12. Githany #3
Staring at the naked, blue-grey version of myself sets a waterfall of emotions tumbling through me. Each one fights to surface, clinking off my ribs like stones. Shame, hatred, self-loathing, relief, confusion, and fear. Fear that this might all be real.
The man is dead. Whoever finds him will think he hit a deer and was ejected through the windshield. They’d never guess it was some demon summoned at a summer camp.
I’m limp as the wind drags me through the door and back into the room.
Back to the doors.
Madness peers down at me, his dual faces pinched in thought. His form snakes around me as more tears burst free. “I have to go through all of them?”
He nods. “I will be with you.”
And so we do.
Every door. All the girls from camp. More of the counselors. Two paramedics and a police officer.
The killings become increasingly more random. “How are they all connected?”
“By touch.”
That doesn’t make any sense. “They’ve all touched? Me?”
He shakes his heads.
“The board,” I muse.
They all came in contact with the board.
Everyone? When I woke up in the hospital, the board was gone. They thought it was one of my belongings. The counselors sent it home.
With my parents.
I’m filled with a surge of panic. How many doors are left? Something I missed before becomes glaringly apparent. The next door has two numbers. Twenty-two and twenty-three are carved next to each other. Two people died at the same time. I, I—
“No. No! They touched it. They didn’t mean to. They didn’t know. My parents didn’t know what it was. They died in a boating accident. Oh god, don’t tell me I did… Don’t.” I’m choking on stolen breath. My fingertips dig into Madness’s smoky soft form. “Tell me it was an accident.”
The door opens.
“No, I can’t do this.” In a fit of hysterics, I beg for mercy but none is granted. I’m thrust inside and dumped into the stormy sea.
My parents are on a sailboat. They didn’t take me on that trip.
Probably needed a break from their troubled teenager.
Watching is as awful as I knew it would be.
The only comfort I receive is the knowledge that my parents’ deaths were quick.
She saved the horrific slaughter techniques for the others.
My mom got dragged overboard first. There was a moment, after the immediate shock, when my mom’s eyes lit. Did she know it was me? Was she able to recognize her daughter?
Dad jumped in after her. The thing from the game was waiting for him in the waves.
They both went under and never came back up.
I blacked out for a full week surrounding my parents’ death. I’d always assumed it was a trauma response. Turns out it was just my demon traveling to and from the site of its murders.
I barely notice as the ocean clears and the doors reappear. Self-hatred pumps through my blood like an acid burn.
“I killed my parents.” My voice sounds icy and detached.
Madness wraps his arms around me. “It wasn’t your fault.”
I scream at him, shoving out of his embrace. “What do you mean it wasn’t my fault? Are you fucking blind? Did you see how eager I was to put my hands on that stupid game?”
“You were a child.”
“She murdered people with my body!”
I’ve always hoped I would see my parents again. Every time I walked along the beach, I imagined them coming up to me. Needing to see them, knowing they were okay. It’s haunted me for years.
Now, I’m glad I never saw them. I don’t deserve to. Not after what I’ve done.
I cry on and off through the last ten doors. When the thing in me ran out of connections to the board, she started killing those closest to me. Boyfriends, friends. Each murder makes me more and more numb. By the time we pull away from the final door, I’m a stranger in a cold body.
The first kill, Kristy, was done by a creature so scary and dark that I barely saw myself at all.
By the last round of deaths, it is so clearly me, it stings.
The final door belongs to the people in the graveyard room.
That’s where my lost time went. They died so fast, the room counted them as one.
Kristy’s ghost showed me the door and I murdered the people inside.
“There’s a lesson to all this,” Madness offers gently.
We sit in silence while I digest that little fucked-up emotional tidbit. There is a lesson to all this.
“She is not she. She is we,” Madness tells me.
And we killed those people.
I killed those people.
“We aren’t separate anymore are we? That thing and I have become one another.”
Madness smiles softly. “You are very bright, Githany.”
The admission grants me freedom. The room must have been waiting for me to say it out loud. In a rush of wind and sadness, I’m ferried back to the haunted house. Hunt and Gator stare anxiously.
“Did you…did you all see?” I croak.
“They could see everything we saw,” Madness confirms. Their heads hang, eyes dropping to the ground.
Hunt’s wide mouth is turned down. Gator’s long neck swings side to side, brow creased. This is the first time all night that they’ve displayed anything resembling pity or sadness.
“My parents—” I break down, sobbing so hard and fast that I feel a ripping sensation in my diaphragm.
Arms envelop me as my monsters swoop in, pulling me into their chests.
Fingers stroke my scalp and back. The pressure of their grip keeps me upright as I cry.
The tears flow and flow. My throat is raw, face muscles aching, before the numbness returns.
My cheek is pressed against Hunt’s smooth chest. The sight of my arm wrapped around his waist floods me with new frustration. I’m still blue.
“What do I have to do to survive now?”
“Accept. Accept what you are,” Hunt encourages.
The idea of accepting myself, knowing the horrible things I did…
Every one of those people died in such terrible ways.
At my hands. Thinking about my crimes for the rest of my life will surely drive me to insanity.
Especially not knowing if and when it will happen again.
Is the rest of my life going to be full of blackouts?
Waking up, covered in blood wondering whose daughter, brother, husband, friend, I’ve killed?
“If I accept,” which I can’t, “will I stop blacking out?”
“Yes. You will be fully in control.” Madness brushes his fingers beneath my chin.
Control sounds nice. Especially considering someone else seems to have been running the show for so long. Control won’t erase my guilt. “Will I still be evil?”