The Hanged Girl Seven

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Helen

 

Image credit: sellingpix

Image credit: sellingpix

The next morning Lisa would only remember fragments of her nightmare. She would think this a blessing, but the shadows of memory and disconnection would tug at her sensibility, suggesting in low whispers that she really should remember. That it was important somehow.

And she would try to shrug that off, with only minimal success, using her pragmatic nature to tell herself it was the combination of many things : the excitement of meeting their new neighbour, the special sort of thrill that ran as an undercurrent through the evening between her and Damien – it had been so long since she’d really felt anything like that – the strange history of the house they met in and also the wavering tension in the air that held its origins in the emergence of her suddenly and unusually bright and inter-active daughter.

But before she woke, before she had the chance to shuffle the dim flickering images into some form of daytime sensibility, she bled into the night, torn from one image to the other.

First it is the three, the three of them, back in the dining room of his lovely home. He is laughing, telling a story, entertaining them, though something is distorting the sound and she can’t quite make out his words. Then she realises what it is. The table is humming, then it rumbles, and out of the centre, breaking through the fine tablecloth with ease, grows a tree trunk, slim but sturdy. And as they regard this with less awe than such an event should evoke, the trunk’s branches sprout. Three branches, one for each of them, reaching out like long limbs to embrace them all.

But it is not so much an embrace as a connection, an insertion, a possession, for into the chest of each the branch burrows itself without pain. She looks at Damien, a bit bewildered, wanting a cue as to how to react. He just looks back at her, calm, but with a faint glimmer in his eyes. Then she looks at Mandy and is alarmed to see not confusion, not fear, not disorientation but something else. Mandy is revelling in this, glowing.  She is a flower claiming its light on the branch of a tree. The first flower of springtime, she is blooming.

‘Very neighbourly of you,” Damien says suddenly, looking at them both in turn, as though he approves utterly.

Mi casa, su casa.

Then the colour drains from her vision and she is outside, in a black and white, shadowy world. It feels cold, there is a breeze against her skin, chilling her. She feels grass beneath her bare feet. And she hears a strange creaking, swinging sound, and looks into the shadows to try to coax more clarity in her sight.

Creak, swish, whoosh, creak, swish, whoosh. Rhythmic and almost calming.

Slowly she sees a tree. Another tree! This time on a hill, and it’s familiar, but she can’t quite place it, and in any case her eyes are drawn to a movement and something so strange. What is that hanging from the sturdiest branch? Is that a childrens’ swing?

But no, the shadows retreat and she can see the figure. It is the figure of a girl, hanging upside down, swinging. She is lifeless, though she has not been hanged in the traditional sense. The noose is not around her neck, it is around her right leg, against which her left is crossed and tied. Her neck has not broken, she has not been robbed of breath. Somehow Lisa knows that death came some other way. The grip of the rope and the tree is strong, and the wind is making her swing back and forth, her dark hair trailing like a ragged scarf in the breeze.

The dark hair completely covers the face so she can’t see it, can’t see who it is, but the hair, the body, is so familiar, she suddenly thinks she knows. And she screams.

Then she is in a darkened room lit by many candles. Damien is there again, a dark figure sitting solemn across from her. A small but raised coffee table separates them. He is shuffling cards. Large cards, too large to be playing cards, then he starts to lay them out, face down, in a strange pattern, but one that is also vaguely familiar.

He turns the first card. She sees an image like the hanged girl on the tree, and he nods. Something distant in her memory is whispering the word ‘tarot’ to her, and beneath this is some knowledge of the basic theory behind the cards. She went to a reader once, she thinks, a long time ago, and they said her marriage would be happy, and they were wrong, wrong, wrong, so how can you trust the cards?

This isn’t comforting though.

‘What’s next?’ Damien asks quietly, more to himself, as he goes to lift the second card and turn it over.

And she’s somewhere else again. After the black and white, then candlelight hues, she’s in a cacophany of colour. An auditorium, or some type of large event room of that nature. But there’s lots of noise, just behind her, and people are wailing and shouting. She’s perfectly still, just beyond the turmoil, looking at the walls, the bright yellow walls. Now splattered, like a Pro Hart painting with something else, something garish and red, something that looks like blood.

Blood.

Then she’s back with Damien in the candlelit room and he turns the next card. On it the picture of a skeleton sweeping the ground ahead almost seems to laugh at them.

‘Of course,’ Damien says, ‘The natural order of things. Death follows a sacrifice.’

She doesn’t know what he means, but she’s gone from him anyway. It’s black and white again, and she’s glad for the vision leached of colour. For everywhere around her are bodies. Many, many bodies, piled on top of each other. It’s like the end of a battle, or something far worse. Thoughts of nazi concentration camps occur, and she thinks, indeed, the quality of light and the terrible vision is like those early newsreels from that time. She half expects that when she turns she will see a camera projector and she will be in some old-time movie theatre.

But when she turns it is still more of the same, and something worse. A dark hooded figure, impossibly tall, impossibly large, is striding towards her, effortlessly wading through the bodies. And as it gets closer, it raises its head and she sees the face and she thinks: I know that face.

And she screams.

And she wakes, sweating profusely, heart racing, but the last images already retreating to places inaccessible to memory. And for long moments she lies in the early morning light, in wonder at what she can recall.  She feels lost, struggling in vain for what she can’t remember, and reliving of what is left only that which she can bear.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Hanged Girl | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Flavour of Spite Seven

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Susan Montgomery

Image credit: Susan Montgomery

She wakes from a dis-orienting dream, and the strange light around her – so unfamiliar, though as she wakes it is hard to fully fathom why – makes her blink rapidly. Her eyelids are butterflies frightened by the wind.

