A Melancholic Black Series (Book 1): The Red Door (5 page)

Did she break his neck? Rip his head off?
Nell asks herself, but she truly cannot answer them. Surely looks like a massacre. But, not Amberly. Not her beautiful little angel.

The bottom of the wooden entry of Amberly’s bedroom door pushes back the layers of blood that has formed a puddle. Ignorance is thickening more than ever now as Nell steps in, kicking the room-temperature blood into her shoes, drowning her socks.

Any single person right about now would vomit all over the floor. With this much blood who would even notice? Instead, she upchucks a small amount of last night’s dinner into her hands and tosses it aside. Like a lady.

The thick trail of crimson leads to the red closet door where Sion’s legs and lower torso stick out. His body violently jerks back and forth as the sound of cracking bone and tearing meat can be heard, but thankfully not seen.

Not yet.

Nell… poor woman. She’s about to become witness to something truly wicked. Perhaps she should do what any normal person would do and get the hell out of dodge. Just, her curiosity is too strong; she
needs
to see.

She moves closer and peaks her head around the closet door and looks in, before quickly placing her hands over her mouth. Gripping so tight that she could snap her own jaw.

Amberly has her head buried in to Sion’s shoulder, breaking apart the collar bone and drinking the marrow like a chucked oyster. Sion’s lifeless eyes coincidentally and woefully terrifying, stare back at Nell.
Is he alive?
She wonders. There’s no way. He was dead as soon as he got out of his truck.

Nell begins shaking before she can even notice that Amberly has stopped eating and is gawking at her. She licks her lips, like a dog mid-meal.

“…Amberly?… baby?” Nell cries. “What have you done?” She leans in closer when Amberly grunts and tries to assault Nell. Another warning, nothing more. She’s not done dining. Nell cries in fear before, again, covering her mouth as to not agitate Amberly any more than she already has.

Nell trips on the leg of Amberly’s bed and falls down into Sion’s warm blood. She can’t scream. She’s too terrified. Amberly growls.

“It’s okay… Amberly, it’s okay. You need help now, I understand… I can help you,” Nell pleads to deafened ears. It’s hard to tell if Amberly can understand at all, or just doesn’t care, as she pulls Sion fully in to the closet and slams the door shut.

Nell sits in bewilderment, still surrounded by Sion’s blood as Amberly finishes her meal from inside the closet. A growing girl needs to eat. Nell couldn’t possibly report this to anyone. Just like any parent who knows their children drink beer, they say, “best to have ‘em drink at home, than drink anywhere else.”

Nell understands now. She’s not giving Amberly up and her little girl isn’t going to stop. As perverted as her thoughts are, it’s best to feed Amberly than to have Amberly look for food herself. Never in her life had Nell ever imagined she’d be at the crossroads of “morality” and “damnation.”

VII

November 11th.

3:15PM.

What a happy little girl Amberly is when her stomach is full. She crawls out of her closet and looks up at Nell and smiles. Her blood-stained teeth baring bits of flesh. She rubs her teeth clean with her tongue, chewing the little bits of skin before swallowing. Nothing goes to waste.

“I’m so happy for you, baby,” Nell adamantly confesses. Nothing makes a parent prouder than seeing their child eat their food. Although Sion was mostly fat and meat, Nell doesn’t know what he had for breakfast, or the night before. He could have eaten vegetables. He did always talk about eating large amounts of fiber. In the eyes of Nell, Sion is most likely a perfectly-balanced meal.

The damned woman is trying everything to not see it as a brutal, violent murder of an innocent man, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the bright side, this is the first time she has seen her daughter smile in a long while. Best not to waste it on regrets over Sion.

The mailman has helped her, really. Raw meat bought from the grocer worked for a couple of days, but Nell now knows that Amberly is a hunter. Just like a lion in the South Sahara Desert, food is best when it’s fresh. Best eaten right after a kill.
And
just like the lion, it tends to get
very
messy.

“Come here,” orders Nell.

Amberly slowly walks over to her mother, who sits down on Amberly’s bed and uses the blanket to wipe her daughter’s face. “You’re a young lady. Young ladies don’t walk around with messy faces, do they?”

As Nell cleans the gore off of Amberly’s face, she notices something remarkable: she’s rejuvenating itself. The life force of another is, not necessarily healing her, but giving her strength and her beauty is returning. She
is
dead, though she looks more alive now than ever.

“See?” Nell asks, finishing wiping off the blood. “Such a beautiful young lady!”

The good times are over rather quickly, as Nell grunts with frustration and disgust as she drags Sion’s mangled cadaver down the hall. Tears of heartbreak and terror stream down her face. There is nothing left, save for roughly, 10 pounds of chestnut-colored skin; a pound of brain matter; 2 pounds of intestine (1.5 large and .5 small). Very thorough for a small girl. If there is any solace to find in Sion’s death, it is: he was delicious from head to toes.

Literally
.

Amberly follows closely behind. Looking at Nell, then to Sion. Like a hungry, insatiable dog watching its owner pour Kibble in to his bowl. She doesn’t care so much that Nell is touching her food, more curious as to where she’s taking it.

“Best to keep this out of sight, sweetie,” Nell reaches the basement and opens the door, yanking in the corpse. It thuds as it tumbles down the stairs, smacking on the cold concrete floor below. Nell tiresomely descends down the stairs to retrieve the dead postman.

She drags him to his new spot in the corner, right next to the water drain. Better to have the blood filter away through the pipes than to dam the entire first floor.

