was enough to make the nun forget that it was a sin to take the lord's name in vain.
The haggard woman hanging on the door had dumbly stared back at the circle of wide eyed sisters, her eyes rolling crazily in their sockets like marble pin balls as her rabid gaze leapt from one to the next.
"T-th-th-th" the word caught on her trembling lips, frantically playing the lone syllable over and over as they tried to form the words that just wouldn't come.
The nun's didn't even hear her. They were too busy trying to get their minds around the fact that this stuttering wreck before them was covered from head to toe in something suspiciously red. When the wet, acrid smell of meat finally clawed its way up their collective nostrils, none among them could deny the already shrieking voice with in in their skulls which cried 'blood!'
"Oh dear god…" One of them, our Allende had croaked as her eyes began to get over the initial shock and finally focused on the finer, morbid, darker details.
It was enough to make your stomach crawl up, die and turn to dust.
The blood clung to what must have once been a white shirt, sinking deep into the bleached material in erratic patches. It stuck stubbornly, like some viscous glue to the pair failing legs that had lost the will to stand and emerged from a saturated skirt. Blond hair that hung limp, plastered together with lumps of the now dry gore, fell heavily across a face that looked as though it had just taken a peek at hell itself.
She might as well have been sweating the stuff.
One of the nuns fell away from the fold, gagging horsy. No one noticed.
"Th-th-th-th-"The rattling sound started up again, cutting into the intense, thick silence like a blunt knife. The woman blinked once, as if trying to clear the hysteria from her eyes. "They're all dead!" She blurted, and that lone sentence was all it took for it all to come flooding out.
"Itkilledthemohgodthatthingkilledthemallanditwouldn'tstopohgoditwasamonsterohgodsavemeit'samonster" The nuns finally came back to life as well, surging into towards the jabbering, broken woman as she fell apart, slumping slowly down the wooden door as the weight of whatever it was she held within her skull finally cracked her like fine china. All tried to ignore the long, crimson streak that chased her slowly slipping form.
Together, they'd dragged her into the depths of the nunnery, but even after an hour, they could extract nothing more than the continuous rush of babble from her.
Mother Superior, who had been standing silently at the back of the room surveying her nun's attempts to bring the shattered woman back to this side like some omniscient totem-pole, was the one to suggest it.
"We should look into this."
Those five words were enough to stop the frantic babble of chatter and wrap a throttling hand with an iron grip around the throat of each and every nun, killing even the thought of talk. The sudden silence prevailed as one by one, the robed women each turned to their leader wide eyed, brains checking if the had really heard what just came in through their ears.
"Are you suggesting we go up there?" one finally blew up the gall to ask and was rewarded with nothing more than a Spartan, curt nod.
Of course that was what she meant. Millicent Paxman, over-seer of this particularly remote convent lacked even the ghost of a sense of humour and was keenly blunt with her seldom, rationed words. The day she cracked a joke would be the very same when pigs sprouted wings and soared off into the stratosphere while a snow ball ruled supreme in hell.
No one said anything, for none of them dared to question the wisdom that had inspired this decision. However, they'd remained just as mute when she'd asked for a volunteer to go with them. Allende had just been looking a bit more uncomfortable than the rest (if such a thing were possible) and so made the perfect target to be dragged along on what she feared would be a suicidal crusade.
Except, both of them were now driving back, perfectly alive with hearts still pumping to a familiar beat. There had been no monster waiting for them at the gates of Dobbs Ferry's orphanage, nor had one sprung from the sparse woodland that lined the lonely road trailing up there on the rust bucket of a car which carted the two nuns there and back again.
The only thing that had been there to greet them was a single, sobbing little Japanese girl, soaked with crimson blood.
And that was the thing that still held Allende's attention as she stared into the depths of the car's nether regions, mind still whirling as it ran over the series of events which lead up to this very moment. The tell-tale rustle of movement yanked Allende from the deep, all consuming maw of meditation and the woman came back to this world, eyes clicking on.
'Oh heavens, it's going to pounce on me and'
Sadly (or perhaps not, taking another look at her thought pattern would expose that as utterly the wrong use of the king's English), she was in for an anti-climax. The little girl did nothing of the sort, choosing to stay huddled up in the crook of the plush car seat as she looked up, bringing eyes that his behind cracked glasses over the ridge of her crossed arms.
Allende felt the spittle evaporate from within her very mouth. A sudden gush of fear drowned out the recent thought that this child did not deserve its title…
…but that rush quickly passed, for the child looking so very glumly back at her was not the monster responsible for the blood bath that had greeted them so warmly at Dobbs Ferry's home for lost and forgotten children. Her pulse slowed and the world seemed like a relatively safe place after all.