She was dreaming, of course, though it was more a nightmare. But surely that sensation, that strange memory of the ordinary walk home in the twilight hours punctuated by inexplicable fear, a roughness, arms around her, whispered words she could not make out, then awful dizziness drawing her into the dark – surely this was the stuff of nightmares, not reality.

It must have been a dream. She knew that in the moment it occurred, that sense of your life tipping over into something so alien, so horrifying that you are shocked into complete disbelief. That had to be a dream, it couldn’t be anything else. It just couldn’t.

She was a normal girl, from a normal family, living a normal life. Well, normal enough anyway. She had been well brought up and wanted for little. Her life had been well-planned, and while she was a bit lonely, this would surely pass. The keys to the kingdom lay in wait for her, not some shadowy predator in the night. These things did not happen to her. Not to someone like her.

If anyone is frightening it’s me, she thought, with a bravado and belief from her youth. I’m not the one to be afraid!

And the other thoughts, spilling through : I’m so normal it’s terrifying; be afraid of the quiet ones; hassle me and I’ll have your throat. And images arose of her as queen bee in the school yard, tormenting others. She liked to think she’d mellowed since then, but really that was the social order, replicated at her work, where she may be a student of sorts but she already ruled her kitchen. Her kitchen.

So it must have been a nightmare, a stressful, anxiety dream brought on by the grind of work and the sense of dislocation she felt from time to time in this town. Nothing more, nothing more.

By now her inner mantra is aligning with her eyelids as they stop their ragged fluttering and her vision accustoms itself to the light around her.

And the first thought is – this must be a dream within a dream, a nightmare within a nightmare, I’m not awake yet, surely, because this..cannot…be.

She finds her movements limited. Slowly she realises that she is strapped down somehow on a makeshift bed. She is not panicking yet, knowing this as a dream, willing to explore its limits with some dispassion.

The mattress is soft, too yielding, and therefore uncomfortable. She begins to be aware of a pain in her back and an ache in her legs from being immobile for too long. She can lift her head enough to look around her.

It is a room, and at first sight almost normal, if sparse. A dressing table is nearby and something that looks like a wardrobe. Then the catalogue of strangeness starts to build. There are no windows in this room, or at least none she can see from this angle. The only light is from some lamps affixed to the walls, and they look old and unreliable. Yet their light suggests the room itself does not look old – instead it seems cold, almost clinical, as one might expect a hospital room to be. Is she in hospital? Is she dis-oriented and drugged in a hospital, seeing phantoms around her, is that it?

But no, looking further she sees that in the shadows on the farthest wall dark implements seem to hang but she cannot make out their nature or form from this distance. That is not like a hospital.

Then there is the smell. It is not a hospital smell. She can recall what that smells like from a time when she was young and her appendix ruptured and she spent days in such an institution as she healed. She remembers the smell of illness and clinical death mixed with disinfectant. This is not like that. Not exactly…..

It is a dank, steely, lost smell, like the odour of fear and regret. She recalls falling in her youth and badly scratching and tearing her right leg. She still has scars on her thigh from that. And she remembers the smell of blood as it coursed out of her. And somewhere here, now, is that smell also, below the coppery top note, or merging and forming that from something else again.

She realises her breathing is jagged, wretched. And as her senses attune in the preternatural stillness of the room the degree of clarity that arises brings the most terrifying message of all.

She is awake.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Flavour of Spite | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Hanged Girl Six

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Helen

 

Image credit: Andrey Bayda

Image credit: Andrey Bayda

For a reputedly haunted house, number 6 Mercy Lane was very beguiling indeed. The moment Damien opened the door to them Lisa and Mandy were literally flooded with a warm light from the hallway, seemingly reaching out into the early twilight haze like a welcoming embrace.

Damien also proved himself a host with great flourish and a kind of old school elan, bowing to them and bidding that they ‘enter my humble abode, dear friends’ which made Mandy giggle lightly as she crossed the threshold and he nodded, grateful, as Lisa handed him the box of chocolates.

Maddy’s laughter made him pause for a moment and regard her, a warmth sparking in his eyes.

‘So full of life,’ he said approvingly, the looked to Lisa, ‘You must be proud.’

Under normal circumstances Lisa might have been slightly bemused by this description of her often withdrawn and quiet child, but looking back to her in this moment, seeing her young face break into the broadest of smiles, she felt mixed emotions. Pride, yes, indeed, and dismay, but something else also ran underneath it all. Something that almost had a taste, like copper on the tongue, vague and even unpleasant in some indefinable way. But whatever this strange cocktail of conflicting emotions, reality rose above them all and Lisa could only marvel in the moment at how beautiful her daughter suddenly looked, basking as she did in the approval of their new, mysterious friend.

Careful, or she will get a crush, Lisa thought suddenly, and looked back at Damien with slight horror, seeing him meet her daughter’s gaze with amusement.

‘I’m Mandy,’ her daughter said, as though she felt her mother had missed an important social requirement and she was making up for that with charm. Her voice had with an unfamiliar lilt and for Lisa for just a second the world seemed to totally stand still.

It was the briefest and most tenuous of exchanges, but even in those seconds something rose in Lisa, something unfamiliar. It seemed old, something from years before, even something from when she might have been her daughter’s age. That response to who had the attention of the man – or the boy as it would have been in those days. It felt, though she dared not admit this to herself, a little like jealousy.

A thought rippled through her, an unwelcome snake slithering across her heart. Was she so damaged by the wreckage of her marriage she would feel the need to compete with her daughter for the attention of a man?

But then the thought passed, and the world righted itself, once more rotating on its appointed axis.

Of course, how could she be jealous of her daughter, it was absurd. They had only just met Damien and he was far too old to be of real interest to Mandy.

