*The VHS tape calls to you.
*You put it in the player, and hit play.
The Journal
(Some of you may have already seen these. I’m just gonna post them here too, for safekeeping <3)
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“Wooby… Wooby, we can’ go in thew! Gwamma wiw be mad! Come back!”
The creak of a floorboard under careless foot, ancient and unkempt. The rattle of shutters in a galing wind, the whistle of a coming storm through a cracked window pane. The deathly stillness of dust, boxes and crates filled with the unknown, shadowy silhouettes of either furniture or monsters in the darkest corners… a flash of brightest red, blood on snow on the chillest winter’s morn.
And the shuddering, quick breaths of a frightened child, eyes wide in the unknowing and uncaring fall of night.
The child lingering in the dim doorway, peeking through a crack in the door, couldn’t have been more than five years of age, though it was difficult to say, as she looked smaller and more frail than any child her age should be; her dark, choppy hair was held back in a messy, dirty ponytail that looked as though it had never seen a brush, her clothes ratty, old, too large, and far too threadbare for the frost nipping at the single, moonlit window high above the maze of odds and ends filling the attic space.
Everything about the girl was thin and weak, but for her almost too large, widened eyes. Her irises held a strangeness to them, catching the moon’s light in a shade that looked almost golden, and sparked with odd magic; as she looked about the boxes and dusty coverlets with clear anxiety, clutching at the doorknob under hand, the darkness seemed to be no burden to her, and despite the impossibility… the path of her gaze seemed almost to glow.
The little girl’s name was Aliza, and she was not supposed to be there, in more ways than one.
She pulled at the frayed ends of her baggy sweater’s sleeves, lips parted as she panted out tiny, foggy breaths and jumped at every sound, every gust of wind and creak of the old, decrepit house around her; she seemed to be searching for something, though was completely disinterested in the crates and furniture before her as she, at last, pushed past the door and crept one, shuffling footstep forwards at a time.
There were many places in the house she wasn’t allowed to go, gramma’s room, the basement, the porch, the yard, the kitchen, the living room during the evening, sometimes the bathroom… but she had been told, many, many times, to never, ever go into the attic. It was dangerous, gramma had said, and none of her business.
And Aliza had always been okay with that. It looked boring and dirty anyways. She’d never been curious enough to venture inside, to open the door, or to even peek inside for more than a moment when gramma was getting something. She’d been perfectly happy to ignore it.
But Ruby never had been.
The little girl swallowed hard, cautious, glowing eyes darting back to the slightly ajar door as it creaked on its rusty hinges, her body stilling like prey on the run; Gramma was asleep, on the ground floor at that, but there was a chill, persistent and nagging, zipping along Aliza’s spine that she did not like in the least… like there was something wrong , and she couldn’t see it.
She’d always trusted that instinct, as it had saved her from punishment and danger before, but there was nothing for it this time. She had to find Ruby before she could leave, curl up under her blankets, and pretend this had never happened. She couldn’t leave her here… she couldn’t sleep without her.
So another step slid forwards… another icy breath snuck from chapped lips. Bony fingers dug into frayed cotton, and golden eyes swept towering piles of boxes and piles of moth eaten clothes in torn plastic bags.
“Wooby… pwease come out, it’s- it’s scawy…” the girl whimpered under her breath, voice as thin a willow reed permeating the dark in a way that sent the chills into overdrive (no no no… shadows didn’t move, nothing there, no); almost in answer, another flash of scarlet lit up a narrow passage through the mess, brighter yet than even the first, and Aliza, catching her breath, cast one last look back at the cracked door, and the silent house beyond it, hesitating visibly, before hurrying towards the already dimming light, squeezing through the crack in the boxes nimbly.
It led into another, almost identical causeway of boxes and crates, rising precariously towards the wooden ceiling on a prayer. There was old, splintering furniture on this row (a broken side table, a wardrobe covered in scratches, one door ajar, a molding armchair piled with rusting beer cans), thicker dust on the rough floorboards, and high above, perched on one of the newest looking boxes of the lot, was a glowing, glittering, vermillion butterfly.
Aliza sucked in a breath at the sight of the insect, though not in surprise, as any other would at the appearance of such an oddity; in fact, her little face narrowed, her brows lowering and her hands, almost completely hidden by her sleeves, propping on her hips. She looked as severe as she possibly could, eyes flashing the between gold and, it seemed at least, the same red that the butterfly was illuminated with.
“Wooby, come down now! We have to go befow gwamma wakes up!” she scolded in an undertone, about as firm as the pile of boxes she was standing beside, and in response, the glowing butterfly, seeming to have been dubbed Ruby by the child, merely flapped its wings, unphased by the girl’s demand.
The girl’s shoulders drooped immediately, all fight going out of her in a rush, and, with a sigh, pouted her lower lip out in a last ditch attempt to sway the strange insect.
“Pwease?”
Another flap of the wings, unanswered and unmoved, the girl’s plea falling on a deaf audience; she seemed unsurprised, merely huffing and halted the wobbling of her lip before looking around herself for something. Her posture righted as she seemed to spot what she had been searching for, and disappeared for a moment around the edge of a large, torn cardboard box.
There was the quiet shuffle of a blanket slipping to the floor, and the sound of wood scraping against wood; the butterfly, high above, perked her antennae in the direction of the noise, obviously curious, before Aliza reappeared, tugging at the edge of a three legged, cracked side table, its surface stained with rings, dark stains, and lines in the dust from little fingers.
