Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The Monthly Journal of Stephannie Kingston-Chp5

May 20XX
I think my power of sight is getting worse.

Since the incident with the exchange student and the haunted house in our bazaar, I’m beginning to have more frequent visitations from ‘the other side’.

It all started when my boyfriend and I were planning to go out on a drive-thru movie to watch that really hot-in-the-season flick “Evergreen of the Everglades”. He had to go purchase it weeks in advance because it was the long-awaited movie of the century and had to line for five hours before he finally got tickets for both of us. So needless to say, I made a call home to tell them I won’t be home for dinner and promising them for the umpteenth time that I will not stray away and go straight home after the movies. What can I say? I’m the only girl in the family. They have a little right to be a little overprotective.

He had to go for football practice, so I was at my favourite spot under the tree catching up on my reading while waiting for him to come and fetch me. Suddenly, I heard someone crying somewhere in at a distance. I went to investigate, following the cries and I saw a little girl at about 3 squatting under the boardwalk of the running track, crying and whimpering. I thought she was one of the kids belonging to one of the teachers in our school, so I walked towards her and asked, ‘Are you alright? Why are you crying?’

“My Mummy and Daddy… they… they didn’t come and pick me…” she sobbed, “I waited for so long but they never came… I was hurt… hurt so bad… and yet they didn’t come to save me…’

What cruel parents! I thought, who do they think they are, leaving a little girl like this to fend for herself while they go gallivanting to goodness knows where doing goodness knows what?!

She mentioned that she was hurt, so I asked, ‘You said you were hurt, can I help you?’

She didn’t answer.

“Can I help you with anything?” I repeated my question. “It’s alright. You can tell me anything. I have you know I’m rather good with children’s needs.”

It was no joke. I used to have share of working as a babysitter earning $10 an hour to look after my neighbours’ kids, which included the troublesome Mrs. Rueben’s baby triplets and her feisty five-year-old.

“You…can help…me…?” she whispered.

“Yes, anything. Just name it!”

The kid slowly looked up and asked, ‘Then…can you find…MY EYES?!’

I got the shock of my life at what I saw in front of me. She doesn’t have any eyes at all; she only had black, empty sockets that were so spookily hollow, and she was crying tears of blood! Her hands were stained red and most of the blood were running down her cheeks and dripping down her little white dress, and she stank of dead meat.

I ran for my dear life away from that ghastly girl but I could feel her chasing me. I could almost feel her hands reaching out and touching my shoulders and hear her crying right near my ears, smelling the foul stench of her breath as she cried, “MY EYES! MY EYES! YOU SAID YOU’LL HELP ME FIND MY EYES!!! YOU PROMISED!!!”

When I finally saw my boyfriend waiting for me outside the gate, I was so relieved. I turned around to see if the girl was still chasing me but she was no longer there. I couldn’t even answer when he asked me what happened because I was in critical shock. I couldn’t enjoy the movie and had huddled against my boyfriend all night, looking over my shoulder at the slightest sound, fearing that the little girl had come back, demanding for her eyes.

Needless to say, our date was a total mess and I couldn’t blame my boyfriend when he sent me home with a disappointed look on his face.

I finally learnt the truth about the girl after I asked an old-timer janitor who cleans the boardwalk every other day: Our school, before it became what it was, used to be an orphanage back in the late 60s-70s. She was one of the orphans there whom a novice monk who, unbeknownst to others, was a bit of a pedophile and a schizophrenic. He believed that the little girl was his lover in his past life and began to feel much attached to her, and even had relations with her. When she was finally being adopted and waiting for her foster parents to fetch her with a nun accompanying her, the jealous novice monk suddenly kidnapped her and hid her in his cottage deep in the forest and raped her every day, claiming that she is his wife and that she should not belong to anyone but him.

Finally, when she attempted to escape from him, he attacked her, digging her eyes out of her sockets. By the time the authorities along with her foster parents got there to arrest him, it was too late. She bled to death and before he hung at the gallows, his last words were “If I can’t have her, no one will. Not even God”, or something like that.

Do you think I have problems now?

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