"Well, hello there…what's your name, little girl?" She tried in what she prayed was a warm and friendly tone. It didn't work. All her efforts earned her was a sharp little gasp from the girl as she ducked back behind the sanctuary of the arms that cradled her and a harsh tut accompanied with a flash of a cold glare from Sister Paxman as the elder let her eyes dance from the road for a moment. Allende sighed and let herself slip back into her muzzy seat, keeping herself content with watching the monotone scenery whiz by to the clunking backing-track of the Chevy's striving engine as it wheezed along.
This was going to be a long drive.
8 8 8
The child did in fact have a name, even though at that point she chose to keep it to herself. We can't really blame her for that though, for what had happened to her only three quarter's of an hour earlier would be enough to rattle anyone's sanity.
And probably crush it.
Anyway, her name. Yumiko Takage was her modest title, one attached to her by parents who were now nothing more than dust and bone. You see, three years ago or so, when little Yumiko had passed no more than another three or so on god's green earth, her parent's had met with a tragic, if not self inflicted end. Following their first child's birth, they'd come to the land of the free chasing that common dream of high, over-inflated salaries and ridiculously, over-sized, all terrain vehicles but their high-flying careers had in fact been the very thing to un-do the married couple...
…Well, not the jobs themselves to be precise, but rather the social benefits that came attached to them.
Like any ladder-climbing executive, Mr. Takage was required to go to more luncheon soirées and cocktail parties than spend hours in his lushly furbished office. However, it was at one of these gatherings that he presented himself as too juicy a target for fate by knocking back the best part of a magnum of champagne and refusing to let his more than anxious wife drive them home.
A shame really. They were only a mile or so away from the sanctuary of their house when Mr. Takage overshot that red light and ploughed straight into the perpendicular and oh so very fast moving traffic.
And so little Yumiko suddenly found that she was utterly alone in a world that was as big as it was scary. Both Mr. and Mrs. Takage had been the last sole survivors of their respective bloodlines (Yumiko aside) so there was no next of kin to fall back on. The only thing for the girl was to put her in an orphanage and hope that someone would pick her up one day as they browsed through the masses of faceless children, picking out the most suitable as a farmer might a cow at bovine market.
Only, no one ever seemed to look at the little Japanese girl. Sure, their eyes may rest on her for the whole of two seconds but quickly, they'd glaze over and move onto the next hopeful child, forgetting her face (and probably the fact she even existed) within the space of a few short moments.
"They're never going to pick you if you just stand there and watch the floor." Yumiko shook her head, half-heartedly batting at her ear as she sat on the dusty stairs leading down to the great court yard. Even above the chorus of shrieking children, high with a mirth she seemed to be missing out on as they ran about playing variations on tag, she could still hear it;
The Voice.
Or at least, that was what she liked to call it, the title it gave itself was a little too familiar to be any source of comfort... not that having a disembodied whisper that only you could hear express it's points of view in your ear for as long as you could remember was reassuring in the first place.
"They will…one day"
"Yeah," The Voice snapped back from somewhere deep inside her young skull. "One day when all the other children have gone."
Yumiko sat up, brows knitting into a soft frown.
"What's that meant to mean? You're just teasing me again, aren't you?"
Silence, and in it, Yumiko could just imagine the fat, oily smirk spreading across her invisible companion's face.
"They're never going to chose you over them. Your always last to be picked for games, why should this be any different?"
Yumiko shifted on her step, trying to ignore the itch of bone-dry dust against her leg that had creped up from the gritty, parched court yard and watch the children play.
"They hate you."
Still, the girl said nothing, staying as dumb as a stone as she let her eyes chase the saggy old basket ball the congregation of pre-teens were chucking between them in a game that looked like the bastard son of basketball and 'catch'.
"You've heard them… what they say about you…"
Her teeth slid out, lightly chewing on her lower lip. Maybe, maybe if she just ignored it, The Voice would get bored and leave her alone. Wasn't that what the care-takers had told her to do the last time the others had reduced her to nothing but a salty flood of tears?
"They just want to go away."
A whimper, and then the girl rammed her hands over her ears, crunching up into her self as if she could just roll up into some impenetrable ball.
It did little to help. If anything, blocking up her ears just seemed to make it all the sharper, like some angry bee caught in an up-side down tumbler. Without the noises of the outside world to dilute it, it could scream its rant louder than any jet engine.
"You're just pathetic…weak and pathetic." It snarled thickly, the words, unheard by the rest of the world, dripping with a hot, sticky venom that burnt the child's ear. "That's why they single you out… that's why they pick on you and hate you with everything they've got!" It paused for a moment, leaving just enough time for its bitter acrid words to sink in before delivering the cope-de-grace. "You need to be more like me!"