Or if he was of interest to her, a young girl with a crush on an older man, then certainly she was far too young to be of interest to him.

But each of these thoughts also proved ephemeral. They fled from her as quickly as they came, unwelcome guests vanishing into the night.

Damien shut the door and the night behind them and ushered them down the hallway. All the walls were a uniform creamy pale colour, glowing slightly yellow from the numerous lamps along the passageway, but looking far more modern and stark as they entered a dining area illuminated by more contemporary wall lighting.

The room, rather like the gracious host, seemed almost an exercise in irony. Modern light fittings and a large entertainment system to the right of the table clashed with a very elegant, traditional and possibly antique full dining ensemble. It would be like stepping from one century to another just by sitting or raising yourself from the table.

Damien seemed to understand the reaction. Perhaps he always furnished his homes this way and was familiar with the vague disorientation such traditional splendour mixed with the clinical coldness of modern technology could inspire.

‘The dining table and much of the furniture are family heirlooms,’ he explained, ‘Whereas the rest of the renovation work I had done here, and my rather distinct addiction to all things electronic, is more a reflection of me.’

Lisa looked at Damien and smiled, ‘I think it’s charming,’ she said, ‘So individual.’

‘So confused,’ Damien replied and they laughed gently together. In the meantime Mandy was transfixed by the entertainment system. She had gravitated to it immediately and was now regarding it with awe.

‘Wow,’ she said.

Damien was amused. He laughed and looked at the girl again in the way that caused Lisa’s stomach to slightly constrict, turn upon itself. There was nothing prurient in his gaze, nothing that suggested an inappropriate threat.

No, the threat, if one existed, wasn’t coming from him.

Mandy looked back at him. She’d just discovered the expansive and well stocked drawers of DVDs below the huge television screen. ‘You have so many films and tv series!’ she said, in awe.

‘Addict I’m afraid, probably given away by the fact that the system is in the dining room. I confess, I do that thing no-one is ever supposed to do. When I’m alone I watch TV while I eat! ’ he admitted, then he looked at Lisa, ‘It would be less tragic by far if I had company of course. You must come over and watch some with me if any run to your taste.’

A real sliver of pleasure ran through Lisa suddenly. ‘I’d like that,’ she said, ‘Sometime, perhaps. I could bring the popcorn.’

‘It’s a deal,’ he said, ‘Very neighbourly of you.’

Mandy cut across the reverie with a squeal of pure joy. ‘You have Twin Peaks!’ she said, ‘I’ve read so much about it. And mother always said it was wonderful.’

Damien turned to her. ‘It was, especially the first series,’ he agreed.

‘I was too young to see it when it aired’ Mandy continued, and something under the words irritated Lisa, making her feel old by comparison. She had little time to try to analyse why she would react this way as Damien turned immediately back to her and continued, ‘Though it seems two of us here have already seen it, otherwise we could have even watched an episode or two after dinner. Twin Peaks has a sensibility that fits quiet well with how our street, and this house in particular, are viewed by the community.’

‘So true,’ Lisa agreed.

‘I’d like to see it!’ Mandy half-whined, and Damien turned to her as Lisa shook her head at the teenager antics she was displaying. Then she saw something else in Mandy. It wasn’t her usual morose and frankly self-pitying stance. This was something else. She stood with her head half bowed, looking up at Damien through lashes made too long by too much mascara, her legs half bent with one foot awkwardly ahead of the other balancing as her hips slightly swayed. It wasn’t petulance. It was coy.

‘Well, you are welcome to come over and just watch them at your leisure,’ he offered, ‘I can give you a key if you like.’

‘I don’t really think we should presume on your hospitality that much!’ Lisa said sharply,  part alarmed that a grown man was offering this to her teenage daughter, and part something else she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – quite name.

‘It’s fine if it is alright with your mother,’ Damien continued, still looking at the delighted girl before him, “I meant you could have the key as I am often not here, my work takes me away frequently, so you would have the place to yourself, but only during the day of course. If I am here I’ll ask you to choose another time. I am sometimes work here, and when I do I need peace and quiet. But otherwise, either of you are welcome to use these facilities any time you choose. Mi casa, su casa.”

And with this, he turned back and looked intensely at Lisa, relaying a much deeper message than just the offer. A message that said the invitation is for both, not just a girl, and she will be safe, and with a myriad of other implications beneath it that made Lisa feel suddenly afraid she had been offensive. Damien had been nothing but an excellent host and a friendly neighbour. To even imply anything less wholesome was insulting at the least.

‘That’s very kind,’ she said quickly, ‘Perhaps we might take you up on it but overall, it would be far more enjoyable to do this together with you, when it suits everyone’s dairies.’

‘As you wish,’ he agreed, amiably. ‘I confess, for a moment part of me thought having the place habituated a bit more than I can offer it might chase away the ghosts they say are here.’

And he laughed half with them and half to himself at this thought.

‘Unless, of course, they want company,’ he finished, with a faint trace of irony, ‘In which case it won’t work at all.’

The storm seemed to have passed as quickly as it had come. He smiled and nodded again then asked them to take seats at the table while he brought food in from his kitchen. Lisa felt her equilibrium settle as she sat at the beautiful table and lightly touched the elegant cutlery before her. She looked up at her daughter, finally remembering she was there too, and for a moment was chilled. For just before her daughter saw her gaze and smiled, re-arranging her heavy, almost lush features into something warm, she held a very, very different expression. It was chilled, and seemed older than her years, and it was dark.

It looked, for just a second, like hate.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Hanged Girl | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Flavour of Spite – Six

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Amy Johansson

Image credit: Amy Johansson

I am a creature of meticulous research. While it would be wonderful to woo my love in the conventional sense and gradually bring her to our home to be through the more normal rites of romantic passage, I am realistic enough to know that leaves a good deal to chance. And I am not a man who is open to risk where it can be avoided.