Straining and puffing out tiny breaths of ice, the child painstakingly dragged the damaged table against the stack of crates the butterfly was perched atop, a stray strand of her hair sticking to her forehead and her tiny eyebrows beetled in concentration; the tip of her tongue extended past her lips as she, with one final push, seemed happy with the table’s positioning before, following a moment bent at the waist to catch her breath, she scrambled atop the dangerously leaning piece of furniture, swaying slightly along with its movements to keep balance.
After a moment of stillness, letting the table settle under her weight, Aliza, dusty, tired, and more than a little weary of her friend’s games, stretched up on her tiptoes to reach for the now flashing, pacing butterfly above her, who looked about as concerned as a butterfly was capable of, the agitated flap of her wings sending shadows and flashes of light dancing across the attic walls and piles of boxes.
The stretch of the child’s fingers gathered more dust the higher she reached; it drifted down in feathery flakes, layering her hair and shoulders and averted face. The letters on the side of the box under her hands, revealed by her increasingly more desperate grasp, went unnoticed, however, her eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to rid them of a particle of dust.
She wouldn’t have known what to make of the word ‘ Frisk ’ in any case… she couldn’t understand her letters, much less words or names.
The winds outside the house were gathering power, and brewing into a storm. A bright, burning flash of lightning lit up the large, crowded attic space a pale, candescent blue. A resounding crack of thunder shook dust and plaster from the roof, making the little girl, fingertips only centimeters from her quarry, jump in shock at the rolling, deafening sound.
A gasp shattered the air, as darkness fell again, and another crack, wooden and filled with doom, resounded around the shadowed room.
The table let out an ominous creak. The top tilted dangerously, and little fingers scrabbled at the box beneath them, looking for purchase that just wasn’t there. Gravity kicked in, the cruelest foe in a contest of will and nature, and dragged the girl, the table she had been standing on, and the topmost box of the pile to the plywood flooring, the crash of falling objects again disturbing the silence of the house around them all.
By some miracle, Aliza herself had managed to roll out of danger’s path, silent and still beneath the toppled form of a styrofoam clothing mannequin, and peered out into the settling mess with fear and horrid anticipation freezing her blood into stone; surely gramma had heard that, it had been so loud , she was going to be in trouble, so much trouble, she’d broken things…
It had been an accident, but gramma hadn’t cared last time either, why hadn’t she just gone back to her room-
Her breaths were ragged and fearful (though no longer icy; they seemed almost to steam, melting the frost in the air and singing the styrofoam of the mannequin), her hands shaking and her eyes burning a bright, piercing scarlet in her obvious petrification… but the longer she sat there, the wind outside the house howling and the thunder and lightning cracking around the roof above… the more she began to think that, in all possibility…
The storm had hidden the noise. Maybe she hadn’t heard after all.
After waiting nearly ten minutes, mostly spent rocking in place and hugging her knees, Aliza finally gathered the courage to crawl out of her hiding place and stand on wobbly, slightly scuffed knees; if gramma had heard, she’d have come up by now, even with how long it took her to climb stairs.
Her breathing was calming. Her breath was no longer scorching the ends of her askew hair, again gathering crystals of ice from the air. Her eyes had gone through all the stages of crimson and gold and settled into a sparkling azure as it moved from the yawning doorway into the hall and to the mess she had made on the floor, the top of the crate that had fallen askew and its contents spread across the floorboards.
It appeared to be mostly papers, big folders (she thought she had heard gramma call them… vanilla folders, before, big and yellow with little clips on the bendy part) full of documents and notes… a few pictures here and there. There were several glass containers, some broken… there was a little wooden box too, fancy and gilted and, from a crack in its lid, filled with something shiny (her palms itched, wanting badly to open it), and almost everything, besides the little box, was covered in little red stickers or written on in bold red marker.
Something about the contents of the box, the bright red stickers and big red letters she couldn’t read, made her think she should put it all back into the box, push it into a corner, and forget she had ever seen it. The hairs on the back of her sweaty, dusty neck were standing up, and the sense of danger that had saved her before was telling her to run .
But one of the pictures in the box stopped her, as Ruby, appearing almost as though out of thin air, crawled across it. It halted her feet as she shuffled closer to the haphazard mess, and froze her the beat of her heart in her chest.
It was a picture she shouldn’t have known, had never seen before… but she did. She knew the person in it, had seen her in the pictures gramma would show her when she was having a very, very sick day… and even as tears rose to fog her vision, as hiccups faltered her breaths and shook her fingers… she still reached out to pick it up from the mess at her feet, holding it tenderly, like the most treasured thing she had ever possessed.
“Mama…”
The fallen crate could later be found pushed into a remote corner of the attic, cracked lid set as firmly as possible on top and covered with a dusty sheet. The table that had toppled was likewise hidden, and any trace of the happenings of that evening, from the burns on the mannequin to the little fingerprints on the boxes, were wiped away.
The crate itself, though, was completely empty, now. It’s contents were hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the small room Aliza called home, every paper, folder, photograph, and note stashed away neatly. The single unbroken glass container was concealed in the back corner of her beaten up wardrobe, wrapped in a motheaten sweater, and the box, the beautiful box and the treasure within, she kept in her pile of blankets, to be admired and cherished every night and moment she was locked away in her little prison.
It would take four more years before she discovered the purpose of the glass container, and another, to grow enough for the bracelet in the beautiful box to stop sliding off her wrist so readily (though, even almost seventeen, it still fell off). It took one more, to know and understand what had happened to the beautiful, sad woman in the photographs, and yet another to fully compile all the papers into what she began to call the Journal.
Even when she began her journey, though, through all her years reading it, she never discovered what the red words and stickers on the folders and papers had meant.
‘Memetic’, ‘Paranormal’, and ‘Cryptid’ had meant nothing to her, after all, in comparison to the opportunity to know the most important person in her life, even long after she was gone.