"No!" Yumiko sat bolt upright, jerking from her fetal curl as if someone had just run two hundred volts up her spine. No was right, she couldn't let The Voice out; not now, not ever. She'd spent countless years listening to its bitter raving and dark, violent thoughts to know better than to be suckered in by its vicious, pricking words. If she gave in to it and let it take control for even a minuet… well, something terrible was bound to come to pass.
And then it did.
Out of nowhere, something of a dusty, orange hue blazed into the oriental girl's vision and-
SMACK
The rouge ball smashed into her face, knocking her flat on her back. For a split second, the sound of her thin, fool moon glasses shattering briefly sang out as the twin panes of glass splintered into shards and fell away having bourn the brunt of the ball's onslaught.
…and then…
Silence. For a moment the hands on the clocks seemed to take a breather from their relentless march as Yumiko lay motionless, strewn across the stairs like some limp and lifeless rag doll as her bear, unshielded eyes mindlessly reflected the blue sky above. Funny, without the lenses she could still see every detail of the lazy clouds that rolled by overhead-
"Hey!" A young, un-broken voice called from somewhere. "HEY!" It came again, now laced with irritation. "God damnit, chuck us the ball ya shmuk!"
"Oh for crying out loud." Meters away, another of the group turned on the squalling boy. "Just go get it yourself. You're the one who missed it anyway." The squaller turned on his peer, a fat, sulky lip jutting out.
"Yeah? Well maybe if you weren't such a crap throw."
"You're closer."
At this rate, the petty argument could have spanned on for the best part of the remainder of the morning and into lunch. However, the whiner quickly caved having caught the tepid looks being thrown back and forth between the other waiting players.
"Whatever…" And with that, he turned on his heels, letting them drag him towards the precious ball and that kid…what was her name again? Something weird…
Oh yeah, Yumi-something or other. The boy shuddered, looking down at his feet as he traipsed towards her. It wasn't that he was scared of her, it was just that girl could be pretty creepy at times, especially with that whole muttering to herself act. She just wasn't… natural. Who knows, maybe what the other kids said was true and she was several sandwiches short of a picnic.
The boy looked up. He stopped. There was a safe distance between them but for some reason, that didn't stop the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stand too. Something wasn't quite right with this picture…
During the course of his meditation, she must have got up for now she was standing on her own two feet and as still as a leaf in a spent breeze. Between her two, dust coated hands, she held the ball.
"Um, you going to pass that over?" He may as well have been speaking to a brick wall. Actually, he probably would have got more of a response from one of those.
She just stood there, black hair hanging over her face as she stared almost mindlessly at the ball as if it were the only thing in a world of nothing. If the intensity of that gaze rose, she might just bore a hole straight through it.
'Werido…'
He swallowed, but it did nothing to budge the knot that had seemingly tied itself in his throat. "Hey, I'm talking to you…Anyone home in there?" He laughed, forcing the sound from his mouth and stepped a little closer.
The second his foot touched down, her head snapped up, aiming right at him. Between her hands, the ball popped but the boy didn't hear it. His eyes were to busy gawking at her face.
Someone other than Yumiko was staring straight back at him, drilling into his very skull with the same unscrupulous gaze the ball had been treated to only half a second ago. Sure, this girl's features were all in the same place and shared her exact dimension… but those eyes. It was as if someone else was behind them, twisting them out of shape into cold, stony, hateful things that dug right into him, seeing all that ran under his skin.
Something, a sad, sadistic excuse of a smile, crawled out from between her lips, bearing more teeth than it should as this… this thing that should be Yumiko let the limp and empty husk of worn rubber fall from its hands.
"Yumiko's just gone out…" it hissed between tightly clenched dentures that leered like a sprung bear trap. "But I'm here now."
A high whimper wheedled its way up from the boy's taught vocal chords as he stumbled back. The monster's eyes never left him, still probing, still digging, seeing everything. Even as it launched itself dead at him, anxious, eager fingers splayed wide, its eyes never moved. Even when the screaming started and the blood flowed like spilt claret, its eyes never moved. Even went the slick bones finally were cracked open, bearing themselves to the over head sun, its eyes never moved.
It took Annabel Hardy, that nervous wreck we met earlier; the best part of two minuets to realize that there was something off with the sounds coming from the court-yard. Sure, the children would whoop and holler as they whiled away the morning but the cries coming from out-side were…well, a little too intense. There was something foul in the noise, foul and fearful.
