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At age five, he had endured more trauma than most adults.
He looked over at the painting resting against the wall, and noticed the dark, twisted faces staring back up at him. Maybe it was because he was by himself now, but the pained grimaces in the dim light made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
She was so filled with joy and relief that she forgot all about that sound she may or may not have heard.
“My dog ran away,” Derrick informed her. Lisa immediately ended her agenda and focused on this new tidbit of information. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that? How long ago did that happen?” “He ran away yesterday morning. Me and my daddy walked around the entire neighborhood and couldn’t find him.” “That makes me sad. What is his name?” “Clark.” “Well, I sure do hope Clark comes home, Derrick. I’m sure your mommy and daddy will do everything they can to find him.” “He’s dead.” This took Lisa by surprise, and she thought carefully about how to proceed. “What makes you think that? He may just have run
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oh shit its about to pop off
“Did you see her, Daddy?” Derrick said with concern. “She comes from the closet.”
oh hell naw
“She said you’re lucky you didn’t catch her there, because she would’ve killed you and threw your body in the river like she did with that boy from our neighborhood,” he calmly explained.
OH FUCK OK
He could barely tell what it was in the dark, but it looked like an entrance to a crawl space.
fuck no
He waited for a reply that never came. Instead, he heard sounds like someone was tiptoeing around on the landing above him. The sounds got louder as they grew closer—the floorboards
“Daisy? Is that you?” he whispered. There was no sound, but the silence was deafening as he waited with anticipation for a response. “Yes,” a high-pitched female voice quietly whispered back from behind the drywall.
“A surprise, Derrick,” she replied, her high-pitched voice lowering in tone as she said his name. And then, in a raspy, bass-filled voice he had never heard come out of her, she said with a laugh, “I have a surprise for you.”
He listened to her shuffle back across the threshold of their homes behind the drywall, and he closed the door and ran to his bed. He pulled the covers up to his neck, stared at the ceiling, and kept quietly repeating to himself out loud, “Daisy is my friend.”
After attempting to explain away the obvious for days now, Bryan was back to his original conclusion that the cause of all this chaos resided next door to his family. Maren had kidnapped his dog. Maren had been inside his home. Maren was targeting his six-year-old son.
“The disease is a coverup for what she truly is.” “And what’s that?” Ron’s whole body tensed as he leaned forward in his chair. He stared intensely into Bryan’s eyes and said with reverence, “Absolute evil.”
Mommy, are you coming upstairs?” Derrick hollered down. “Daisy is up here with me and says that she’s ready to meet you!”
Ellie immediately realized that there were few sounds she’d ever heard as nauseating at that of her own bones breaking.
None of this bothered Derrick, as he continued to get more and more excited as he closed the distance between them. In fact, this was the kind of clownish appearance to which a child could be drawn. When studied closely by Barb, however, Daisy’s entire presence invoked abject horror at its grotesqueness.
Whoever was on the other side of the door seemed to enjoy toying with Ellie. Just as Ellie was about to scream for the madwoman to reveal herself, the doorknob was released and the heavy, wooden door slowly swung open. The hinges creaked as the open doorway revealed nothing but a black abyss.
Derrick stood in his bedroom facing her, but a thin, pale figure stood directly behind him. Ellie could only make out dark black circles where its eyes should be, and an abnormally long mouth stretched out into a grotesque grin across its skeletal face.
The last fleeting moment of consciousness was spent trying to decide if the thing clinging to her back was breathing or hissing.
Bryan was creeped out by the fixed stare in his milky, dead eyes. He found himself staring at the deep hole in Ron’s head trying to catch a glimpse of human anatomy normally only seen in textbooks. How could there be so much blood in one body?
There were burns, bruises, lacerations, blisters, and what looked like bite marks scattered across her body like some ghastly form of corporal art.
“Well what in the hell is that?” “Anathema,” Ellie whispered proudly, still unable to produce coherent words without hardship.
What she saw could not be real. This was not how life was supposed to work. Parents weren’t meant to see their children this way. She stood frozen as she stared at Derrick’s limp, lifeless body twisted on the ground, broken by the impact of a steep fall.
As he watched his friend’s blood snake toward the corners of her grinning mouth, he allowed his wrath to have its just vengeance.
She remembered the neighborhood boy they said drowned before the Stocktons had moved in. She remembered Derrick telling them that Daisy was responsible for that boy’s death. She remembered thinking her poor son was making it all up.
Derrick who is that behind you!?” Bryan screamed in an attempt to get his son to move, but Derrick didn’t budge.
Bryan didn’t think his heart could break any more than it already had, but when he looked into his son’s eyes, he saw that he was a child no more.
Gone was the boyish wonder that Derrick had maintained and nurtured throughout his short life, even in the most difficult of times. There was a dark, vengeful gaze that seemed to have possessed his little boy. Bryan recognized it as his own.
Derrick scurried back across the water-covered floor until he hit the wall. He started to cry and hyperventilate as he realized how he had been deceived by the demon all along. He curled up into a ball and wanted nothing but to have the chance to do it all over again. He thought of everything that he did wrong and began to blame himself. He was not a knight. He was a scared, stupid little boy.
“I don’t have much time,” Ellie struggled to say, “so I need you to…listen carefully.” Derrick nodded his head. “I love you…your daddy loves you, but…this world is full of bad, scary things…and…sometimes, you might not see…any light. That just means it’s your turn…to be the light.”
“The thing about absolutes is that they have no motive. Whether something is absolute good or absolute evil, they are these things because that is their nature. They just are. If someone was acting with motives of vengeance, pleasure, or rage for example, they would just be a normal, flawed human being. One could look at their acts and find a reason for why they committed them. Absolute evil has no motive. You will only drive yourself mad trying to prove the contrary.”