Nell dumps the body as Amberly runs to it; amazingly still eating. She’s s
till
hungry. On top of that, she gets to dine in the dark, with minimal to no disturbances, and for Nell, out of sight equals out of mind.

“You haven’t had enough?” Nell asks even though she could correctly guess the answer. Amberly is constantly hungry. To imagine the energy it takes to fuel the recently resurrected. Instant digestion in a body that is now built for doing nothing but killing and eating. She’s unearthly fast and inexplicably quiet. Even a normal child running around all day tends to eat a big meal.

Sion wasn’t a
big
man, but he
was
a grown adult. Even he cannot fill Amberly’s hunger for more than thirty minutes. What Amberly needs is a bigger food supply.

For Nell, an epiphany: taller…
meatier
men.

VIII

Later that day…

“Heaven help us,” begs a shocked Rodney as he stares at the blood covering his living room floor. He knows there is something wrong. He’s no idea who is at fault, but unlike Nell with her head in the clouds, his head is firmly still planted on his shoulders. Still based in reality and aware that there are going to be very serious consequences for whatever has happened.

Amberly came back to them and brought along a new ravenous appetite. There’s so much blood covering the home. The question: from what?
Or whom?
It isn’t from raw meat, hat much he does know.
What has Nell done?
He asks himself, unable to answer it. Unable to answer
any
of the dozen questions running through his head.

The only logical—though insane—thing to do is to follow the blood trail to its inevitable conclusion. It has to be a body. Just
has
to be. He just doesn’t know who. Olave isn’t a small place, but there’s only a dozen people that would ever bother coming to their home. That’s what makes it that much harder: what if it
is
someone Rodney knows? Someone he likes.

Shaking from fright; his nerves wracked, he follows the dried blood to the basement door. He opens it and sees nothing but darkness. “Nell, honey? Amberly? I’m coming down…” he makes his descent as the smell of iron and the buzzing of flies get stronger and louder.

He reaches the bottom step, his heart-rate racing. The blood rushing through his ears is all he can hear. Every other sound is diluted; mumbled. Amberly or Nell could be behind him, screaming his name, and he would never take heed.

“Please, someone answer me. What’s happened?” he asks again, praying that he’s wrong about a dead body. Common sense tells him otherwise.

The sunlight sprays through a small window on the basement wall and it shines on a hunched over Amberly. “Sweetie?” he calls out, still frightened over his own daughter from the earlier interaction. He whispers, “…shit” as he walks closer. He’s not unafraid, but at least he can see her.

If she were to turn and take charge, he likes to think that he’d have enough time to react and run away to safety. Though, he could be wrong.

He walks even closer to see her eating…
something
. The sounds of her lips smacking together and the grinding and crunching between her teeth. That’s when he realizes that she is finishing up the leftover corpse of Sion.

His head spins as he gasps in horror, which finally gets Amberly’s attention. He cannot possibly process what he’s seeing, just that every ounce of his being is telling him to run. Run like hell.

Amberly roars in anger as she charges him. He goes to back but he isn’t anywhere near fast enough and he’s nowhere near safety. Amberly has him by the humerus. Digging her nails in deep. The pure shock has Rodney’s frozen in place. He wants to scream, but right now he can’t. She turns him around gets right directly in his face. She’s so much stronger than him. He can’t breathe, and it doesn’t seem that she cares at all. His strength and resolve are dwindling down to nothing. “Please, stop! Oh G-God!…Stop!” he finally begs, as the stench of Sion pours off of her breath.

“Stop!” Nell’s voice screams out, as she runs down the basement stairs. “Drop him, now,” she orders as Amberly reluctantly lets go of Rodney. “Bad girl, that’s your father. No.
No!
” But to Amberly, he’s just a freed meal.

And he knows it, as he kicks and screams his way to the steps. “What the
fuck
is wrong with you, Nell?!” He hollers, holding his shoulder. The words barely coming out. He fights through the pain, “Whose body is that?! Oh, God! Is that
Sion?!
” Rodney can’t keep his head together. He’s losing it. Badly.

“Oh, calm down, Rodney,” Nell keeping her eerie composure as if none of this is
that
big of a deal.

“Don’t tell me to calm down! I fucking
warned
you! She…
killed
a person, Nell?”

“It’s not her fault. She never asked for this. But… just
look
at her. See how beautiful she looks now? It’s what has to be done to keep her healthy. You have to deal with that,” Nell responds.

It really doesn’t matter how bad it gets, she’s never going to open her eyes and see Amberly for the monster that she has become. She’d past the point of rational thoughts before she even dragged Sion’s body to the basement.

“How did you become so dumb? So fucking naive?”

“You know how, Rodney. You know.”

That
day.

The day Nell and Rodney were told that their daughter was dead. That’s how she became so “dumb.” So “naive.” She was forced to turn a blind eye to natural and supernatural. Forced to ignore the real world and its problems. Amberly’s back and that’s that. No more reason, no more thinking. Realism is mysticism and vice versa.

“This ends,” Rodney threatens.

“No. No it doesn’t. You can’t.”

“Watch me, Nell. You need help and that…
thing
over there?
That
is
not
Amberly, dammit!”

“Rodney, just… can’t we talk about this a little?”

“No, we can
not
,” Rodney shouts before turning to walk away.

Nell, panicking, looks all around for a way to stop Rodney. She’s not strong enough to subdue him and Amberly would just tear him limb from limb. She wants to stop him, but doesn’t want him dead.

A garden spade on the ground.

Before Rodney can climb even three steps, Nell grabs the spade and hits him over the head as hard as she can. Blood trickles down his brow as he grimaces in pain, before falling down the steps to the ground below.