A Horrific Fantasy

Chapter 45

Alastor didn't need to make Charlie promise not to scream, because she completely stricken with silence. Her heart had stopped, her breath was caught in her throat, all color had drained from her face, and her mouth had lost the ability to form words. She knew that Levana probably did something dreadful to everyone but this...This amount of terror far exceeded anything she had comprehended before.

"Yes I know, I'm hideous." He admitted trying to be a little humorous about this. "But one learns to live with it after two years."

Charlie couldn't understand him making humor about of this at all.

"No doubt, you are wondering how I had allowed this to happen." He started to explain. "Well I had always been a very strange child. One with interests in anatomy, the macabre, and old fashioned technology and mechanics. I would like to draw and build certain things my mind would imagine, and would often take apart things and rebuild them in the way I thought they would be better suited. Yet sadly my vision is one with an acquired taste. In other words, most people thought I was a freak. They couldn't understand my fascination with history and my disinterest in modern times. They also couldn't understand my preference of mixing dark with light, shadows and light, giving a creepy yet whimsical look. The philistines."

He cringed a little at the memory of those who criticized him.

"So naturally, I had no friends growing up. Children either avoided me or bullied me, and the adults would often recommend that I needed therapy. Therapy for what? For choosing to build and create something over constantly staring at a screen? Ha! At least I wasn't a mindless zombie like their children. Only one who ever understood me was my mother. When I run home from school in tears over what the other kids had said about me, she would hold me and say that there was nothing wrong with me. That I saw things differently than what most people saw, that I was gifted and that someday I'd impress the whole world with my talent. She made facing the world bearable."

She could see the permanent smile tremble a little, either from genuine happiness or sorrow. She couldn't tell.

"But then my mother had died of cancer when I was nine." Alastor continued. "I loved her very much and so did my father. But he didn't know how to cope and he didn't know how to comfort me. He didn't hold me, he didn't talk to me, he couldn't even look at me. And he hated to see me smile cause it was just like hers. I felt alone. Then one day when I was looking through my mother's things, I dropped her brooch, the one he gave her. He was so angry, he grabbed me, he yelled at me, he said he wished that he didn't have all this stuff and me to remind him of her. I thought he hated me and I hated him. So I ran away one night and I found the bridge, and she found me."

"Levana?" Charlie guessed.

Alastor nodded.

"She knew exactly what to say, she knew exactly how to act, and she knew exactly what I wanted. She played me like a fiddle and I'm ashamed to have made it so easy for her. When she asked for my eye and my heart, she promised me that I could be with my mother again in exchange. I didn't believe her at first, but when she showed me that figure who looked like my mother I was so happy, I didn't think rationally. I just thought my mother was back and everything was going to be alright again. So I gave up my eye but just as I was getting ready to give up my heart, the figure smiled at me and it was nothing like how my mother would smile at me. I went to hug her, I didn't feel any warmth or love. I didn't feel anything. That's when I finally realized that thing wasn't my mother and that she was still dead."

Charlie swallowed down a sob, knowing all too well how painful that must've been for him. It just like when Levana tried to convince that she could bring back her parents, and just gave her emotionless fakes, copies. A cruel, sick method.