The Monster

***Warning: Graphic Gore***

Amanda hated the room. The foreboding dark wood felt like it reached for her, straining to wrench her beating heart from her chest. She shook the notion from her head. It wasn’t the wood that terrified her so. It was the little girl, staring at the wall.

Nine-year old Gloria’s blond hair fell to mid-back, combed to perfection by Amanda. Gloria turned as Amanda approached.

Most agreed that Gloria possessed unnatural beauty even at such a young age. In those few moments when Amanda’s hands weren’t shaking with fear, she could agree, but those eyes revealed the cruelty burning inside that small body. When those pale, pitiless gray eyes stared up at her, Amanda always believed her heart might stop.

She hated the little monster, but could do nothing about it.

Amanda held out an immaculately crafted doll, imported from India. It cost fifteen-hundred dollars. Money that Master Barclay wouldn’t stop to pick up from the street. “Perhaps this one is more to your liking, Mistress?”

Gloria snatched it from Amanda’s hand. She didn’t bother looking at it. Instead, she looked into Amanda’s eyes and saw the hope waiting there. Gloria’s mouth twisted evilly. “I hate it, you incompetent oaf. I hate it!” She smashed the doll onto floor. Cracks spread like spider webs across the porcelain face. She yanked on the arms and legs until the faux body’s pieces dangled by strands of wire. She walked to a panel in the wall where the disused shaft of a dumb-waiter should’ve been sealed permanently. She opened the panel and hurled the broken body down it.

At the bottom of the shaft, in a place no human had seen for fifty years, something stirred.

The Presence lay below a pile of broken dolls, discarded by Gloria. It was a reject as well, a deformity tossed away by revolted parents from another dimension. A creature whose life-cycle varied unfathomably from terrestrial life, it still waited to die after forty years. The hatred imbued upon Gloria’s tortured dolls provided enough energy to sustain the beast, but only barely. As Gloria grew, and her hatred of everyone with it, so she empowered The Presence.

With this boost of energy from the Indian doll, The Presence finally found the motivation to explore. Its body, no more substantial than mist laced with puce green nodules, sent tendrils up the shaft and out of the only available opening. It drifted across Gloria’s room and into her ear canal. The blood within the little girl was something unheard of by the The Presence’s home dimension. Blood possessed fountains of energy, energy it quickly became addicted to. Soon after this realization, it discovered Gloria’s brain. A crude instrument by the standards of The Presence’s people, it was easy to comprehend, and command.

Gloria’s personality was ripped asunder by jagged psychic claws and replaced in moments by The Presence. Soon, it had full command of the body.

Amanda returned to Gloria’s room to deliver her dinner. The horrible little girl still faced the blank wall in that disturbing way of hers. As Amanda set the tray down, she noted a strange scratching sound coming from Gloria. She wondered what awful thing the little terror had gotten into this time. “Mistress?” she said, approaching gingerly. “Are you alright?”

Gloria’s arm ceased its rhythmic motion. Without turning, she held out a file, covered in blood.

Amanda backed away, eyes bulging. “Mistress! What have you done?”

Gloria turned at last. The bloody cracks across her face oozed bloody puss. She grinned with teeth filed down to points.

Amanda screamed.

Minutes later, Gloria’s body, guided by The Presence, stumbled from her room. It could sense more sources of blood and thus, more sources of power. The more it fed, it knew, the more it would grow. Nearby, more blood to feed upon waited.

It followed the smell of humanity in Gloria’s nose. Amanda’s small intestine trailed behind in bloody loops gripped in her small hand. The Presence still hadn’t yet grasped the importance of bones. So when it looked down the banister into the family room below, it forced the head too far, snapping vertebrae. No matter. With the energy absorbed from Amanda’s body, it could control Gloria’s corpse even without bones.

Inhuman eyes stared at Gloria’s parents.

“At last,” sighed Evita Barclay. “Amanda finally stopped screaming.”

“Such a feeble girl, that Amanda,” said Bernard Barclay. “So easily intimidated. You’d think our daughter was a monster!”
________________________________
Okay I know I usually write funny stuff, but there was a time when I wrote horror as well. It is the month of Halloween after all.

Written for the Grammar Ghoul Press’ Mutant 750 writing challenge. Look here for the original prompts and other stories based upon them. http://www.grammarghoulpress.com/gg-writing-challenge-55/