But to capture a butterfly has its own risks and challenges. And there is where my particular talents and eye for detail will serve me well.

Every human being has routines even if they delude themselves to think they are too free-spirited to be above that. None of us can truly escape our essential natures or our habits. Early philosophers would tell you freedom is only achieved through breaking out of oneself and one’s desires, but I dispute this. It is not even possible, at best we follow our own will, as Kant would have it, and we pretty much determine what is right and wrong from that. Overlay that with our upbringing and our society and the whole concept of freedom becomes entirely relative. But for all that may be elastic across groups of people, it is not so flexible within any given person. We all are what we are and nothing more or less.

And so my lovely Violet has her patterns. From careful, hidden study over weeks I have ascertained her work schedule. I also know that one two evenings a week after work she sometimes goes to classes to further her culinary skill further. It is clear she does not wish to be only a pastry chef, but something much more cosmopolitan. On those days she occasionally also joins fellow classmates for a late coffee or nightcap afterwards. They are therefore not good days to plan our first real, and decisive, assignation, though happily her attendance at class and these after class coffees are both quite irregular. In this way she would not be missed for some time, if at all, if she failed to continue to attend.

Weekends she often goes away. I was worried this could be to some establish rendezvous with a man, or possibly with family. In either case it would have meant a very high risk of her being seen as missing very quickly and by those with more than a rudimentary, casual friendship interest in her. Agreeably, having paid for very discreet private detective research, I learned she is always on her own on these travels– her family, what there is of it, live in another town and she has no boyfriend or even closer group of friends here as yet. It seems she moved here only relatively recently, for her career development, and has yet to really establish herself, find roots in the city.

Well, she shall find that with me.

But as to her weekend visits, it seems it is solitary journeys as I said. I flatter myself she is lonely precisely for the same reason I am – that we are not yet together, and that part of her soul knows she is simply waiting for that right connection to make itself known and give the true and destined shape to her life.

But still, it may be that my beloved has some inherent wanderlust in her that may prove tiresome and difficult in our early time together. I shall need to be empathic with what will feel, to her, like a real curtailment of her freedom. In time she will see the vistas and travels we will take together – journeys into the mind the heart and the soul – have so much more to offer, so much more flavour. But at first I can see, she may rebel a bit, and I should be a kind, if stern host, until she realises her mistake.

Otherwise, her other weekday evenings she spends alone in a small flat not far from her work. I am not sure if she chose such a humble abode due to its work proximity or due to available funds, or both. Either way, it is helpfully a nondescript unit in a small, almost deserted block and the streets are not well-lit, and the roads are usually empty also. I wonder how she doesn’t feel afraid to live there – my brave girl! But in any case, she shall soon be far safer, ensconced with me.

I do not wish to cause her alarm. I have the right dosage of a sedative to quickly apply to her one evening soon, as she turns the corner into her darkened home street. There is a convenient set of bushes at the corner where I can await our meeting, and I have checked this vantage point for its visibility by others and been satisfied it provides the requisite cover. She will barely know a moment’s fear before the drug soothes her. I do not wish to cause her distress.

Not yet at least, not in circumstances where it provides no pay off, no purchase in her soul for her ultimate refinement and betterment. That shall come later under controlled and careful conditions.

But at first I do not want to see fear in her lovely eyes, oh no! Just an understanding, a brief acknowledgement, a recognition that it is me, and then surrender.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Flavour of Spite | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Hanged Girl – Five

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Dean Drobot

Image credit: Dean Drobot

Lisa was concerned. Mandy didn’t seem to want to talk about school. And not wanting to talk about something – anything really – was not like Mandy. She’d had problems at school before, in other locations and at other ages. There seemed to be phases where schoolchildren had spurts of viciousness, and the internal politics of whose group you were in – or not in – were more labyrinthine than Machiavelli at times. But before tis Mandy would wax lyrical about it all. She was a contemplative girl who liked to share her thoughts.

But she wasn’t sharing now.

Any attempt to get her to talk about her experiences so far were greeted with the monosyllabic responses Lisa had heard other parents experience from their teenage children, but it was foreign territory in this home. Still, a query of how the day had gone, or what the other students were like, or her teachers, elicited no more than an ‘okay’ or an ‘aright’, with the occasional extra generosity of a well thought out ‘I suppose’ or ‘I guess’ a few seconds later.

To Lisa this bought a sense of foreboding. Generally Mandy fitted in with he peers. She did ride the waves of schoolyard allegiances a bit, and she was never one of the popular ‘It crowd’ – being a bit too clever and bookish for that group and a little too un-coordinated with sport – but she was generally well liked overall. Lisa suspected she was experiencing something different here, and she worried about her friend’s warning about how people responded to the street hey lived in and its sad, grisly history. Could that shadow have fallen upon her so undeserving daughter?

The only thing that seemed to rouse her from her general distance was the prospect of their dinner invitation at their neighbour’s house. If the street they lived in was the cause of problems for her at school it didn’t lessen her curiosity and excitement at the prospect of meeting the new neighbour. Like Lisa, it seemed the very existence of an inhabitant at the house had given the whole thing an extra gloss of excitement. What sort of man would live there in defiance of its history?

“He seems a very balanced man,’ Lisa told Mandy the evening after she had met him at the bookstore. Then when he quickly followed through with the formal dinner invitation, via a lovely handwritten and embossed card he left in their mailbox a day later, ‘and very polite’ was added to the initial assessment.

‘Did he talk about the history of his place?” Mandy asked, with the first traces of real life and interest in her eyes that Lisa had seen for days.

‘Not really, except to say that he considers the past is part of the past,’ she replied and Mandy looked slightly disappointed but not enough to dampen her excitement at their invitation.

