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That’s where they took us as I told the police. This dank, broken place. Once it was a warehouse, one of them said, but it had been abandoned for years.

It was a good place, he said, a good place for fun and games.

I didn’t like it. None of us did. There’s fun, and then there’s something else. There…there was a place of something else.

I made new friends there. As kids you do, don’t you? You make friends pretty easily? And particularly when you are afraid.

We didn’t know better. We didn’t know how much it might hurt to have made friends there. We didn’t know what loss was, not till then.

There’s blood dried there. It’s all that’s left of some of my friends. That was the point, I understand now, and it could just as easily have been me. But one of them, the oldest man, liked my blonde hair. So that’s it. The only real thing that differentiated me, that meant I still live to remember, while my brown haired friends didn’t.

But they don’t believe me, the police. They say all this stuff is just imagined. That I got it off the internet. They call it ‘satanic panic’.

But I didn’t mention Satan. The police did. For me, this place is just the place of death. If Satan is there he wasn’t showing himself. It was just them, just them.

And it was just there.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016