Prologue

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One, two, picks up her shoe. 

“Get back here, you ungrateful little b***h!”

Three, four, locks the door. The monster is coming.

“Open this door! Open this f*****g door right now!”

Five, six, she panics. She wonders how she will get out of this. She starts to pray.

Seven, eight, she goes into a mental state, rocking back and forth on the cold floor of the dark basement, where her only friends are the rats that live there. There is a lump in her throat and she is unable to stop herself from shaking.

Nine, ten, will things get better? She prays again.

Eleven, twelve, the monster gets frustrated and starts running up against the closed door, trying to get it to burst open, whilst the little girl inside rolls onto a book shelve.

Before long, there is a horrible cracking sound and a loud thump and the door is broken down. Her mother appears in the bright light of the entryway, her hair a disarray and her face an ugly, bloody mess. The little girl does not make a sound. She is careful to stay perfectly still.

She’s been here before. She knows how things work. Soon, things will be back to normal, she convinces herself. Soon, her mother will resort to only beating her again, instead of trying to outright kill her. And things will be perfectly fine.

“Alex,” Her mother rasps, limping around. Her eyes search the darkness, her fingers tightening around the big steak knife in her hand. “Where are you, you little runt?”

“You know,” Her mother continues in a drunken slur, nearly tripping over a box of an overturned cart. “From the minute you were born I knew you were a mistake”.

This hurts the little girl but she holds back the tears that threaten to fall. If she makes a sound, she will be found out, if she is found out, then she will be killed. And she doesn’t want that.

“But Harry, he thought you were just about the sweetest thing he ever saw,” She makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat, furiously shaking her head, as if to shake the images out of her head. “Disgusting. As far as I’m concerned, Alex, you were worthless then and you’re just as worthless now”.

A loud screeching noise fills the entire room as she runs her knife all against the wall, quietly laughing to herself, a laugh like an evil witch’s cough. “Get out here, Alex. I want to get this damn thing over with. I don’t got all f*****g night for this. I got a life, you know. Unlike you”.

The urge to laugh tasted like strawberries in the back of Alex’s throat. Ha ha ha, she wanted to say to her. If you really had a life you wouldn’t be doing this, trying to murder your own daughter. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep in the words, but she had been waiting for so long to say them.

“Show yourself!” Her mother staggers around. “You hear me, you little b***h? Get out here this minute! Stand up for yourself for once, goddamn crybaby. I’ve been waiting for the day you’d grow up”.

Alex’s heart sinks to the bottom of her stomach and her fists curl up at her sides. She couldn’t take it anymore. She just couldn’t take it. This was all just too much to handle, too much to bear. There is no way she would stand for this. Not anymore.

Grow up? She thinks darkly. Sure, I’ll do just that.

 

Reviews

[M.A. Van Dyke]

My attention is piqued! Very good start, is there more to this? I'll check. Two small things, at the end of a quoted section of speech, like this, "I had chills run down my spine when I read this," he said... the punctuation is inside the quotes, even for periods (except in a situation where you say something like this, Matt is what we call a "Nitpicker".) and the next word, unless it's a proper noun or whatever, is not capitalized.
Either way, this was great!

[Rain]

whoa, i like this!
yes, the childhood game really does make it sound creepier!!
i really want to know what happens next! please continue to write!

[Rachel 6sixtrümper]

I. LOVE. THIS.

[Jennifer Neuman]

wow this is outstanding, i cannot wait for more (assuming there will be more). The general layout with using an old childhood game makes it even more twisted then it would have been with just the words outright. amazing!

[Alex Thomas]

Very dark. You have a typo or two no big deal. It's spelled "shelf." I like it. I can't wait for the rest.