It struck Lis suddenly, as she saw her daughter fuss over her dress and makeup for the evening, that Mandy hadn’t yet really talked much about boys, and the absence of her father from her life now was probably another anchor to the male gender gone for her. It might be the prospect of a dinner with a man now held a kind of frisson for her that straddled both her slowly emerging womanhood and her loss of being daddy’s girl. Not that daddy was around enough to really give her that sense in the first place though, Lisa considered darkly.

“ I got a box of chocolates to take with us” Lisa said, hovering near the fridge to take the offering out..

‘Not wine?” Mandy asked, disappointed.

“You are a bit young to be drinking wine on a school night, “ Lisa remarked, “And wanted you to be part of whatever we brought to share.’

‘Genna drinks wine every evening with her family,’ Mandy commented, reflecting on her best friend from her last school. Genna was a nice girl, but rather sophisticated with very ‘liberal’ parents. Lisa wasn’t really sure she entirely approved, but the bond of the girls had been genuine and strong. She knew that Mandy missed Genna a great deal, and no amount of Skyping made up for real face to face contact.

‘Nevertheless,’ Lisa responded, ‘Chocolates will do. We don’t really know our neighbour yet, so let’s take it a step at a time.’

If Mandy was frustrated it passed quickly. She smiled and nodded and fussed some more with her mascara, a girl excited for the evening ahead.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Hanged Girl | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Flavour of Spite – Five

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Helen

 

Image credit: Bondarenko

Image credit: Bondarenko

The readiness is all.

I have a weakness here, I have to admit. My conditioning has had this impact, this effect, where my mind finds it hard to settle for long enough to truly plan and achieve. This has not been a problem in my day-to-day life, as Imogen – may her soul rot in perpetual filth – did at least leave me well provided for on her death. I have not needed to work, not needed to join the dismal parade of office workers or factory ghouls, to put food (and indeed very fine food indeed) on my table.

But this does little to assuage the feeling of dislocation I can experience when trying to plan something properly. Imogen’s conditioning did not seem to affect her this way, perhaps it did not take as well, or the practitioners and handlers were less (or possibly more) skilled than she. Indeed Imogen always seemed frighteningly lucid, and most so when she was conditioning me. And teaching me, her less than stellar pupil, the ropes of the game.

So I am like some child with ADD more often than not. Food settles me, cooking, and contemplating a future with dear Francine. I shall call her Violet, I decide, as a tribute to the flowers so often on display at the patisserie. She looks like a Violet, a perfect royal flower, a blood line pure as her form displays, my perfect Aryan princess.

And see, I jump from discussing my disability (of sorts) immediately to other thoughts of her. And this is not helpful when you are planning the perfect abode for your love. I must rely on others – salepersons and trades-people and for my specifications they must be totally discrete and understanding. It would be far better if I could coordinate the interior design completely on my own, buying items and elements from wide-ranging places, never leaving a trail. But I cannot, it would never be finished, and I yearn to bring my dear heart home.

And besides, people never go looking for the darkness, no matter how obvious the trail. Not really, otherwise they would have found Imogen years ago. I’d have lived the remainder of my young life in an institution somewhere, and even I can see I am better off now where I am. But my experience proves a larger truth. The world is utterly indifferent, and to think otherwise is just a happy delusion.

Still I take no real chances and rely on the discretion that only true wealth can secure, and I bark instructions and requirements as rapidly as possible, holding the entire vision complete for as long as my fractured mind can achieve. I am quite proud, ultimately, of how I manage this. It is no small thing for me.

But when you would house the very best, you must have the very best. And this is simple when it comes to bedclothes and household furniture and mirrors and finery. I flatter myself I know her taste. By day in the kitchen, of course, she wears no jewellery, but I’ve followed her at night from time to time and seen the simple gold items she prefers when she is out with her frivolous friends. She has exquisite taste no ostentation at all and she shines in this, of course, in comparison to her garish companions. So I build her abode with a similar aesthetic.

But for some of my other needs perfection is harder to come by, more expensive. Thankfully there is much left over in this ancient house from aunt Imogen, and for the most part it is still functional. The tried and tested tools may be the best.

Still, implements of exquisite learning should be private, they should not be shared. I was quite specific about this. She would not be touched by some of the crude implements Imogen reserved for me. That would be an abomination. The finest steel, the newest medical equipment, the best lighting: these were all essential and took planning and took money and took the silence of those from the dark.

It was exhausting, but slowly it grew and developed and I saw the perfect home materialise before me as though someone had skilfully read my mind and recreated it whole. Downstairs, the place of learning and fitful sleep. Upstairs, the best kitchen money could ever buy. A prohibitively expensive security system finished it off, turning this old home into a modern mecca for development and love. Even my mind found solace in that, and the chance to contemplate with more calm and time than normal. It felt, finally, like my home, not hers, not Imogen’s.

Or our home, dear Violet, my blessed, perfect bride to be.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Flavour of Spite | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Hanged Girl – Four

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: wavebreakmedia

Image credit: wavebreakmedia

‘I like your raven hair,’ the blonde girl said to Mandy, her voice very sweet but with the threat of something else beneath it.

They were in the school cafeteria, and it was the beginning of Mandy’s second week at school. The week before most of the others had given her a wide berth, and following some failed attempts to join in conversations in class breaks, she’d retreated into a corner of the cafeteria with a book to eat her lunch and read.

But now one of the more popular girls, the blonde and rather precise Jasmine, was standing before her, holding her lunch tray in front of her as though deciding whether to place it at the table and join Mandy. Behind her a couple of less stellar looking girls lingered, waiting to take the cue from their more glamorous leader.