She stopped her writing, laying down the pen and cocking her head to the side as she tried to decipher the garbled cacophony of young voices. That mass of noise was on the move now, drawing nearer and with it came the sound of tiny feet hammering away on the floor.
And then it clicked. They weren't just shouting.
They were screaming. For their lives.
She rose sharply, vaulting past her desk and towards the door as the shrill sound blared right by it and started to fade once again. Without a second thought, she ripped the door to her office and blundered out into the hallway beyond...
…only to slip as her foot slid across the wet, friction-free floor.
She hit the linioume and felt the cool surface roughly kiss her side but the little gasp that breezed from her mouth was one born of surprise rather than pain.
Thunk
As if on running on automatic, she put her hand to the floor to push herself up.
Thunk
Only, she couldn't complete the motion.
Thunk
Something warm… the temperature of living things greeted her hand, letting her fingers sink into its paper thin depths without the hint of resistance. Annabel froze, the muscles in her eye tightening up as it dawned on her that there was something red around her on the floor, just beyond her peripheral vision.
Thunk
'What's that noise?' Fortunately, she didn't look down, not just yet at least. Instead, she turned to that sound, that repetitive, damp thud which had been echoing up the hallway ever since she'd made her oh so graceful exit from her office as it finally snared her attention.
She looked. Her eyes focused, at first not quite believing the messages they where sending to her brain. Then she screamed.
Thunk
The sound came again, only this time Annabel was able to bear witness to the actions that composed it.
Thunk
The lifeless body had given up screaming as the gory, crimson mess that had once been its face was smashed once again into the floor. Skin and long threads of gummy tissue clung to the sky blue surface, now dotted with red as the hands which clutched two tiny fistfuls of the dead guardian's hair pulled the ruined head back up in preparation to drive it back into the floor yet again. The thing sitting on the corpses back pauses as Annabel's shrill yelp thundered up the hallway, its head swiveling round, hunting down the source of the sound.
The second those twin eyes landed on her, the screams just jammed up in the woman's throat, clogging it like clammy gunk in a drain.
"Oh dear god…" The thing just silently regarded her through its straggly black hair, locking on to her with that gaze. It let the head between it's childish hands drop to the floor where it lay motionless and drew up to its full, tiny height. Still watching the floored Annabel, it stepped over its latest victim and began to amble towards the woman.
"Yumiko?" The woman asked in a voice that had shriveled up to nothing more than a whisper, but the only reply she got was a crack of sharp, high laughter, void of even a hint of sanity.
That was enough to get her moving. Without wasting yet another precious second, she stumbled to feet which slid over and stubbornly refused to grip the slick ground. She bolted down that hallway without looking back, trying to force her eyes not to take in the smears of sticky blood that ran hap-hazardly across the floor in all kinds of crazy patterns or the desecrated lumps that lay motionless in the shadows. For one fleeting second, while her sanity strived to hold together, Annabel wondered if she had fallen asleep in her office and somehow woke up in an abattoir. Even as she flung herself through the exit into the mid-day sun, that psychotic, euphoric giggle, intoxicated with the blood-shed it had wrought, hammered after her. It was only when the woman slammed the door behind her, locking it in with a blood-spotted key did it stop.
For a moment, the only sound to interrupt the chatter of distant birds was her ragged breathing as she stared at the door, dumbly wondering if it would contain the beast as the memories of what she'd just seen came bubbling up.
When they finally surfaced, she started screaming all-over again…
8 8 8
Yumiko tried to forget the sight she'd awoken to. Even though everything from the point where that ball had smacked her in the face to rising her broken glasses to her face was nothing more than a dark, incomprehensible blur, what she saw the moment she'd put her fractured glasses on ten minuets or so after they'd been knocked from her face told her enough. The Voice had got out and Yumi (the name it loved to call itself) had finally broken free.
And it had killed them all to quell her own subconscious contempt and jealousy.
The car stopped and the engine died as if someone had ripped its mechanical heart out. From the back of the car through the dull, gloomy windows, Yumiko looked up at the tiny church they'd come to a stop before.
"Am I going to go to hell now?" She asked quietly, more to herself than anyone else. However, that didn't stop Sister Paxman from turning in her chair and fixing her stony gaze on the girl.
"No, at least not yet, child. You see, God has a purpose for every one of us."
-Fin
A/N- Once again, thank you for taking the time to read this. I know that like most things I write, it's nothing more than a series of digressions and, if they have offered a legitimate reason for Yumiko's… disorder then I apologies. Here in England, manga comes out very slowly indded. Also, before I quit, I must also apologies for the spelling mistakes that may be lurking within the text. I cannot spell and my spell checker hates me for it.