ST CLAIRE’S MENTAL INSTITUTION, VERMONT [1942]
Dolores sat at the corner playing with her hair as she watched them struggle to sedate the violent and rambling Harry who had been using his body for the last hour as a projectile in the bid to destroy the padded walls of his room. And even with the restrictions the straight jacket he was wearing posed, Harry still tried everything within his power to ward off the orderlies but when the effect of the sedative began to take effect, his struggles slowly abated as he continued to repeat on and on in a slurred voice that “It was the game”.
As usual, Doctor Hammond misunderstood, shook his head in pity and told the orderlies that Harry still thought his heinous actions that led to him being remanded here was a game. Then he told them that the hospital board had already authorized them to perform a Lobotomy procedure on Harry in two weeks time since he hadn’t responded well to past and present treatments.
But as Harry tried desperately to explain to Doctor Hammond that he meant “It was the game” not “It was a game” his body succumbed to the potent effects of the sedatives and he crashed in to a darkness filled with the sound of crashing waves, haunting memories and a cacophony of destruction.
NINE YEARS AGO
It all began in the summer of 1933 in Vermont, New England where five young college sophomores spent their holiday in an old house that had been willed over to one of them by his Grandma. The house which was situated in the mountains was a brownish wood paneled Spanish architecture from the 19th century with two chimneys, a ginger bread mill work, blue and grey ornamentation with a judicious use of black in a single detail along the cornice and on the window pediments.
They were having the fun of their lives especially as they had with them a substantial stash of marijuana and liqueur which they smoked and drank to oblivion. They had picnics, played hide and seek like they did as kids, took strolls along the mountain paths, skinny dipped in the nearby lake and even camped outside a couple of nights. But after about two weeks, all those activities lost their allure and they became bored. So in a bid to create some form of entertainment, they decided to explore some of the locked rooms in the old house in the hopes of finding something “To spike up the excitement” as Harry put it. And by a stroke of ill fate, they found just that in a locked box, under the floor board in the locked and barred attic. At this point common sense should have prevailed and questions like “why was the attic the only place not just locked but barred?” And “why was the content in the box locked and hidden?” But like they always say, “Only fools rush into where angels fear to tread”.
They opened the box and it revealed a strange flat board marked with alphabets, numbers, the words “yes”, “no”, “hello”, “goodbye and some other graphics none of them had seen before except for Chloe who claimed she recognized it because her folks owned one back when she was a kid. She said it was called an Ouija board and it was used to communicate with the dead.
Communicating with the dead sounded cool so that night they all gathered around a table and with Chloe’s guidance, they attempted making contact by asking the board if anybody was there and after a few minute the planchette moved towards “yes”. Everyone got excited but also concluded that the movement of the planchette wasn’t enough for them to believe that they were communicating with an actual spirit, so they asked more questions till they were convinced.
Her name was Nancy, she was 8 years old and she drowned 37 years ago in a well not to faraway from their present location. She also answered their questions eagerly because she claimed she was always bored, but the meetings with Nancy were always cut short because of Nancy’s abject terror for “her”. She warned them to never communicate with “her” and when they asked her who “her” was and why they should avoid “her”, she would became frantic and leave quickly without a word and on other times she would abruptly leave them whenever she said that the “her” was around until finally Nancy stopped coming.
On the third night of their futile attempt to establish contact with Nancy, the repugnant smell of sulfur suddenly blanketed the room before they then felt the presence of something malevolent amongst them. Scared out of their wits, they all started casting furtive glances around the room until Chloe screamed and pointed at the mirror. When they all turned to see what had gotten Chloe spooked, a look of disbelief and terror crossed their faces as they saw the reflection of a horrifying woman with a pair of socket less eyes grinning at them.
Terrified out of their mind, they all ran scrambling for the door in an attempt to leave the house but everything became different. Their perception seemed to have been altered because as they opened the front door leading out of the house, it led them straight back into the room they had just escaped from and when they made for the door again the same thing happened again and again until they realized that the entire house had become one big fucking loop where escape was impossible and untimely death inevitable.
In their panic and desperation to survive, they all dispersed and forgot the number one cardinal rule whenever a group of people found themselves in a shitty situation, “Together we stand, divided we fall”, and Dolores gleefully hunted them all down in the most gruesome ways unimaginable. First of her victim was the Blondie Cindy who bolted out of the upstairs cupboard she stupidly went to hide in the hopes of evading whatever was after them. She came out shouting at something to get off her shoulder before she ran and took a nosedive through the window directly on top of the flower garden outside but instead her body mysteriously plummeted down into the kitchen where Tim was hiding. Tim on the other hand who had opened the door to spring out of the kitchen immediately a fire started because Cindy’s mangled body had crashed on the stove, found himself looking at a brick wall. Yep! talk of being caught “In between a stone and a fire place”.
While trying to escape, Jeff fell of the stairs, hit his head at the edge and split his skull before disposing all his bodily waste. And as he painfully lay alive in his putrid feces he witnessed the madness that overcame Sally as she used a shard of a broken glass to pluck out her eyes in her attempt to stop herself from seeing the horrible images that threatened her sanity. It was such a beautifully evil sight and further made perfect by the fact that they both lay facing each other on the floor and expired at exactly the same time.
Harry was trapped in the house for days and by the time he escaped into the mountains forever to be haunted by the ghosts of a woman, he had already witnessed enough horrors to last hundred men in a lifetime. What he didn’t know was that he was spared the gruesome death his mates experienced because he was a latent psychic and spirits tend to be attracted to his kind, furthermore Dolores was like a spiritual parasite only this time feeding off the psychic energy of her host which was him. She couldn’t exist without him but she living off him was a win, lose situation because in the end he lost all.
Weeks later, the story of how a young man butchered his friends in cold blood made the newspapers for weeks and the court cases that ensued were far worse. At the end, the verdict was “Mentally unfit to stand trial”.
ST CLAIRE’S: [TWO WEEKS LATER]
Dolores which ironically means “Sorrow” in Spanish seemed to be looking more human as the day passed by. Today she gently stroked Harry’s hair and told him all would be well and that she would never let anything happen to him. She promised never to let anyone come in between them and when she said with so much conviction that they were going to live happily ever after like in the fairy tales, the feeling of terror overcame Harry’s lobotomized brain but his only responses were the rise in his pulse, the twitching of his finger and the unusual discharge of spittle from his mouth as he sadly stared straight ahead.
My Dark School Of Thoughts 
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