Mandy looked up at her, wary but hopeful.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply and waited. She’d noticed Jasmine on day one, of course. You always notice the popular ones, the ones with the boys preening around them, the one that others followed. Why did every school have one, and why were they always blonde? Were they cloned and farmed out in equal measure as some sort of social experiment, like the Stepford Wives, but at school? Perhaps they were sent to teach everyone a valuable early lesson – there would always be those above you, heights you could not scale dreams you could not reach. Aim lower and avoid disappointment.

‘Suits a witch,’ Jasmine continued and the gormless girls behind her giggled in unison.

‘I’m not a witch,’ Mandy said, thinking back to her goth phase about a year ago when she would have been flattered by the association. Now it just felt dangerous and she wasn’t sure why.

Jasmine snorted mildly. ‘Pity,’ she said, ‘Would have made you more interesting. But nothing interesting every happens around here.’

And with that she turned on her heel and started to stalk away, her followers following, of course. Leaving Mandy alone again. She watched them walk to a table filled with more of the popular ones, and saw how even they moved to give Jasmine space, while her followers did their best to find room to sit. Social hierarchy played out before her eyes. Her father would have been able to analyse and dissect this and in a way that was amusing and comforting all at once. He’d have given her the weaponry of understanding and the timing for the perfectly applied retort or response. But he was gone. He didn’t love them anymore, and that was lost to her.

A cold, sharp pain flooded through her and she gasped slightly, and at that moment Jasmine eyed her keenly and then nodded to herself and said something to the throng, who all turned and gazed at her, smirking.

It wasn’t nice, whatever she said. And their gaze was too much. Mandy collected her book and bag, leaving her half eaten lunch and moved to fee the cafeteria. To do so she had to pass them, there was no other way out. She remembered her father talking of Dante’s dictum that the only way out was through. But that was in hell. Still, the allegory applied really, school being one of the lower circles no doubt.

As she passed them there was still laughter and she wondered how she would be able to be in class with any of them later. It was wrong to flee, it was weak, but she felt so insubstantial these days. Not even a paper ache girl – too translucent, you could see right through her, just as this nasty clique could right now. All her confidence had fled when her father left them. The world she had known proved a chimera and she was unsure of everything ever since. This new start hr mother promised was just a re-run of the past. You can escape a town, but how do you escape yourself?

‘Wonder what she’d look like hanging from a tree?’ one of the boys asked within earshot. He somehow made it sound sickly sexual, like it was a scene from some pornography running in his feral little mind. She refused to look round to give him any satisfaction.

‘She’s already bloodless by the looks of things.’ That was Jasmine, her sweet voice like a viper.

Mandy didn’t understand it and didn’t care to; Jasmine’s observation was just the last thing she heard as she gained her temporary freedom by walking out to the hallway. For a moment she stopped there, breathing heavy, eyes threatening to spill tears.

No, don’t cry, she thought, there have been enough tears, too many, too many.

School was going to be terrible, she could tell. She could just tell.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Hanged Girl | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Flavour of Spite – Four

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Helen

 

Image credit: S_Photo

Image credit: S_Photo

A terrible night needs to be assuaged by pleasure. And now for me the greatest pleasure was a visit to my favourite patisserie. No longer just for the wonderful food, of which there was aplenty, but also in the hope of snatching a glimpse of her, the perfect one, the chef in training, the girl in the calico apron.

This morning I selected a short black coffee and a chocolate croissant. I normally find the latter a bit too obvious, a bit clichéd, but chocolate has its endorphins and it is a comfort food and I felt in need of comfort. This, in itself, is a type of trigger, but one that is less powerful because I am aware. I have learned to control it rather than have it control me. But in those dark days so often after my conditioning Imogen would give me a hot chocolate to drink, or after the very worst of trials, she would open the big carved box in which she held the most sacred chocolate treats and sweets.

We become addicted to sugar and chocolate in many ways, and for me it was through pain and its cessation. A Pavlovian dog, I even now seek that comfort, but it does not re-trigger the pain and the memories as it once did. For now it is just soothing, as knowledge and the mastery of it is soothing.

One day she will know. I think she will understand this, grasp this more quickly than I did, partly because she is older than I was then, and partly because she knows food. She knows food so well, given the artistry of her work.

I took a deep bite of the croissant and let the chocolate melt into my mouth. They had heated it slightly for effect – not enough to wilt the pastry, but just enough to make the inside chocolate a running stream of joy. It was not fresh from the oven, for I had arrived to see a line of the croissants in the counter display and had seen the serving girl select one for me. So it had been prepared a second time, and briefly, to restore its original just baked glory. It was a small, and quite open, deception, and so one that could be tolerated and indulged.

But one day she will cook only for me and I shall have her bounty fresh.

I licked my fleshy lips after each bite to secure every last drop and sipped at my coffee. There was no sight of her, yet I could sense her, feel her presence, in the shimmering morning light, in the bustle of the serving counter, in the depth of the flavours.

My serving girl for the day, much larger and more gauche, came up to take my plate as I finished. I was not yet ready to give up my quest, and ordered a second coffee.

‘Anything with that?” she asked, and was clearly bored. I refrained from replying with disdain, for I wanted her to take a message for me.

‘Compliments to the chef,’ I said, ‘Please pass them on, but no, nothing more. To have any more would be to spoil the perfection of the work.’

The girl frowned at me, her freckled skin seeming to fold into itself as she processed what I had said. Perhaps she is slow, I thought, a bit stupid. She seemed to consider something, then nodded and said, ‘I’ll let her know.’

‘Her?” I asked innocently, but I had known already, I had been sure I had eaten her food.

‘Yes, why?’

‘No reason, just a cliché I suppose, one expects a chef to be a man.’

‘Does one?’ she asked, stressing the last word with a kind of derision, stupid, uncultured girl that she was. It is pathetic these days how few people really know proper English. But then she seemed to think better of insulting a customer, and offered, ‘Francine is a chef in training, working for our head chef Michael. But she makes these pastries.’

Francine? The name would never do. It was too manly, too unrefined, for my precious girl. We would have to see to that, but re-birthing her with a new name would be appropriate, in any case.

‘Well, please pass on my compliments to…Francine.’ I said and she nodded and withdrew.

I watched her go to the counter, ring up my order, and then disappear into the kitchen area for a moment. I waited with bated breath. Would the foolish, ugly girl actually pass on the message, or was this just for show? But then it seemed perhaps even those not blessed with looks might have other nobler aspects to recommend them, for she was good to her word. Moments later Francine emerged for a brief moment with her, looking out to those of us in the café area.

The girl pointed me out and Francine followed the line of her direction and met my gaze, fully, and knowingly, for the first time. Sheer joy coursed through my system, but I was measured in my response. She smiled demurely and nodded, with perfect, precise happiness and humility mixed, mouthing ‘thank you’ towards me, and I simply nodded and smiled warmly in response.

Then she was gone, a faun lost to the forest of the night, a brief moment of transcendent, incandescent beauty, then but a memory – sweet, sweet memory – more precious and more rich than the flavour of chocolate could ever be.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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The Hanged Girl – Three

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Sunny Forest

Image credit: Sunny Forest

‘Sheesh!’ Susan exclaimed ,almost spilling her coffee, ‘I didn’t realise you’d move into that street, and so close to that house!’

It was Saturday morning, the first weekend after her first week on the new job, and Lisa finally had a chance to catch up with her friend who had moved to this country town following University in Sydney and who had extolled its virtues to her as an ‘oasis of calm after the drama of the past few years for you’. The drama of course meaning the divorce, primarily, but also the way the emotions laid to waste her once flourishing career as a bureaucrat. She had been on the rise as a manager with senior executive roles in close sight. Now she was a salesperson at a bookstore.

Life never takes you where you expect, she thought, and now I’m here. I’m here too.

Lisa had always wondered why Susan came here, and even more why she remained. She was more a city girl, surely, more fire in her belly than this? But to hear Susan tell it there were many more interesting stories in a country town like this, almost large enough to be a small city. Just enough local intrigue and incestuous closeness to make for scandal and just enough breadth and size to make even local politics have some flavour.

Susan had originally come here to cut her journalist teeth in a less competitive market and then she’d just stayed. She’d tell you it was for the town itself, but Lisa had never been sure. Still, when she suggested it as a new start, albeit one that Lisa thought of as transitional only, it had made some sense. Lisa’s funds were not great, and she did need to get away from Sydney. All in all it had seemed a sensible move for a year, maybe two, and Susan was here. Her best friend really, and following the divorce it seemed she had far fewer of those than she had thought.

‘Well, it was the best value. Far bigger than the other places and in better condition,’ Lisa explained.

‘Because no-one will live in that street?’ Susan laughed.

‘It is fairly empty from what I can tell,’ Lisa agreed, ‘But we do have a new neighbour it seems, just moved in also. To that house.’

‘Sheesh” Susan said again, “Wonders will never cease!”

‘So tell me, ‘Lisa demanded, half friendly and half frustrated, ‘What is it about that house and that street? Given you didn’t give me a warning or anything and the realtor said all sorts of things about death at No 6 and a girl as part of her disclosure but kept saying she didn’t know the details. I gathered it was rather horrible and that the town still holds views about it, making it infamous, but I’m short on the facts really.’

‘I call bullshit on your realtor,’ Susan said, “Everyone round here knows about the Hanged Girl. Saddest, strangest thing the town has seen, at least as long as most living memories tell it. Happened over twenty years ago, but the memories in the town remain fresh. Young girl living with her uncle. Her mother had committed suicide for reasons unknown and the girl had come her to live with her mother’s brother. Apparently he was really wild and strange, which makes you wonder about the whole family really, and genetic madness.  But of course the myth of the town is more florid than that! Lots of talk they were into dark things, rituals and the like, all that rubbish. But something odd was going on there, though something far more seamy and prosaic I’d bet. One day the uncle just disappeared and up on the tree at the back of the yard, up that hill, the girl was found hanging.’

‘She was hanged?’

‘Not exactly, she was hanging upside down, with her throat cut, though no blood to be seen, like she’d been killed and drained and then hung. But in the strangest way. Her arms were tied behind her back, and one of her legs was sort of crossed against the other, held fast by rope. Someone said it was like a tarot card, one called The Hanged Man. They said that meant sacrifice, so you can just imagine what impact that had. Town went wild. Some said the uncle killed her then left town, others said he was dead also, they just hadn’t found the body. Some even said the devil came and literally took him away.’

‘Wow,’ said Lisa, ‘People can be so imaginative.’

‘Small town,’ Susan agreed, ‘In any case, that kind of crime, with no reasonable explanation of guilt party to be sure of, caused a local myth to arise. They say the house is haunted by her, and up at the tree too. No-one has lived there since.’

‘Till now,’ Lisa commented.

‘Till now,’ Susan repeated, in deep tones that meant to be theatrical and ultimately funny. Both women laughed.

‘Glad to know there will be another sensible person in the street then,’ Lisa said, thinking of Damien and his visit to her shop.

‘Yes but be careful,’ Susan replied, sobering somewhat and looking down into her coffee.

‘You don’t seriously think the place is haunted?’ Lisa asked, shocked by this turn in her friend’s nature.

‘No, no! of course not. It’s not that. It’s…small town mentality. This place might be close to a city in size these days, but its culture is still very..provincial.. shall we say? People living in that street…I think others might be suspicious of you. I wish you’d said where you were looking there, I’d have warned you.’

‘If you don’t know a question exists, you don’t ask. But do you really think people will treat us badly?” Lisa asked, horrified.

‘Perhaps. Probably not you, though some might speculate whether you are some witch or something I suppose. It’s more Mandy I’m concerned for. You can recall what the later years of school were like, how horrible adolescent girls can be to each other?”

Lisa remembered. She and Susan had flown reasonably under the radar at school and missed the worst of the bullying, but they’d witnessed it. Anyone a bit different was always a target. And Mandy was already a bit different, a bit out of sorts since the divorce. What would her schoolmates make of that from a girl who lived so close to the Hanged Girl’s place?

‘Jesus,’ Lisa muttered, half under her breath and then continued, ‘It might already have started actually. She started school mid-week and she said the others were a bit strange, a bit hostile. I put it down to being the new girl, nothing more.’

Susan reached out and put her handover her friend’s hand, feeling guilty for raising the shadow in the first place.

‘Hopefully that’s all it is,’ she said, ‘After all, all the rest of the myth, it’s just ridiculous.’

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Hanged Girl | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Flavour of Spite – Three

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Helen

 

 

 

Image credit: lassedesignen

Image credit: lassedesignen

I had the nightmare again. I woke shaking around 3am, the witching hour, the hour when most people suicide, according to some article I read many years before. It is the hour when the temperature is coldest, and so your body is chilled. And when your body is chilled, so is your soul, or so it seems.

Was there a trigger for this memory, this terror? Did something occur during the day before? Often it is this. Imogen instilled so many silent commands, so many memory and sense triggers, in her cold steel room with me, that I can be completely unaware I have seen or heard or smelled one and within hours I am soaked in terror, befuddled. Or if I am unfortunate enough to be asleep I will be drawn into the nightmare realm, a hapless child led by the hand by the cruellest protector. The one who does not protect at all.

I understand the mechanics and the utility of these triggers and their place in control and order, though now without an anchor they are more debilitating than constructive I find. Still, I have learned both first hand through Imogen, and later through my own reading, of the heritage of our family and of the strange experiments of Dr Green in America all those years ago. But knowledge is no shield against the force of the trigger and the blistering impact on the fragile, fractured soul.

I rose from my bed and staggered to my fridge, to take out a piece of my rapidly dwindling store of special meat meant to satiate the hunger of fear. I had so little left, so little left from this..cow…and I wondered what I could do for the nightmares when this was finally done.

As the microwave started to defrost the slice of meat, I allowed myself to cautiously re-live the nightmare, to leech it of some of its strength through wakeful examination.

A flickering, neon light above my head as I open eyes, laid out on something cold and hard. I’m blinking, so many times, my eyes watering, trying to adjust to the inconsistent glow. I am aware I am tied down and cannot move. Something cold is clamped across my forehead, and I am distantly realising something and praying to whatever god might hear my cries that I don’t want the shock, not the electricity, not the lightening pain, not this time, please, not this time.

Though I know there are worse things than the electricity.

I have been good, haven’t I? Done all that was asked of me, learned my lessons, progressed? I do not need a re-adjustment. I do not need a re-alignment. I open my mouth to say this to the shadowy figure in clinical white beside me. Perhaps they do not understand, they are overly keen to progress me and are over-reaching this time? Perhaps they can be made to understand and release me? I can’t see them, only the white of their surgical robes. I can’t see the face to know if it is her, or another. She sometimes enlists the help of others. I never know who they are. Perhaps this one might help me, after all?

But my mouth is stuffing dried and cracked, my tongue a heavy and unresponsive slimy muscle. If I keep my mouth open too long I might swallow this useless muscle, and choke to death. There is no use for it, no words to say. Whatever will happen, will happen.

I hear a voice, the voice, that voice, her voice. The very worst voice of all, mistress physician. The tone is soothing but the words are not. It is time for something to be implanted in me, some knowledge, some memory, some trigger for response. I’m being told this is necessary for my development and it must hold fast. I know what that means. The best truths hold tightest and last longest when delivered through trauma, through pain.

Dr Green’s experiments were conclusive on that point. Even his lesser and earlier successes came through pain. There is no reason to argue.

My hand is being raised and I become dimly aware, with the greatest horror of all, about the source of the pain to come. It is my most profound fear of all, the thought of torture that I cannot even look in its face or contemplate in thought. It’s the one I’d beg not to endure, so it is the one she would choose. Of course.

I must have told her this once, I must have confessed in a bubble of false and deluded safety. Never give away your secrets, no matter how much you yearn to tell. They will always be used against you. Always.

Something sharp, under a finger nail, seeking purchase. Its stabbing sensation goes through me, a sword through my middle, up to my heart. I can imagine the red ripping I cannot raise my head to see (even if I wanted to, which I do not). I can sense before it comes the pain, the tendrils of skin seeking to hold the nail to the bed, even as it is torn away. I can feel the agony before it occurs, and as it comes, as it tears through me, one finger at a time..one, two..and then three this time..two on one hand and one on the other…words and images imprint on my mind.

I will not forget, I will not forget, and tomorrow I will be bandaged and kept from school. Days later school counsellors at school will shake their heads on my return and write learned theses on my self-destructive nature. I will not speak, I will not contradict. I see this image, this image always – a mouth, with a finger across it and the message …sshhh…do not speak..and it will illuminate my developing mind.

But for now there is only the pain, the ripping, wetness of it all, the soul searing loss. And through the shock of memory I awake, mercifully this time, from a dream, my fingernails intact, and I go to feed.

To feed on the flavour of inflicted pain, of muscle and flesh cut and torn, the flavour of death.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Flavour of Spite | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments